Issue 35 – Are You Ready for Some Lawyers?

I must admit that this time of the year is always fun…or it used to be. Time was when I would hunker down with the NFL rosters, a fantasy football magazine (who know the kind that say “Rule Your Draft” or something equally bombastic), and a spreadsheet. Statistics would be entered, models and fits tinkered with, and the optimal draft order determined. The only considerations were weighing new talent against old, strength of schedules, and coaching changes. I never did particularly badly but never won it all.

Over the years, I’ve given up on the numeric side of things and have been paying greater attention to the people side. How is the locker room chemistry, how desperate is management to get rid of a big salary cap issue, how disgruntled or downright anti-social is a player. These have been the focus and I must say that I’ve been doing much better.

But with the NFL in its current state, I’m wondering if I need to start looking at the number of legal briefs drafted, the number of motions filed with the federal court, and what interactions are happening between the NFL front office, the Player’s Association, the NLRB, and some judge somewhere who may or may not be overruling some judgement rendered by some other bigwig.

Now let me be clear, I don’t know and, frankly, I don’t care if Tom Brady plays or doesn’t. I really don’t care if he cheated or he didn’t. The NFL has a long history of teams ‘cheating’ in all sorts of ways. If old anecdotes are to be believed, teams look for every little edge they can get. Want to make the opposing team uncomfortable as they sit, make their sideline bench too short. Want to make them too hot, stick them on the sunny side of the field with the sun shining in their eyes. And so on it goes. Why deflated footballs matter when both teams were using them is a mystery to me. Or perhaps only the Patriots were – who knows and who cares. The point here is that fairness in the NFL is like the proverbial elephant in the room. Focus on something else.

One last note, the demise of the NFL is on the horizon if this continues much longer. No industry can long prevail once the wretched ambulance chasers and insufferable word stretchers get too strong a hold. What was it that Shakespeare said about the lawyers?

Well, until the legal beagles figure out a way to take our free speech rights from us at Blog Wyrm, we’ll continue to provide our weekly content.

This week, Aristotle to Digital ponders how a small footnote can lead to a big idea and an uncomfortable one at that. Find out all you ever wanted to know about deductivism and the great lengths that some go to make everything logical.

About Comics completes its two-part look at Denny O’Neil’s book on writing comics the DC way. This installment covers his ideas on the large format undertakings, including graphic novels, miniseries, and more.

Common Cents takes a critical look at some recent economics analysis that suggests that not all billionaires are created equally. Cronyism is identified as the deciding factor in separating the sheep from the goats and while we agree with the conclusions we are skeptical of the method.

Finally, Under the Hood sets its sites on a prolonged engagement with the Laplace Transform. Long considered the darling of the controls engineer, the Laplace Transform has always taken a back seat to the Fourier Transform in the halls of physics. Under the Hood is determined to find out just why.

Enjoy.