x m o v or
the bet m g m line or
m g m total

What I wanted was that story that said who plays who in college football and which team is expected to win.

USAToday used to help me out with a story that listed the Top 25 games as picked by their 6 college football reporters.

Each pick was shown by the teams logo.

Took a long time for the story to load online but once it popped, there were all the logos in nice straight lines, usually all matching except when someone went a little crazy and picked, you know, Michigan over OSA last year.

That used to be the lead story on USAToday on Saturdays but this week, I had to search for and it wasn’t easy to find.

Scrolling through the New York Times, I came across and clicked on the article, College football Week 8 projected scores: Model predicts every FBS vs. FBS game, thinking this would tell me what I want to know.

Who wins, who loses today.

What I got was a game by game listing of something called the XMOV, the BETMGMLINE, the XTOTAL and the BETMGMTOTAL.

Most of the XMOV scores were negative numbers.

For a sport where points are score by 1,2,3 and 6, one game showed an XMOV score of -0.5.

I have no clue what I was looking at and in the case of the -0.5 game, does the means San Jose State should win or lose?

I just don’t know.

To paraphrase Grantland Rice, Its not whether you win or lose, but how you bet the game.

Sports betting and the immediacy of the world wide web and the constant presence of the hand held device is beyond and doubt a match up devised, produced and supported by Hell.

But is new or just its overwhelming presence.

Recently I was paging through the memoirs of Alistair McAlpine,  a British businessman, politician and author who was an advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

His book is titled, Once a Jolly Bagman and he relates this story of his Father, who was addicted to betting on horse racing.

Television was not much favoured by my father until he discovered that not only could you watch the racing at one racecourse, but by changing channels you could see what was happening on another racecourse at the far end of the country. Within the year my father’s bookmakers at Henley-on-Thames had installed a direct telephone line to my father and his television. Shortly afterwards (undoubtedly aided by the large sums of money my father had spent with him), Sam Cowan, a bookmaker in the then small town of Henley, opened a London office. My father was rather pleased by his telephone, for his calls to the bookmaker were free and he could also listen to what was happening on a third racecourse via the Bookies Blower and the telephone link. The idea that our family should sit over their meals and ‘make’ conversation with each other came to an abrupt halt just before two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, at which time my father moved to the sitting room where he remained, cigar in hand, until five-thirty, switching channels, a telephone tucked under his chin, with the Sporting Life laid across his knees and his head and shoulders shrouded in cigar smoke illuminated by the flickering black-andwhite light of the screen. It is not hard to imagine how much his pleasure was increased when the broadcasts began to be in colour and he could spot by the jockey’s colours how a particular horse, neglected in the race reader’s commentary, was doing.

Dating this from the description would put in the early 1950’s but then he is writing about Great Britain so maybe this was in 1980.

But sports betting and the latest media has been matched up forever.

All through history, a match up devised, produced and supported by Hell.

Witness the movie The Sting where they convince the mark they can intercept horse racing results that are sent by the latest and greatest … telegraph wire.

I just wanted to know who might win today.

I don’t understand the over and under or the xtotal or xmov or anything like that.

Who might win.

Who might lose.

I am so confused.

Some where in my mind is a memory of a Bob Newhart show where Jerry the Dentist wants to make a bet on a football game and he explains the over/under and this and that of sports betting (back in 1978).

Bob listens and finally says something like … “tell you what Jerry. I’ll bet you a quarter.“

mark against your name
marks not that won or lost, but
how you played the game

Adapted from the poem “Alumnus Football” by Grantland Rice as it printed in the book, The Sportlight, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1917).

The final stanza goes:

Then came the final whistle,
And the end of all the strife,
And Bill Jones, the brave half-back,
Was carried from the game of life.
But when the Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks — not that you won or lost —
But how you played the Game.

And it’s that last line, how you played the Game, that comes to mind this morning.

It’s not yet fall, it’s not even Labor Day, but College Football has started and it starts with finding the T shirts and the hats and the memories of past games and past rituals.

Back in the day, a favorite fall ritual on a Sunday morning after my team won it’s game on Saturday was to drive downtown to Elliott’s News Stand in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I grew up, and get newspapers from out of town.

Not sure how back then, but you could get newspapers from almost every major American city east of the Mississippi River.

I wanted a New York Times and maybe a Chicago Tribune and if possible, the local paper from whatever town where the team my school had beat on Saturday was located.

My favorite time was when I needed to find editions of the Columbus Post Dispatch or the Lansing State Journal.

I loved reading the viewpoints of my team as written by the other side.

I wanted to read how they played the Game.

I wanted the who, what, where, why and how they played the Game.

In 1995, I had got a Macintosh Performa Computer and a modem and got a free internet access account from something called iserve.net and learned how to access information on the recently created World Wide Web.

I had to use something called a LYNX browser and you only had text and the early websites often had issues not display a lot of coded gobblygok but with a little patience, I found I could get to the few newspapers then online.

The Detroit News was one of them and I could read all their stories about my team at detnews.com.

From such little acorns, giant Oak trees grow.

By the year 2000, I was working in the online world and ALL newspapers were online and I was no longer driving downtown to buy print newspapers.

No one knew it, but the tide had shifted and was going out on print media.

By chance, I started working for a TV station with corporate ties to the Detroit News and I found myself in meetings with the online staff on how we could improve the product.

Occasionally the revenue model would be discussed and how this would all work out but no one saw anything but a bright future.

Readers started using the web and abandoning the print editions because the web version was free.

No worries said the papers, much like someone on the Titanic thinking the big ship couldn’t sink, we can make up the revenue from ads.

After being in online news for 20 years, let me tell you, the only people who made money from online advertising where the people who managed the online advertising.

By 2009, the rug was being pulled out from Newspapers and I watched as more and more of the people I worked with the newspaper side were let go or ‘repurposed’ or made redundant.

This cycle kept going until it caught up with me and I found myself being called into a Tuesday online meeting with an HR rep and told my last would be Friday.

It’s a long story but this was the 2nd time I had this meeting with that company but the 1st time it happened I was offered a way out if I accepted another position in Atlanta, but I digress.

Still, my Sunday Morning ritual continued.

Newspapers continued to wrestle with the revenue models of pay-windows or limited access to free atricles.

I had become accustomed to going to the websites for the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press and clicking on what articles I could and ignoring those marked SUBSCRIBER ACCESS ONLY.

This morning those links were gone.

This morning almost every article I clicked gave the 1st paragraph and then required me to login as a subscriber.

And I am resistant.

I would pay for those newspapers at Elliott’s.

Why wouldn’t I pay for subscriber access?

If I could answer that question for myself, I would think the Newspapers would be glad to know the answer.

Earlier this week The Atlanta Journal Constitution announced they would no longer print a newspaper.

Their reported numbers are dismal.

According to a New York Times story:

About 40,000 subscribers receive the print newspaper, down from 94,000 in 2020. At its height, in 2004, the paper’s Sunday edition had a circulation of about 630,000. The paper is printed at a facility in Gainesville, Ga., that The Journal-Constitution does not own. About 30 staff members, half of them part-time workers, would lose their jobs as a result of the change, a company spokeswoman said.

…. an ambitious goal of reaching 500,000 paid digital subscribers by the end of 2026, a figure that would make the business sustainably profitable.

The paper is not on a pace to hit that goal. It has about 115,000 total paid subscribers, with 75,000 of those digital-only subscribers, a figure that’s up from about 55,000 at the end of 2023, according to a company spokeswoman.

“The bottom has fallen out of the entire industry,” Mr. Morse said. “Our organic traffic from Google has dropped 40 percent in the last year. Never could have predicted that.”

The folks at the AJC hold to the importance of news saying:

“Everything we’re doing is designed to protect the journalism, to build the best products we can and to get it in front of the most people,” Mr. Morse said.

Now, searching for a description of the yesterday’s game, I came across a handful of stories.

Just about all of them were pre game stories on how to BET THE GAME.

Or they were post game stories about how BETTING ON THE GAME turned out.

If they weren’t on betting, most of the stories were the current puff pieces of the athletes thoughts on Cracker Barrel or Taylor Swift of their favorite online reels.

I don’t have a lot of answers and maybe I am not even sure what the questions might be.

As Andrew Morse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution President and Publisher, was quoted, “Unless news organizations have the courage to disrupt themselves faster than the marketplace is disrupting the industry, really important institutions that have existed for generations will cease to exist.”

In no small way, I fill a part of the reason this is happening.

But all I wanted to know is how they played the game.

allows the NFL
to measure accurately
and efficiently

The official NFL Tweet states:

introducing the new virtual measurement system for first downs, which allows the NFL to accurately and efficiently measure the distance between the spotted ball and the line to gain.

As Herman Wouk wrote in his book, The Caine Mutiny:

You just have to develop an ear for Navy prose … for instance, note that split infinitive in paragraph three. If you want a letter to sound official, split an infinitive.

This new system is supposed to take only 30 seconds to determine where the ball should be while the old fashioned, been around since Moses played football, chain gang on the sidelines, takes 40 seconds.

This is real progress.

Yet I have to think that the new way will be less.

Think of the old Alfred Hitchcock scenario.

Talking about SHOCK vs SUSPENSE, the Director said take two guys and let them talk baseball and then set off a bomb and the audience is shocked and goes on … take two guys and let them talk baseball and SHOW THE BOMB under the table with 5 minutes on a timer and you got a theater full of people screaming LOOK UNDER THE TABLE for 5 MINUTES.

IN the old way, the Referee calls for a measurement and the chain gang drags their equipment out from the sidelines.

One little known piece of the equipment is a small white plastic disk with 10 holes around the edge with the numbers 0 5 10 15 etc for labels.

It looks a lot like an old telephone dial piece of plastic.

The disc is as wide as any of the yard lines that cross the playing field.

Each time the chains are move for a 1st down, the sideline ref takes the disk and clips it the chains where it crosses a yard line.

If the yard line is the 25, the Ref puts the clip through the hole marked 25 and then clips the disc to the chain so that it lays flat over the 25 yardl line

When the chain gang is called on the make a measure, they run out on the field and the ref puts that disk down on the 25 and the steps on it and then the two yard markers are stretched out mark the ball.

All in about 40 seconds, while everyone is one the edge of their seats in suspense.

Its a nice piece of melodrama if you ask me.

But its on the way out.

We will now have the Sony InstaCheck brought to you by some chiropractor that ‘always finds the right spot.’

Yessir, Sometimes I do hate the 21st century.

don’t miss it, don’t miss
it, don’t miss it – never want
to say, don’t miss it

Adapted from the article, How Jake Bates went from soccer prodigy to brick salesman to rising star with the Lions by Dan Pompei (New York Times, July 17, 2025).

Many assumed another kicker would be signed, but Lions special teams coach Dave Fipp believed fiercely in Bates and told anyone who would listen they needed to buy in on him. Head coach Dan Campbell trusted Fipp. That meant no training camp competition. There were skeptics, but being underestimated probably was beneficial for Bates. “He’s so determined to prove people wrong who didn’t think he was good enough,” Fipp says.

In the first preseason game, he kicked a 53-yard field goal in bad weather against the Giants. Bates started to think he could do this. Then a 30-yard field goal attempt went wide right.
Before the miss, he told himself, “Don’t miss it, don’t miss it, don’t miss it.”

Fipp encouraged positive thoughts. “You never want to say, ‘Don’t miss,’” he told him. “You want to say, ‘Put it through the middle.’”

I have to say I link that.

You never want to say, “Don’t miss.”

You want to say, “Put it through the middle.”

Encourage positive thoughts.