Aaron Cohen INC@NYU

If I showed this line to Colts fans six weeks ago and said, “This will be the line for your Week 2 game against the Browns,” they would have asked things like, “Are the Browns about to trade a 2012 third-round pick for Michael Vick, LeSean McCoy and DeSean Jackson?” and “Did our entire team get malaria?” Speaking of catastrophes, I’m launching a new segment in the NFL picks column this season: the NBA Lockout Watch, sponsored by Anusol. That’s right, Anusol, the cream you should buy for your itchy anus. If you’re clawing at your anus like a bear trying to break through a camper’s tent, it’s time for Anusol. Anyway, here’s this week’s edition of the Anusol NBA Lockout Watch (feel free to skip four paragraphs to the next game) …

After wasting nearly the whole summer pointing fingers, leaking stories to reporters and doing everything except getting in a room and negotiating, Billy Hunter’s side finally came down a little … and, of course, instead of just agreeing on a better revenue split (right now it’s 57/43 for the players, but both sides know it will land somewhere around 51/49), four-year maxes for guaranteed contracts (easily achievable, and absolutely necessary because teams literally can’t stop themselves from overpaying players and being crippled by their deals) and a slightly harder salary cap — three moves that would have gotten us 87 percent of the way there — a few of the newer owners (Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert and Phoenix’s Robert Sarver are the biggies) are now pushing for even more stuff and that’s bogging everything down. This faction believes the players’ side is crumbling because a few of the biggest NBA agents (Jeff Schwartz, Arn Tellem, etc.) lost faith in Hunter and are investigating the decertification process (which would be THE dumbest thing they could do). These owners don’t just want to win this lockout, they want to take a hatchet to 65 years of progress by NBA players … who, by the way, did nothing wrong other than continue to cash in on the ridiculous contracts that owners kept giving them.

Let’s take a step back and consider the stupidity of this. Sarver and Gilbert both overpaid for their teams and hope to blow up the system, then create a more favorable one that would cover up the fact that they overpaid for their teams. In Gilbert’s case, he coddled LeBron for years, overpaid just about every player on his team (did Daniel Gibson write his deal himself?), showed no roster savvy whatsoever (his front office was really the Bizarro Sam Presti), crippled his own cap season after season, then flipped out when LeBron finally said, “I gotta get out of here, I need to play with better players”⁵ … and now he blames “the system” for what happened because there are apparently no mirrors in his house. Sarver overpaid for the Suns, realized it about a year later, then spent the next few years pinching pennies … which would have been fine if he didn’t have a legitimate chance to win the title from 2005 to 2008 and also in 2010. He’s the kind of guy who watched Steve Kerr build a team that came within a couple of breaks of making the 2010 Finals, then offered Kerr a pay cut. His fans hate him; hell, his own players hate him. When I made a few Sarver/Gilbert tweets yesterday, Steve Nash retweeted one of the anti-Sarver tweets.

Why do two owners with CLEAR AGENDAS like Sarver and Gilbert have any input here? It’s a great question. The NFL had three of its best and most ruthless owners (Bob Kraft, Jerry Jones and Jerry Richardson) handling its lockout; the NBA has the likes of Sarver, Gilbert, New York’s James Dolan and Minnesota’s Glen Taylor involved. Have you watched how they run their teams? For god’s sake, Taylor just splurged on a coach (Rick Adelman) who told him in no uncertain terms, “I am not answering to your current GM,” so instead of firing that GM (David Kahn, the least respected GM in the league by a landslide), Taylor decided, “OK, you don’t have to answer to him” AND KEPT BOTH GUYS!!!!!!!! And Dolan is Dolan — he’s basically the train from Unstoppable at all times. Why should I expect those four owners to have great insight into solving something as complicated as a labor dispute?

And are we really missing games over this? You should have labor stoppages only because of real issues — like what we had in 1964, when the players nearly sat out the All-Star Game in Boston because they were being treated so badly, or in 1998, when the players were suddenly making so much money that the owners needed a better way to protect themselves. We’re not even close to that. I can tell you right now where we’re ending up: 51/49 split, four-year max deals, slightly harder cap. So effing get there already. Enough with the posturing. And by the way, both sides could mention the fans once in a while, or show at least a little urgency that they’re about to blow all momentum from one of the best seasons in the history of the league. If they think anyone except for die-hard basketball fans will care that there’s no NBA in October, November and December — when we’ll be focused on the baseball playoffs, the NFL and college football — then they’re even more delusional than I thought. I hate everybody in this. Seriously. Both sides make me want to throw up. That was your Anusol NBA Lockout Watch for this week. Back to football.

Romocalypse

You saw what happened in the Cowboys-Jets game on Sunday night. For the sake of Cowboys fans with heart problems, we don’t need to rehash it. What is worth noting, though, is the specific height from which the Cowboys fell. To measure that, we can use the win probability charts created by Brian Burke at his Advanced NFL Stats site. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, it’s simple to explain: Given a particular scoreline, field position, down, and distance to go with a certain amount of time left in the game, how often does the team in the lead win?

This is where those aforementioned Cowboys fans might want to skip ahead a paragraph. When Felix Jones ran the ball in from a yard out with 14:50 left in the fourth quarter, it gave the Cowboys a 24-10 lead and a win probability of 96 percent. Ninety-six percent! A Jets touchdown brought those odds down a bit, but as Tony Romo took the snap on third-and-goal from the two-yard line with a one-score lead and 9:15 left, the Cowboys were still at 94 percent. And even after the two teams traded turnovers, the Cowboys were still at a win probability of 95 percent during the third-and-long that immediately preceded the game-tying blocked punt. After the Cowboys moved the ball into the red zone on the opening drive, their chances of winning did not dip below 60 percent until the Cowboys punted with 2:16 left. They were at 66 percent when the Jets punted the ball away, but Romo obviously threw that down the drain with his mystifying throw to Darrelle Revis.

Did Romo blow the game? Probably. But we would have suggested the same thing about Mark Sanchez if things had gone slightly differently. Sanchez really hung in well during a tough first half that saw the Cowboys’ pass rush barrel down on him, and he made some great throws during the team’s comeback. But he fumbled inside Cowboys territory with six minutes left in a one-score game, and it came on a play in which he simply held the ball for too long. After the blocked punt tied up the game, Sanchez took another sack on third-and-long that set up the Cowboys for a game-winning drive, only to get the ball right back. Once Romo decided he wanted to lose the game more, Sanchez threw a would-be pick that went right through a defender’s hands. And this all came against a secondary that was down its top three cornerbacks for part of the second half. We remember all this stuff now, but two months from now the Jets’ win will get thrown in Sanchez’s file as a comeback victory without any of the context or in-between happenings. It’s absurd. Sanchez deserves credit for the late drives he’s led (the drive against the Texans from last season comes to mind), but giving him a “win” for what he did in the fourth quarter is just a bad use of statistics and assigning credit.

allenpaltrow:

Update: I have appended this follow-up.

Growing up I was a huge apple fan-boy (fine, still am.) The first NY apple store in Soho opening was probably the coolest thing that happened to me between the ages 6 and 12. For a while I would spend almost every weekend there. Every year for halloween…

When you read the list of startups coming through Ycombinator it is absolutely amazing to me that none of them appear to focus on reinventing the not really disrupted film business.

What conclusions can we draw?

1.  Ycombinator doesn’t like movie/tv related startups?

2.  Today’s brilliant young engineers don’t care about the movie business?

3.  I’m a contrarian.

4.  I’m clueless.