Sports Notes

Jayhawk Talk

Well that was much better. Sure, it took about 17 minutes to get going, but once the Jayhawks found an offensive rhythm last night, they had no issues with Houston. Great games from Melvin Council Jr. and, especially, Tre White. Darryn Peterson played the whole game again! He didn’t do a ton, but two second half 3’s were huge in making sure Houston could not come back. The defense was outstanding. Aside from the slow start, it sure looked like Flory Bidunga was right when he said after Saturday’s loss that the Jayhawks had looked past the Bearcats to the Cougars. Not the instant classic like the Arizona game two weeks ago, but another night when the Phog was rocking and a very good team came in and faltered under the pressure.

Crazy stat: this season KU is 5–1 against the five best teams in the Big 12 (with one more to play against Arizona), but just 1–3 against UCF, West Virginia, TCU, and Cincinnati. And that one win had all kinds of crazy stuff occur to not be another L.

This team can play with anyone. But they can also lose to anyone.

Now to keep Peterson on the court for 30+ minutes the next three weeks, let him settle down instead of trying to force things, and then hope it’s not too late for the team to develop some magic on the offensive end and become one capable of winning multiple games in the tournament.

Olympics Wrap Up

In my blogging life I’ve often kept a notebook of thoughts while watching the Olympics. I never got around to doing that this year. Mostly because while I watched a healthy amount of the games, I never fully locked in. I blame the weird TV schedule. I normally come downstairs just after 7:00 each morning. I would turn on the TV and not only would there be live events on, but NBC was already three hours into live action. And that would stretch throughout the day, with live coverage wrapping up just before dinner our time.

The issue was there were often long gaps between events with nothing live on. That made it hard to keep the TV on and ride sport-to-sport the way you can do in the summer games. I would disconnect to do other stuff then forget about checking back in.

Worse was how NBC broadcast the games (evergreen comment). There was the constant shuffle between NBC, USA, and Peacock. Worst of these was Peacock, where you had to run through the normal streaming app hassle of navigating to what you wanted to watch, sitting through the pre-loaded ad, then hoping everything worked properly. I had a couple moments where the app just stopped working in the midst of something live.

In general I’m not here to argue against using Peacock. We are too far down that path to ever come back and should be thankful NBC still shows anything on traditional stations. However, can we please make the Peacock experience more like switching between cable channels than switching between Netflix and Hulu? The technology really should be there to avoid the gaps in coverage, or having to exit out of what you are currently watching to find other options.

The craziest thing I found in coverage was how you could watch a preliminary event live on Peacock, and two hours later it would be replayed on NBC while the next round was live on Peacock. Example: Saturday we watched the mass start speed skating, which was great. The semifinals were live on Peacock. A few hours later they were replayed on NBC/USA. AT THE SAME TIME the finals were back on the streamer. Which makes no sense. Why on earth are you hiding a final, on a Saturday morning, on the streaming app while showing a pre-taped heat of the same event on “live” TV?

I guess I should be happy the Olympics were in a reasonable time zone after back-to-back winter games in Asia.[1] The odd scheduling kept me from getting fully invested, though. And it forced me to write more about my experience watching the games than the games themselves. Embarrassing for an OG Olympics lover.

What stood out?

Hockey, of course. I’m not a hockey watcher but Olympic hockey, especially in the medal rounds, is terrific. The two finals were spectacular, a pair of 2–1 overtime wins for the US over Canada. Another traditional comment in these posts is that there is no patriotism quite like Olympics patriotism, even when certain powers that be try to fuck that up. I was all-in on hating the Canadians last week.

I know NBC had to lean into the comparisons to the 1980 team, given that this year’s gold medal game fell on the 46th anniversary of the US win over the USSR, but I found it a little thick at times. There is no comparing the context of US-USSR ’80 to US-Canada ’26. They might as well be two different sports. Hell, I’m in the large minority of American fans who watched both games. It was a LONG time ago, and while the current NHL players who made up our team were no doubt inspired by the stories of how that squad of college kids took on the best team in the world, they were all born 20–25 years after the game and only know of it because of grainy clips or the movie Miracle.

Figure skating just isn’t my thing, but I accidentally stumbled onto Alysa Liu’s gold medal winning skate Thursday afternoon, moments after the American women had claimed their gold. I don’t know shit about skating, but in real time I could tell that Liu was skating with a joy, confidence, and ease that seemed uncommon to my amateur eyes. I knew she nailed it, without understanding why. A magnificent performance and deserved gold.

What else did I watch? As much alpine skiing at time allowed, although it was a bummer that these events were usually quite early and I was only able to catch the end of them live each morning. Fortunately I just missed Lindsey Vonn’s horrific crash. They need to find a way to stretch the alpine events out longer. A fair amount of curling. Lots of speed skating, sliding events, and cross country skating. Basically whatever was on during the morning when I was getting going and then while I was working out and could put on the TV.

We never got into a regular cycle of watching at night, since we generally knew all the results. I don’t think it bothered S as much as me, but I hate how tightly edited events were for prime time. Which, again, I get it! Events are basically turned into highlight reels that focus on the Americans over all else. Unless it is figure skating, when shit gets stretched out to cover long stretches of the three-hour prime time window. Another reason we didn’t watch much at night. I can only take so much of the skating crap.

It is a weird time for the Olympics, from a viewer’s perspective. I can literally watch any event I want, whenever is most convenient to me. If you told me that 20–30–40 years ago I would not have understood how that was possible. Younger Me would have expected that Older Me would spend every waking hour flipping around.

However, all those little friction points in the process kept me from fully diving in. Add in weird timing along with dissatisfaction with NBC’s product, and I could not get fully locked in this year. I assume that will change in two years when the summer games are here in the States. Although you never know how world events and NBC might find ways of fucking that up, too.