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.

is an offensive
crime mathematically
and ethically

Hey, I am not writing about the current administration!

Boy Howdy, but yes, talking about something that may be a crime and I am talking about … sports.

Today’s haiku is adapted from the wonderful word rhythm in the sentence from the Sports Illustrated article, March Madness Is Likely to Expand Because of a Cash-and-Power Grab by Pat Forde where Mr. Forde writes:

This potential crime against sporting art is offensive mathematically, geometrically, intellectually and I daresay ethically.

When I was a kid and I first heard the song 76 Trombones in the musical Music Man, I imagined great phalanxes of marching trombone players followed by another block of 110 cornet players followed by rows and rows of the finest virtuosos.

I could see those powerful, majestic rows and rows of marchers in my head.

In the same way, I got that feeling of power marching forward as I read those majestic polysyllable words marching across the screen of my tablet.

Mathematically.

BAM

Geometrically.

BAM

Intellectually.

BAM

Ethically.

BAM

I am reminded of the scene in the movie Anatomy of a Murder where the Prosecutor yells, “Objection! His testimony is incompetent (bangs his hand on the table), hearsay (bangs his hand on the table), irrelevant (bangs his hand on the table), immaterial (bangs his hand on the table), inconclusive (bangs his hand on the table) …”

And Jimmy Stewart, the Defense Attorney, replies … “That’s too much for me. The witness is yours.”

What was funny is that they all fit into Mr. Forde’s argument.

Adding more teams to March Madness was wrong …

Mathematically – The number of teams did not work out so that every team played the same number of games.

Geometrically – 64 teams was the limit of the number of teams that could fit on a bracket THAT COULD BE PRINTED on a single piece of 11.5 by 8.5 paper (could there be a better reason).

Intellectually – It was an affront that the tournament needed fixing.

Ethically – the changes are suggested for all the wrong reasons of making money and displaying power rather than a move toward fairness on behalf of excluded teams.

Mr. Forde also writes that the planned expansion of the NCAA March Madness Tournament means that the powers-that-be in College Sports are standing in front of the Mona Lisa right now, ready to deface their masterpiece a little more.

Does that mean that a little bit of paint on the Mona Lisa would be acceptable?

we’ll forget, but now
absence feels like a loss – game, set
match to the gizmos

It’s the perfect Wimbledon. The sun is out, the Brits are firing and as for the scoring, that too will be somewhat perfect, this being the first Wimbledon since the tournament told the line judges, long the arbiters of accuracy, that after 148 years, their services will no longer be required.

Arguments, unpredictability and, as the cameras zoom in to the line judge whose eyesight judgment prompts a participant explosion, buttock-clenching awkwardness in close-up: goodbye to all that. Hello, AI and sharp-eyed robots, analysing in real time 18 lots of footage.

It’s perfect now, but is it progress? After the first day, players complained that while the calls were perfect in their accuracy, they were imperfect in that the gizmo’s volume was set too low and they could not hear the verdicts.

To some extent, Wimbledon is falling into line – both the Australian and US Opens, and very many of the lesser professional tournaments, have waved goodbye to the humans and embraced electronic line calling. The players wanted it. They strive truly, madly and deeply for perfection; their short, explosive careers cannot hinge on the human fallibility of others.

But look at Centre Court without the sentries posted around the border, and without the quiet ceremony that has always marked the departure of one set of line judges and the arrival of another. One day their absence will feel natural and maybe we’ll forget they were ever there, barking their assessments. But for now, their absence feels like a loss. Game, set and match to the gizmos.

From the article, Look at Wimbledon without human line judges and tell me this: do you really want life to be perfect? by Hugh Muir.

Major League umpire, Bill Klem famously said about making the call in baseball games that, I never missed one … in my heart.

Past University of Michigan Football Coach, Bo Schembechler once said something along the lines that his game plan always took into account 7 points that could go either way because of the calls by the referees … it’s part of the game, he said.

I like to follow Cricket when I can.

I follow Team England.

In Cricket the difference between an being called OUT can depend on whether of not the ball hit the player or his uniform or if the ball hit the bat.

To make sure the correct call is made, Cricket uses HOT SPOT and THE WHISTLER.

The HOTSPOT is an infrared camera on the play because the HEAT SIGNITURE of a ball hitting wood (the wicket) is different than that of the ball hitting the cloth of the uniform of the batter.

If that doesn’t work, there is the WHISTLER that is a microphone under the plate because the SOUND SIGNITURE of the ball hitting wood is different from the sound of the ball hitting cloth.

Oh give me a break.

But sports are a billon dollar industry.

Betting on sports is a billion dollar industry.

To quote General Jack Ripper in the movie, Dr. Stangelove, Clemenceau once said that war is too important to be left to the generals.

Well, today, in or out, in bounds or out of bounds, before the horn or after the buzzer or what have you is too important to be left to humans.

I guess.

I understand that athletes strive truly, madly and deeply for perfection; their short, explosive careers cannot hinge on the human fallibility of others.

I don’t know.

It used to be part of the game.

It used to be … a game.

One day the absence of humans will feel natural and maybe we’ll forget they were ever there, barking their assessments.

But for now, their absence feels like a loss.