Welcome to Deadspin’s IDIOT OF THE MONTH, in which we ruminate on some cringey happenings from weeks past.
An honorable mention for September goes out to the Milwaukee Brewers’ Devin Williams, who will miss the playoffs after punching a wall and fracturing his throwing hand just prior to the flipping of the calendar. Bravo, dude.
The fallacy of “cancel culture” is that all of these dweebs come back.
Louis C.K. played Madison Square Garden. Marilyn Manson is featured on the new Kanye West album. Meghan McCain is somehow appearing on Meet The Press now. There’s always people willing to look the other way on how awful someone has been, to whatever level, and continue to provide opportunities.
Calling high school football games in Cincinnati isn’t that prominent of an opportunity, but Thom Brennaman is still drawing a paycheck, rather than never getting behind a microphone again after using a homophobic slur on a hot mic last summer.
But even though he’s getting a chance to continue his career, on a streaming service that just happens to be sponsored by the same car dealership empire that’s a major sponsor of the Reds broadcasts that Brennaman used to do. So, clearly, Jeff Wyler Auto Group is on board with him.
Still, Brennaman is pissed, because… a lot of people he meets at convenience stores tell him that it’s unfair he got dumped from Reds games and Fox football telecasts. As if a sample of people who travel in Brennaman’s circles and are willing to approach him in public are representative somehow of a wider view, or excuse what he did.
Brennaman, in an interview with Sports Broadcast Journal, bemoaned not only the loss of his job, but that of former Sacramento Kings announcer Grant Napear, who was ousted over an “All Lives Matter” tweet. The fact that Brennaman doesn’t understand how “All Lives Matter” as a response to “Black Lives Matter,” here in 2021, is just a demonstration of how little he cares to educate himself about the world he lives in, and why people wouldn’t want him on the air.
He’s an idiot, and there’s a deep drive to left by Castellanos…
Working at ESPN likely takes a certain level of desire for attention. It stopped being a journalistic entity eons ago, so if you’re going there it’s not really to cover the biggest stories, it’s to be around them and be on TV with them. It must be, otherwise why would you choose to live in some Connecticut backwater? (Sorry, we shouldn’t have said that. All of Connecticut is backwater — no need to single out Bristol.) And it’s easy for that desperation to spiral out.
That’s the only way we can explain Sage Steele, other than just natural, right-wing brain worms. She probably does believe most of the horseshit she spews, but there has to be an element of trying to stand out in an industry and company that, however slowly, is pivoting left. She must lap up trying to be the “rebel,” the one standing firm in the gale or whatever. Because if you just genuinely believe the dangerous and hateful drivel Clay Travis is peddling, well then it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe. (Ed. note: I see what you did there... and I appreciate it — Rich O.) Or to make yourself a martyr because you felt coerced into doing something so simple that happens to protect everyone around you.
Again, she probably does believe all this, but she also must enjoy knowing it’ll keep her name in the news at a place where she increasingly looks like she’s headed out the door. Fox can’t wait, surely.
In the future, a young person will ask an elder to give them an example of just how insane the current times we’re living in once were. And that elderly person will say, “let me tell you about the time Kyrie Irving, Bradley Beal, Andrew Wiggins, and Jonathan Isaac – four Black NBA players – were all being publicly supported by a woman-hating piece of shit named Ted Cruz.
Yes, you read that right. The guy who doesn’t want women to have any control of their bodies, is “standing” with idiotic anti-vaxxers in the NBA in support of them “controlling” theirs.
Hilariously enough, the NBA has announced that “any player who elects not to comply with local vaccination mandates will not be paid for games that he misses.” Conveniently for Cruz, Texas is one of the states where unvaccinated players can still play, and so he’s been afforded the opportunity to spew nonsense without it directly affecting him.
“When it comes to vaccines, I believe in vaccines, I have been vaccinated, my wife has been vaccinated, my parents have been vaccinated, her parents have been vaccinated,” Cruz said in August.
Translation: “We’re safe over here in my house, but y’all can do whatever the fuck y’all wanna do. I don’t give a shit about y’all anyway.”
And to make things worse, Denver’s Michael Porter Jr. has joined the Idiot Dream Team of anti-vaxxers.
“For me, I had COVID twice, I saw how my body reacted, and although the chances are slim, with the vaccine, there’s a chance you could have a bad reaction to it,” Porter told the Denver Post. “For me, I don’t feel comfortable.
No one ever “sticks to sports” when it’s actually time to.
It wasn’t a great month for US Soccer. First off, Roger Bennett, of Men in Blazers, discounted decades of hard work by the grassroots soccer community in the United States, instead giving all credit for the growth of the game in the United States to a TV show (a great one, at that!) that debuted in August of 2020.
Many of us have PARENTS who did more for the growth of soccer in this country than Ted Lasso (aka Jason Sudeikis) — coaching, forming club teams, and driving their kids to matches all over tarnation every weekend. That’s where the credit for the growth of US Soccer over the last 30 years lies. Bad tweet all around, Roger.
Not to be outdone, though, US Soccer decided its best course of action in the ongoing battle by the USWNT for equal pay was to ratchet up the rhetoric on Twitter, which is definitely a place known for nuanced discourse among adults.
If US Soccer wants to wage a social media battle with perhaps the most beloved sports team in America, bring it on. After all, this is the same organization that saw fit to say in legal proceedings that the USWNT, despite their four World Cups, didn’t deserve the same pay as the USMNT because girls can’t run as fast, and who had to be taken to court before they agreed to provide equal travel accommodations for the women’s team. But even more stupidly, it’s well-documented that US Soccer had the chance to participate in the “90-minute one-sided movie,” (the documentary about the USWNT’s fight for fair pay, LFG, which you should definitely watch), and chose not to. It’s hard to overstate the idiocy of choosing not to speak and then calling something one-sided.
Stop whining and pay up, US Soccer.
Prior to the season, we said that we didn’t think Matt Nagy was worthy of being on the hot seat. We got roasted for this, and rightfully so. It always seemed like the team’s offensive struggles were mostly due to Mitch Trubisky’s incompetence at quarterback! Sure, Nagy hadn’t properly used players like David Montgomery and Allen Robinson properly, but was he such a bad coach that he was worthy of being on the hot seat? After all, he did lead the Bears to the playoffs in two of his first three years on the job.
Well, we’ve seen the light. We know better now, and we’d like to take this time to apologize. Matt Nagy has shown through these first three weeks of the season that he had no idea how to build an offensive game plan around a quarterback like Justin Fields. There are numerous ways to criticize how Nagy has failed his organization’s first-round pick, but perhaps Dan Orlovsky said it best Monday on Get Up.
A lot of people will probably say something like “Well, maybe Fields just wasn’t ready yet.” And sure, he may not have been, but the gameplan Matt Nagy put forward against the Browns was so bad, so incomplete, so obviously ill-prepared for a team like Cleveland, that it almost seemed intentional. We’ve said in the past that Nagy was covering his own ass by starting Andy Dalton. In doing so, he was buying himself extra time as head coach of the Bears, because nobody expected the team to win with Andy Dalton, but if his inability to create a gameplan around Fields got exposed at the beginning of the season, Nagy would already be unemployed.
Nagy had almost 150 days to prepare for Justin Fields’ first start of the season. Instead of giving Fields protection from Myles Garrett and Jadeveon Clowney, Nagy, more often than not, relied solely on his questionable offensive line to protect the future of the Bears’ franchise. If that’s not idiotic, what is?