Wednesday Catch Up Notes

A very good Tuesday night in our house. First, the Irish began the City tournament with an expectedly easy, 33-point win. Next, as a nice surprise, KU pounded previously unbeaten Iowa State. Can’t ask for a better evening than that.

Rather than dive into those games, I’ll instead share a post I’ve been sitting on for nearly two weeks. I really should have posted it on a weekend, as most of it is rather out-of-date. There are a few really good nuggets in here, though, so it is better to post late than delete it.[1] I’ll throw in a few other bonus notes that have popped up since.

Elf sure was on TV a lot last month. It seems like five different cable channels had the rights to it, and it was available on multiple streaming platforms.Christmas Vacation was on nearly as often.

Not that I’m complaining. The girls laughed when I would switch from one movie to the other during commercial breaks when they were both on. Somehow I managed to never watch Christmas Vacation all the way through. Long time readers may recall I’ve had a recurring dream for years that I get to Christmas and haven’t watched any of my usual movies. Maybe I’ll stop having that dream now?

Anyway, I remember the days when it was special to find these movies on cable, as they would run maybe once a week on a single channel.

I will complain about there still being tons of Christmas-themed ads on TV through the first weekend of January. Watching football Jan. 2–4 I lost track of how many ads had a holiday connection. And not even like a post-Christmas sale angle, straight Christmas-time vibes.

Maybe it was because the holidays fell on Thursdays this year and that kind of messed everything up. I sure had no idea what day it was most of the time from L’s last day of finals until she started J Term. Years ago I advocated for a dramatic change in our calendar to help us get through the winter months: move Christmas to January 25. There’s no biblical reason for it to be on December 25, Christmas and New Year’s are too close to each other, January sucks. Moving Christmas back a month would help us get through the worst time of the calendar year. Now I’m thinking we also need to make Christmas and New Year’s Days always fall on a Friday. Add/subtract days in other months as needed so these mid week holidays don’t mess everything up. I’m sure that won’t be too difficult, right? We have an authoritarian president who thinks everyone has to do what he says. If he can make this happen, I might re-evaluate my opinion of him…

The main high school reporter for our local paper has a nice gimmick he pulls out each year when he writes preseason, all area teams for football and basketball. In addition to asking the kids about toughest opponent, when they started playing, favorite player, how they picked their number, etc., he always has some tie-in to what’s going on at the moment. Sometimes it’s their favorite song, show, social media app, or feelings about some other trend. For the boys basketball preview in early December, he asked players how many of Santa’s reindeer they could name.

Nothing made me worry about the future of our country more than the responses. SOOOOO many kids couldn’t name a single reindeer other than Rudolph. A couple didn’t even get the most famous reindeer of all. Don’t they teach the kids the song anymore???? What really threw me was that multiple, like at least five, kids named “Dixon” as one of the reindeer. WHO THE FUCK IS DIXON? I get the Vixen is a weird name, and there are several that start with D. But Dixon?

I was relieved that my girls did much better when I quizzed them. All that Christmas music on rides to-and-from school when they were little paid off.

We noticed another pronounced reduction in the amount of Christmas cards we received this year. We are down probably 25–30% from just a couple years. Which makes sense, as more and more of our friends ease into empty nest-dom. S has already said next year is the last time we send a family card out. We barely got them out this year, and ordered the absolute minimum our printer would allow. After handing them to family, neighbors, and co-workers, we were left with a handful to mail to friends in other locales. If you did not receive one from us it was not personal. In fact, you’re just ahead of the curve as we end that phase of our lives this time next year.

Some NFL announcer thoughts. The Colts got the Ian Eagle – JJ Watt combo a lot this season. Eagle has been great for years. I was pleasantly surprised by Watt. He played recent enough to be familiar with the modern game. It seemed like he could be critical of players and coaches, but never over-the-top. And he had a subtle humor that meshed nicely with Eagle’s. I was expecting a bigger personality from him based on how he enjoyed media attention as a player. I liked that he never tried to be bigger than the game he was analyzing.

I thought Tom Brady improved a lot this year. He still sounds too stiff and sometimes repetitive of his partner. He still makes the occasional large gaffe, like Saturday when he said the Eagles taking a time out to avoid a delay of game penalty was a good call, ignoring that if they didn’t get the first down on the ensuing play, the game was basically over where the extra time out would allow them to extend it. But he began to loosen up and I enjoyed when he would get excited about something that happened on the field. He also did a better job of using knowledge from his career to explain specific plays. He still has a lot of room to get better, but he was not the unlistenable disaster he was a year ago.

However, I do not get him doing Pizza Hut commercials. There’s no way he’s eaten Pizza Hut pizza, and maybe any pizza, since he graduated from college.

Perhaps this has been clarified/debunked since it first came up a week ago, but during the TCU-KU game, ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla said that this year on video reviews in the Big 12, referees will make their decision based on just one camera angle.

The dumbness of this was quickly apparent as on the play in question viewers at home saw three different angles. Two showed the ball clearly going off a TCU player’s hand before it went out-of-bounds. A third made it seem possible that Elmarko Jackson touched it last. It was never explained to TV viewers which angle the refs were seeing.

Fortunately for KU, the refs gave the ball to the Jayhawks, who tied the game and sent it to overtime seconds later.

If Fran’s assertion was correct – and when has Fran Fraschilla ever been wrong about anything? – it is super dumb. Limiting camera angles is not the way to improve replay. I still insist until the college game allows referees to retroactively award fouls during replay reviews like the NBA does, using replay in the college game to determine possession is idiotic. Seriously, don’t get me started…

Peacock announced that they will soon roll out a feature, likely only available on TVs with the latest audio capabilities, that will allow viewers to mute announcers while still hearing the crowd noise. HOLY SHIT THIS IS BRILLIANT!!! KU fans quickly called this the Mute Fran feature. I’m sure you all have your “favorite” announcer you will use it on.

Peacock simply must share this feature with every other broadcaster.

OK, finally, I haven’t collected enough items for a new Dumb Or Not post, but one thing has been sticking in my head for a while: targeting penalties in football. To me it is asinine that a player’s first targeting penalty results in an immediate ejection. We’ve all seen plays that, upon review, might be legit targeting penalties but only happened because of the flukiness of each play, not out of intent. A safety is coming in to make a tackle and the runner ducks his head into the him at the last moment, they knock helmets, and suddenly that defender is out for the rest of the game.

I get the purpose of the ejection, but it is far too punitive and subject to chance rather than malice. There needs to be some kind of warning, like a yellow card for soccer or even some kind of penalty box like in hockey, rather than immediate ejection.

About 10 years ago there was a period where if you barely touched a quarterback’s head it was an immediate 15 yard penalty. That has pretty much gone away. I don’t usually feel bad for Aaron Rogers, but he got destroyed Monday night and at least twice there were hits that I was shocked were not flagged. It seems like on those calls we’ve swung way back from where we were a decade back. Perhaps even with the concussion fears some sanity will eventually come into play and the way targeting is penalized will be adjusted.