Looks like Woody’s “stoopid” genes were inherited intact: If my dad owned an NFL team, the last place I would take my cute date would be to the team’s locker room, where she could compare me to the disrobed professional athletes.
Just want to add a note on Cowboys original owner Clint Murchison, who owned the Cowboys from their inception until the late-80's. He was widely portrayed as a "hands off" owner who didn't meddle and allowed Tex Schramm, Gil Brandt and Tom Landry to build the great Cowboys teams of the mid-60's to mid-80's.
Reality is was a walking cartoon character.
Was born into money....Murchison's father was one of the wealthiest men in America and handed Clint a billion-dollar fortune.
Turned a $1.25 billion fortune into $550 million in debts that eventually forced him to sell the Cowboys in 1984
Signed Tom Landry to a 10-year extension in 1965 against Schramm's wishes, despite Landry having won less than one of 3 games played over the team's first 5+ seasons (talk about meddling!)
Practically invented "corporate sellout" by creating the first luxury boxes, which were sold almost exclusively to corporations when Texas Stadium was built in 1971.
Was literally on drugs (cocaine) while maintaining a playboy lifestyle in New York city.
Used the drug to help him in his pursuit of young women, which was apparently a major focus of his life.
After divorcing his first wife married Gil Brandt's former wife in 1975.
Ended up living in a typical suburban house when he died from complications from ALS in 1987
Have always thought it hysterical the Murchison's rep was as a sober, wise, behind-the-scenes power-broker who in reality was a nepo-baby reprobate.
Well, if Murchison was a drunken, too-licentious-to-much-care-about-the-Cowboys, behind-the-scenes, very-very-occasional power-broker, whatever his motivations it sure worked out fine. (for the Cowboys) Including his one absolute meddling decision. Also including the luxury box thing, as much as tax-paying Richie hates them.
I thoroughly recommend Railroad Tycoon II : Platinum Edition (£5 to me, so presumably $5to you) on Steam. Scratches the Railroad Tycoon itch with a little more QoL and runs on latest machines fine. After II though the series adds gloss but loses substance I reckon.
I’m not sure about the true reasoning behind the changing of the endzone message for the Super Bowl, but given the hatred being spewed against anyone outside the most binary it did feel to me that swapping ‘end racism’ for ‘choose love’ wasn’t a total capitulation. As far as I know the players and teams can still choose from all the previous options for the helmet & pitch side messaging, so it isn’t like ‘end racism’ is being completely removed.
I have a Linux desktop at home, and I was able to download some Steam-adjacent magic (a container app) and buy RR Tyc 2 a few months ago. (I think it was around $7 or $8.)
I've played an unhealthy amount of the Antarctica scenario in the Second Century campaign just this year. Compulsive.
The container magic doesn't run RR Tyc 3 as cleanly; it crashes. Sad, bc 3 is the richer game.
If Linux isn't an issue – if you have Windows machines – then you can totally buy a RR Tyc 2 and/or a RR Tyc 3 executable, neighborhood of 7 bux, and play it. No container magic or even Steam required.
Fellow Railroad Tycoon fan here. 2 and (especially) 3 are better games - and the music is fantastic, I sometimes put the soundtrack to them on in the background. I loved Civilization for a while but then got into the Paradox GSGs, which split these eras into separate games with more appropriate mechanics for each era. If you love 4X games, their Stellaris is fantastic if you dig sci-fi and space exploration.
I still think the best of the Civ series is Alpha Centauri. The mechanics + the lore has me playing it to this day. I played it in college and it basically cost me a semester.
Stellaris also has deep lore, and Paradox commits to improving and adding DLC to their games for years. That, Crusader Kings 3, and Victoria 3 have eaten ungodly amounts of my free time. Just don’t bother buying one of their games until after the first few patches and maybe the first DLC. If you wait for the latter you’ll usually get a discount on the base game. Plus their thorough developer diaries on their website give you a great idea of what’s to come.
Their “Project Tinto,” presumably the next in their series of Europa Universalis series, looks absolutely stunning, covering from about 1337 to the Napoleonic Wars.
I don't know if it is now with the new rules but before the rule changes this seems almost certain to me. The penalty factor is the key reasons. Returned kickoffs generally seemed to end up around the 20 with the occasional "big return" to the 25. But penalties that sent the team back to the 12-15 yard line seemed to happen more often than returns beyond the 20.
I like returns (they're more exciting than a touchback) but I imagine strategically they're a negative for the average return team.
I didn’t have the right platform for Civilisation.
I had weekend access to a BBC Micro Model B, a machine my father used with his high school Physics classes and would bring home at weekends to figure out why it didn’t work.
The game that consumed my weekends, and my imagination during the week, was Elite.
Mike, your gratitude is understandable, especially given what you went through to get here. But we’re grateful too. This stuff is three levels above whoever is second best at it.
I always wonder how talented people deal with the struggle. You really can’t be this good at something without knowing it, and the relative success of lesser writers would bug the hell out of me.
I picture Dylan in 1965, thinking “Gerry and the Pacemakers sold how many records?”. He eventually found his audience, and has had a (presumably) fulfilling life doing what he wants to do, but in the moment there’s got to be some frustration.
Anyway, I’m glad you had the courage to bet on yourself. As Guy Clark sang: “…always trust your cape”.
Thanks! Most of the writers who have more success than me brought SOMETHING to the table. They are better interviewers. More dogged in seeking access. Were more willing to travel for jobs. Were better suited to combining podcasting and YouTube with their written work. They can connect to younger/hipper audiences. It's fine. What worries me now is that there are no decent jobs for folks with independent voices, and that young smart people end up getting force-fit into content models. And I hate the fact that being generic and stringing keywords together is not only a quicker path to relative success than being smart and unique, but actually chokes that path out of existance for many younger voices.
In the name of high quality long-form content (well, long-form content anyway)...and shameless self-promotion I submit my YT channel featuring deep dives on various classic rock and progrock bands. If you like 6 hours breaking down the career of Rush this is the place for you:
Railroad Tycoon 2 and Railroad Tycoon 3 received deep, deep investments of my time & energy. Loved those games.
Also spent many hours with Empire Earth, 20 or 25 years ago. My favorite was sending tanks thru medieval villages; also one time I dropped a bunch of nuclear bombs on my unsuspecting cousin's farms. Turns out I have way more of a taste for war crimes than I ever suspected.
I remember one season the Mighty Pack was great in the Red Zone. Next one they were mediocre, with the clever scheming they were doing down there now completely on film for everyone to see, none of it worked anymore. Same thing another year with the 49ers.
'Red Zone Ability' would be easy to check for. Find a team/coach that had a very high (perhaps in the upper 10%) ratio of TDs to short field goals for a number of seasons in a row. My guess is you might not find any.
I feel like personnel-driven success is more repeatable than schematic success.
I'm thinking Dez Bryant at his peak with Tony Romo. Inside the 10 Romo knew he could just throw high back shoulder throws to Bryant at the goal line and Bryant would outjump/outmuscle those little cornerbacks 8 out of 10 times. You could call the play before it happened and teams still couldn't stop it.
That's my memory. Would be interesting to go back to that time and see if the stats support it but I'm too lazy to do that.
SoE Was before B/R. And I did indeed fall upward. I was considered pretty sexy in the early-2010s, when everyone was searching for a Bill Simmons-type. Things only really got wibble-wobbly around COVID, which coincided loosely with the rise of SEO as a business-defining model, a dip in advertising rates and the early days of ChatGPT and such. And I wasn't exactly wired to be a TikTok sensation.
I have only figured out the process of submiting maibag questions, forgive me Mike: what is your opinion of the Lions coaching retool post-JohnsonGlenn?
I don't have any deep insights. I don't really know what a Passing Game Coordinator does under Sean Payton, so I know little about John Morton. I am not THAT worried about brain drain with Johnson leaving, because any coordinator can look like an innovative genius with an offensive line like the Lions'.
Cuttin' onions by the end, Mike. Glad you're still at it.
"Everybody comes to Rick's" A good omen for your continuing success...
Looks like Woody’s “stoopid” genes were inherited intact: If my dad owned an NFL team, the last place I would take my cute date would be to the team’s locker room, where she could compare me to the disrobed professional athletes.
A long form on the Norman Braman era would be Must See TV reading. Your fans are begging you to write this up at some point. :) :)
Yeah, I think an all-time worst owners saga or series would be great stuff! Also, tremendous dodge on the political stuff!
Egads. Maybe I will try Braman this summer and see how it goes.
Just want to add a note on Cowboys original owner Clint Murchison, who owned the Cowboys from their inception until the late-80's. He was widely portrayed as a "hands off" owner who didn't meddle and allowed Tex Schramm, Gil Brandt and Tom Landry to build the great Cowboys teams of the mid-60's to mid-80's.
Reality is was a walking cartoon character.
Was born into money....Murchison's father was one of the wealthiest men in America and handed Clint a billion-dollar fortune.
Turned a $1.25 billion fortune into $550 million in debts that eventually forced him to sell the Cowboys in 1984
Signed Tom Landry to a 10-year extension in 1965 against Schramm's wishes, despite Landry having won less than one of 3 games played over the team's first 5+ seasons (talk about meddling!)
Practically invented "corporate sellout" by creating the first luxury boxes, which were sold almost exclusively to corporations when Texas Stadium was built in 1971.
Was literally on drugs (cocaine) while maintaining a playboy lifestyle in New York city.
Used the drug to help him in his pursuit of young women, which was apparently a major focus of his life.
After divorcing his first wife married Gil Brandt's former wife in 1975.
Ended up living in a typical suburban house when he died from complications from ALS in 1987
Have always thought it hysterical the Murchison's rep was as a sober, wise, behind-the-scenes power-broker who in reality was a nepo-baby reprobate.
Well, if Murchison was a drunken, too-licentious-to-much-care-about-the-Cowboys, behind-the-scenes, very-very-occasional power-broker, whatever his motivations it sure worked out fine. (for the Cowboys) Including his one absolute meddling decision. Also including the luxury box thing, as much as tax-paying Richie hates them.
I thoroughly recommend Railroad Tycoon II : Platinum Edition (£5 to me, so presumably $5to you) on Steam. Scratches the Railroad Tycoon itch with a little more QoL and runs on latest machines fine. After II though the series adds gloss but loses substance I reckon.
I’m not sure about the true reasoning behind the changing of the endzone message for the Super Bowl, but given the hatred being spewed against anyone outside the most binary it did feel to me that swapping ‘end racism’ for ‘choose love’ wasn’t a total capitulation. As far as I know the players and teams can still choose from all the previous options for the helmet & pitch side messaging, so it isn’t like ‘end racism’ is being completely removed.
Yes.
I have a Linux desktop at home, and I was able to download some Steam-adjacent magic (a container app) and buy RR Tyc 2 a few months ago. (I think it was around $7 or $8.)
I've played an unhealthy amount of the Antarctica scenario in the Second Century campaign just this year. Compulsive.
The container magic doesn't run RR Tyc 3 as cleanly; it crashes. Sad, bc 3 is the richer game.
Thanks! I will look into this.
If Linux isn't an issue – if you have Windows machines – then you can totally buy a RR Tyc 2 and/or a RR Tyc 3 executable, neighborhood of 7 bux, and play it. No container magic or even Steam required.
I feel like you did answer JS’s question about the Chargers at FO and the Messenger. It’s just that the question about the Chargers never changes.
Fellow Railroad Tycoon fan here. 2 and (especially) 3 are better games - and the music is fantastic, I sometimes put the soundtrack to them on in the background. I loved Civilization for a while but then got into the Paradox GSGs, which split these eras into separate games with more appropriate mechanics for each era. If you love 4X games, their Stellaris is fantastic if you dig sci-fi and space exploration.
I still think the best of the Civ series is Alpha Centauri. The mechanics + the lore has me playing it to this day. I played it in college and it basically cost me a semester.
Stellaris also has deep lore, and Paradox commits to improving and adding DLC to their games for years. That, Crusader Kings 3, and Victoria 3 have eaten ungodly amounts of my free time. Just don’t bother buying one of their games until after the first few patches and maybe the first DLC. If you wait for the latter you’ll usually get a discount on the base game. Plus their thorough developer diaries on their website give you a great idea of what’s to come.
Their “Project Tinto,” presumably the next in their series of Europa Universalis series, looks absolutely stunning, covering from about 1337 to the Napoleonic Wars.
I’ve been waiting nearly 20 years for a new version of Sid Meier’s Railroads. It’s coming out soon, right?
Alpha Centauri is one of my all time faves. Have you tried Beyond Earth?
I think I tried it but didn't inhale. Games which are too similar to Civ just send me back to Civ.
Wish they had more ports to iOS, Civ 6 on my iPad Pro is so nice
Given the unlikelihood of a big return and the likelihood of a penalty, I wonder if taking the touchback every time is the ideal strategy.
I don't know if it is now with the new rules but before the rule changes this seems almost certain to me. The penalty factor is the key reasons. Returned kickoffs generally seemed to end up around the 20 with the occasional "big return" to the 25. But penalties that sent the team back to the 12-15 yard line seemed to happen more often than returns beyond the 20.
I like returns (they're more exciting than a touchback) but I imagine strategically they're a negative for the average return team.
I really want this Gas Station Off I-80 show now
I didn’t have the right platform for Civilisation.
I had weekend access to a BBC Micro Model B, a machine my father used with his high school Physics classes and would bring home at weekends to figure out why it didn’t work.
The game that consumed my weekends, and my imagination during the week, was Elite.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
I see your 3.5 inch disks and raise 5 1/4.
Mike, your gratitude is understandable, especially given what you went through to get here. But we’re grateful too. This stuff is three levels above whoever is second best at it.
I always wonder how talented people deal with the struggle. You really can’t be this good at something without knowing it, and the relative success of lesser writers would bug the hell out of me.
I picture Dylan in 1965, thinking “Gerry and the Pacemakers sold how many records?”. He eventually found his audience, and has had a (presumably) fulfilling life doing what he wants to do, but in the moment there’s got to be some frustration.
Anyway, I’m glad you had the courage to bet on yourself. As Guy Clark sang: “…always trust your cape”.
Thanks! Most of the writers who have more success than me brought SOMETHING to the table. They are better interviewers. More dogged in seeking access. Were more willing to travel for jobs. Were better suited to combining podcasting and YouTube with their written work. They can connect to younger/hipper audiences. It's fine. What worries me now is that there are no decent jobs for folks with independent voices, and that young smart people end up getting force-fit into content models. And I hate the fact that being generic and stringing keywords together is not only a quicker path to relative success than being smart and unique, but actually chokes that path out of existance for many younger voices.
In the name of high quality long-form content (well, long-form content anyway)...and shameless self-promotion I submit my YT channel featuring deep dives on various classic rock and progrock bands. If you like 6 hours breaking down the career of Rush this is the place for you:
https://www.youtube.com/@therockrollsoapbox6075
If shameless self-promotion is frowned I apologize but my 69 subscribers need some company.
I never played the OG Railroad Tycoon
But
Railroad Tycoon 2 and Railroad Tycoon 3 received deep, deep investments of my time & energy. Loved those games.
Also spent many hours with Empire Earth, 20 or 25 years ago. My favorite was sending tanks thru medieval villages; also one time I dropped a bunch of nuclear bombs on my unsuspecting cousin's farms. Turns out I have way more of a taste for war crimes than I ever suspected.
I remember one season the Mighty Pack was great in the Red Zone. Next one they were mediocre, with the clever scheming they were doing down there now completely on film for everyone to see, none of it worked anymore. Same thing another year with the 49ers.
'Red Zone Ability' would be easy to check for. Find a team/coach that had a very high (perhaps in the upper 10%) ratio of TDs to short field goals for a number of seasons in a row. My guess is you might not find any.
I feel like personnel-driven success is more repeatable than schematic success.
I'm thinking Dez Bryant at his peak with Tony Romo. Inside the 10 Romo knew he could just throw high back shoulder throws to Bryant at the goal line and Bryant would outjump/outmuscle those little cornerbacks 8 out of 10 times. You could call the play before it happened and teams still couldn't stop it.
That's my memory. Would be interesting to go back to that time and see if the stats support it but I'm too lazy to do that.
:-)
So Sports on Earth was before BR? And so you fell upward in going from Earth to Report?
SoE Was before B/R. And I did indeed fall upward. I was considered pretty sexy in the early-2010s, when everyone was searching for a Bill Simmons-type. Things only really got wibble-wobbly around COVID, which coincided loosely with the rise of SEO as a business-defining model, a dip in advertising rates and the early days of ChatGPT and such. And I wasn't exactly wired to be a TikTok sensation.
I have only figured out the process of submiting maibag questions, forgive me Mike: what is your opinion of the Lions coaching retool post-JohnsonGlenn?
I don't have any deep insights. I don't really know what a Passing Game Coordinator does under Sean Payton, so I know little about John Morton. I am not THAT worried about brain drain with Johnson leaving, because any coordinator can look like an innovative genius with an offensive line like the Lions'.