Jason

Deserve’s Got Nothin’ To Do With It

Fun week for NFL-based popularity contests. In the span of just a couple of days, we have one person getting an award they probably didn’t deserve, another NOT getting an award he almost certainly did… and people losing their shit about both.

For those not up on their American football (please don’t call it “sportsball” or “hand-egg”, I’m begging you), the two cases are:

Cleveland Browns’ rookie quarterback Shedeur Sanders, who played in less than half his team’s games, and was… how shall we put this?… “a work in progress” even when did play, was selected as a reserve for the NFL’s Pro Bowl (festivities). Think “All-Star Game”, except it’s not a game of 11-on-11 football, but a skills competition and some 7-on-7 flag football.
Long-time New England Patriots’ head coach Bill Belichick, who guided the Patriots to 6 Super Bowls, was NOT selected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first appearance on the ballot.

For those who don’t follow the NFL, the Pro Bowl has kind of been a running joke for a while now. Even when it was still a “real” game of football, nobody took it all that seriously because a) it’s held at the end of the season and everyone’s ready to take the pads off and relax and b) nobody wants to blow-out an ACL and fuck up their career trajectory because they were going all-out in an exhibition game. Also, it used to at least be a free trip to Hawaii, and now it’s just played wherever the Super Bowl is, so — surprise, surprise — dudes weren’t lining up for a trip to San Francisco on a Tuesday in February.

(I mean, if you want a barometer of how seriously the game is taken, during one Pro Bowl, NFC center Jeff Saturday lined up for THE OTHER TEAM so he could snap the ball to his long-time teammate Peyton Manning, who was playing for the AFC.)

The point is, SEVERAL of the game’s stars pass on the Pro Bowl every year, and the league has to scramble to fill the slots. It’s the definition of business as usual. This time around, they took Shedeur Sanders, who… all fluffery aside… ranked 40th in QBR (ESPN’s attempt to create a one-number stat for QB performance). 32 teams… came in 40th… math doesn’t care about your feelings.

BUT… what Shedeur Sanders does have is “brand recognition”. First, he’s the son of NFL Hall of Famer/sometimes-TV-analyst/college coach/cowboy hat aficcionado Deion Sanders, one of the best to play the game. He’s also got history in that he had a weird NFL draft cycle in 2025– this time last year people were talking about him as not just the first QB taken, but a possible candidate to be taken #1 overall… and he ended up falling to the 5th round. So multiple teams that NEEDED quarterbacks (including my hometown Steelers) passed on him… more than once. So he’s a guy whose career people have been following with interest, regardless of his stats line looks like.

So… they gave the kid a spot because he might draw some eyeballs that luminaries such as Geno Smith or Marcus Mariota might not draw. And on THAT level, so what? The Pro Bowl Mid-Week Spectacle For Degenerate Gamblers To Wager On, Presented By FanDuel is an entertainment product, so… give the people something that might entertain them. Not that big a deal.

The only place I maybe push back a LITTLE is that there’s a body of Hot Takes from Browns’ fans and people who thought Shedeur got a raw deal back at the draft that are positioning this as a Vindication(tm). Indeed, that Shedeur has Proven The Haters Wrong(tm). Now, I don’t really have any animosity toward the kid outside the confines of the Steelers-Browns rivalry, and Shedeur himself has handled his selection with nothing but graciousness. But I mean… come on. Is that what we’re doing now?

Definitionally, vindication isn’t going to be found throwing flag football touchdowns in a game that’s going to be forgotten the second the whistle blows. Vindication is going to be found by coming back in 2026, starting 17 games, and completing 60 or 65 percent of his passes. If he does that, then yeah… THAT’S vindication. If he doesn’t do that, “Shedeur Sanders, Former Pro Bowler” may end up just being an interesting Jeopardy! question or a chyron on a Toronto Argonauts broadcast.

So now… Bill Belichick.

Much as it pains me to say it, if Bill Belichick isn’t a Hall of Fame coach, nobody is. And pass-fail, there’s a pretty clear case to be made that he should’ve been a first-ballot selection. Six Super Bowl rings, 302 career wins (3rd all time behind Don Shula and George Halas)… there’s really not much more you can do as a coach.

But still… some of the outrage feels a little over the top. He’s almost certainly getting in eventually. (In fact, I’ve got 20 bucks that says the NFL not-too-subtly attempts to whip the votes for him next year just to make sure this doesn’t remain an ongoing story.) He just didn’t make it this time.

First, there ARE blemishes on Belichick’s career. There’s Spygate, where he was sending Patriots’ personnel to record opponents’ practices so they could decipher their sideline signals, which is… not to put too fine a point on it… illegal. The Patriots were fined and had to give up draft picks at the time. There’s DeflateGate, where the Patriots would deflate the balls Tom Brady used so he could grip them better. Also illegal (the league DOES let teams set up the balls for their QB, but it’s required to be within a certain range of pressure); also resulted in fines and Brady actually got suspended. Belichick was also generally kind of a grumpy dude when dealing with the press. He’d do shit like list his ENTIRE team as Questionable on the injured report just to keep information from getting out, and… a LOT of really terse, combative answers over the years. Should that keep him out? Probably not… but on a HUMAN level, you can sorta understand Hall of Fame voters — most of whom are sportswriters whose jobs he made harder — meeting the same energy he put out into the world.

There’s even just the possibility that this was a “flaw” inherent to the voting system. Without getting into the deep weeds, there were five candidates on the supplementary ballot they use for coaches, owners, and players who fell off the “modern” ballot, and voters are only allowed to vote for three people. So it’s entirely possible you had a few voters who decided “well, Belichick’s getting in anyway, so maybe I’ll use three of my votes on guys who need the help more”. (The “other guys” were Patriot owner Robert Kraft, and players Ken Anderson, Roger Craig, and L.C. Greenwood.) If enough voters did that, you could easily end up with the “obvious” candidate missing the cut. Not to mention the possibilty of a vote split between Kraft and Belichick — maybe voters just didn’t want to vote for both and make it a Patriot lovefest.

Lastly, I have a personal pet theory: Tom Brady is eligible in 2028. What if Belichick didn’t get in this year because a few voters romanticized the notion of putting them in together? People always wrestle with who was more responsible for the Brady-Belichick Patriots'(tm) success… maybe some voters are ducking the question for two years so they don’t have to decide, so they can put them in as a tandem.

So pass-fail… should Belichick have gotten the votes? Yeah, probably. Does it represent some sort of crime against humanity and the ghost of Walter Camp? I guess YOU can take it that way if you want, but I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over it.

But more forest for the trees… this is what happens when you try to hammer Jell-O to a wall by attempting to put “greatness” in a one-size-fits-all box. It’s true across sports, but everyone’s got their own definition: some people hew pretty close to what the statistical record says (the J. Evans Pritchard method), some people take — for lack of a less sappy word — a more “holistic” view of stardom, and there’s probably even a few people who just vote for what made them feel good as a fan. And that’s OK. First-ballot? Unanimous selection? Whatever, man… over the long haul, the various systems get it right more than they get it wrong, and it gives us something to shout about over beers when there’s nothing else on TV.

Exhuming McCarthy

I’ve been spinning my wheels for most of Sunday, between doom-scrolling the latest news out of Minnesota and checking my work email every half-hour just to see if anyone’s made a determination about whether we’re open or closed tomorrow. So I figured I’d take a few moments to sidebar back into good ol’ Steeler football for a bit, since at some point yesterday, the Steelers announced a verbal agreement with Mike McCarthy to be their next head coach.

So… NOT a young defensive coordinator who’s never been an NFL head coach before. OK, that’s certainly different.

Look, I’m willing to admit my initial reaction was… not positive. Maybe I’d fallen a little too much in love with The Steeler Way(tm), or the gushing praise for the various young coordinators was getting to me, but it felt like a little bit of a letdown. You’re telling me we replaced a guy with a superficially good record whose accomplishments still felt mildly underwhelming with… a guy with a superficially good record whose accomplishments ALSO felt mildly underwhelming?

bUt He’S a YiNzEr, So He’S pRoBaBlY hAd O fRiEs Or SoMeThInG!

And OK… I’ll admit that it also crept into the back of my brain that this is all an exercise in the tail wagging the dog and the Steelers chose their coach so that Aaron Rodgers would be swayed to come back next year. That thought was worth popping an extra Tums before turning in for the night.

But I slept on it, and when I woke up this morning, I found myself not totally hating it IF they’re doing it for the right reasons.

The Steelers are clearly at a crossroads. They haven’t been the same since Ben retired (or really a few seasons before, when he started to decompose in real time), and the efforts to replace him have largely amounted to duct tape and paper clips. (MacGyver!) Steeler Nation can collectively rub one out to Renegade and the idea of “hard-nosed defense” as much as we want, but the truth remains that the NFL is a quarterback-driven league now. Certainly more than it was when Noll, Cowher, or Tomlin was hired.

It is known, khaleesi.

So there’s a mental math out there that says that our next head coach’s job — more than a leader of men, more than a purveyor of colorful quotes, certainly more than someone who knows where Isaly’s used to be — is to find our next franchise quarterback and set that kid up for success for the next decade. Unless he accidentally stumbles the team into the Super Bowl while doing so, ANYTHING else is secondary. I would argue the next guy could have three losing seasons, get fired, and if the QB position is in a good spot for the next guy… that’s still a success.

As an aside, at this point I’m agnostic whether The Kid is to be Will Howard, drafting someone new, or throwing a bag at Malik Willis and hoping he can be turned into the new Sam Darnold/Baker Mayfield reclamation success. Just so long as we’re not living of the purgatory of being Linked To Kirk Cousins any more.

Looking at it through that more task-oriented lens… Mike McCarthy is probably an acceptable pick for the moment. He’s generally regarded as a solid offensive mind, and he did oversee MOST of Aaron Rodgers’ career development (though you have to be fair and mention that he did not draft Rodgers; he inherited him). Much as we might fetishize the idea of Three Coaches In Modern History, and how some unknown New Toy Syndrome coordinator might sound exciting, how is a novice coach supposed to build a franchise QB when he still has to figure out his own stuff first?

(Though… I wouldn’t mind more of a hotshot young guy as OC, so that maybe there’s a transition path and maybe some continuity beyond McCarthy’s years. If you could maybe get that Scheelhaase kid from the Rams to bite on upgrading from “pass game coordinator” to OC… maybe that’s worth pursuing. Best of both worlds.)

So… maybe it’s best to do something different. Maybe we don’t need the right man for the next two decades, maybe we need the right man for this moment, and (gulp) maybe that’s Yinzer Mike. Don’t get attached; he’s here to get the QB position right and then he’s moving on. If he has success and sticks around after that… OK; if he turns the keys over to the Fifth Coach In Modern History in better shape than he found it, that’s ALSO an acceptable outcome.

Abandon All Hope, Ye Without $300M Media Deals

So, it was shaping up as kind of a fun off-season. It looked like the Pittsburgh Pirates were actually TRYING for once. Gregory Soto, Ryan O’Hearn, Brandon Lowe… OK, they weren’t bringing in perennial all-stars, but they immediately upgraded the Pirates’ roster better. And there were whispers that more moves were still on the way. It looked like the front office had finally gotten the message that it was time to put up or shut up.

And then… Kyle Tucker to the Dodgers. Four years… $240M.

That’s right. $60M a year for a guy who’s certainly GOOD (the 4.6 WAR he put up in 2025 is the lowest since becoming a full-time starter), but I’m not sure there’s too many people who think of Tucker as a “face of the franchise” type of player. But hey, the Dodgers have the money and want a few more toys, so that’s what’s going to happen.

And all of the sudden, as a Pirate fan, it feels like being thrown in a cold shower. Fuck you for daring to even hope things could be better. Fuck you for caring at all as a fan. Your team exists merely for the Dodgers (and a few other teams) to have someone to play against, and to develop players to fill their shopping list when they have an opening. And that’s just how it’s going to be.

Look, I know Bob Nutting gets a lot of heat for being cheap, and that’s absolutely PART of the problem. “Sell the team, Bob!” Yeah, yeah, yeah… makes for a clever slogan and earns some cheap points, I suppose. Put it on a T-shirt, make a few bucks. But guess what. Bob Nutting can sell the team tomorrow, and whatever Imaginary Friend people have concocted to “Save the Team” isn’t going to magically make the Pirates’ local media deal $200-250M more lucrative. If teams can outspend you to the point where you can’t even make a profit (these teams are still businesses, after all), and then just throw in another $100M for shits and giggles… while I don’t feel SORRY for Bob Nutting, I do feel sorry for the fans who get sold a bill of goods year after year.

I’ve had enough of being gaslit about how broken a system is in the “real” world, don’t need it in my sports fandom too, thanks. I look at the NFL and NHL delivering a compelling product even with a salary cap, and if I say “why can’t baseball just do THAT?” I get an army of scolds asking me “wHy Do YoU sUpPoRt ThE bILlIoNaIrEs?” I don’t. I support ME as a FAN, being offered an entertainment product that isn’t a fucking joke. I don’t care how the billionaires who own the teams and the millionaire who play for them — ALL of whom make more money than I’m going to make in my working lifetime — divide the money. (Though as an aside, I think they all need to do better by the guys in the minors.)

At some point, fuck it. Either institute a salary cap — yes, with a FLOOR too so that Cheap-Ass Bob Nutting has to invest in the product — or just dissolve MLB and have the Dodgers play the Savannah Bananas 162 games a year. They’ll get the spectacle they want and the rest of us can stop caring about an entertainment product that clearly doesn’t care about us as fans.

Requiem For The Standard

I look at Mike Tomlin’s departure from the Pittsburgh Steelers after 19 years the same way I look at divorce. Not every story has a villain; not every divorce ends in cheating, abuse, or other dramatic acrimony. Sometimes people just grow apart; so too with football coaches, teams, and their fan bases.

I think in today’s “hot take” culture, it’s easy to fish for the extreme take: “Tomlin sucks; good riddance” vs. the scolding “be careful what you wish for, Steeler fans, you just got it”. But I think with the truth is somewhere in the middle — Tomlin was a decent coach, but I think it’s a fair criticism that complacency just set in, and at SOME point, something was going to have to change. Whether this off-season is the right or the wrong time to pull the pin on that grenade… I guess we’re going to find out.

The good is right up there in the record books: zero losing seasons in a 19-year career. Some people kinda brush that off, but yes, that is an achievement. 31 out of 32 teams end every season disappointed, but the Steelers never felt IRRELEVANT on his watch — some organizations can’t even say that. If Tomlin ought to be dinged for the years he underachieved with a 12 or 13-win team, he probably ought to earn some praise for the years the Steelers looked like a 5 or 6 win team on paper and he somehow navigated them to respectability. And dudes LOVED to play for him. I don’t think that makes a difference for STAR players, who just want to get paid as much as possible, but it when it came to signing veteran depth guys, it’s a competitive advantage I think we may come to miss. I’m not sure Pittsburgh is as much of a “destination” without Tomlin at the helm. (Especially not if you read those NFL player surveys that rank the Steelers toward the bottom of the league in terms of facilities and organizational culture.)

But the warts are also equally evident. The most obvious is the recent playoff record — it’s not just that we went 0-7 in recent playoff memory, but few of those games even felt competitive. Weird choices in game management — playcalling, clock management, and such — brushed off with some Tomlinism that didn’t really explain the thought process that went into it. The Steelers managed to play down to the level of at least one inferior opponent per season; so much so that the fanbase collectively seemed to fear the trap game against some 3-9 team more than playing the Ravens. Every opposing tight end in the league probably circled us on the calendar because we seemed to be incapable of covering one properly. (Though… I suppose that complaint even goes back to Cowher. ALFRED F’ING PUPUNU.)

And for a guy who brought the world “we do not live in our fears”, the Steelers sure feel like a team that’s been playing fearfully in recent years: playing NOT to lose, rather than to win. The pathological aversion to throwing to the middle of the field (BUBBLE SCREENS… BUBBLE SCREENS FOR EVERYONE!). Going too conservative, too early when we had a lead, letting teams claw their way back in it. The “keep the play in front of you, give up small chunks, and hope you can get a splash play or the offense makes a mistake before they string 12 plays together” defense. With the Cowher Steelers and even the EARLY Tomlin years, we didn’t play that way. We played to win; sometimes we even stepped on a team’s neck and ran it up on them. If this move is an acknowledgement that we need to get back to that mentality… I’m here for it.

Of course the elephant in the room is the ONE thing that can’t be solved by letting your coach walk: this is a quarterback-driven league, and we haven’t had a quarterback for a good chunk of that 0-7 run. The thing we don’t really know (because there’s not any Hard Knocks footage to dissect) is how to apportion the blame: how much is Tomlin’s fault for his choices of coordinators and coaching, and how much of that is the front office burying their head in the sand during Ben’s decline phase and not creating a more graceful transition?

(Hey, remember when Lamar Jackson was just sitting there and we took Terrell Edmunds instead? Pepperidge Farms remembers.)

So what comes next?

For the Steelers, if they stick with the recipe, it’s going to be a young defensive coordinator who’s never been a head coach before. I would argue that the game has changed and we need an offensive mind, but given that they’re 3-for-3 on coaching hires during my lifetime, I’m willing to trust the process. Though, I kinda like Brian Flores, so if they’re willing to be a little flexible on the “never coached before” check-box, I don’t think that’s a bad outcome.

I have heard a few people say “well, who would any coach want the Steelers’ job?” You mean the one job that if you get it right, you might get two decades of job security because it’s a old-school family-run organization that thinks coaching churn is embarrassing in some way? WHO INDEED? But I’d also say that the Steelers have some pieces in place to be a decent team… it’s just that they’re missing the ONE piece that’s most important. Yeah, the Ravens probably have an edge because Lamar Jackson and Derrick Henry are pretty plug-and-play, and the Giants might be intriguing if you’re a coach who believes in Jaxson Dart… but I don’t think the Steelers represent some black hole like the Browns or Titans still largely are.

As for Tomlin? Does he want to do TV? Were they actually going to fire him, and “walking away” was a negotiated exit? Does he secretly want to coach again, but just wanted out of Pittsburgh? Is he going to lean into his resemblance to Omar Epps and do a reality show where they Freaky Friday each other’s lives, with Epps coaching a football team and Tomlin going to acting auditions?

It’s not that I don’t care; it’s more that Bill Cowher’s departure cured me of my interest in speculating too aggressively about guys’ reasons for stepping away. If you remember Cowher leaving, everyone was freaking out because How Could He Walk Away At The Height Of A Dynasty?(tm) And then we learned several years later it was probably to spend time with his wife, who it turned out was battling cancer, but he just kept that part of his life private. So if Tomlin says he wants to step away… HOWEVER that might have come about behind the scenes or what his future plans are… I guess that’s what the man’s doing. As a wise man once said, “we want volunteers, not hostages”, and that includes the head coach.

So… thanks for 19 great years, Coach T. It’s been a fun ride, I hope you have a good… break, retirement, whatever this ends up being… and we’ll see you if and when you wish to be seen.

2026: The Year Of Intention

I continue to have a weird relationship with New Year’s, and with the concept of resolutions.

On one hand, I carry a certain amount of cynicism about the whole idea of making life changes because an arbitrarily-constructed calendar cycled around to the beginning of another tour around the sun. (Shouldn’t the new year start on the shortest day or something?) There’s also sense — maybe it’s a little judgmental — grounded in the idea that if something is worth doing, well, you’ve got 364 other days to do it… nobody’s forcing you to wait until January 1st to start.

On the other hand, just as a logistical thing, I tend to have a good amount of downtime around the new year. I work in the world of EDU, so I’m mercifully off work between Christmas and New Year’s. My family is a) small and b) mostly local, so I haven’t traditionally had big plans to travel or anything like that. So even if I tend to be cynical about the concept of resolutions, the big Pressing Of Pause at the new year does leave time for some introspection that often lands in a similar place.

And this year I stumbled upon a friend’s Facebook post that helped me think of things a little differently: rather than look at resolutions as a specific set of promises that I may or may not bother keeping, think of it more as setting an overall aspirational goal or theme for the year. That way, you’re not necessarily locking yourself into one narrowly-defined thing you’re going to feel bad if you don’t get around to doing.

So I started rolling that around my brain and the idea came to me — as the best ones do — while I was procrastinating. Specifically, in this case, about going to the gym. My normal routine is Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday, but I had halfway convinced myself that I didn’t need to go “because it’s a holiday”. And then I realized that’s not really a reason. Not a real one, anyway. So if I didn’t want to go to the gym, I needed to be honest with myself about the real reason was and decide if THAT was a valid reason to not go.

The immediate problem of the gym was soon resolved: the real reason I didn’t want to go is that I was comfortable playing with the dog, and… I decided she’ll be fine for an hour, so I made it to the gym. But it also provided me with the answer to my friend’s post and the larger guiding theme for the year…

Intention.

I am guilty in life of sometimes letting the currents carry me too much. Indecision. Procrastination. Doing what comes easiest. Sometimes just screwing around until options drift out of reach and I’m kinda stuck with what’s left because I didn’t REALLY choose to act. In doing so, I’ve been traditionally bad about recognizing that that indecision is, in itself, a choice and an action.

Yoda’s “do or do not, there is no try”? Historically, I’m really bad at that.

This applies to big AND little things. I can see it in claiming I want to travel more while not really setting aside the money to do it or planning an itinerary until it was too late. But I can also see it in coming home, turning on YouTube videos while I’m eating dinner, getting sucked in, and then deciding to just KEEP watching YouTube videos because “there isn’t enough time before bed to do much else”.

So I think the challenge this year will be one of approaching things with more intention. Certainly the part of the iceberg that sits above the water is converting inaction into action with more regularity. But the other part… perhaps the more meaningful part… will be to interrogate my inaction more than I have in the past… understand it… learn from it. Because I’m STILL not going to be able to do every single thing that pops into my head; but if I DON’T end up doing something I convinced myself I wanted to do, it’s going to be important to dig past the easy excuse of “Things Just Didn’t Work Out”(tm) and figure out why I REALLY didn’t move forward, even if it means confronting something awkward or uncomfortable.

Look at travel, which I mentioned above. I DO want to travel more. It kills me that I did the traveling consultant thing for over a decade (between two stints) and never REALLY saw most of the cities I went to. And in fact, in July, I went down to Florida for a week and visited my brother and another lifelong friend who lives down that way, and it was a blast. But then I also had plans to go see my son toward Thanksgiving, and that just kinda died on the vine. At the time I never really asked myself how that happened, but I probably should have. So why didn’t I follow through on that? Was I worried about money? Was it concern my job might somehow see me differently if I missed too much work? Was it worry that a Trump-run FAA might turn my trip into Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Regional Jets?

(That last one was definitely a factor when the air traffic controllers weren’t getting paid.)

And to bring it all full circle, that’s also why I’m kicking the dust off my blog once more.

For a long time, I managed to convince myself that answering questions on Quora was scratching the writing itch I’ve had ever since the days of the college paper. And in superficial ways, I suppose it was. But it’s missing the one essential piece of the equation — it’s really only existing in other people’s curiosity rather than indulging my own. And if this is going to be a year of intention, maybe I need to actually either Write-With-A-Capital-W or dig into why I’m REALLY not doing it.

(Though, OK, part of it is also that Quora has gone the way of lots of social media sites and is increasingly a tire fire of bot-driven conflict. But that’s a whole other conversation.)

Maybe it’s the time commitment… though if I took JUST the time and word-count that I put into Quora, that would probably be a shit-ton of content. Maybe I’ve grown too comfortable with the idea of having a pre-existing audience over there and am scared of really starting from scratch. And OK… there’s also this little fear I have of making something I enjoy too structured and turning it into a chore I hate doing. There’s a difference between doing something because you want to do it and doing something because it’s on your schedule to do it.

You know. Like a New Year’s Resolution.

The Accidental Resolutionist

I’m never quite sure how I feel about New Year’s resolutions.

On one hand, Grounded-In-Logic Me is not much of a believer in the idea that your life will somehow change because of an arbitrary date on the calendar. If we’re being honest, New Year’s Day was just the day that days started getting noticeably longer after the winter solstice. In short, folks decided to party once they were convinced the sun wasn’t burning out. SILLY PEASANTS! So calibrating your life to something so arbitrary feels kinda silly.

On the other hand, what I have noticed in recent years is that when you’ve got two weeks off work and life slows down for a bit, you have more time to sit around and take stock of how your life is going. So while I refuse to give any DIRECT credit to the calendar, I suppose the new year can drive change, though it’s one of those “correlation is not causation” things where the removal from routine is the more valuable thing. Last year, for instance, I got back to the gym — not because the calendar said “January” but because not being at work for almost two weeks made me hyper-aware of how much of a slug I was being. (And OK… the fact that my yearly physical happened in December and I got a scolding from my doctor around the same time might have helped… to-MAY-to, to-MAH-to.)

So while swearing up and down that I “don’t do resolutions”, here’s some things I’ll be working on in 2025… big, small, silly, serious. I’ll probably start with the big/serious stuff and work toward the smaller items toward the end.

Empty That Nest!

My first goal, and in some ways, the one that’s going to drive a lot of the others, is to get unstuck on the process of selling my house. To back up a little bit, I became an empty-nester in April 2024, and I’ve decided that I don’t really have an appetite for owning a house of mostly empty rooms… especially with it being an older house that requires a lot of upkeep. (Also, neither of my kids wants to stay in Pittsburgh and one has already left, so it’s not like I’d be keeping “McDonald Manor” for either of them to inherit.) I’ve already started to work on de-cluttering and getting it ready to sell, but I’ll admit I hit a bit of a wall in the September/October timeframe. I could blame work, football season, or any number of things, but the net effect is I haven’t kept the forward momentum like I’d hoped. So 2025 will be the year to get things rolling again, and hopefully (this shit had better not take another full year) drive it to completion.

Fitness Journey 2: Fitness Boogaloo

The good news is I dropped 45 or 50 pounds in 2024 (depending on whose scale I choose to believe) so some of this is simply maintaining the progress I’ve already made. But it does feel like I’ve kind of plateaued in recent weeks and I want to get my weight down even more. I feel like 200-220 is the sweet spot here: I don’t think I’ll ever be the 185 that the ideal weight chart claims I should be, but 200-220 would be realistic while also being about as light as I’ve been for most of my adult life. Except for that stomach bug back in the 90s where I was puking for three days straight; I think I dropped into the 190s for that.

Maybe it’s changing my workouts. Maybe it’s refining what I eat — I count calories, but don’t track specific nutrients or anything like that. Perhaps it’s even adding running back to the mix (I was running regularly in the 2015-17 timeframe), though that was always a little rough on the knees, which I can’t imagine has improved with more years on the odometer.

Or maybe things will start moving forward again once football season ends and I quit going out for beer and wings once a week. Could be that too.

The Write Stuff

This isn’t the first or last time I’ve been on this particular kick, but I need to channel my writing into something more… productive, substantial, choose your adjective. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Q&A site Quora over the years, which I guess scratches the itch (and on pure word-count, it might add up to a book or two), but a) it’s all a bit jumbly and unfocused, and b) that place becomes more and more of a shitshow by the day. So, for the moment, the plan is to whip this site into better shape and write more consistently; at least I’ll be at the helm of my own ship, rather than just drifting with the currents of random strangers’ questions. (Though I might still duck my head into Quora just to mine it for ideas to bring over here.)

Not Storming The US Capitol And Attempting To Disrupt The Peaceful Transfer Of Power

Didn’t think we needed to spell this one out, but… it’s the times we live in, I guess….

There’s a few other “big” things on the list, but some of those are more private. Among other reasons, some of them intersect with other people, and while I don’t mind putting my own business in the street, I’m always a little leery of airing OTHER people’s business in public. Quoth Austin Powers: “that sort of thing’s not my bag, baby”. So let’s just table those for now, with the idea I may come back to them down the road.

Meanwhile, let’s turn to the more fun/lighthearted stuff…. the reindeer games, if you will.

Hit The Road, Jack

Now that I’m an empty-nester, I feel like travel is one of those things I’ve neglected over the years. I did a fair amount of travel as an IT consultant in my 30s, but that was almost entirely for work, and I rarely got to really experience the places I was visiting as a traveler. I do pretty well on those “how many states have you visited?” quizzes, but “airport, job-site, hotel, lather, rinse, repeat” is no way to see the world.

I have standing invitations to visit various friends and family in different cities, I haven’t been out of the country since 2001, and… I think I’d like to get moving (figuratively and literally) on some of that. I still think the house stuff takes priority and drives the agenda a bit, but once I put that in the rear-view mirror, I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more of the world.

(There’s also a simple logistical issue that my home state of PA is switching to RealID in 2025, and the same documents you need for that are the ones you need for renewing your passport. Some of the paperwork shuffling HAS to happen as a matter of necessity even if the travel doesn’t come together right away.)

A Little Night Music

I always feel guilty I’m not doing more with music. I am an owner of guitars, though “play” is probably an ambitious verb choice. During the election season, I bought a pair of drum sticks and a drumming pad to burn off nervous energy, and there’s an electronic drum set that’s currently in limbo: it belongs to my son, but he doesn’t really have room for it in his new place (and I’d have to ship it across the country as well). Now that I’ve accumulated an entire band’s worth of instruments, I ought to at least bang out “Hot Cross Buns” every once in a while or something.

Shall We Play A Game?

Let’s talk video games for a minute. I’m not going to ever renounce gaming as a hobby (though some Gamers(tm) make my skin crawl), but I’ve got a serious case of the Backlog Blues. I buy games — in my partial defense, I usually wait for stuff to go on sale, so I’m at least being semi-responsible on the money side — but then I never really get around to playing them. Sometimes it’s pursuing other activities, but sometimes it’s just playing the same few treadmill-y games rather than experiencing something new. I don’t know that I need to change how much I play, but I do feel like I need to… for lack of a less pretentious way of putting it… play with more intent when I pick up a controller. Have a sense of how long I’m going to play for or what in-game goal I’m going to try and reach so I’m not just chasing flashing lights and beeping noises. And then move on to something else when I hit that goal, so I’m not just spinning my mental wheels.

Anyhow, I feel like that’s a pretty good list to get started with. For someone who doesn’t do resolutions, it seems I’ve managed to stumble into a few of them by accident anyway. So… let’s get to it.

Noooooo Canada

After weeks of waiting, it’s finally here… Matt Canada Firing Day!

For those who don’t follow football, Matt Canada was, until today, the offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers. His passing offense — if you can even call it that — has been one of the least imaginative, most conservative in the league. There are almost zero deep passes, and even most of the short passes are to the sidelines; it’s almost like he’s allergic to the middle of the field. If that’s not easy enough to gameplan against, he also runs a bunch of slow-developing plays — bubble screens, jet sweeps — that get broken up behind the line of scrimmage for a loss. To be fair, the bread-and-butter running game has been fairly competent, but in today’s NFL, if ALL you do is run the football, you don’t go very far. We’re light-years removed from the “three yards and a cloud of dust” game of years past.

If you want to put some stats to it: the Steelers were 28th in both points and total yards during Canada’s tenure, and NEVER had a 400-yard offensive performance. In 2023 in particular, they’ve been outgained offensively in EVERY game they played. (Yet, they’re somehow still 6-4… which is a bit of a minor miracle, honestly.)

In short, Canada has widely been viewed amongst Steeler Nation as sucking at his job, pretty much since the day he was hired. But he had thus far managed to escape much in the way of accountability. In 2021, it was “Ben Roethlisberger no longer has the arm to throw deep, so they have to manage the playbook to what he’s capable of”. In 2022, it was “Kenny Pickett is a rookie, they’re easing him into things”. But now, in 2023, there’s no more built-in excuses and the offense looks as bad as ever… maybe even worse. And so today, the axe finally fell.

Now, I’m not going to pretend Matt Canada was the ONLY problem with this team. Kenny Pickett, the aforementioned quarterback, has been maddeningly inconsistent since being handed the starting job. Enough so that there are doubts creeping in over whether he can really be the franchise QB they hoped they were drafting. Maybe it’s not a fair comparison, but C.J. Stroud managed to hit the ground running this year, and it’s not clear the Texans’ personnel at the other 10 offensive positions are any better than the Steelers’. Sometimes QB’s have the “it” factor; sometimes they don’t.

Speaking of those other positions, they’re not immune from criticism either. The offensive line has had its ups and downs as well: they had a lot of turnover of personnel over the last few years and the charitable explanation is they’re still meshing; the less-charitable explanation is they signed the wrong guys. They’ve also struggled to find good wide receivers ever since Antonio Brown’s departure. Diontae Johnson puts up superficially good numbers and is certainly a success for a 3rd-rounder, but seems to disappear in big moments; George Pickens is a physical freak, but has a tendency to sulk and check out if his number’s not getting called. Calvin Austin has intriguing speed and elusiveness in the slot, but he also lost his entire rookie year to injury, so he’s still in learning mode. Allen Robinson… exists. So some of this is a personnel issue as much as a coaching one.

(The sole bright spot has been the emergence of running back Jaylen Warren. He’s a 5’8″ undrafted free agent, his physical tools don’t really leap out, but when he gets running north-south, he’s like a cannonball out there. And his stiff-arms are becoming the stuff of legend.)

But it starts with an offense gameplan that has been both predictable and unimaginative. Every. Single. Week. You can’t run an NFL offense when the opposing team knows your entire offense runs within 5 yards of the line of scrimmage. When a fairly team-first guy like Najee Harris admits to a locker room full of reporters that opposing teams pretty much know what’s coming… a new coordinator is probably the first and easiest thing you can do to try and fix it.

Among other things, they had to do it for the sake of the defense. The Steelers’ defense is actually pretty good this year, and T.J. Watt is a generational talent that they just signed to a huge contract. Since a 30-7 loss to the Texans back in Week 4, they haven’t allowed more than 19 points to an opponent. That should be enough to win football games in today’s NFL… if you can couple them to an offense that doesn’t three-and-out almost every possession. The Steel Curtain Steelers of the 70s would’ve struggled if their offense could never get them off the field for a breather.

As tenuous as their position in the standings is, they also had to do it for the standings. They’re still at 6-4, and there’s a few traditionally good teams having down years — Buffalo just fired THEIR offensive coordinator; Cincinnati just lost quarterback Joe Burrow for the year. The playoffs aren’t unrealistic if they can get the offense to play slightly better. Super Bowl? OK, probably not. But you gotta try, right? “Any given Sunday?”

Lastly, I’d argue they had to do it to force an honest reckoning regarding Pickett. Right now there’s this debate over how much of the offensive struggles were Canada’s offense, and how much were just that Pickett isn’t that good. In fact, I think a lot of the fanbase WANTS it to be Canada’s fault so they don’t have to reckon with the possibility we have to go back to the drawing board at quarterback. Admittedly, that’s probably a deeper dive than I wanted to do here, but it’s a question that needs to be resolved. And next year is going to be a deep draft for quarterbacks, so there’s a bit of a feeling that if Pickett ISN’T the guy, 2024 would be a good time to draft some competition at the position. If pushing Canada out the airlock is what creates the conditions for really scrutinizing Pickett’s strengths and weaknesses, that’s probably a net positive as well.

The only problem with all of this is that it’s pretty hard to make sweeping changes mid-season, especially when you’re mostly doing it with the same personnel that are already in place. Maybe they can go get a splashy outside hire in the offseason, but for now the Steelers already announced that running backs coach Eddie Faulkner will be the interim OC with QB coach Mike Sullivan as the play-caller. So maybe those two are sitting on a treasure-trove of plays they’re just dying to call (in my head-canon, I’ve already decided it’s a vintage Trapper Keeper labeled PLAYS MATT CANADA WOULDN’T LET ME RUN), but chances are it will look more like incremental tweaks to what already exists.

But all of that is for down the road. Today, the fans got what they wanted. Even if there’s a little undercurrent of “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it”.

The Next Great Japanese Import

Even if you’re not much of a baseball fan, you’ve probably heard of Shohei Ohtani — one of the best batters in baseball, one of the best pitchers in baseball (though he’s recovering from an injury), and the ONLY guy who’s been doing both at a high level. And six years into his MLB career, probably the best baseball player ever to come over from Japan.

Well, tomorrow, the bidding war begins for the next big thing from Japan. Get ready to hear a lot of talk about Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

To be fair, he’s not the “next Ohtani” because he’s “just” a pitcher; as far as we know, he’s nothing special with a bat. But calling Yamamoto “just a pitcher” is like saying Beethoven “wrote a few tunes”.

In fact, Yamamoto has been far and away the best starting pitcher in Japanese baseball the past three years running. Consider these numbers that look like something out of a videogame:

2021 – 18-5, 1.39 ERA. 193.2 innings, 124 hits, 40 walks, 206 strikeouts.
2022 – 15-5, 1.68 ERA. 193 innings, 137 hits, 42 walks, 205 strikeouts.
2023 – 17-6, 1.13 ERA, 171 innings, 119 hits, 28 walks, 176 strikeouts.

Each of those seasons won Yamamoto both the Triple Crown (leading the league in ERA, wins, and strikeouts) and the Sawamura Award (the equivalent of the Cy Young Award). He’s also had 5 All-Star appearances, 2 MVP awards, 2 Gold Gloves, and he’s also thrown two no-hitters. And if you want a little extra, he held his own at the World Baseball Classic earlier this year as well, against some of the world’s best players.

And the best part… Yamamoto only just turned 25 in August, so theoretically he’s still got some of his best baseball ahead of him.

But that means we need to talk about “the posting system”. In order to keep the peace between MLB and Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB — the Japanese major leagues) and keep MLB from using their deep pockets to sign players at will, there’s a formal system for allowing players to come over. If an NPB player who hasn’t reached free agency yet wants to come to MLB, he has to seek his team’s permission to leave, and if the team agrees they “post” his rights for MLB teams to bid on. There’s a negotiation period of 45 days, after which the player signs with an MLB team, and the Japanese team that owned the player’s rights (in this case, the Orix Buffaloes) would get a one-time payment for releasing him. If no one signs the player (obviously not a concern for Yamamoto, but has happened for some lesser players), they can return to their NPB team with no harm done.

(A little bit of history, Until 2018, it used to be the rights auction would come first — the MLB teams would submit bids to the Japanese team for the right to negotiate with the player, and ONLY the team that won that auction would be eligible to sign the player. So the player didn’t really have full free agency; they basically got told which MLB team they would be allowed to play for. One side effect was this gave the MLB team all the leverage when negotiating a contract because the player’s only Plan B was staying in Japan for another year. As of 2018 they changed the system to give the players more negotiating power — the player can now negotiate freely with any/all MLB teams, and the posting fee is merely a percentage of the contract he actually signs for.)

So let’s put some estimated numbers to it. To keep the math simple, let’s say Yamamoto signs for $200M total (it’s the total value of the whole contract, so if he signs a 6 or 7 year deal, that’s easily possible). The posting fee is 20% of the first 25M ($5M), 17.5% of the second 25M ($3.75M), and 15% of everything over $50M ($22M in this case). So on a $200M contract… over 5+ years, that could happen… the posting fee to Orix would be $31.875M. So you can see why even though Orix would probably love to keep Yamamoto, they probably wouldn’t mind $30M+ in their bank account either. Especially not when he’s a seven-year veteran and would be eligible to leave as a free agent in a few years anyway.

So what’s team get for that money? Yamamoto’s fastball sits pretty comfortably around 95mph, but he can pump a few extra clicks when he has to. He also has a curve and a split-finger fastball. He throws all three with better-than-average control. He technically has a slider as well which he hasn’t used much, but some people suggest he might start leaning on it a little more in the majors. The fastball-curve-splitter combo mostly offers vertical movement; a slider might be a way to mix in some side-to-side action. He’s also been fairly durable — he pitches deep into games, and I haven’t really been able to find any injury information worth mentioning. Beyond the inherent risk that comes with any pitcher (it’s an unnatural body movement), there’s nothing that pegs Yamamoto as a health risk.

So who’s going to get him? Line up the usual suspects. The New York and LA teams seem like they’d have to be in the mix. Philadelphia is firmly in win-now mode, so they might take a look. Chicago and Boston generally have deep enough pockets, but I’m not sure they’re ready to contend yet. I could see a few of the smaller-market West Coast teams like Seattle and San Francisco try to make a splash because they have some interest in actively courting a Japanese audience. (Seattle in particular tends to keep a few Japanese players on the roster because they’ve cultivated a bit of a Japanese fan base over the years.)

It’s hard to read the tea leaves when Yamamoto just posted today and the bidding doesn’t even open until tomorrow, but it feels like the Mets might have a bit of an edge. Two reasons. First, their owner Steve Cohen is obscenely wealthy and not afraid to spend it, so much so that one of last year’s subplots was other owners complaining that Cohen’s free spending was making them look bad. But there’s also the fact that they signed another Japanese pitcher, Kodai Senga, last year, and Senga has been openly courting Yamamoto to come to New York. (Or as openly as one can do without risking tampering charges.) And there’s also a little culture shock for players coming over, so Yamamoto might appreciate having a fellow countryman already on the roster. If you put a gun to my head today, I’d say the Mets, but there’s a long 45 days ahead of us.

Prime And Punishment

It’s been a busy week in the world of Coach Prime, though if we’re being honest, a) when has it not? and b) isn’t that somewhat by design anyway?

This week’s excitement came in the aftermath of Colorado’s 28-16 loss to UCLA, a game where QB Shedeur Sanders (yes, his son, if you haven’t been following this closely) was sacked 7 times and hit enough other times he had to get an injection of painkillers at halftime. Asked about the state of the offensive line in the post-game press conference, and what he would do to address it, Sanders pere‘s typically colorful response was:

“The big picture, you go get new linemen. That’s the picture, and I’m gonna paint it perfectly.“

This has set off the latest round of “Coach Prime Is Telling It Like It Is And Holding People Accountable” vs. “Coach Prime Is A Disgrace To College Football” on social media. Everyone’s staking out their positions, but there’s an awful lot of posturing and fairly little clarity.

So let’s start with the facts.

First, the line play was bad. “Defense will stipulate”, as the cop shows say. In fact, it’s been bad for most of the season. One of my first-draft points was “how can he run down his line publicly without looking at the game tape first?” but this isn’t the first time this has been an issue, only the most dramatic example. So we’ll let that one slide on by.

There has been some confusion on how many of the players were new transfers vs. how many were holdovers from the previous 1-11 2022 team. I’ve seen detractors dunking on Sanders’ inability to recruit linemen AND supporters claiming that the entire line were holdovers from the previous regime, and the truth is in the middle. Just for factual clarity, it appears there are two returning starters — center Van Wells and left tackle Gerad Christian-Lichtenhan — and the other three starters are part of Deion’s “luggage”. (As are almost all of the reserves.)

So with the facts somewhat established, let’s wander into the forbidden forest of hot takes and opinions. As with a lot of what Sanders has done in his Colorado tenure, I think it’s not so much the message being conveyed as much as it is how he chose to convey it.

First, it’s simply a question of internal vs. external… keep that shit in-house. If you want to tell your players they should be looking for new gigs next year, save it for practice when the cameras are gone. I guarantee Sanders won’t be the first or last coach to have threatened a kid’s spot on the team; but he’s the first I can remember to threaten about 10 of them to a room full of reporters. When you’re sitting in front of a room full of hot mics, a leader protects his people. YES, you can say the line didn’t play well — no sense denying an apparent truth — but you don’t offer up the kids on the o-line as red meat to protect your bruised ego. Feed ’em some platitudes about looking at the film and seeing where we can improve, and get onto the next question.

And OK, I feel like the perception of nepotism has to chafe a little, when mere sentences before, he praised his son Shedeur as “the best quarterback in the country”. And when there was no talk of getting new defensive backs in regard to his other son Shilo getting ejected for targeting after putting his helmet into the chin of a UCLA receiver. At some point it’s gotta get old being told you’re one of 73 Ringos backing up John and Paul.

(OK… maybe Shedeur and Travis Hunter are Lennon-McCartney and Shilo is George Harrison in this analogy. We’ll keep workshopping it.)

But there’s a bigger and arguably more more worrisome issue underlying his comments. It feels like on some level Sanders is abdicating the responsibility to actually COACH the players under his charge. The man has created this image of “Coach Prime”, but apparently, if you don’t protect his kid and make him look good, he’ll just get rid of you and go out and get a new batch of mercenaries to take your place. Which… lest we forget… was the same message he delivered to the players already in the program when he took over, so it’s not like this is a departure for him. Meanwhile, the line’s been bad for weeks; what has Coach Prime done about it other than threaten to kick them out of the program? Maybe he should rebrand as “GM Prime”: he recruits and assembles the roster, and then someone else does the actual work of making his players better.

And this gets into the larger question that goes well beyond Deion Sanders… it’s NIL, it’s the portal, it’s conference realignment…. Where is the ever-shifting balance between “this has become an ‘amateur’ league in name only, and results are all that matter” and “this is still ultimately a developmental league where helping the players improve their skills is still part of what’s being offered”. If this is just NFL Lite, then OK, bring in a new class of free agents and try again, but at that point let’s stop pretending that the NCAA offers anything a professional minor league couldn’t offer equally well if funded adequately. If we’re going to keep propping up the cause of student athletics as the NCAA’s raison d’etre, than I think coaches should have an obligation to stick with the guys they bring in and try to make them better, rather than better-deal them the second adversity — or the UCLA front seven — hits.

Sid Gets An Early Birthday Present, Dubas Gets His Man

It took a month of haggling, but Pens’ Grand Poobah (GM/Director Of Hockey Operations… yeah, I ain’t saying all of that) Kyle Dubas managed to get Sidney Crosby the perfect birthday present… defenseman Erik Karlsson. The deal that’s been rumored since… well, forever… finally came together with Montreal serving as the mystery third team that greased the wheels for a move.

The particulars are:

San Jose also retains $1.5M of Karlsson’s $11.5M contract, but the Pens retain a similar amount of Jeff Petry’s, so from the Pens’ standpoint it evens out.

Pittsburgh’s motivations here are obvious. They’re pretty obviously trying to squeeze one last Stanley Cup out of the Crosby-Malkin-Letang core, and to some extent they don’t care what happens after that because it’s going to involve a major retool. Sid’s retirement will do to this team what the meteor did to the dinosaurs, and we just have to be OK with that. But for those remaining 2-4 years, they add one of the best offensive defensemen in the game, even if he’s at a pretty expensive price tag and doesn’t play a lick of defense. Between this and standing pat with Tristan Jarry in net, they’re going to be leaning into winning a lot of 6-4 games. But still… it does make the Pens a more dynamic offensive team in the short term, and specifically should help the power play, which struggled mightily last year.

And OK, they got rid of almost ALL of Ron Hextall’s bad contracts in the process. For $6M, Petry needed to be a Norris candidate, not a second-pair talent; Granlund was a disastrous trade-deadline acquisition at $5M a year. Rutta ($2.5M) and DeSmith ($1.8M) weren’t horrific overpays, but they’re luxuries when you’re already bumping your head against the cap, as the Pens are. So trading $14M-ish worth of “meh” for one $10M guy who’s likely to be very good… that makes a certain demented amount of sense.

As for the other guys, Hamaliuk has some decent size (6’3″) but hasn’t produced much in the minors, Pitlick could find himself in the mix for the bottom six, but I don’t think either moves the needle much.

The only thing I don’t like a lot is that they only got San Jose to retain $1.5M. When they were talking about retaining $3-4M and making Karlsson a $7.5-8.5M acquisition, that seemed like a more comfortable landing spot. But again, it comes down to “you don’t care what happens after the meteor strikes”. If the wheels come off and Crosby retires at the end of his contract in 2 years… you can probably still ship Karlsson back out. And if you can’t, you blow the whole thing up and he’s the one salary you keep around to get over the minimum salary.

For San Jose, it’s all about paying off the credit card early. Salary-wise, Hoffman and Granlund end up being about the same price as Karlsson today, but Hoffman is done after this year and Granlund after next, whereas Karlsson had four years left. So two years from now, the Sharks will have a mostly clean ledger while the Pens will still be paying Karlsson $10M. And the Sharks get an extra first-round pick. The fact that it’s top-10 protected isn’t that critical; with Karlsson the Pens are a decent bet to make the playoffs anyway. (And I’d add that Hoffman has enough rep as a goal scorer that they might be able to flip him at the deadline and get another pick or two if he has a good first half.)

Montreal is the third team, which mostly represents Jeff Petry having a no-trade clause and not wanting to go to the Sharks. (Two reasons: 1) at age 35 going on 36, he doesn’t want to wait on a rebuild and 2) he’s expressed that he wants to stay closer to his family in… Michigan, I think?). So basically, the Pens traded Petry (plus parts) to Montreal for Hoffman, and then sent Hoffman — who couldn’t refuse the trade — along to San Jose. It’s a little hard to see why Montreal wants Petry, and it wouldn’t even surprise me if they turn around and ship him back out, but Legare (still young enough to have some prospect buzz), DeSmith (in the ballpark of what you pay for a backup goalie), and a decent draft pick in what’s supposed to be a deep 2024 draft make for an OK package to swap one overpriced veteran for another.

My prediction on Petry’s ultimate destination: Detroit. They’re a young team on the rise, they’ve got a young-but-talented defense corps that could use a veteran mentor, and if Montreal retains a little more salary, that could be a good fit. But I’m not some insider… just a gut feeling.

So there it is… after a month of will they or won’t they, the Pens finally get their man, get their salary cap situation under control, and mostly hit reset on the Ron Hextall era. (Don’t mind me, muttering things under my breath in the general direction of Jeff Carter.) Does it make them Cup condtenders? They’re probably at least in the conversation now, but hardly the favorites. Does it make them a better team? Absolutely.

Happy Birthday, Sid!