Ken Norton Jr. out as defensive coordinator for the Teattle Teahawks…I mean, Seattle Seahawks.
Also out: Andre Curtis, “defensive passing game coordinator”.
Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category
More firings.
Wednesday, January 19th, 2022Firings watch.
Tuesday, January 18th, 2022Mike Mayock out as general manager of the Las Vegas Raiders.
The biggest issue seems to be that Mayock was closely tied with Jon Gruden (I’ve seen him described as “Gruden’s hand-picked choice for GM”) who, as you may recall, got fired in October.
Obit watch: January 15, 2022.
Saturday, January 15th, 2022Eddie Basinski has passed away at the age of 99. He was the second oldest former major league baseball player.
Interestingly, Mr. Basinski was also a trained classical violin player.
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Saousoalii Siavii Jr., former defensive tackle with the Kansas City Chiefs. This is an odd one: he died in custody at Leavenworth.
Culley-ing the herd.
Friday, January 14th, 2022Well. Well well well. Well.
David Culley out as head coach of the Houston Texans after a single season. Battle Red Blog.
The Texans were 4-13 and, quite frankly, stank. But:
Also out: offensive coordinator Tim Kelly.
Battle Red also reports that, while Culley had a five-year contract, only the first two years were guaranteed. So he’ll get paid a mere $4 million instead of $12 million to $14 million if all five years had been guaranteed…
Obit watch: January 12, 2022.
Wednesday, January 12th, 2022Jean Ramirez, catcher for the Tampa Bay Rays. He was 28.
Firings watch.
Wednesday, January 12th, 2022Sorry for the lack of a clever headline, but the NY Post cut me off at the pass on this one.
Joe Judge out as coach of the New York Football Giants. Two seasons, 10-23 overall.
Blood in the streets!
Monday, January 10th, 2022While this would be an appropriate title for an after-action report on the training classes I went to over the weekend, this is not that report. I hope to be able to write that sometime this week.
This is your “Monday morning after the end of the NFL season” firings watch. So far, there’s a lot of “sources say”. I’m going to leave these unlinked for right now, and update when there’s better confirmation.
“Sources say” Mike Zimmer is out as head coach, and Rick Spielman is out as general manager of the Vikings.
Edited to add: Story from the Star Tribune, though it is still “according to a source familiar with the team’s decision-making”. I can’t find any evidence that there’s been a press release, press conference, or other official announcement.
Zimmer had led the team to the postseason in three of his first six years, earning a second contract extension from the Wilfs before the 2020 season. Shortly thereafter, the Vikings gave Spielman a three-year deal to match the length of Zimmer’s, rewarding the general manager who’d had full control of the roster since 2012 and hired Zimmer to replace Leslie Frazier in 2014.
Zimmer finished his eight years in Minnesota with a 72-56-1 mark, ranking third in team history in wins, games coached (129) and winning percentage (.559). He was the seventh-longest tenured head coach in the NFL; all six who’ve been in their jobs longer than Zimmer have won Super Bowls.
Edited to add: this is now official, with a statement from the team ownership.
“Sources say” Matt Nagy is out as head coach of da Bears.
Edited to add: Chicago Tribune, “according to league sources”, Sun Times.
More as events break.
Edited to add: going back a day, Denver Post coverage (by way of archive.is) of the Vic Fangio/Broncos firing.
Edited to add: Brian Flores out as head coach of the Dolphins. This appears to be an official team announcement, not “sources said”.
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Edited to add: Dave Gettleman out as general manager of hapless the New York Football Giants. It seems like the official spin on this is that he “retired”.
Firings watch.
Sunday, January 9th, 2022Very very quick, as I’m using downtime: Vic Fangio out as coach of the Denver Broncos.
Obit watch: January 3, 2022.
Monday, January 3rd, 2022Richard Leakey, paleoanthropologist.
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Dan Reeves, former Dallas Cowboys running back and later NFL coach.
Reeves played and coached with the Dallas Cowboys during a stellar period when they won two Super Bowls, one when he was a player-coach and one when he was an offensive coordinator, working for Coach Tom Landry. After several seasons as an assistant to Landry, he was hired as the Broncos’ head coach in 1981, replacing Red Miller.
Over 12 seasons in Denver, his teams had a record of 110-73-1 and were among the best in the American Football Conference. Led by quarterback John Elway, they lost the Super Bowl in 1987, 1988 and 1990 by wide margins to the New York Giants, the Washington Redskins and the San Francisco 49ers.
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Jeanine Ann Roose. She was the young “Violet” in “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and…that’s it.
She went on to attend UCLA, becoming a psychologist and later a Jungian analyst, according to TMZ, which quoted her as once having made a comparison between her life and the movie’s story line.
“It’s a Wonderful Life was the only movie that I was in and it been an amazing lifetime experience to have been in such a collectively meaningful picture. … It became clear that my desire was specifically to help others who were struggling with finding meaning in their life — not unlike Clarence in the movie who helps George see the meaning of his life,” she said.
Max Julien. He was “Goldie” in “The Mack” (opposite Richard Pryor). Other credits include “Mod Squad”, “The Bold Ones: The Protectors”, and “The Name of the Game”.
Obit watch: December 29, 2021.
Wednesday, December 29th, 2021Comment I made to Lawrence last night: “Sure,” the NYT reporter said, “I’ll cover the obituary desk between Christmas and New Year’s. Nothing ever happens between Christmas and New Year’s.”
I’m being kind of short with these first two because everyone is on them like a fat man on an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.
John Madden. ESPN. LAT.
“Rabelaisian emissary”. Gotta give that guy credit.
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I wouldn’t say I was ever a big Madden fan. I had nothing against him, it was more a matter of me not being a big football fan in general. But that seems like a good general leadership principle: be yourself, and treat your people like intelligent human beings.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Madden was offered the “Ernie Pantusso” role on “Cheers”, but turned it down.
Harry M. Reid. Las Vegas Review Journal.
Jeff Dickerson, ESPN reporter covering the Chicago Bears. He was only 44.
I wanted to note this, even though he wasn’t as famous as the other guys. The ESPN obit makes Mr. Dickerson sound like a really good guy who was taken too soon:
Even after being placed in hospice last week, he told colleagues he was there merely to humor his doctors. No one around him heard a word of self-pity, and he disarmed those who expressed concern by asking them about their own lives.
“JD always wants to know how you’re doing,” Waddle said. “I’d ask him how he’s doing and his first response is, ‘How are you doing? How are [Waddle’s daughters]?’ The dignity with which he has carried himself through some of the most difficult times any human being would be asked to go through, what his wife went through and the dignity and strength and grace that he showed at her side throughout all of this … I don’t know anybody I’ve met in my 54 years in life who has handled adversity over the last decade with more grace and strength and dignity than Jeff Dickerson. I know a lot of people go through [stuff]. I do. I’m sympathetic to all of it. But what Jeff Dickerson has had to go through the last decade is cruel.
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“He always carried a care for the subject that he was going to write about,” said Gould, who co-hosted an ESPN 1000 radio show with Dickerson during a portion of his Bears career. “As a player you can appreciate that the wisdom he put on paper was as neutral and correct as it ever was going to be. It was always going to be your words. It was always going to be what the story was. It was never going to be someone filling in the blanks …
“Players definitely noticed. He always wrote a true story. He always wrote what was happening at the moment. He didn’t try to back the bus up over somebody. He tried to get it exactly how the story was. … I think you saw a lot of guys give him a lot of credit because they knew he would write it right.”
Obit watch: December 23, 2021.
Thursday, December 23rd, 2021He was “Enrico Rossi” in 113 episodes of “The Untouchables”. Other credits include two episodes of “Get Smart”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Mission: Impossible”, “The Rockford Files”, four episodes of “Quincy M.E.”, the Andy Sidaris film “Picasso Trigger”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Deadfall”, season 1, episodes 17 and 18. We have not seen this yet, as we are saving season 1 until after we’ve watched seasons 2 through 8. But this is kind of a legendary episode: Joe Mannix gets into a bloody fight with his boss at Intertect.)
Robbie Roper. He was a high school quarterback in Georgia and one of the top recruits in this year’s class.
He was only 18 years old, and passed away after a routine surgery.
Bowl watch.
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2021Doesn’t count as a firing, but still kind of interesting. Lawrence tipped me off to this earlier today, but it was just a rumor at the time: now it seems to be confirmed.
Texas A&M is out of the Gator Bowl.
Is it the Wuhan Flu? Sort of.
But they’ve also got “as many as ten upperclassmen” who are eligible for the draft and have said they don’t want to play. They’ve got two more players in the transfer portal, and “as many as 12 players” who are out because of injuries.
ESPN:
Texas A&M athletic director Ross Bjork told ESPN that the program was down to 38 scholarship position players, of which 20 were offensive and defensive linemen.
In addition to the outbreak and the injuries, Texas A&M also had tight end Jalen Wydermyer and running back Isaiah Spiller declare for the NFL draft. Quarterback Zach Calzada, who started 10 games this season, entered the transfer portal.
“So if you take running backs, receivers, quarterbacks and defensive backs, we had 13 of those guys and only 13 scholarship players on defense,” Bjork told ESPN. “We had over 40 guys out between COVID, season-ending injuries, transfers and opt-outs.
The Gator Bowl people, the NCAA, Wake Forest (the other team) and the ACC are all supposedly working to find another team to play. At this date, though, it seems to me like a long shot: the game is scheduled for December 31st. I imagine many teams have already released their players to go home (Texas A&M was supposed to release theirs Tuesday, and have them come back after Christmas) and I doubt a lot of teams that aren’t already scheduled for bowls are going to want to scramble and take risks just to compete in a lower tier bowl game.
On a completely related note:
The national championship game could be pushed to January 14th (it is scheduled for January 10th) but:
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Not that I am hoping for anyone to come down with the Chinese Rabies, but man, a national championship by forfeit would be a sight to see.