Category: Uncategorized

With the announcement on Tuesday that the Bears have signed former Kansas City Chiefs director of player personnel Ryan Poles to be their new General Manager, they have cleared an incredibly low bar that many people in Chicago thought they would still manage to botch. The team managed to put someone in charge of football operations BEFORE they signed a head coach. While this seems like a pretty basic rule of thumb, especially since nobody above the GM actually knows their ass from the fail son hole in the ground they popped out of, there was a lack of confidence in them doing the signing in the right order that was very discouraging. In Poles, they also pulled off the rare feat of hiring someone to a position that doesn’t require team owner, family matriarch, and former lover of William Henry Harrison, Virginia McCaskey to have to learn a new name. She can say Ryan Pace and it still sounds really close to the correct name, so she has that going for her!

Let’s just call this what it is, a dedication to suck. 2021 felt like a slow morphine drip of mediocrity, or better, 2021 was a terrible sitcom. And by that I mean, nothing really changed. The episode ended and everything just reverted back to what it was before the episode started. Nothing got better. Joe Biden is just folksy Donald Trump. Social media continues to melt brains. Social change continues to feel like it’s going in the wrong direction.

Basketball was invented by God as a means to give giants something to do beyond losing fights via slingshot. From those early days, it evolved into a use for peach baskets once all the peaches had been consumed. The bigwigs at the ladder factory kept the bottom of the baskets intact for decades, citing a need to keep the game “pure, beautiful, and slower than a tortoise with his hands tied up.” That phrase doesn’t make much sense to me either, but what was once a boring, often cumbersome sport to watch has blossomed into one of the great games on this planet. The NBA, National Basketball Association for long, began seventy five years ago as the Toronto Huskies hosted the New York Knickerbockers, losing 66-68. Basketball then isn’t close to what it is now. Baseball added the curveball well over a century ago. Football did the same with the forward pass. But basketball’s true genesis of the modern, perfected sport didn’t come until just 60 years ago when the three-point arc was added in the ABA. It would be 18 years before the NBA officially adopted it and decades more before it altered the game. Now the David sons (part of me will have you laugh at that) can truly be equal with the Goliaths. And here we are, in the amber of the moment, and the damn Bucks are the reigning champions.