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Pay to play: Why we gladly give franchises our money for new sporting venues, and how citizens for and against those projects can find common ground

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Professional sports and incredible sums of money are, at this point, inextricably intertwined. At the highest levels, franchise values rival small nation GDPs. The NBA is a concern of $4 billion in annual revenue; its 30 franchises have an estimated combined value of $15 billion. A single Lakers courtside ticket for a single game runs equivalent to two months gross salary at California's minimum wage. Players themselves make salaries that'd make a Rockefeller jealous; Kobe Bryant is due $30 million this season, and NBA teams will pay out about $2 billion in total salaries to roughly 450 lucky athletes. The lowest-paid player in the league will make about $490,180.

The only limits on revenue are a lack of creativity and the cold hammer of the word no from the buying public.

This is a full-blown major industry. But leagues -- including the NBA -- rarely bask unconditionally in the glory of their solvency. There's always more money to be made. Expanding revenue streams is one path. That's why the NFL talks about expanding its already brutal schedule a week or two. That's why Major League Baseball adds a playoff game for each league. That's why we have NBA teams wearing nine different uniforms a season and, coming soon, ads front and center on those special jerseys. It's why there's football on Thursdays, outdoor hockey on New Year's and two months -- two months -- of NBA playoffs. Businessmen and businesswoman run these leagues. The only limits on revenue are a lack of creativity and the cold hammer of the word no from the buying public.

The other path to increased profits is reduced expenses. And the leagues have all flogged this one, too. Want to know why so many JDs contribute to sports websites? Because of all the damn lockouts. Within the past three years we've seen lockouts from three of the top four sports leagues plus two referee stoppages. (The NBA ref lockout was mercifully resolved before it touched the regular season. NFL fans were not so lucky.) Labor is the biggest expense for the leagues, without question. But it's not the only expense.

In fact, there's a real fat capital expense facing every single team in every league: the facility in which it plays. And there's one major way to reduce that expense. Unfortunately for us, playing in a 20-year-old building that cannot be touted as "state of the art" but gets the job done isn't the answer.

Arenas and stadiums are huge expenses for sports teams. If only there were someone to help pay for it ...

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Public funding of sports arenas and stadiums brings out venom typically reserved for the most heated on-court rivalries. Pro-subsidy fans facing the potential loss of their team shout down opponents at every opportunity. Subsidy opponents bemoan the meathead charlatans and spit at every argument that a new arena is a good use of money. Economists-for-hire spin up fabulously false tales of grand regional benefit and a high return on the investment. Arena foes seethe out loud about the salary of the team's star compared to that of their kid's second-grade teacher. "You have no vision, no heart," says one side. "You have no soul, no brain," says the other.

They're both wrong, of course. And if the backers and detractors would get on the same page, better projects with better results and less heartburn would result.

The core fact that makes public funding of sports facilities possible is its popularity with voters. Some current NBA arenas funded in part by tax dollars have received explicit voter permission. The public portion funding the AT&T Center in San Antonio needed voter approval in 1999; 61 percent of Bexar County voters said yes. In 2008, an Oklahoma City initiative to assess 1 percent sales tax for improvements to then 6-year-old Ford Center was approved with 62 percent of the vote.

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In most cases, the public considers spending its collective money on arenas to be a fine idea.

More commonly, funding deals don't include direct tax increases on local residents. Bonds, land grants, loan guarantees, hotel and rental car tax or other sources may constitute the contribution, which means that final approval comes from a city council or county board instead of the electorate. But these almost always pass easily, and the biggest elected boosters find themselves retained by the voting public. Orlando mayor Buddy Dyer led the charge to help fund the Amway Center in 2007. In 2008, 61 percent of the vote kept him in office. Kevin Johnson pressed hard on public funding for a new Sacramento arena through 2011 and 2012. (A common complaint was that working to get a new Kings arena was the only thing Johnson did in his first term.) In a June 2012 primary, he won 58 percent of the vote in a four-person field to avoid a run-off.

In most cases, the public considers spending its collective money on arenas to be a fine idea. What exactly is the problem?

Subsidy opponents have few recent victories at hand, and this core issue is the culprit. No matter how much a subset of the population dislikes the model, they are outnumbered. In democracies, that's a losing formula. From my experience, arena subsidy opponents come from a range of disparate groups: neighborhood activists, social welfare proponents, anti-tax crusaders, anti-corporation liberals. Three of those four categories aren't exactly renowned for their fundraising ability. The one exception -- anti-tax folks -- have only recently been stoked with cash, and it's more likely to be used beating back Democratic politicians and policies than development deals.

Who backs arena subsidies? Well, the teams and leagues, obviously. As we've established, they have plenty of money to fund favorable research, conduct expensive and time-consuming outreach and, when push comes to shove, buy campaign ads. The business community tends to support these endeavors, too; Seattle and Sacramento each benefited from huge assistance from locally-based corporations in recent subsidy efforts. Labor groups are on board if brought on board; builders of all stripes like the work, too. More recently those who support "smart growth" policies are more likely to be strong backers of arena and stadium projects if downtown revitalization is a piece of the puzzle; these interests add some additional, traditionally liberal punch to the equation.

But those supporter groups can only buy attention and arguments, and that doesn't necessarily win elections. You need votes, whether at the ballot box or at the council dais. (Votes at the ballot box eventually shape votes at the dais, of course.) In pulling their fans into the battle, they buy the ballot box support, which is all that matters in the end.

This is the trump card subsidy opponents can't defeat. Sports fans aren't just individual voters: they are passionate advocates for the brand and, by extension, the brand's cause. Wearing team colors is a political statement. Have you ever seen a non-politician wear a jersey with a politician's name on the back? You can buy a lot of things in politics -- access, favors, forgiveness, votes. But you can't buy the kind of loyalty that comes with a sports logo.

That's a powerful weapon in favor of subsidies, and bemoaning it won't ever help opponents. It'll only strengthen the resolve of those fans who just want to keep their team. So if anti-subsidy residents and groups want to actually improve the situation, a different tact is needed.

Most importantly, though, the opponents need to understand that demonizing pro sports is not ever going to work. You might as well spit into the wind.

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Bravesstadium_mediumRendering of the new Braves stadium in Cobb County, Georgia. (Via Home of the Braves)

Why is the public comfortable spending its collective money on sports facilities? Because the public has become comfortable spending its individual money -- and lots of it -- on sports. American sports leagues have become some of the most important cultural pillars of our society, for better or worse. I bet you know more neighbors' NFL allegiances than religious denominations. The Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento is a really fantastic institution with a good annual program and strong permanent collection. It's dirt cheap, too, and open about 310 days a year. It drew 250,000 attendees in 2011-12, according its most recent annual report. The Sacramento Kings, a horrid basketball team then suffering under extreme mismanagement, featuring relatively high prices and a fraction of the convenience of a typical museum visit, welcome almost 500,000 paying customers in 2011-12 on 33 nights of action. A bad team in an unstable situation brought in twice the number of customers than the local excellent museum in about 11 percent of the available dates. This says nothing about the Crocker or the Kings: this says everything about sports.

The cost of being a sports fan has never been higher. Each league has premium packages that ensure the fan can see every game on every type of device every day. Broadcast deals are exploding, and fans happily fork over the increased cable fees. (If a la carte TV was a real thing instead of a fever dream of wishful cord-cutter, we'd pay out the nose for several ESPNs, TNT, Fox Sports and NBC Sports. Yes, even NBC Sports. It has hockey, soccer and the Olympics.) We pay huge sums to procure tickets to sporting events, to park at arenas, to eat and drink at arenas. Personal seat licenses were actually made viable by fans, and not laughed out of existence.

The market for our eyeballs, our subconscious minds, our eventual consumer dollars -- it's a rich one.

Most of all, we pay in exorbitant amounts of our precious attention. Our sports win our attention for the magic moments they give us. In breaks in the action, the sports leagues sell that attention to the highest bidder. I will likely never fly Emirates, but I sure as heck know they exist. (Thanks, Arsenal!) I've been sold cheap tacos by Charles Barkley, cheap credit by Yao Ming and cheap cars by Blake Griffin (in the middle of an official NBA event). Those exploding broadcast deals are made possible by the aversion to time-delayed viewed sports fans hold. Fewer TV programs are watched live these days; sports are No. 1 with a bullet. The leagues, networks and advertisers know we'll see those finely crafted commercials. The market for our eyeballs, our subconscious minds, our eventual consumer dollars -- it's a rich one.

We pay a ton to be sports fans. What's another couple of bucks when my team asks for a public subsidy?

That's an overly simple view of the common fan's outlook on public subsidies. But it's really hard to compare mostly invisible "taxpayer dollars" to the coin we actually spend and come out with a real sense of understanding. And because we have so much already invested in our favorite teams, the case of the public subsidy is much easier to make than most of the alternates. Compare these calls to action.

"If we don't come up with $100 million, our team is going to move."

"If we don't come up with $100 million, we will have to continue with a conservative budget leading underfunded social programs, austere infrastructure upgrade plans and status quo public safety."

All of those things in the second threat would apply to every resident every day. But it's really hard to beat the emotional pull, immediacy and simplicity of the relocation threat.

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being the city that says "no!' gets you two things: angry voters and a vacant stadium.

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Teams and leagues will continue to ask for help as long as help is given. But being the city that says "no!' gets you two things: angry voters and a vacant stadium. The nation's most lucrative league has left the nation's second biggest market abandoned for 18 years now. The leagues will leave any city that doesn't play ball. If you annoy the commissioner just enough, they'll even seek to make an example out of you. Ask Seattle.

The cycle of public funding for sports arenas and stadiums won't be broken by some heroic mayor standing up to a team owner. It won't be broken, period. If Cobb County has taught us anything in the week since it announced it plans to pay a premium to take the Braves from Atlanta proper, it's that there will always be another mayor or county executive or governor with open arms and an open checkbook. There will always be fans to offer cold cash and warm loyalty. Pro sports are the dominant force in our current cultural landscape, and there are enough of us who refuse to be without a team to call our own.

What can improve the current public sports funding paradigm is more open-minded civic ownership from fans and more effective advocacy by non-fans. Improved social programs, infrastructure and public safety is in everyone's interest; the majority of sports fans are smart. We can chew gum and chant, "de-fense!" at the same time. So we should work to ensure deals coming down the pike are actually responsible and protect investments in the public interest. We should not just listen to critiques of funding plans -- we should try to make sure we're getting a good deal as citizens. We need to admit that some deals just suck. We need to vote and speak as well-rounded members of society, not single-issue partisans.

To affect positive change, opponents of public sports subsidies need to convince fans to take a comprehensive look at the costs and risks of individual plans. If you oppose every arena plan that comes down the pike, you're going to get tuned out. Work to improve individual projects, and not by porking up the prospectuses with additional beneficiaries. Lawsuits almost always make things worse, and know that you will likely lose at the ballot box if you choose that route. Once things go partisan, you've lost the audience you need. (For this reason, ideas like Seattle's Initiative 91 -- a voter-approved measure to create parameters to be met for any future public subsidies for sports facilities -- are good to pursue as long as the process is transparent and the actual policy is good. There are some issues with I-91 in particular that hinder its effectiveness.)

Teams will stop pitching bad projects when fans, the public at large and the officials they elect into office show a consistent ability to support only the good ones. Fans should join in and fight boondoggles. Non-fans should lend support to good, responsible pitches. If the two sides don't work together, teams will continue to take as much as they can get, and they'll do it by dividing the public into us and them factions that, in the end, hardly serve the community. We owe it ourselves and each other to work together.

If we still disagree at the end of the day, that's okay. That's why we have elections.

Producer:Chris Mottram | Photos: Getty Images

Sunday Shootaround: Dawn of the Paul George era

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Dawn of the Paul George era

Paul George started laughing before the question was even finished. Like an onrushing double team, he knew exactly what was coming and just as importantly, how to deal with it when it arrived. The question was about becoming a superstar, a label we’re quick to throw around even if we can’t really define what it means.

It’s a question George has heard many times in the last few months. It began late in the 2012-13 season among the basketball heads who had fallen in love with his silky game and the nerds who crunched the numbers. It helped that he looked the part. George plays an aesthetically pleasing game that is at once blindingly athletic and cooly smooth. He glides where others pound, unspooling threes from the top of the arc and throwing down dunks that are more aerial ballet than unrelenting slam dances. Yet outside of the afficionados, George was still something of a cult figure even after making his first All-Star team.

All that changed in the postseason when the Pacers reached the conference finals. The first round was an afterthought and the second round belonged to Roy Hibbert, but it was in that series against Miami and LeBron James that George solidified himself in the public’s mind as an elite player. He made huge plays and at times matched James shot for shot, an effort that was punctuated by a 28-point performance in Game 6 that helped the Pacers stave off elimination.

As the hype machine kicked in, the numbers still showed reason for caution. Despite shooting a decent percentage from behind the arc, George wasn’t an efficient enough scorer yet. He didn’t get to the line enough. He committed too many turnovers thanks to a handle that had improved from shaky to suspect but still wasn’t good enough to allow him to create his own shot at will. A star? Sure. A superstar? Chill.

Then this season began. By any measure -- be it analytical, observational or in the cold calculus of wins and losses -- George’s play has reached that magical superstar level. He’s averaging better than 24 points a game and almost seven rebounds while playing lockdown perimeter defense on a team tied for the best record in the league.

He’s also taken on a larger role in the Pacer offense, becoming the undisputed go-to guy on a team known for its collective approach. His usage rate has jumped and his PER has spiked from 16.8 to 24.5, while his free throw attempts have doubled and his turnovers have gone down.

So, does he hear the talk and does he buy into it?

"Not really. At the end of the day I let my play do all the talking," George said after the Pacers conducted a shootaround in Boston on Friday. "I don’t really have to worry about much. My team is 10-1 right now. I’m trying to play at the highest level I can. Everything else will take care of itself."

Savvy words from a 23-year-old, but George wasn’t so passive this offseason about his place in the game. Over the summer, he worked with trainer Jerry Powell on his ballhandling and for the first time he enlisted the aid of a shooting coach.

In a nondescript gym of a community college in Los Angeles, George toiled under Mike Penberthy’s watchful eye, getting up 500 shots a day at game speed. Penberthy went to work on his mechanics, insisting that every shot -- no matter where it comes from on the floor -- be taken with the same stroke.

George’s goal was to improve his mid-range game, which would allow him to become the kind of player his team could rely on in the closing minutes of games. He’s added a nasty pull-up jumper that is unblockable and has become his go-to move off isolations on the wing. That was the missing piece.

"Last year I was just unsure of that role as opposed to this year where I feel like, ‘That is my role," George said. "I think it was just maturity. Going through having to learn how to deal with pressure situations, now I’m expecting pressure situations. Learning how to perform when your teams needs you the most. That’s what I gained the most out of the playoffs."

Via NBA.com’s shot charts, George is shooting better than 50 percent from the area defined as the mid range, a skill that has become almost quaint in today’s NBA. But George heeded the lessons from former assistant coach Brian Shaw, who shared his wisdom from working with Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles. To be a go-to guy, a player has to have options. He has to use the whole court, and he has to be able to get a shot when his team needs one. This was a new and entirely different mindset for George.

"Last year he came into the season thinking that he was going to be opposite Danny Granger and potentially still a fifth option on offense," Pacers coach Frank Vogel said. "He was hoping to expand that role but not really understanding that he could be the first option. He grew into that last year toward the end of the year. Then you go into the summer and he went into his summer workout program with that in mind. ‘I’m going to be the number one option and I’m going to take another giant step with my improvement and development,’ and I think that’s shown."

"He wants the big moment. He wants the ball in his hands." -Frank Vogel on Paul George

On Wednesday night against the Knicks, George rescued his team with a 35-point performance. Twenty one of those points coming in the fourth quarter and overtime. After the game George told reporters that he might have deferred in that situation last season, but no more. Where once the big moments came at him quickly, now those situations happen in slow motion. "I completely believe in my abilities at that point," George told me.

"He wants the big moment," Vogel said. "He wants the ball in his hands. Last year when he was becoming our leading scorer and our first option, he wasn’t necessarily the guy we were going to late in games. He went into the offseason with that mindset that he’s going to have the ball in crunch time and he’s got to be able to create his own shot and make plays for us."

It’s been quite a remarkable ride for George in his short career. He went from unknown high school player to unheralded college player at Fresno State where he made himself into a draft prospect. Through his first 3+ seasons in the NBA, George has made slow and steady progress with a dash of spectacular thrown in, tantalizing with his talent and potential. Greatness wasn’t really thrust upon him. Rather, he grabbed it when it became available and then tried to make it his own.

Consider that at this point last season he was trying to find his way in the wake of Granger’s knee injury. He became a focal point by default as much as anything, and it was a struggle at first. But by midseason he had grown into an All-Star. By the playoffs he was becoming a genuine phenom. The only thing left was for him to take was that proverbial next step.

"It’s awesome," Vogel said. "You can’t say enough good things about who he is as a person. There’s a lot of talented guys in this league that don’t have the hunger, the drive and the determination that Paul George has, and the coachability. He’s just a refreshing guy to be around. He wants to learn. He wants to listen, everything you say to him. He’s a sponge. He absorbs it and he uses it."

That’s perhaps the most impressive thing about George. He’s on the rocket ride to stardom -- no matter how you choose to define it -- but still seems grounded. He’s also learned to adjust to new expectations and new pressures. Just like his team.

"We don’t feel like we’re the underdog," George said. "We feel like we have a target on our back. A lot of teams are coming after us. It’s fun. You’ve been the underdog for so long and you prepared being the underdog for so long, you’re ready for all opponents. That’s really how we carry ourselves now. We expect to get the best out of teams and we perform."

Sounds a lot like their best player, as well.

OvertimeMore thoughts from the week that was

Over a half-dozen years studying Kevin Garnett, what always stood out more than anything was his consistency. No matter how much his minutes fluctuated or his position changed, Garnett’s per-minute numbers rarely deviated. His shooting percentages remained consistent, and his plus/minus was always in the black. This is, after all, a man who follows the same elaborate pregame routine right down to tapping his toes in rhythm during the anthem the same way every night. The only thing he hates more than a mouthy rookie is change.

Yet, there was one metric that seemed to be a bellwether of sorts for how Garnett was feeling: his defensive rebounding percentage. When he made his comeback from knee surgery in 2009-10, those numbers began to drop and he had his worst season in Boston. When he returned to form the following season, they went back up. Garnett looked like a shell of his former self following the 2012 lockout, yet his rebounding numbers picked back up once he got himself back into optimal shape.

Garnett came into the weekend grabbing almost 33 percent of the available defensive boards when he’s on the court for Brooklyn, which leads the league and would be an all-time high. Unfortunately, that’s the only good thing on a stat sheet that includes an unsightly 36 percent shooting percentage. KG’s frustrations bubbled over in an awful loss to the Wolves on Friday night when he picked up a technical and a flagrant after jostling with Kevin Love, turning a double-digit deficit into blowout territory.

Considering the sorry state of the Nets and KG’s own game, his rebounding is admittedly not much to hold on to, but it’s reason enough to believe that he will turn it around before too long. Additionally the Nets have played slightly better defense when he’s on the court and hold teams to 50 percent shooting at the rim, as opposed to almost 60 percent when he’s on the bench, per NBA.com.

Make no mistake: KG has been dreadful and so have the Nets. They don’t score well or defend worth a damn. It’s jarring to not only see him and Paul Pierce wearing black and white, but also to watch them play for a team that gets beat repeatedly on the defensive end. It hasn’t helped that Deron Williams, Brook Lopez and Andrei Kirilenko have missed time with injuries or that first-year coach Jason Kidd has looked lost and out of his element on the sidelines.

At age 37 and with over 53,000 minutes on his odometer counting the postseason, there is little reason other than boards and blind faith to believe that Garnett has more left in his body. But we’ve been down this road too many times and seen far too much to write off Garnett after a dozen games. Give up on KG? Not until the retirement ceremony, and even then we won’t be fully convinced.

Viewers GuideWhat we'll be watching this week

MONDAY Timberwolves at Pacers

The Timberwolves have a sturdy defense and a young emerging superstar to anchor an excellent starting five. They also have a shaky bench and very little depth. Sounds a lot like last year’s Pacers. That bench is the only thing holding back our optimism for the Timberwolves who have cooled off after a strong start. All those minutes begin to take a toll after a while and one injury could really derail the whole process. It’s imperative that Rick Adelman gets something out of Derrick Williams this season.

TUESDAY Magic at Hawks

Jeff Teague has made a career out of slow and steady progress. He was OK as a rookie, competent as a second-year player and solid as a starter in his third before showing tantalizing glimpses of stardom in his fourth. Now in his fifth year and still just 25 years old, Teague is really coming into his own as a playmaker. The Hawks are better than you think and Teague is one of the biggest reasons.

WEDNESDAY Spurs at Thunder

This was the conference finals matchup that should have been until Russell Westbrook injured his knee and the Grizzlies grit and grinded their way into OKC’s rightful place. As loaded as the Western Conference is -- and it’s stacked -- we keep coming back to these two teams at the top of our rankings. Honorable mention to the Nets-Laker game for the over-35 championship.

THURSDAY DNP-Turkey

FRIDAY Warriors at Thunder

Let’s talk about Klay Thompson for a moment. He’s averaging over 20 points with a True Shooting Percentage over .650. That’s absurd. Even more absurd is that Thompson ranks second on the Warriors in TS percentage. Even more absurd is that Steph Curry is third. The leader? Andre Iguodala. There is no good way to defend this team when everyone is on the floor.

SATURDAY Nets at Grizzlies

A couple of weeks ago the Grizzlies looked like roadkill. The spacing was horrendous, the usually reliable defense was in shambles and first-year coach Dave Joerger looked like he was in over his head. All it took was a four-game sweep of a west coast swing and a coaching adjustment by Joerger to get everything back to normal. Take heart, Nets fans. It can happen to you too.

SUNDAY Pacers at Clippers

We end where we began with the Pacers beginning a five-game road trip through the West that includes games against the Clips, Blazers, Spurs and Thunder (with the Jazz thrown in for kicks.) This is where we start to get a better feel for Indiana and how it matches up with the best in the business.

The ListNBA players in some made up category

Everyone loves lists, especially completely arbitrary lists like this one. This week: In the name of Paul George, here’s a list of breakout players who are entering the superstar realm.

Kevin Love: In this age of over analysis and periodic rankings we are required to expand things like the MVP race into ongoing discussions; as in, "Kevin Love is in the MVP discussion even though we all know he won’t win." Well, maybe we should take him even more seriously. Small samples and caveats aside, Love is second in the league in scoring and rebounding with about five assists a night thrown in for effect. He’s not the defensive force that LeBron James is, but Love is no pushover for a team that ranks in the top five in defensive rating. He won’t win, of course, but there’s a strong argument to be made that Love has been the NBA’s best player in November.

Steph Curry: Thanks to better depth and a couple of blowout wins, Curry is playing about six fewer minutes per game but his per-36 scoring numbers are basically identical. What has improved is his playmaking. His assist percentage is up to 44 percent and whether it’s Klay Thompson on the wing, David Lee in the post, or giving up ballhandling duties to Andre Iguodala, Curry is playing with and off his teammates even better than last season.

Blake Griffin: Are we past the backlash yet? Can we instead focus on this 22 and 12 player who still mixes in a half-dozen jaw-dropping gems each game? The jury will be out on Griffin until he A) Gets his free throw shooting up to a respectable rate and B) performs in the playoffs when open space and fast breaks are limited. That said, Griffin is shooting over 57 percent from the field and cleaning up more than a quarter of the defensive boards. If he can get that free throw percentage up to say, 70-75 percent, he’ll be unstoppable.

Anthony Davis: We waxed poetic on Davis in the Shootaround a few weeks back, but let’s repeat the raw data: 20 points, 11 boards, 3 blocks, a 29.7 PER and more assists than turnovers. When the rest of his game catches up with his immense physical skills, there won’t be enough money to max him out in perpetuity.

ICYMIor In Case You Missed It

Pay to Play

Public money for private stadiums? Tom Ziller goes deep on why we gladly foot the bill.

Wade's World

Dwyane Wade has a sitcom deal about a basketball player named Daryl Wade and his eccentric entourage. Really. David Roth has ideas on how to make it better.

Noah on Noah

SB Nation’s man in Canada James Herbert talked to Joakim Noah in this engaging Q+A about chemistry, staying in the moment and being an underdog.

Offensive meltdowns

Why have the Nets, Pelicans and Pistons all struggled? Mike Prada has the answers with pictures.

Philadelphi-huh?

The 76ers were built to be bad, but they’re surprisingly not terrible. Yours truly talks to CSN Philly’s John Gonzalez on the Drive & Kick podcast.

Say WhatRamblings of NBA players, coaches and GMs

"I don’t know what the fuck that was, just to be honest with you."-- Celtics forward Gerald Wallace after 109-85 loss to Rockets.

Reaction: The Celtics had lost three straight and had two days off before allowing 40 first quarter points and getting obliterated in the first few minutes. Lack of talent is one thing. A complete lack of effort and execution is another. Preach on, Crash. No matter how much the league fines you for speaking the truth.

"The big thing I’ve always wondered about was what would have happened with Vietnam. Would he have been smart enough to get us out of that quagmire? It sort of started with him in office, but we’ll never know."-- Spurs coach Gregg Popovich reflecting on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination.

Reaction: I would like a one hour special where Pop just talks about the world. I’ll take that over sideline interview theater any day.

"You know what? I wouldn’t take last year’s team for this year’s team, because this year’s team is more designed to be a playoff team, whereas last year’s team was 18-5 but look who was playing: we had Rasheed Wallace who was doing everything for us, right?"-- Knicks owner James Dolan in a rare interview with the NY Post’s Mike Vaccaro.

Reaction: There are so many weird Dolanisms in this Q+A, but this one slid under the radar. Rasheed Wallace played less than 300 minutes and missed 47 of the 69 three-pointers he attempted but yeah, Sheed did everything.

"A scoring point guard is what they called him, but then when we first got him, we saw that he can really see the floor well."-- Suns coach Jeff Hornacek to the Arizona Republic’s Paul Coro about Eric Bledsoe.Reaction: It’s hard not to be impressed by Bledsoe who is averaging over 20 points and about seven assists per game as a full-time starter for the pesky Suns. It’s also hard not to be impressed by Hornacek who has his young team playing an entertaining style and hanging in every game. Good coaching is about adapting to personnel and Hornacek looks like a keeper for Ryan McDonough’s rebuilding plan.
"It’s just bad coaching. I take the blame for this."-- Nets coach Jason Kidd after a rough loss to the Blazers dropped his team to 3-7. Reaction: Meet the anti-Suns. Few teams have gotten less from more and their star-powered nucleus look like they just met an hour ago. It’s possible that Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Joe Johnson all fell apart simultaneously, but we still think it’s scheme and injuries as much as age. That’s on Kidd.

This Week in GIFsfurther explanation unnecessary

Tony Allen

The crane kick heard 'round the world.

DeMarcus Cousins

Captain Boogie won't allow Isaiah Thomas to shake Chris Paul's hand. Leadership.

Matt Bonner

Spurs forever.

Steven Adams

Apparently Byron Mullens studied at the DeMarcus Cousins School.

Designer:Josh Laincz | Producer:Chris Mottram | Editor:Tom Ziller

Stillwater on ice: Oklahoma State, Baylor and the coldest of Westerns

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The Cowboys in white hats defended their merciless turf against the men from Waco, just as they've done since 1939, and the Big 12's food chain remains intact.

1. On the way into Stillwater, Oklahoma along I-35 North, I saw four accidents in an hour, cars discarded by indifferent roads into guardrails and each other. Oklahoma State Troopers attended services for the cars, gingerly motioning for flatbed tow trucks and shaking their heads at the wreckage, the panhandle-shaped state outlined in white on the black doors of their Magnums.

Signs for Continental Resources drilling line the road, reminding Oklahoma that without horizontal drilling, life would be nearly impossible here.

  • WITHOUT CONTINENTAL RESOURCES YOU WOULD BE EATING SOD
  • OKLAHOMA: A SUBSIDIARY OF CONTINENTAL RESOURCES
  • YOU SHOULD PAY US TO BE HERE, REALLY. LOVE, CONTINENTAL RESOURCES
  • HORIZONTAL DRILLING, BUT ENOUGH ABOUT YOUR MOTHER

That all may be partially true. This is the part of America where ease runs out, where the weather turns mean. Look down from the airplane on the way in, and you will see the giant, skidding path of tornadoes carved into the fields around Moore, Oklahoma, where an EF5 tornado blew up a good chunk of a town in minutes. You can't see the swath the El Reno tornado cut from the plane. That one, also an EF5, from this past June was 2.6 miles wide and had other smaller tornadoes spitting out of it like bubbling lottery balls.

one hand reaching up for warmth, the other holding a beer away from the heat.

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2. It is a beautiful place, even with the sky coughing sleet. Pass the giant arrows stuck in the ground at Will Rogers World Airport, then run north though the city and out into the country that hits shockingly fast for anyone accustomed to living in sprawling web-cities like Atlanta or Los Angeles or Dallas. It is rolling, tawny farmsides, the occasional headbanging motion of an oil pump, billboards saying YES! WE HAVE THE COLDEST BEER, and a giant crucifix somewhere between Edmond and Guthrie. Look to the roadside long enough, and in the distance you will see a natural gas vent, an orange flame on the horizon like a stuttering sun.

I followed the sand truck into Stillwater, which was like steering into a soft rain of buckshot for 10 miles.

3. The cowboys huddled in tents pregame, some with tree-like gas warmers posted just outside the tent, one hand reaching up for warmth, the other holding a beer away from the heat. Others put blazing fire pits under the canopies, safety be damned. It was cold.

If the fire pit sparked an ember into the canopy, and the whole damn thing caught fire, the cowboys could pull the flatscreens and beer away from the blaze before it got too far out of hand, then warm their hands by the now-larger and more impressive fire.

The wind blew in the sides of the cloaked tents, turning them into warped cubes humming with footbally TV noises and the murmuring sounds of drinking. Students and alumni walked around with open beers in gloved hands. Some dealt with the warmth by donning full worksuits -- some in Realtree camo, some taken straight off the rack at Walmart -- after putting no fewer than three layers of clothing on first. Others stretched the limits of their goin'-out jeans by putting on long underwear tucked into their boots, but skipping the cowboy hat completely. The wind would have taken them straight off and parked them somewhere in a field just west of Tulsa.

4. On the Strip, just by the corrugated metal sides of the brew-through called The Barn, a dude walked by me with a tall boy in hand. The other three were hanging out off a plastic four-ring he'd tied into his pockets. He looked cold and drunk. The sign on The Barn announced that they had the season's Beaujolais nouveau, and that they also had Lime-A-Ritas waiting and ready.

5. Below a certain temperature, everyone outside the city of Philadelphia makes the conscious choice to be nice to each other. Baylor fans hurried from point to point in the cold unharassed, for the most part. Oklahoma State fans are not there to break either rank or rules. A mob of jaywalkers after the game crossed against the signal when traffic cleared, and an older fan plaintively complained, "NOOOO DON'T CROSS AGAINST THE SIGNAL."  A fan next to me said that Boone Pickens Stadium was the only place he had ever been told to cheer less loudly.

Maybe that's a byproduct of the setting, which can be foreboding enough to allow for some free courtesy. The campus of Oklahoma State is the usual mishmash of new and old -- some utilitarian shed-buildings from the '60s, a glass-and-metal research center straight from the Logan's Run school of architecture, the old engineering building topped by two old oil derricks, and an old campus with broad lawns and turn-of-the-century campus buildings topped with dark cupolas. In sunshine it probably looks like any other pleasant college campus; in foreboding, overcast bluster, it has a prairie Something Wicked this Way Comes vibe.

6. The trees opposite the Atherton Hotel are swept back, blown to a perma-lean by the unceasing wind. Someone has filled out the panes of the windows of one old building with messages. The most visible one, spelled out one letter per pane, reads: "ESPN > SI."

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7. Boone Pickens Stadium has T. Boone Pickens' name on it no fewer than four times in 10-foot high lettering, lit from behind with a soft orange glow. It is the biggest and most visible building in Stillwater, a blocked-in horseshoe with jack-o-lantern lighting topped with a ring of luxury suites that hum with warmth and probably expensive brown liquor. It's being poured to people not sitting on cold, aluminum bleachers.

T. Boone could be somewhere up there, watching the beast he's fed from a wee pup into its burgeoning, snarling maturity. Pickens is largely responsible for taking the erector set of Lewis Field and morphing it into this, the place that will get so loud No. 4 Baylor can't make simple line calls on the field. He's also responsible for the JumboTron that plays Kurt Russell's snarling "Hell's comin' with me!" speech from Tombstone. He played a large part in making Mike Gundy the head coach. Oklahoma State stayed in the Big 12 when the conference was at risk of imploding and scattering to the winds. Assuming Pickens had nothing to do with that would be ignoring the basic realities of the program and the four huge, identical names ringing the stadium.

Pickens is also not sitting in the stands on this Saturday night, losing all feeling in his lower body and regretting, every time the wind picks up a gear or two, the choice to not wear a second pair of long underwear. Pickens might be a lot of things, but he is definitely a.) the most influential and visible donor to any major program in college football outside of Phil Knight at Oregon, and b.) smarter than you, since he built a stadium and can sit where he pleases, such as inside where it's warm and they have booze.

8. Baylor will not win this football game with No. 10 Oklahoma State. Baylor has not won a football game in Stillwater since 1939. They will walk off the field at Boone Pickens Stadium a numb, bedraggled mess standing behind a 49-17 margin. They will be savaged by 370 yards passing from the suddenly brilliant Clint Chelf and the mean work of a defense all too happy to let Baylor hand the ball over and to stand in the middle of Baylor's perpetually open passing lanes.

And let's talk about how a team comes completely off the rails somewhere between Oklahoma City and Tulsa. You do it one stuttering wheel at a time until the entire train flips over and catches fire. You do it when Bryce Petty, with zero tacklers in the vicinity, trips over an invisible marmot on the one-yard line.

You do it when, on the next play, Shock Linwood, Baylor's third-string running back playing due to injuries, reaches toward the goal line and hands the ball to the flummoxed-but-pleased Cowboys defense.

You pull another wheel off the rails when a rattled Petty, pressured by three- and four-man fronts all night, can't hit on simple passes he has completed with ease all year. You continue the derailment when your defense can't stop Oklahoma State's receivers in double coverage, much less single coverage, and when the last real hiccup of a comeback attempt dies on a horrendous shotgun snap that soars over Petty's head like a wounded grouse.

That's how it happens, one wheel at a time.

9. That's too passive, though. You can't really imply that something just happened to Baylor. It was done, committed, ripped out of their hands and literally taken at every turn by Oklahoma State.

The Cowboys were playing with naked aggression in freezing temperatures and doing everything Baylor was supposed to have been able to do. They were the ones baffling defenders with play-fakes out of a glorified wishbone and heaving throw-backs to the quarterback. They were the ones who spread the field. They then countered heavy up the middle with Kye Staley, 236 pounds of glorious, ripped rumble-up-the-middle who scored on the most important sequence of the game: the turnaround 99-yard trample by the Oklahoma State offense.

There was nothing passive about this. Oklahoma State took this game, and then beat Baylor about the head and shoulders with it.

10. It is a joy forever watching a bowling ball like Staley scatter pins and scare the hides off tacklers on the way into the end zone. That is all.

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11. "It's not Ames," he said. They said this more than once, especially in the dying minutes of the fourth quarter when, after a late cannibal's special of a passing touchdown, Oklahoma State began to run the clock out. (If you're wondering when that is in the Big 12, it's when you're up by 30 or so with five minutes left.) Up in Ames it was nine degrees, and someone was watching a bitter, meaningless contest between Kansas and Iowa State somewhere in the dark of superflyover country, someone with less reason to watch than anyone staying or leaving the Strip in Stillwater, someone wondering why they were watching at all out in the darker dark of an Iowa winter.

Stillwater is not Ames in at least one sense: the Cowboys ruin dreams as a habit, not as accident. That the dark days of Squinky are dead, and that losing to a team like West Virginia can be regarded as a genuine accident that just happens to even the best of football teams. That Sports Illustrated's worst attempts at detailing the extraordinary benefits of being an athlete at Oklahoma State -- They have sex! And the mari-huana! Unlike any other student! -- slide off their truck hoods like so much goose shit in a gale. That they can now complain as a luxury, as fans did in the fourth quarter, that Gundy was letting Baylor back into the game when they knew Oklahoma State could score again if they wanted to really put some stank on what was already a lopsided beatdown.

(For the record: shortly after this complaint, Oklahoma State passed for the final touchdown. Gundy also danced in the locker room, because he is a showman who gives the people what they want: destruction and light twerking.)

Standing against titans like Texas and the historical bully to the south in Norman, Oklahoma State does more than survive. That they were the ones to kick Baylor back down the ladder is appropriate. They're ahead of them on the upstart trail and will brook no passing on the left or right.

12. But Oklahoma State thriving is all the more astronomically unlikely and remarkable because of where it is and what it is. It is not a simple place to survive, a place of intense extremes and Biblical weather, of a sky so freaking huge it threatens to swallow the eyeballs if you look at it long enough. The economy rides the whims of geology and the market and the endless need to not freeze in your own house somewhere a thousand miles away.

The bumps are real, substantial, and come without warning, just like the 3.9 earthquake that shook Stillwater on the morning of the Baylor game. Forget that for too long, and the land itself may remind you of just how tenuous and hard-fought the smallest of successes can be, much less the moment when your football team -- the most frivolous of things --pummels the speed freaks from Baylor on national television in the dark of a freezing Oklahoma night.

13. TL; DR: Standard western plot. It got cold, and everybody but the cowboys died.

* * *

Long live the read option: The most talked about offensive scheme of 2012 is still thriving this season thanks to its ongoing evolution

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Is the read option still a thing, or what?:

The emergence of the read option at the NFL level was one of the biggest stories of the 2012 season. A concept appropriated from college playbooks became an important weapon on offense for teams like the Niners, Seahawks, Panthers and Redskins. It was was hyped because it was interesting and wildly successful. Most of all, it was fun to watch.

Veteran NFL defensive coordinators appeared to have no answers for it. The NFC wild card game between San Francisco and Green Bay saw 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick rush for an NFL-record 181 yards. Dom Capers and the Packers didn't sufficiently prepare to defend the San Francisco read option after the Niners had used it sparingly during the late part of the year, and that neglect ended Green Bay's playoff run.

Teams went back to school during the offseason, consulting with college programs.

This was a theme for the late part of the season. Defensive coaches tried to play catch-up on the different ways to stop the read option. Offensive play-callers who had dual-threat quarterbacks at their disposal took advantage and used it with impunity (that's the media hype train taking over).

Even during the absurd read option heyday in the second half of 2012 and during the playoffs, there were many that saw the read option in the same light as the briefly successful wildcat craze: a fad, a short-term deal that coaches just had to study to figure out or, as Mike Tomlin put it, "eliminate."

Teams went back to school during the offseason, consulting with college programs that had been facing the same schemes for years. They came back better prepared and ready to throw down thine enemy and smite his ruin upon the mountainside, stamping the read option out of existence at the NFL level, just like they'd done with the wildcat.

Bring out your dead!:

Except, something weird happened: more teams started using it. Teams like the Eagles, Chiefs, Raiders, Bills and Jets joined the usual suspects. At the midway point of the 2013 season, according to ESPN Stats & Information, the rate of read option handoffs had nearly tripled over that of 2012.

At the NFL level, the read option is, and always will be, just a changeup. A knuckleball, screwball, slider, or a cut fastball, if you will. Just pick a lesser-used pitch for this metaphor. That's the read option. It is not one of your top two pitches.

Every team that uses the read option has a base identity to its offense that is not related to the read option -- the Niners and Panthers are power run teams. The Seahawks are oriented around a zone blocking scheme and a play-action passing game, and you could probably lump the rest of the read option teams in some traditional fuddy duddy category.

The read option isn't taking over the NFL -- remember how I told you that its occurrence had tripled? It went from 1.3 percent of all offensive plays from scrimmage to roughly 3.7 percent, per ESPN Stats & Info. Some teams use it more frequently. Philly led the NFL at the midway point, using it on around 30 percent of offensive snaps. Seattle, Washington, Carolina and San Francisco use it anywhere from 7-13 percent of the time. So no, it's not taking the NFL by storm. It's just another cool wrinkle that a select group of teams are using, and they're still using it effectively.

While the newness factor contributed to the "boom" of the read option's 6.2 yards per carry last year, even after spending an entire offseason preparing for it, defenses are still only limiting handoffs in that scheme to 4.7 yards per carry in 2013. I like to think offensive coordinators can work with that.

So, let's get down to the meat and potatoes, and look at how use of the read option, as well as defending it, has changed this season.

I was told there'd be no math:

I'll let Patriots coach Bill Belichick explain the basic concept to you, and keep in mind he was referring to the wildcat, but the same principles apply to the read option:

"When you put a (typical slow, passing) quarterback under center, you lose a blocker, you lose a gap, offensively. You basically play with 10 men on offense. But when the quarterback is one of the runners, whether it's single-wing or veer or wishbone (or the read option), the defense runs out of people to defend you."

Coaches really know what they're talking about. Let's see what another coach has to say. Niners defensive coordinator Vic Fangio on the read option:

"It just becomes a numbers game. Your typical run, the quarterback hands off and it's now their 10 against your 11. Now when he's a potential runner, it's their 11 against your 11, and they're not even blocking one of the guys at the point of attack, so it actually becomes 11 against 10 if they do it right. So, the numbers are flipped."

You're not even blocking one of the guys at the point of attack? If you're not super familiar with the read option you may be wondering what is Fangio talking about. Here's context:

When Fangio talks about the offense now having 11 guys to the defense's 10 -- it's because in some zone-read schemes, the offense leaves the backside defensive end unblocked. The fake, and the threat of a quarterback run, is the de facto "block," because it freezes that defender. Watch:

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As for the defensive end, and the defense just in general? Tentative, unsure, thinking = slow.  This was the principal issue at play: defenses were inexperienced and unprepared to defend the read option and its variations. So, coaches re-educated themselves during offseason to brush up on tactics to stop it.

So what did these coaches learn in summer school? That is an article within itself, and I will not be able to list all the nuances, but here are the basics:

if you could get in a few assaults on the QB, it would influence offensive coordinators.

One common method is called the scrape exchange, which sees the defense crash its defensive end hard on the running back with no care for the quarterback keeper option. This, in theory, forces the quarterback to hold the ball and not hand off, as per his "read option rules". Once the defense has manipulated the quarterback into not handing off, it "scrapes" a middle linebacker over the edge and around the corner to where the defensive end started, and in theory, tackles the ball carrier. This is somewhat effective, but has limitations, which I'll explain below.

The other main strategy that was bandied about all offseason was an inverse of the scrape exchange. Instead of crashing hard on the running back (regardless of handoff or not), teams had talked about the idea of viciously attacking the quarterback at the read option mesh point with your defensive end. This strategy is loosely protected by NFL rules, because as of right now, you can hit a quarterback if he's in "run posture", or in other words, if he's faking a handoff and/or faking a quarterback run.

In theory, teams thought that if you could get in a few assaults on the quarterback at the mesh point, it would influence offensive coordinators to just stop calling the play for fear of hurting their star player. Russell Wilson experienced this firsthand in Week 2.

This is what that strategy looks like:

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The key for Ahmad Brooks to hit Wilson was that Wilson was still in a "run posture," which makes that play legal. If Wilson had been standing up like he'd just handed off or thrown, the quarterback protection rules would have applied. Wilson ended up being fine after the hit, and it's also worth noting that Marshawn Lynch picked up about 20 yards on this play.

And, overall, while this threat of getting your quarterback "blown up" at the mesh point was talked about a lot during the offseason, that Brooks hit was the only time I've seen it happen to the Seahawks, and I haven't really heard much about it thus far. More commonly, defensive ends have been tentative at the mesh point, option handoffs have been quicker, and quarterbacks have juked at the last second to avoid giving defensive ends a clean shot. Notice Wilson's movement as compared to above:

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Bill Barnwell of Grantland wrote something similar a few weeks ago:

The other argument-slash-warning for read option practitioners was that running the ball with your quarterback would open him up to injuries. Some teams indirectly threatened to go after the quarterback on any play when he might have the football in the (implied) hopes of knocking him out. The results haven't exactly worked out that way. Of those five most frequent zone-read teams from the past two years, only the Jets have lost their starting quarterback, and they didn't lose Mark Sanchez because of the read option. Cam Newton did miss a few snaps after getting hit on a read option handoff recently, but that's about it.

I never bought the "mesh-point-blowup" as a viable solution because there was never going to be one, singular thing that could stop such a varied group of plays and schemes. If your one plan to stop the read option is to hit the quarterback, there are myriad things an offensive coordinator can do to exploit that.

Instead, defenses have taken a more general approach. As Stanford defensive coordinator Derek Mason told teams over the offseason when they sought his advice:

"The quarterback wants a fast read all the time. If you don't give him a fast read, then things start to break down and he starts to panic because everything is predicated on him being able to make a fast read.

There's no magic elixir playing against those schemes.

No magic elixir? Here's the bottom line:

It's being fundamentally sound in terms of your keys. That's it. If you don't understand your fits, or where your eyes go and where your help is, you're at risk. You're just out there playing ball, and they're always going to be one step ahead of you."

Why is discipline and understanding of your responsibilities so important? Because when we're talking about the "read option", we're not talking about one play that a team needs to figure out how to stop. The "read option" is really a varied series of plays and schemes. The idea that teams can just "stop the read option" is silly because there are many ways to run it. You figure out a way to stop what the offense is doing? They'll counter with a tweak that screws up your "solution".

The read option evolves

Here's a look at some of the basic option concepts and the adjustments to them we're seeing this season.

The Inside Zone Read (IZR)

The inside zone read is characterized by "downhill" running. The running back on inside zone handoffs is typically going north-south with an aggressive nature, and the offensive line fires out into their blocks with that in mind.

Here's the first thing that makes it tough to defend: the quarterback can "read" a number of different players and make his handoff/keeper decision based on several criteria. You can't just follow one set of principles based on the quarterback reading the defensive end, because then he'll do an inside zone read on the defensive tackle instead.

Below, San Francisco "reads" the DT after leaving him unblocked.

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Seattle did the same in Week 1 late in the fourth quarter as it tried to run the clock out. This first down allowed them to do so, and they got it by running a DT-read option play. Just when you think you've figured out how to stop the DE-read option, the offense can switch it up.

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Which is why defending the read option becomes a matter of discipline and understanding. Offensive playcalling vs. defensive strategies becomes a game of cat and mouse. If an OC notices that the defense is being overly aggressive in attacking the running back, (or "cheating"), then do this:

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This highlights the ability to punish a defense when it gets too aggressive or becomes undisciplined in its gaps.

The Outside Zone Read (OZR)

Here's what noted zone-read enthusiast Chip Kelly has said about varying styles within the read zone system:

"We want to get off the ball and be a physical downhill running football team. The [inside zone] is not a finesse play. This is physical football. The offensive linemen play with confidence because they know they have help from their teammates in their blocking scheme. This is the offense we run and everyone knows that

"The outside zone play is a complement to the inside zone play. The inside zone is a hole to cutback play. The outside zone is more of a hole to bounce play. The reason we run the outside play is to circle the defense. When you get good at running the inside zone the defenders begin to tighten their techniques and concentrate on squeezing the inside gaps."

"If we feel that is happening or we start to get many twists and blitzes inside we run the outside zone play. It gives you speed in space and the offensive line can play with confidence when you have something to change the focus of the defense."

The outside zone read is characterized by lateral movement at the snap by both the offensive line and running back. The quarterback has the option to keep the ball if the defense flows too quickly to cut off the lateral run, which keeps opposing teams honest.

Exhibits A & B:

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In addition varying inside vs. outside zone to confuse defenses and defeat defensive tendencies or momentum, there are other wrinkles that teams use. Probably none are cooler than the triple-option stuff that Carolina does with Cam Newton and Co.

The Triple Read Option

This is exactly as it sounds. Cam has three options: first, to hand off to the diving running back; second, to run upfield after his blockers; or third, pitch to another running back on the outside.

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This next one below, from last year -- note the arc block by TE Greg Olsen (No. 88)  -- he moves to the second level to block for Cam on the incoming safety, Kam Chancellor. This leaves OLB K.J. Wright (No. 50) with the impossible decision to try to tackle Newton or the pitch man. God, I love this stuff.

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As I've pointed out, when defensive coordinators "figure out how to stop the read option," offensive coordinators can make little adjustments to their schemes to counter the things defensive coaches have learned and taught. If a defense is starting to have success defending your inside zone, go to your outside zone. When they've found good ways to stop both of those, tweak your blocking schemes, and repeat.

Examples of these little tweaks include downfield arc blocking with your tight end, which is illustrated above in that second read option play, and the slice block, the swing pass and the use of play action.

You'll see a few of those examples below, but the other obvious work-around to defensive coordinators' so-called "answers'" on how to defend the read option is to simply not do any reading. Observe:

The "No-Read" Read Option

If there's no "read" going on, this isn't a read option, but the idea is that the opposing team thinks it's a read option, and plays it accordingly. That's where you can break out some of your new toys, like the slice block with your tight end or fullback.

Below, read option rules would dictate that Wilson keep the ball instead of handing toff to Marshawn Lynch because the defensive end is crashing hard on the running back. However, in this case, Seattle has a called handoff all the way, and takes care of the defensive end with what's called a slice block. Taking the defensive end's place on the outside is No. 52, Chad Greenway, and by scraping over to take on Wilson on what is supposed to be a QB keeper, he's now way out of position to make the stop on Lynch.

The defense, by trying to manipulate the mesh-point handoff, finds itself out of position.

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This is the same concept that Seattle used in the playoffs last season. Note the scraping linebacker, who expects Wilson to be holding the football, get blown up on the slice block by Zach Miller. Lynch does his thing and scores. Incidentally, this is one of my favorite plays ever:

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Okay, I'm talking about the Seahawks too much. The Niners do it too.

Here, an inverse set of ideas. In this case, the slice block takes out the defender at the point of attack for Colin Kaepernick, who by "read option rules," should have handed off.

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Play Action

Running play action out of read option looks is one of the deadliest wrinkles you can use.

From Redskins' OC Kyle Shanahan:

"The zone read is something I learned, throughout going through the year, that I think really helped us. It [worked to create] the least [amount of] pass rush I've ever seen as a coordinator. Guys just sitting there scared to death just watching everybody, not moving. I really enjoyed, actually, sometimes being able to drop back and not have four guys just teeing off from the quarterback, all trying to hit him in the pocket."

Watch how tentative the pass rush from Denver is on this play -- instead choosing to wait and watch, expecting a run play. This gives Alex Smith a ton of time to hit Sean McGrath up the seam.

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Similar to the non-read read option, you can just run your regular plays out of your standard read option-looking formations.

Below, you see Cam Newton and company start what looks to be their standard triple option to the right. A good amount of Niners defenders bite on that action, and Newton uses his inside hand to hand off to DeAngelo Williams. Brilliant play call, excellent deception and a great run by Williams.

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I guess, you can actually go that way ... then keep going and going. The Niners and Panthers are two teams that both run Power-O with their quarterback as the ball carrier. This goes back to the discussion about the wildcat, and the math that goes into it. With Kaepernick as a bona fide running threat, it evens up the numbers for offense vs. defense.

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It's not easy to stop. It's a numbers game that you can't get away with.

The Wildcat (Which Just. Won't. Die.)

Everyone assumes that the wildcat is dead. It isn't. Not the idea of direct snapping it to the running back in some sort of variation of the wildcat, anyway.

Just in the past few weeks, I've seen the Cardinals, Jets and Raiders use forms of the direct snap with varying success.

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Here's the thing: If you do what the Raiders did above and score a touchdown out of this play, then that's just gravy. I am more convinced that teams roll out a series in the wildcat maybe once a week just so other teams have to waste their time preparing for it. The more time you spend worrying about stopping the wildcat, the less time you have to prepare for what we actually do 95 percent of the time and are way better at doing.

Trolling. If you see anyone running the wildcat, they're just trolling the teams on their upcoming schedule.

In fact, you could make the argument that this is the biggest benefit of having the read option in your repertoire: simply making opposing teams prepare for something you only use a small fraction of the time.

The bottom line:

The read option is marginally less "effective" in 2013 than it was in 2012, but there are myriad variables at play. The yards per attempt is down some, which is exactly what pretty much everyone expected to happen -- even the most hardened read option defenders.

Teams are going to focus on it, it's going to be a priority and therefore it's going to be a little tougher to do, for the most part. That said, even if teams "know" how to stop the read option, there's still the little detail of actually executing that plan.

As Seahawks offensive line coach Tom Cable put it:

"I've heard Mike [Tomlin] and others talk about defending it. Whoever is going to do it, you better have the answers. All we've heard all spring is every defensive coach in the NFL is saying ‘I'm going to go to Texas A&M, I'm going to go to Oregon with their new coach, and try to figure this thing out."

"Hey, it's football. It's no different than getting in the I[-formation] and running the lead play. It's a different way of doing it."

Even if you know it's coming, you've still got to stop it. You still have to account for it.

No defensive coordinator found a magic elixir for stopping the read option between this season and last.

As I have illustrated (and keep in mind, most of these GIF'd plays are from the past couple of weeks), there are ways to defend the read option, and there are ways to beat those defensive adjustments. In general, running 3-4 looks with multiple linemen two-gapping is a way to mitigate the numbers advantage the use of read option creates. If you're in a 4-3 defense, bring eight defenders into the box. Again, generally, having elite athletes on the edges is nice, and in the secondary, it helps to call zone coverage with players looking in toward the line of scrimmage so they can see the action in front of them. Simply, you must play disciplined, smart football, minding your gaps and staying on script while knowing which player you're responsible for.

No defensive coordinator found a magic elixir for stopping the read option between this season and last. Teams will continue to use it as a complementary weapon in their offense. For the Seahawks, the "no-read read option" has been a pretty popular deterrent to the common read option defenses. For the Panthers and Niners, their wide variance in read option looks and formations is what makes their versions hard to defend. The Chiefs have done a good job in using pistol read option looks to create play-action passing opportunities. The Eagles, who run the read option more than any other team in the NFL by a long shot, use all of the above to make it effective.

The differences in the read option from 2012 to 2013 run parallel to the changes in strategy in defending it. As defensive coordinators figure out better ways to stifle it, their counterparts break out new tweaks in response. The game of chess continues.

Producer:Chris Mottram | Editor:Ryan Van Bibber | Title Photo: Getty Images

2013 SB Nation Holiday Gift Guide

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2013 SB Nation Holiday Gift Guide

o the turkey and stuffing has been consumed, the tree and ornaments at least thought about, and the Lions game yelled at. Now begins the three-week scramble to figure out what the heck to buy for the sports-loving fans in your life. Well, we're here to help.

Our team of crack sports enthusiasts has wrangled up the items they would most recommend and we've divided them into three vital categories: The Tailgater, for those who live for going out to brisk stadiums on the weekends to rub elbows with their fellow fans; The Barcalounger, for those who prefer to enjoy sports from the comfort of their own home (or for the professional blogger you may happen to know); and the Participant, for the athletes who are out there making it happen.

So kick back, scroll through and enjoy our handy gift guide, designed to help make your life just a little bit simpler this holiday season. (And hey, if you want to grab a few things for yourself along the way, that's just fine. We won't tell anyone.)

The Tailgater

Caitlin Mangum
Video Host, SB Nation

Caitlin loves cheap beer, fried chicken, and organized competition. Since her alma mater was pretty terrible at football, she practically earned a bachelors degree in professional tailgating.

The Barcalounger

Lauren Williams
Office Coordinator, Vox Media DC

Lauren ditches the overpriced concessions and aisle seats to watch her favorite team on her 50-inch HDTV. Plus it's easier to keep up with her fantasy team when she's plugged in to game action at home.

The Participant

Cory Williams
Support Manager, Vox Product

Cory is still upset that he wasn't the star of the Ridiculously Photogenic Guy meme. He enjoys running in circles around our nation's finest monuments while dodging tourists.

Cory enjoys the finer things in life: beer, beer league softball and running off said beer.

Tailgating is an activity for the dedicated: Early morning treks to the stadium, followed by setup time and, later, takedown and cleanup. From careful selection of tailgating activities and accessories, the tailgater is ready for all elements, and prepared for a good time. Whether you're organizing a tailgate or just showing up to have a good time, these are the essentials for a successful pre-game experience.

KanJam $39.99
Yes, you Kan Jam with this tailgate frisbee game.
Frost Boss can chiller $44.95
Chill your beverage in seconds.
Red Party Cup/Shotglass Set $19.95
Shots? Mixers? Have both with this two-in-one cup.
Coleman Broadband Quad Chair $29.99
Why stand around talking sports when you can kick back in the parking lot with a collapsible chair?
Coleman 9x9 Canopy tent $139.99
The best damn canopy tent in the land.
Coolagon Cruzin' Wagon Cooler $239
Rugged for all types of terrain.
Black Max Football $9.99
Rugged, durable football to keep the tailgate entertained.
Coleman Stadium Seat $13.85
No more hard surfaces and cold seats.
Square Stow-A-Way Collapsible Carrier: Red by Rachael Ray $10.95
Keep that seven layer dip nice and warm on a chilly fall day.

The barcalounger is all about the living room experience, right down to the small touches that make a gameday area feel like home. A nice TV, comfortable couch, and plenty of food and drinks are all essentials for the at-home fan. Because sometimes it's better to watch from the comfort of your living room than braving the elements and venturing to the big game.

Duke Cannon Soap Box Set $49
The only soap allowed to be in a man cave.
It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium Book $15
For anyone who’ll never let go of his or her favorite team.
Love's Winning Plays Book $25.95
When you’re tired of learning about college football, here’s a comedic novel about it.
Flip Flop Fly Ball Book $25
Infographics and fun pictures for the most picturesque sport.
FIFA 14 $59.99
The only sports video game you really need.
Study Hall: College Football Book $13.99
Learn and love more about college football.
NFL 13 oz. 3D Enhanced Sports Mug $10.16
At least you can get a grip on PART of your team.
NFL 15.8 Quart Portable Party Refrigerator $199.99
Sometimes your team requires that you stock up.
Roku 3 streaming media player $99.99
The easiest way to watch the internet on your television.
Fathead Stadium Wall Graphic $99.99
Maybe you’ll never make it into the press box, but this view is the next-best thing.
Wincraft wall clock $25
With a clock of your favorite team, it’s always game time.
Birchbox for men $60 for 3 months
Monthly samples of high-end lifestyle products? Sign us up.
Vintage full zip NFL hoodie $89.95
Let your team keep you warm at home and abroad.
Apple TV $99.99
You're still watching regular TV? Amateur.
“The sports gene” $26.95
Discover how genetics factor into athleticism.
NFL team helmet bottle stopper $16.96
Keeps fumbles to a minimum.
Team Blankets $25
Tuck yourself in and dream of football.

Being a spectator is fun and all, but the participant would rather take things into their own hands. Whether a casual or competitive runner, or a weekend warrior in a rec league, the participant spends less time on the couch and more time enjoying the outdoors. They appreciate the finer things, like cold-weather gear and long runs along scenic routes.

Under Armour Speedform running shoes $119.99
These space-age shoes are perfect for setting new personal records.
Under Armour Coldgear fleece hoodie $79.99
Old Navy thinks they have fleece on lock, so prove you're ahead of the game.
Sugoi SubZero Tights $80
Stop exercising in jeans. You look ridiculous.
Under Armour Coldgear stealth gloves $44.99
Stay warm and under-the-radar.
Nike Spiral-tech football $25
Maybe Nike can help you throw like Aaron Rodgers.
Garmin Forerunner Watch $171.67
Know where you’re going and how you’re holding up while you run.
Saucony Women's Kinvara 4 $100
You’re going to need sneakers, might as well get cool ones.
Under Armour escape shorts $24.99 - $29.99
Escape the cold with these Under Armour shorts.
UA Coldgear evo fitted mock $59.99
Look like a superhero while running laps at the track.
Nike Element Half-zip top $65
This is the Twitter generation. No one has time for a full zipper any more.
Under Armour Coldgear storm beanie $29.99
Keeps your head warm, while removing sweat with their signature system.
Under Armour Coldgear gloves $44.99
Pick these up, because nothing is more frustrating than inferior gloves.
Bose SIE2i Sport Headphones $134.95
No run is complete without high quality music.
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SB Nation

Anatomy of perfection: How long can Nick Newell stay undefeated in the cage, and how far can he go?

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It was an unseasonably warm night in Nashville when Nick Newell stepped into the cage last December to fight for his first championship belt. At stake was the 155-pound lightweight strap in the Xtreme Fighting Championships. His opponent, Eric Reynolds, was a far more experienced veteran. The oddsmakers had Newell as a 2-1 underdog, but being underestimated was nothing new for him.

The two fighters started out with an exchange of thudding kicks to each other's legs, shins digging into the thigh with a dull thump. As they circled, Newell delivered a quick left-right punch combo. Reynolds fired back with strikes of his own, forcing Newell up against the chain-link fence. They separated, and Reynolds fired a hard kick to the ribs.

Newell caught the leg against his body and used it to clinch up with Reynolds. He circled behind him, then lifted Reynolds high and slammed him to the ground with a suplex, drawing a cheer. Newell secured a position on his back and hooked his legs around Reynolds' waist. As Reynolds tried to stand, Newell slipped his right arm underneath his chin for the choke and secured it with his left.

Others argued that letting him fight two-handed opponents was downright inhumane, a freak show that shouldn’t be allowed.

Reynolds immediately tried to execute the standard defense, reaching back to peel off Newell's left hand in order to loosen the choke. But there was no hand there to grab. For a moment, as he pawed at empty air, a flicker of fear crossed Reynolds' face.

Newell was born with a congenital amputation, a shortened left arm that ends just below the elbow. It was a distinction which many felt would prevent him from succeeding in the fight game. Others argued that letting him fight two-handed opponents was downright inhumane, a freak show that shouldn't be allowed. But Newell never listened.

As Reynolds' face turned beet red, he finally secured a grip on Newell's right arm. "This is where it's an advantage," said the announcer, Pat Miletich, a former pro fighter. "He can't get hand control on that shorter arm. He's pulling down on the gloved hand but that's already trapped!"

Reynolds collapsed to the ground, squirming to escape the choke. A moment later he tapped out, submitting to the referee. Newell was now 9-0, a champion at age 26, and the only professional mixed martial arts fighter competing with just one hand. He raced around the cage to thunderous applause, collapsing to his back, kicking his legs in the air, overcome with delight.

On Saturday, Dec. 7, Newell will look to extend his unbeaten streak when he fights Sabah Fadai at the World Series of Fighting 7, which will be seen by a national audience on NBC Sports.

* * *

For Newell, the hardest part of fighting has always been finding opponents. He grew up in Milford, a working-class beach town on the Connecticut coast. His mother, Stacey, worked as a nurse and raised Nick on her own. "I always told him he was no different, never let him avoid a challenge or hardship because of his arm," she said. "The more we treated him like everyone else, the more he believed in himself."

"I always told him he was no different, never let him avoid a challenge because of his arm."
Newell_mom_medium

These days Newell stands an imposing 185 pounds of chiseled muscle. But when he joined the wrestling squad his freshman year of high school, he was the smallest member of the team. "I was tiny, like literally 90 pounds, so it was tough to find someone my size." In one of his first matches there was just one competitor in his weight class, a girl, so Newell had to wrestle against her, and lost in front of his entire team and home crowd. "A really proud start to my fighting career," he says with a laugh.

The anecdote is classic Newell, whose personality outside the cage is that of a class clown not afraid to take potshots at himself. It's an attitude he inherited from his grandparents, who helped raise him. They live just a block from the beach in Milford, and Hurricane Sandy left their house submerged in several feet of water. Unlike other properties in the neighborhood, they didn't respond to the disaster by paying tens of thousands of dollars to lift their home on stilts. "Looks pretty silly to me," says Nick's grandfather, George. "If another storm comes along, we'll deal with that too."

That first year as a wrestler, Newell notched two wins and 22 losses. But he never thought about quitting. Wrestling became Nick's primary outlet, a place for him to focus. "For Nick, his coaches became sort of his father figures," explains his mother, Stacey. "They were the ones who helped to shape him and channel his drive."  Despite his small stature and shortened arm, Newell improved quickly. His physical handicap forced him to focus on his technique. By his senior year of high school, he set a state record with 53 wins, going all-state.

Newell went on to college at Western New England, where he was captain of the wrestling team. There he befriended a young man named Brian Myers who shared his passion for the theatrics of Pro Wrestling. In fact, Myers, better known as Curt Hawkins, went on to a successful career in the WWE. As college roommates, the pair would obsess over wrestling on TV. Just after Monday night wrestling finished, a mixed martial arts reality show called The Ultimate Fighter would come on. "Seeing that, I knew it was something I had to try," says Newell.

The sport immediately captivated him, in part, because it allowed fighters to blend different disciplines, to create their own style that emphasized their physical strengths and diminished their weaknesses. As a wrestler, Newell had to overcome his disability and forge his own path. It was an education that tied Newell's journey to the roots of modern mixed martial arts.

* * *

In 1904, a Japanese fighter named Mitsuyo Maeda left Japan, taking with him the knowledge of traditional martial arts known as Judo and Jiu Jitsu. He travelled the globe giving demonstrations and taking on all comers, intent on proving his style of combat superior to all others. Legend has him undefeated in his travels, earning him the nickname "Count Combat."

Eventually Maeda settled in Brazil, where he began teaching techniques of classical Judo and Jiu Jitsu to the two sons of Gastao Gracie, a Brazilian businessman. One son was named Carlos, a strapping young lad. The other was Helio, a chronically ill and weak young man. In order to compensate for his frailty, Helio adapted the traditional moves to rely more on leverage and position, avoiding anything that pitted him in a contest of strength. It was this evolution of the art form that birthed Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, now a central pillar of mixed martial arts.

The Gracie family became the country's most famous and devoted practitioners of Jiu Jitsu, and eventually brought their art form to the United States, where in 1993, Helio's son Rorion helped launch the Ultimate Fighting Championships. In the first tournament, Helio's youngest son, Royce Gracie, represented the family, taking on and defeating three fighters in a row to win the event. He went on to win three of the first four UFC tournaments, battling opponents who sometimes outweighed him by more than 100 pounds.

During the early years of the UFC, most fighters specialized in one form of martial arts, like players picking a certain position on the field. As a kid Newell looked up to Jim Abbott, the major league baseball pitcher who had his own congenital amputation. "He was a big hero to me, because there were basically no other famous people, especially athletes, with one hand," says Newell.

Abbott was able to find success because baseball is such a hyperspecialized sport. He could pitch with his good hand, then switch the glove over to that hand before the ball was in play. Since he stuck with the American League and its designated hitter rules, he never had to bat.

Mixed martial arts is the exact opposite of baseball. Instead of highly specialized athletes focused on one aspect of the game, modern MMA fighters must learn to blend a wide variety of sometimes conflicting disciplines. But that diversity allows athletes with very different skill sets and physical attributes to succeed.

"Because of his shortened arm, certain moves work differently for him."

Newell eventually began training under Andrew Calandrelli, a student of Renzo Gracie, grandson of Carlos, forming a direct lineage between a Connecticut wrestler and the creators of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. In his academies, Renzo hangs a portrait of Helio, a reminder of the everlasting emphasis on technique over physique.

Seven of Newell's 10 wins are by submission, and like the championship bout with Eric Reynolds, his shortened arm has played a role. "Nick took the great base he had as a wrestler and layered on a really dangerous Jiu Jitsu game," says Callendri. "Because of his shortened arm, certain moves work differently for him. His heel hooks and certain chokes come on a lot faster and tighter, with a different kind of leverage."

In certain positions, when Newell is on top controlling an opponent, the lack of a forearm means his opponent can't attack with submissions of his own. No one who had trained or coached Newell would suggest it's an advantage in the cage.  "But it's something his opponents can't really prepare for," says Callendri.

* * *

Fans crowded around close, spilling beer onto the mats. "People kept reaching through the fence trying to grab me."

Modern mixed martial arts has come a long way since the brutal days of the early UFC events, which had no weight classes or time limits. But Nick Newell's first fight, an amateur bout in his home state of Connecticut, was a far cry from the bright lights and strict rules of the Las Vegas Octagon. "My first match was in a bar. They literally just pushed the chairs and tables back to the walls, threw this tiny cage in the middle, and called it a ring." Fans crowded around close, spilling beer onto the mats. "People kept reaching through the fence trying to grab me," says Newell with a shake of his head. His first amateur bout ended in a loss. It was to be the only blemish on his MMA record.

Especially during this early part of his career, before he had a reputation and status in the fight game, finding willing opponents was tough. "People didn't see any benefit in fighting him. If they lost, it was worse because he had one hand. If they beat him, it made them look bad because he had one hand," says Jeremy Libiszewski, Nick's trainer at the Fighting Arts Academy in Springfield, Mass. "It took him twice as long to find decent opponents."

In 2010, Newell got a chance to audition for The Ultimate Fighter, the reality show competition that had inspired his early interest in MMA. TUF acts as a feeder for the UFC, and while numerous mixed martial arts leagues exist, the UFC is far and away the most popular, featuring the best talent and highest salaries. Contestants on the show compete to win a six-figure UFC contract, and several former winners have gone on to become UFC champions.

Hundreds of young hopefuls lined up for their shot during TUF's East Coast tryouts. Inside, anxious combatants hit pads and grappled in front of the UFC's top matchmakers and talent scouts. Before he even got a chance to warm up, Newell stood out. While the fights on the show are never staged, TUF is also a reality television program keen to find characters with compelling life stories. His shortened arm turned heads, and his quick submission of a well-known competitor during the grappling section ensured he made the short list of potential cast members.

The UFC flew Newell out to Las Vegas to meet with its matchmakers and producers. His good looks and natural charm helped him ace the screen test, and it seemed to Newell that he was being offered a chance to be part of the show. But a few weeks later, the UFC informed him that it had decided not to include him after all.

For Newell, it was a painful blow. Dana White, the UFC's talkative, often controversial president, made the logic behind the decision clear in a subsequent interview, when he told MMA Fighting, "It's hard to fight here with two arms. Will the state of Nevada let him fight? Will the state of California let him fight? Would some of these bigger athletic commissions let him fight? Maybe he can get away with that in some of these other states. I don't know, fighting with one arm is just craziness to me."

In Newell's mind, White has concerns about matters that aren't even in play. "I've already been licensed in Nevada, so that's not really an issue at all," Newell told reporters. "It kind of disappoints me that someone that's such a powerful figure in this sport feels that way or looks at me that way."

"Anyone else with my record, 10-0 with nine first-round stoppages, would be getting calls from the top organizations."

In the meantime, he's continuing to prove he can hang with TUF-caliber fighters. In his last bout, Newell needed only two minutes to dispatch Keon Caldwell, an alumnus of The Ultimate Fighter series.

"Anyone else with my record, 10-0 with nine first-round stoppages, would be getting calls from the top organizations," says Newell. His upcoming match was originally slated to be against Gesias "JZ" Cavalcante, a very well-known fighter who has competed in all the top organizations, including the UFC. "After he beats JZ, the UFC would look pretty bad not to consider him," said Callendri, Newell's grappling coach.

But just a few weeks before the fight, JZ pulled out. It was another chance to climb the ladder deferred. Instead, Newell will face yet another fighter with little name recognition and a record nowhere close to his own. "I finish fights, I'm exciting, people want to see me compete," Newell declared recently. "I want to see where I stand among the world's elite fighters, and I feel like I've earned my shot."

Regardless of whether the UFC ever comes calling, Newell plans to continue competing as long as he is able. "I wouldn't stop if I won another belt. I'm the kind of person who is never content, no matter what I have," he said. "It's a blessing and a curse, but it's why I'm here today."

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SB Nation’s 2014 World Cup Draw Preview

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The World Cup draw takes place on Friday and SB Nation is here to get you ready with everything you need to know about the 32 qualified teams.

SB Nation's 2014

World Cup Draw Preview

Your complete guide to the World Cup Draw presented by

On Friday, a large group of celebrities and former players will walk down a red carpet and head into a room where they will watch grown men fumble around with ping pong balls. There will be musical guests. There will be very cheesy video packages about the wonderful culture and landscape of Brazil, the history of the World Cup and the great careers of the players participating in the draw. It will be ridiculous, but the results of the draw matter. A lot.

Upsets happen in the group stage of every World Cup, but for many teams, their fate will be sealed with the draw. They'll know instantly if they have a shot to make a deep run or if they should be happy just to get the experience of going to Brazil and playing three World Cup games.

The 32 teams that qualified for the World Cup have been organized into four pots. Usually, the teams are organized into even pots with eight teams apiece, but a lower number of European teams than usual have been seeded, resulting in one nine-team pot and one seven-team pot. One European team will end up as a wildcard and we could end up seeing the Group of Death to end all Groups of Death as a result -- it's possible that Brazil, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States all end up together.

There's also the possibility of some notoriously weak groups popping up, thanks to some less than fantastic teams getting seeded. Uruguay went to the semifinals of the last World Cup and has plenty of talent, but finished fifth in South American qualifying. Belgium is similarly stacked, but hasn't even qualified for the last two World Cups or the last three editions of the European Championship. And then there's Switzerland, which got seeded thanks to a couple of solid wins and a quirky aspect of the FIFA rankings that didn't reward playing lots of tough games unless you won all of them.

For those who haven't followed the entire qualifying process, there's a lot to get caught up on, especially since almost every team has a reasonable chance to make some noise in Brazil. Below, you'll find a preview of every team in the draw to help you do just that.

The Seeds

Brazil is only 11th in the FIFA rankings, but by virtue of hosting the tournament, they're a seeded team and will be automatically placed in Group A to allow tournament organizers to plan for home games. They're joined by quite a few of the usual suspects in Germany, Spain and Argentina, but the other four seeds are newcomers to the upper echelon of the sport. Uruguay, a semifinalist in 2010, squeaks in despite finishing fifth on their own continent in qualifying. Colombia and Belgium have earned their way into the top group with spectacular performances over the last two years, while Switzerland did a bit of gaming the system, though it's not clear whether or not they knew what they were doing.

Brazil

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Brazil

As hosts and reigning Confederations Cup champions, Brazil is expected to win the World Cup. They don't have the same kind of quality depth that Spain, Germany and neighboring rivals Argentina have, but they make up for it with their high-pressure side and a defense that's considerably better than their tournament rivals.

Neymar is undoubtedly the star of the show and hasn't skipped a beat since moving from Santos to Barcelona in the summer. Whatever learning curve between Brazilian and Spanish football exists took him a couple of months to master, and with Lionel Messi battling injuries, he's emerged as the Blaugrana's most important attacker in recent weeks.

People don't think about defense when they think about Brazilian soccer, but depth and quality at the central defense position are what sets Brazil apart from the rest of the field. Thiago Silva is arguably the best central defender in the world, and Luiz Felipe Scolari's biggest decision is which puffy-haired star Silva should be partnered with. Dante and David Luiz have both had their turns in the starting role, and it's tough to go wrong with either.

The biggest question between now and the World Cup for Brazil will be whether or not Sandro can get healthy. Tottenham Hotspur's midfield wrecking ball was among Europe's best in 2012 and an automatic starter for Brazil, but he's had a couple of setbacks in recovering from an ACL tear. If he comes back, it'll be harder to score on Brazil than it will be to stop them from scoring, which is saying a lot.

Key facts

Coach Luiz Felipe Scolari

How they qualified Hosts

2010 World Cup result Quarterfinals

Best player Neymar

FIFA ranking 11th

Argentina

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Argentina

When you think Argentina, you think Lionel Messi. Or possibly steak. Or tango. But soccer fans think of Messi. OK, younger soccer fans who don’t automatically think of Diego Maradona think of Messi. Just go with it, OK?

Not so long ago, Messi’s contributions to the Argentina national team were seen as trifling, as nothing compared to what the attacker was able to do at Barcelona. Messi wasn’t scoring; ergo, he wasn’t helping out his national side. But even if that was a line you bought into, it’s irrelevant these days: Messi scored 10 goals in CONMEBOL qualifying, more than any player other than Luis Suárez.

But Suárez practically is the Uruguay national football team, whereas on Argentina, six players scored at least three goals during qualifying. In fact, come Brazil, the biggest question will likely be which attacker has to be dropped to a bench role. Sergio Agüero, Gonzalo Higuaín, Ezequiel Lavezzi, Ángel di María … none of these are exactly unknown entities. Reading the Albiceleste roster makes one nod and go “Oh. Yes. There’s a reason they scored 35 goals in 16 matches.” But casting an eye over their defenders, many of whom are on the young side, have been recently injured, or are plying their wares outside the top leagues, explains why Argentina concede in nearly every match.

Not even the biggest madridista will be hoping Messi’s recent injuries prevent him from playing a pivotal role in the World Cup. But even in the absence of Leo, this Argentina side, with their bright attack and devil-may-care approach to defense, will be fun to watch.

Key facts

Coach Alejandro Sabella

How they qualified Top four, CONMEBOL

2010 World Cup result Quarterfinals

Best player Lionel Messi

FIFA ranking 3rd

Colombia

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Colombia

Any team with Radamel Falcao has a chance to win a match, but Colombia heads to Brazil with much more than a chance, and their goals are much bigger than winning just one match. Falcao, arguably the world's best striker, has a wonderful collection of teammates in James Rodriguez, Teo Gutierrez, Jackson Martinez, Fredy Guarin and Cristian Zapata. Give Jose Pekerman that kind of talent, and the team is bound to win, as Colombia did en route to second place in CONMEBOL qualifying and a seed for the draw.

The last time Colombia entered a World Cup with such high expectations, they bombed out of USA 1994. Then again, nothing went right for Colombia that time around, before, during or after the tournament. Chalk that up to bad luck, the nature of tournament football or Pablo Escobar, but they also didn't have the antidote to all that ailed the team 20 years ago -- Falcao.

Step forward, Falcao, the man who will take the neon-yellow men to glory. The World Cup is back in South America, and if a team from the continent is going to win it, why not Colombia? They may not be Brazil or Argentina, but they aren’t far off.

Key facts

Coach Jose Peckerman

How they qualified Top four, CONMEBOL

2010 World Cup result Did not qualify

Best player Radamel Falcao

FIFA ranking 4th

Uruguay

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Uruguay

Being a Uruguay fan can’t have been much fun for the last couple of years, with Óscar Tabárez’s team having fallen off a cliff since their brilliant win at the Copa América in 2011. Despite having literally two of the world’s best strikers at his disposal in Edinson Cavani and Luis Suárez, the coach has struggled to make the team gel as a cohesive unit, tinkering endlessly with formations and personnel. That the Celeste had to go through a playoff just to qualify for Brazil 2014 is indicative of their troubles.

They are certainly weaker at the back than up top, with aging captain Diego Lugano sadly no longer as defensively pleasing as he famously is aesthetically. Fortunately they have plenty of gritty anchormen in the midfield to shield the porous back line, while the inclusion of talented young playmaker Nicolás Lodeiro can help maintain possession and ease the attacking burden on their star strikers.

Also in Uruguay’s favour is their habit of punching above their weight at major tournaments. Despite their small population they’ve won the World Cup twice, including their first ever edition back in 1930. For all of their recent struggles, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if they find their groove when the action gets underway in Brazil. It’s difficult to envision them seriously troubling the best sides, though with Cavani and Suárez in attack, you never quite know.

Key facts

Coach Oscar Tabarez

How they qualified Intercontinental playoff

2010 World Cup result Semifinals

Best player Edinson Cavani

FIFA ranking 6th

Belgium

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Belgium

For several years now, Belgium has been fancied as the next new “It” team in international soccer. However, before qualifying for the 2014 World Cup, there has been a lot of sizzle and not much steak when it comes to the Belgians.

2014 will be Belgium’s first World Cup appearance since 2002, and they got there in style. They won their UEFA qualifying group going away, conceding only four goals in 10 games, winning eight, drawing two and losing none. Manager Marc Wilmots’ squad is littered with club stars, led by a potent attack featuring Christian Benteke, Romelu Lukaku, and Kevin Mirallas.

Midfield is where the Belgians are really loaded. It’s truly a luxury to be able to deploy Eden Hazard, Mousa Dembele, Kevin DeBruyne, Marouane Fellaini, Axel Witsel and other quality players in the middle of the park. Some may consider having that many options to be a problem, but that would be somewhat silly, since having more good players is better than not having them.

The squad is captained by center back Jan Vertonghen, who leads the impressive backline that includes Daniel Van Buyten, Thomas Vermaelen and Toby Alderweireld. Behind them, Wilmots is able to choose between two capable goalkeepers in Thibaut Courtois and Simon Mignolet.

Some may short the Belgians’ chances to win the 2014 World Cup due to a lack of big-game international experience, but there’s no question that they have the talent to win the tournament.

Key facts

Coach Marc Wilmots

How they qualified Winner, UEFA Group A

2010 World Cup result Did not qualify

Best player Eden Hazard

FIFA ranking 5th

Germany

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Germany

Germany has gone into the last few major international tournaments with the swagger of a serious contender, but has tended to disintegrate in the heat of the knockout stages. Since their last World Cup win in 1990 -- which happened to be their last tournament before reunification -- they have wound up as beaten quarterfinalists and semifinalists twice, and runner-up in 2002. So much for German reliability.

But, could Brazil 2014 finally be the tournament at which Germany picks up their first World Cup in almost a quarter of a century? Boasting an ever-more talented squad and just about the strongest domestic team in world football at the moment in Bayern Munich, expectations are high. Germany has an embarrassment of riches in midfield, including Mesut Özil, Thomas Müller and Mario Götze -- playmakers who could stake a claim for a starting spot on any team in the world.

Germany’s defense, with the exception of captain Philipp Lahm -- a player so versatile he could excel in pretty much every position on the field -- isn’t quite as strong, and coach Joachim Löw has occasionally gone Spanish and experimented with a midfielder in attack in the absence of a truly world-class center forward. However, given the team scored 36 goals in their 10 unbeaten qualifying matches, that doesn’t seem to have been a problem. A powerful side capable of destroying opponents with brutal counter-attacks, there’s no doubt that Germany is scary indeed.

Key facts

Coach Joachim Löw

How they qualified Winners, UEFA Group C

2010 World Cup result Semifinals

Best player Bastian Schweinsteiger

FIFA ranking 2nd

Spain

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Spain

Spain is the defending World Cup champions and the winners of the last two European Championships. They’ve been the dominant force in international soccer over the past six years but Spain has started to show cracks in their aura of invincibility recently.

There’s no doubt Spain remains a talented and dangerous team that is certainly among the favorites for success in Brazil. But in order to be the first European team to win a World Cup in South America, they must rediscover some of the form that defined their successful run over the past few years.

Who ends up starting in goal for Vicente del Bosque will likely be a big story leading up to next summer’s tournament. Captain and longtime starter Iker Casillas remains out of favor at Real Madrid, opening the door for Barcelona’s Victor Valdés to earn some starts recently. Casillas still seems the likely choice considering his experience and resume, but if he spends the rest of the season on the bench behind Diego Lopez, Del Bosque may be tempted to go with Valdés.

Spain’s true strength remains their midfield, where they possess a plethora of riches in terms of talent. Barcelona’s Xavi Hernandez, Andrés Iniesta and Sergio Busquets are all regulars in the starting lineup, but the biggest boost could come from the return of Real Madrid’s Xabi Alonso, who is finally healthy after a prolonged absence due to injury.

While Spain’s system doesn’t rely on a true out-and-out striker, the Spaniards will nonetheless need their forwards to be effective to find success in Brazil. Atlético Madrid’s David Villa and Manchester City’s Álvaro Negredo will be in the mix, with Villa’s Atéti teammate Diego Costa a potential wild card up front.

Del Bosque will also need a strong performance from his defense if Spain wants to become the first country to repeat as World Cup champions since Brazil won back-to-back titles in 1958 and 1962.

Key facts

Coach Vicente Del Bosque

How they qualified Winners, UEFA Group I

2010 World Cup result Winners

Best player Andres Iniesta

FIFA ranking 1st

Switzerland

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Switzerland

The Swiss may generally be seen as a fairly docile and harmless lot, though Ottmar Hitzfeld’s side is emphatically not just traveling to Brazil to provide the cheese and chocolate. Switzerland’s national team is bursting at the seams with exciting, young talent, and they will be looking to better their group-stage exit at the last World Cup in South Africa.

They have a great blend of youth and experience, with veterans Gökhan Inler, Blerim Džemaili and Valon adding steel to the midfield, while Gladbach's Granit Xhaka, Bayern Munich's Xherdan Shaqiri and Fulham's Pajtim Kasami offer a more youthful zest. It’s in midfield that the Swiss are best stocked, though emerging attackers like Real Sociedad’s Haris Seferović and Freiburg's Admir Mehmedi have kept the more experienced Eren Derdiyok and Innocent Emeghara from recent squads.

Defensively, Switzerland is rather less well endowed, despite the industry of Juventus’ Stephan Lichtsteiner at right back. It’s this defensive weakness as much as anything else that keeps Hitzfeld’s side from being a genuine dark horse. However, it’s certainly a side capable of causing an upset or two, and possibly progressing into the knockout stages. If you’re looking to adopt a nation for a month and are too hipster for Colombia or Belgium, Switzerland could be a fun choice.

Key facts

Coach Ottmar Hitzfeld

How they qualified Winners, UEFA Group E

2010 World Cup result Group stage

Best player Xherdan Shaqiri

FIFA ranking 7th


Asia, North and Central America

The United States feels better about this World Cup than most after they surged through The Hex, but like the other teams in this pot, their World Cup fate could be decided by the draw. There are possible easy paths to the knockout stage and impossible group stage draws in play for everyone. Costa Rica and Honduras will probably struggle to get out of their groups no matter what happens, but the U.S. and Mexico could go far if the draw shakes out well.

A similar dynamic exists with the Asian teams. South Korea and Japan are knockout stage veterans at this point and will pose a threat to whoever draws them. Iran and Australia, meanwhile, probably need a miracle draw to feel like they have a decent shot of getting out of their groups.

Australia

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Australia

You’d expect a nation that qualified for the World Cup for the first time 32 years in 2006 to not be so picky, but Australians are a fickle bunch. Four years after that famous underdog showing in Germany, Pim Verbeek took a side to South Africa that had been widely criticised in qualifying as being too defensive, and promptly got smashed 4-0 by the Germans.

Probably thinking that if you can’t beat them, copy them, the Socceroos appointed their own German, Holger Osieck, whose initially promising regime – starting with second place in the 2011 Asian Cup – ended ultimately in qualifying success. That’s not enough, though, for the demanding Australian public, and after successive 6-0 friendly losses to Brazil and France that exemplified the widespread concern at a lack of squad regeneration and underwhelming tactics, Osieck was sacked.

In comes Ange Postecoglou just eight months out from the tournament. Having conquered the A-League with an unprecedented possession-based brand of soccer at the Brisbane Roar – and looking ominously like doing the same at the Melbourne Victory until he got the call from head office – his appointment has tied in with a wave of fresh optimism, with supporters feeling Postecoglou is the man to oversee a long-awaited changing of the guard, away from the heroes but also veterans of 2006, and in with the newer, younger players.

It’s easier said than done, though. Australians are no longer prominent in the Premier League and far more likely to be found plying their trade in the Middle East or lower-tier European leagues. The feeling is that Brazil 2014 may come too soon for a side likely to be in transition under a new coach. Still, the appointment of Postecoglou is a significant step forward for the Socceroos, as he’s the first native in the job since 2005, and the first Australian to take the national team to a World Cup since 1974.

Key facts

Coach Luiz Ange Postecoglou

How they qualified Top two, AFC Group B

2010 World Cup result Group stage

Best player Mile Jedinak

FIFA ranking 57th

Iran

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Iran

While there’s no one as lame as North Korea hanging around this edition of the World Cup, three other countries will inevitably be pleased when they draw Iran. They’re potentially the weakest team in the field and a serious beneficiary of the success of Japan and South Korea, who have managed to play well enough in the last three tournaments to secure four automatic qualifying spots for Asia.

Iran won their qualifying group, beating South Korea in the process, but the win in Ulsan that saw them top the group happened after the Koreans had already secured qualification. Now that they’re in the big show, they’re trying to drum up some dual nationals to come over and help their cause, adding Iranian-American defender Steven Beitashour and Iranian-German goalkeeper Daniel Davari. Iranian-Dutch striker Reza Ghoochannejhad joined up during qualifying.

Yes, that is his real name. Yes, he will be starting in Brazil. Yes, the staff here are going to negotiate pay-per-letter contracts.

They’re coached by Portuguese manager Carlos Queiroz, a journeyman who you may know as the guy who outlined U.S. soccer’s youth setup, the guy who used to stand next to Alex Ferguson or the guy who guided Portugal to their most boring and unwatchable spell in their history. You’ll enjoy watching his Iran team pack 11 men behind the ball, then inevitably lose.

Key facts

Coach Carlos Queiroz

How they qualified Top two, AFC Group A

2010 World Cup result Did not qualify

Best player Jevad Nekounam

FIFA ranking 49th

Japan

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Japan

If you’re a soccer hipster whose national team didn’t qualify for the World Cup (or perhaps it did, but you’re still too cool to support it, aren’t you?), you’re most likely going to cheer on Colombia, Belgium or Japan. Probably Japan, ‘cause Colombia and Belgium are already too mainstream. You’re going to be so proud of yourself when Japan wins the World Cup.

OK, no, that won’t happen. And besides, winning anything would make Japan uncool, wouldn’t it?

Though you’ll certainly enjoy Shinji Kagawa’s Panenka in the penalty shootout against England in the first knockout stage. It’s going to give you endless satisfaction to tell everyone how idiotic Manchester United was for never believing in that guy. You’ll have even more to rant about when Japan loses to Brazil in the quarterfinals thanks to a penalty resulting from a blatant Neymar dive.

In reality, Japan probably won’t become world champions, but they just might become more than the hipsters’ choice team. Quick, modern soccer, a few great players like the already mentioned Kagawa, as well as Keisuke Honda, Yuto Nagatomo, Takashi Inui, and Alberto Zaccheroni, a coach who captured the scudetto in Italy. What’s there not to like?

Key facts

Coach Alberto Zaccheroni

How they qualified Top two, AFC Group B

2010 World Cup result Round of 16

Best player Shinji Kagawa

FIFA ranking 44th

South Korea

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South Korea

If you loved/hated South Korea in 2010, you’ll love/hate South Korea now. Park Ji-Sung has retired, along with a few other older players, but they’ve been replaced by a bunch of young K-League and J-League stars who look just as capable as their predecessors.

Don’t be too concerned by the fact that South Korea finished second in a qualifying group with Iran -- they had qualified before the final game and didn’t put their best foot forward in that last match.

Bayer Leverkusen attacking midfielder Son Heung-Min is unquestionably the star of the group and is enjoying a great season at his new Bundesliga club. He’s been touted as one of the best young talents in Germany since he just barely missed out on the last World Cup, but South Korea have some questions to answer in front of him. Attacking midfielders generally can’t do much without some help at striker, and both Park Chu-Young and Koo Ja-Cheol are seriously out of form, while Kim Shin-Wook has just two goals in 22 caps. South Korea might be depending on Lee Dong-Gook, who will be 35 when the tournament comes around, to roll back the years and give them one last big-tournament performance.

Overall, expect to see what you’ve seen from South Korea in the past: a solid, well-organized side that is neither flashy nor overly defensive. They have a lot of players who are good at everything, but not great at anything. They’re not going to win the World Cup, but they’ll provide a formidable foe for everyone they come up against.

Key facts

Coach Hong Myung-bo

How they qualified Top two, AFC Group A

2010 World Cup result Round of 16

Best player Son Heung-Min

FIFA ranking 56th

Costa Rica

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Costa Rica

Its glorious beaches and relative lack of crime when compared to other Central American countries have long made Costa Rica a popular tourist destination for anyone who wants to feel like they went on an adventure without really taking their lives into their own hands. Their soccer reputation? Not quite as fun. The country of about 4.5 million has experienced some pretty good highs -- going undefeated in the 1990 World Cup group stage and qualifying for the Round of 16 -- but hasn’t really established themselves as the CONCACAF power one might expect. After losing all three of their games in the 2006 World Cup, Costa Rica failed to qualify in 2010.

Maybe that failure woke up a sleeping giant. Flying just under the radar, Los Ticos nearly finished atop the final stage of CONCACAF qualifying by winning all five of their home games. Among those wins were a dominating victory over the United Stages (3-1 on Sept. 6). They now head into Brazil with their highest ranking since 2005 (currently No. 31).

Costa Rica does not necessarily have a roster full of international stars, but there’s enough talent there to believe they can at least make life difficult for the opponents. Bryan Ruiz (Fulham) was their leading scorer during qualifying with three goals, mostly being deployed as a wide attacking midfielder in either a 4-2-3-1 or, more recently, a 5-4-1 formation. The lone forward has usually been filled by Real Salt Lake’s Alvaro Saborio, who is his country’s current leading scorer with 31 international goals. Joel Campbell -- the 21-year-old who might best be remembered for his glorious acting job that got Matt Besler booked in Costa Rica’s game against the United States and suspended for the next match -- has blossomed into one of Greek giant Olympiacos’ top attackers.

Sure, Costa Rica will probably still be better known for their beaches than their soccer after Brazil, but it’ll still be fun.

Key facts

Coach Jorge Luis Pinto

How they qualified Top three, CONCACAF

2010 World Cup result Did not qualify

Best player Alvaro Saborio

FIFA ranking 31st

Honduras

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Honduras

Honduras makes their second straight appearance in the World Cup after a surprising third-place finish in CONCACAF qualifying, ahead of the heavily favored Mexico. Los Catrachos have never made it out of the group stages and their chances of finally breaking that streak will likely depend greatly on how friendly a draw they receive.

There’s no question that Honduras has talent but when you line up their players against the types of teams they are likely to face in Brazil, the odds quickly get long for them.

Honduras has a nice blend of experience and youth with one of their best players being midfielder Óscar Boniek García, a creative winger who plays in MLS for the Houston Dynamo. There are several MLS stars, and former MLS stars, in the Honduras fold, including the New England Revolution’s Jerry Bengston, along with Víctor Bernárdez and Marvin Chávez of the San Jose Earthquakes. Midfielder Roger Espinoza and striker Carlos Costly also spent some time in MLS.

Los Catrachos will need to solidify their defense in order to have any chance of getting out of the group stages. Throughout World Cup qualifying, Honduras was inconsistent in the back, looking like world beaters in some matches and getting picked apart in others. Defensive consistency will be the key for them in the end.

Key facts

Coach Luis Fernando Suarez

How they qualified Top three, CONCACAF

2010 World Cup result Group stage

Best player Roger Espinoza

FIFA ranking 34th

Mexico

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Mexico

While the managers, star players and styles of play have long been established for most World Cup teams, there will be nothing but questions about Mexico in the build-up to the World Cup. New manager Miguel Herrera and a squad without any European-based players demolished a poor New Zealand team, but it’s anyone’s guess what they’ll look like in late May and whether they’ll be able to compete with the world’s best.

Mexico is probably closer to the team that won the 2011 Gold Cup and smashed the Kiwis than the one that failed to finish top three in the final round of CONCACAF qualifying. Even if “Chicharito” Javier Hernandez isn’t starting regularly for Manchester United and Rafa Marquez is old, they’re still loaded relative to the rest of North America. This team probably has more talent than the one that made the knockout stage in 2010.

Still, it’s a mystery how that talent will be used or even if their biggest talents will play. There are nearly a dozen foreign-based Mexicans that are among El Tri’s best 23 players, but does Herrera think he needs them? Can he convince Carlos Vela to accept a call-up after he spent years turning down “Chepo” Jose Manuel de la Torre? Will he even try?

No one knows who Mexico is or what they’re going to look like at the World Cup. For reasons similar to not starting a fight with a crazy person, shouldn’t everyone want to avoid drawing them?

Key facts

Coach Miguel Herrera

How they qualified Intercontinental playoff

2010 World Cup result Round of 16

Best player Carlos Vela

FIFA ranking 24th

United States

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United States

The United States is headed to its seventh straight World Cup, but hold off on the party. The Americans have alternated good and bad World Cups in each of the last six, and their last one, in 2010 when they won their group for the first time in more than 70 years, was a good one. Then again, each of the Americans' bad World Cups has come when the tournament was played in Europe, and this one will be in Brazil so, theoretically, the curse will not follow them south of the equator. Toss in the fact that Jurgen Klinsmann has given the middle finger to everyone and everything to great effect since taking over as U.S. manager, and it's tough to imagine history getting in the way of the U.S. in Brazil.

One thing that could cause the Americans problems is their defense, though. The U.S. defensive record has been pretty good since Klinsmann took over, but the team still has question marks all across the back line and is short on experience at the back. With the draw likely to land the U.S. in a tough group -- a result of being the best team in their pot -- and that defense could be their undoing -- unless Klinsmann tells his defense to give the opposition and common sense the middle finger, too.

Key facts

Coach Jurgen Klinsmann

How they qualified Top three, CONCACAF

2010 World Cup result Round of 16

Best player Michael Bradley

FIFA ranking 13th

Europe

The ultimate set of wild cards exists in the pot of unseeded European teams. None of the nine are weak, but the difference between the best and worst teams in this group is significant. No one wants to see Italy, while everyone's rooting to end up with Greece. No one's going to cry about drawing England, either.

Portugal, the Netherlands and the aforementioned Italians are a scary proposition for anyone and could have been seeded in another year. Italy is coming off a great run in Euro 2012, the Netherlands was runner-up at the last World Cup and Portugal, despite recent struggles to qualify for major tournaments, has Cristiano Ronaldo. They make up the top tier of teams in this pot.

England and France are certainly no pushovers and have enough talent and depth that they could become serious threats at any time. They just haven't looked great at any point in the last two major tournaments or qualifying cycles. Russia and Bosnia were both excellent in qualifying, while Croatia have a startling number of world-class players for the size of their country and strength of their domestic league.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

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Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina is all set to take the stage at their first-ever World Cup as an independent country.* In case you haven’t heard anything about BiH since 1995, here’s a quick rundown … about their soccer team.

The one name you almost certainly know is Edin Džeko. If not, just wait – his lack of regular starting time at Manchester City will have him linked to your club in no time. But it took more than one 6-foot 4-inch man-giant to get Bosnia through the qualifiers with just one loss.

Talk to almost any Bosniak and they’ll tell you that the true linchpin of the side is AS Roma midfielder Miralem Pjanic. The 23-year-old playmaker is the one setting up his side for success, providing the balls that allowed Džeko to score 10 goals during the qualifying campaign or Stuttgart’s Vedad Ibišević to score eight. Speaking of Ibišević, talk about him if you want to sound smart: He spent his high school years in St. Louis and was named NCAA Freshman of the Year while at St. Louis University, but wound up pledging his international career to his native Bosnia.

This Bosnia side isn’t filled with world-renowned superstars. The majority of the team’s core are plying their trade in mid-table German sides, or in Turkey, or maybe in Russia. But Safet Sušić has his boys playing dependable, steady soccer that doesn’t require too many tricks. Pjanic provides the dazzle, and Džeko and Ibišević are there to ensure the ball goes into the back of the net. Surprisingly enough, this tried and true formula often results in rather enjoyable soccer.

*Disclaimer: Yes, Bosnia has been to the World Cup as part of the nation of Yugoslavia. That is why we’ve included the phrase “independent nation.” Please cease writing complaints in all caps now.

Key facts

Coach Safet Susic

How they qualified Winners, UEFA Group G

2010 World Cup result Did not qualify

Best player Edin Dzeko

FIFA ranking 16th

Croatia

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Croatia

Croatia is fun, talented, great to watch … and ultimately very disappointing.

Their impressive performance at Euro 2008, featuring a number of players in their early-to-mid-20s who were previously unknown to a global audience, looked to be a sign of great things to come for the country. Then they missed out on the 2010 World Cup, failed to get out of a group of death at Euro 2012 and finished behind Belgium in the most recent qualifying cycle, leading to their battling Iceland in a playoff that was closer than it should have been.

There’s no doubt that Croatia has the depth, talent and experience to be dark horse contenders at the World Cup and make a deep run in the tournament, but they’ve yet to prove that they’re capable of doing so. Ever since their shock win over Germany in 2008, they’ve had more setbacks than accomplishments.

While this shouldn’t be the last shot at a World Cup for Real Madrid’s Luka Modric, Bayern Munich’s Mario Mandzukic or captain Darijo Srna, they might be exiting their primes by the time Russia 2018 rolls around. This isn’t quite a “now or never” situation, but it’s pretty close.

Key facts

Coach Niko Kovac

How they qualified UEFA playoffs

2010 World Cup result Did not qualify

Best player Luka Modric

FIFA ranking 18th

England

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England

England just isn't comfortable in its own skin. Despite being home to the Premier League and a slew of superb players, despite being a formidable enough soccer power, the sense is that it's never enough. Forget the ghosts of 1966 -- the ghost of empire rules over the Three Lions.

The dual strands of optimism (read: arrogance) and dour realism permeate the England setup. In the leadup to this summer's World Cup, the story will be about the squad not having to deal with the same sort of pressure as usual; after they're knocked out, we'll be told that they didn't live up to expectations and would do well to take notes from [insert country]'s culture if they want to be serious about winning. Unless, that is, they play good soccer, in which case they'll lose on penalties in the quarters.

With the last remnants of a generation of greats fading out of the spotlight, the Wayne Rooney era is upon us. And frankly, it's a lot more boring than the prologue might have suggested, leaving England relying on a star player who too often looks as though he possesses the creative ability of a particularly dull rock.

Surrounding Rooney are a gaggle of (admittedly good) players who are either too limited, too old or too inconsistent to count on at the very top level, and perhaps the only position in which England has any depth at all is left back. The midfield is a mess, and the sooner everyone gets over the Andros-Townsend-will-save-us nonsense the better.

Despite the obvious problems, the Three Lions are a decent enough side. But barring a miracle, they're not coming close to winning. England, of course, confides that every man will do his duty.

Key facts

Coach Roy Hodgson

How they qualified Winners, UEFA Group H

2010 World Cup result Round of 16

Best player Wayne Rooney

FIFA ranking 10th

France

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France

Despite seemingly their best efforts to miss out on their first World Cup since 1994, France was able to scrape their way into the field for Brazil. The French overcame a two-goal deficit to the Ukraine and claimed their place with a 3-0 win, powered by two goals from Mamadou Sakho (of all people) and another from Karim Benzema.

Talent has never been a question for this French team. The squad list is loaded with stars that play for some of the biggest teams in Europe, but their results have been extremely lackluster since appearing in the World Cup Final in 2006. They famously finished last in their group in the 2010 World Cup and didn’t fare much better in Euro 2012, finishing second in their group but exiting the tournament in the quarterfinals.

The current squad features a wealth of talent, but the question remains whether they can be more than the sum of their parts. They have explosive attacking players in Benzema, Franck Ribery and the tantalizing Paul Pogba, as well as a mix of youth and experience on the backline ahead of goalkeeper Hugo Lloris. However, the question remains whether this group of French players can put it all together when the pressure is on. They overcame a huge challenge just to secure their berth in the World Cup; now it’s time to see what they can do with it.

Key facts

Coach Laurent Blanc

How they qualified UEFA playoffs

2010 World Cup result Group stage

Best player Franck Ribery

FIFA ranking 21st

Greece

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Greece

Bosnia and Herzegovina almost saved us from the eye-torture that is watching Greece play soccer by forcing the Greeks into a playoff, but they got a fortunate draw and proceeded to advance by Romania comfortably. Now, the most defensive decent team in the world will take their talents to Brazil, where they will inevitably piss off everyone who isn’t Greek.

Seriously, Greece didn’t even try to attack Liechtenstein. Liechtenstein!

While Greece manages to annoy people by being outrageously dull and having players with names that are very hard to spell, the Greeks are pretty good at what they do and have the talent to challenge anyone. Forwards Konstantinos Mitroglou and Dimitris Salpingidis are physically imposing guys who are very solid in front of goal and work hard defensively. They have very good depth in the center of defense and their midfield is always well-organized and difficult to break down.

There’s a good chance you’re going to hate Greece, and for very good reason, but no one can say that they don’t deserve to be here and that they’re not very good at what they do. Moralizing about styles of play is silly, and the Greeks have every right to do what they do.

But seriously, these guys suck to watch.

Key facts

Coach Fernando Santos

How they qualified UEFA playoffs

2010 World Cup result Group stage

Best player Kostas Mitroglou

FIFA ranking 15th

Italy

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Italy

Italy. The very name conjures up images of heaping plates of pasta, flowing glasses of red wine, and defensive soccer teams set to bore us into turning off international tournaments and pouring another glass of wine. But, in the same way Italians don’t actually tuck into oversized platters of spaghetti and meatballs, the idea of a defensive Italian national team is an outdated construct that is still perpetuated by the media.

Sure, Italy used to be known for their defensive soccer – this is the country that popularized catenaccio, after all. But although Cesare Prandelli remains conservative, the Azzurri are not a tight-knit defensive unit. Remember Spain’s 4-0 win in the Euro 2012 final? And if it’s not fair to use Spain as barometer, think of it this way: Italy kept a clean sheet in the qualifying process in just four of 10 matches. If it weren’t for Gigi Buffon, it’s highly likely many more goals would’ve slipped in.

Italy certainly have potent strikers. Mario Balotelli can get the job done, whether from a fantastic goal or going to ground at the right moment. Giuseppe Rossi is finally healthy, and already has double-digit goals in league play. But it’s the Azzurri midfield that will make the difference. Daniele De Rossi will protect the back line. Alessandro Florenzi and Marco Veratti are both young and eager to impress at the national level. But it’s Andrea Pirlo that will make or break Italy’s World Cup. At 34, the midfield maestro is finally growing a bit inconsistent; however, when he’s in tune, he’s practically unplayable.

The “Italy as a defensive powerhouse” stereotype is likely to still be around come summer 2014. But, if Prandelli plays this right, it’ll be “Italy the magnificent midfielders” after Brazil.

Key facts

Coach Cesare Prandelli

How they qualified Winners, UEFA Group B

2010 World Cup result Group stage

Best player Mario Balotelli

FIFA ranking 9th

Netherlands

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Netherlands

By the time summer rolls around it'll be four years since The Netherlands' latest glorious failure. They're not remembered as a great team -- if that match is remembered at all, it's for Nigel de Jong's flying kick into Xabi Alonso's sternum -- but as losing finalists go, they put up a very impressive showing against a Spain side that eased past Germany in 2008 and then embarrassed Italy in Kiev. Holland held out for 90 minutes before finally being undone by an Andres Iniesta strike with the relative safety of a penalty shootout within touching distance.

Nobody's expecting the Oranje to repeat their 2010 heroics, but that might be because the soccer world is badly underestimating Louis van Gaal's side. Yes, they stumbled badly two years ago, failing to get out of the group stages in Euro 2012, but they've been one of Europe's most impressive sides in qualification this time out, dropping just two points in ten games.

There are flaws in the squad. This is particularly obvious in defense. The veterans are adequate, but not top-class, and the youngsters have failed to develop as Holland might have hoped a few years ago. They're also missing some star power in the midfield – Wesley Sneijder's star has virtually extinguished itself since his Inter days, and the Kevin Strootman/Marco van Ginkel generation looks too young/too injured to make a difference at a major tournament.

But there are elite players, too. Manchester United's Robin van Persie will terrify whoever he faces; so too will Arjen Robben. Those two alone mean that the Netherlands are going to be tough opposition for more or less everyone, even if the Oranje are unlikely to go all the way to the final this time around. This is not a side to take lightly.

Key facts

Coach Louis van Gaal

How they qualified Winners, UEFA Group D

2010 World Cup result Runners up

Best player Arjen Robben

FIFA ranking 8th

Portugal

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Portugal

Portugal’s road to the 2014 World Cup culminated in one of the most eagerly anticipated playoffs in recent memory. The Portuguese, led by Cristiano Ronaldo, played Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Sweden for a place in Brazil, and the matchup lived up to the hype. Ronaldo scored all four goals for Portugal in the two games against Sweden, including a stunning hat trick in the second leg to overcome a brace from the Zlatan.

The question with Portugal isn’t Ronaldo, it’s the supporting cast around him. He has to do basically all of the heavy lifting for his side; and while he’s probably the best player in the world at the moment, he can’t win a World Cup by himself. It’s not like the Portuguese squad doesn’t have other talented players like Nani, Joao Moutinho, Raul Meireles and Fabio Coentrao, but if this team is going to make a deep run in 2014, it will need active contributions from players other than Ronaldo. Portugal received four goals during qualifying from Helder Postiga, so it’s clearly possible.

Portugal made it all the way to the World Cup semifinals in 2006, but followed that up with an exit in the first knockout round in 2010. Given Ronaldo’s current run of form and the team’s somewhat troubling depth, I’m not so sure people would be surprised if they repeated either result in 2014.

Key facts

Coach Paulo Bento

How they qualified UEFA playoffs

2010 World Cup result Round of 16

Best player Cristiano Ronaldo

FIFA ranking 14th

Russia

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Russia

Although it’s fair to say that it’s unsurprising Fabio Capello was wooed by Russia’s hefty paychecks, it was still completely unexpected for the Italian to go from England to Russia. It was also an unusual move for the country, which had previously had two Dutch coaches in charge – first, Guus Hiddink for Euro 2008, then Dick Advocaat after his predecessor failed to qualify for South Africa. In nationalistic terms, the contrast is obvious. While Advocaat was inherently counter-attacking in his approach, the side was more fluid and expressive than they are under Capello – but after supposedly also offering Harry Redknapp the job, it’s hard for Russia to complain about style when it’s obvious they didn’t even know what they wanted.

Capello’s soccer, for what it’s worth, is structured, organized and reactive. Probably guilty of being too open with England in South Africa – and promptly being eliminated by a rampant counter-attacking Germany – Capello will be far more conservative with Russia than he ever was with his previous team, illustrated by their fine defensive record in qualifying. They conceded just five times during the campaign, and after an early spell of admirable but not aesthetically pleasing results in the first part of qualification, became more attacking after a pair of 1-0 defeats to Portugal and Northern Ireland, scoring 12 goals in their final four games.

Ultimately, though, they were indebted to Portugal’s slip-up in Israel, which allowed them to escape the potential pitfall of a playoff. Attention now for Capello can turn to Brazil, where Russia will be keen to leave a good impression so as to build for the forthcoming World Cup they will host in 2018.

Key facts

Coach Fabio Capello

How they qualified Winners, UEFA Group F

2010 World Cup result Did not qualify

Best player Alan Dzagoev

FIFA ranking 19th

Africa and South America

Chile, the nerd darlings of the last World Cup, returns with a similar entertaining style. Marcelo Bielsa isn't coaching the team anymore, but his disciple Jorge Sampaoli has picked up where he left off. Ecuador has the pieces to get through the group stage, but understandably, they haven't been great since the death of star striker 'Chucho' Christian Benitez.

Ghana has just as much talent as the teams who made it to the Round of 16 in the last two tournaments, while the Ivory Coast will be hoping for some good luck, for a change. Les Elephants drew arguably the tournament's toughest group in the last two straight World Cups. Nigeria is also primed for a run to the knockout stages with a great roster and a beloved coach in Stephen Keshi, but their governing body usually finds ways to mess up a good thing. Cameroon and Algeria are the weakest teams in the pot, but their two stars -- Samuel Eto'o and Sofiane Feghouli, respectively -- are good enough to fire them to an upset or two.

Algeria

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Algeria

Thanks to Africa’s awful qualification system, the World Cup will feature Algeria instead of more talented and entertaining sides like Egypt, Senegal and Zambia. Apologies if you’re Algerian or have a soft spot for the Algerian national team, but CAF qualifying is horrible and Algeria were the beneficiaries.

You may remember Algeria from the 2010 World Cup, when they squandered a couple of early chances to score against the United States, proceeded to park the bus even though a draw did them no good, then gave up a dramatic U.S. winner in stoppage time.

Some names and faces will be recognizable, but the biggest names from that 2010 team have since retired from international play. Nadir Belhadj, Antar Yahia, Yazid Mansouri, Karim Ziani and Rafik Saifi are gone, but not forgotten. At least by us -- you probably forgot about them a long time ago, and for very good reason.

It’s tough to see Algeria making any noise in the World Cup, simply because they don’t have any of the ingredients that usually lead to an underdog making a great run. There’s no superstar player, they don’t have a coach with World Cup experience, they’re not loaded with grizzled veterans and they don’t have a specific style that they’ve mastered. This might be the strongest World Cup field ever, but Algeria is one of the few teams opponents will truly be happy to draw.

Key facts

Coach Vahid Halihodzic

How they qualified Playoff winner, CAF

2010 World Cup result Group stage

Best player Sofiane Feghouli

FIFA ranking 32nd

Cameroon

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Cameroon

In a 2010 World Cup that was thought to favor the African sides, Cameroon was expected to provide some serious opposition to the Netherlands, Denmark and Japan. Many experts picked them to finish second in the group. Instead, they made a quick exit, losing all three of their games and joining North Korea as one of two sides that didn’t get a single point in the competition.

The four-time Africa Cup of Nations winners and first ever African World Cup quarterfinalists entered a period of decline after that, exiting the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations in the quarterfinals before failing to qualify for the 2012 and 2013 editions of the tournament, as well as the 2012 Summer Olympics. Chelsea’s Samuel Eto’o, the nation’s all-time leading scorer by a considerable distance, has been suspended and reinstated, while also going through multiple aborted retirements from international football. It’s been a tough cycle for Cameroonian football, but Eto’o is back and they’ve been excellent in qualifying.

Their fate is likely to hinge on the draw. They have the talent to get through a lackluster group with teams that lack athleticism, but they’re not exactly a deep or versatile side. It wouldn’t be stunning to see Cameroon get five points from their group and make a knockout stage run, but another zero-point outing wouldn’t be a shock either.

Key facts

Coach Volker Finke

How they qualified Playoff winner, CAF

2010 World Cup result Group stage

Best player Samuel Eto’o

FIFA ranking 59th

Ivory Coast

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Ivory Coast

Ivory Coast emerged from a nervy playoff against Senegal to ensure they qualified for their third consecutive World Cup. Considering they had never made it to a finals before Germany 2006, their recent run has been a pretty good achievement. With a mix of elderly stars and younger talents, Les Éléphants are definitely one of the more dangerous African sides in the draw.

They've got bags of experience from the likes of the Touré brothers, all-time most-capped player Didier Zokora and national hero Didier Drogba, who will spearhead the attack in what will surely be his last World Cup. His former Chelsea teammate Salomon Kalou and winger Gervinho are also familiar faces in the Ivorian camp, while Swansea City’s Wilfried Bony is at the forefront of the younger generation waiting to break through into the starting 11.

However, despite their wealth of experience and depth, it’s hard to see Ivory Coast bettering their previous two appearances at the World Cup and progressing through to the knockout stages. While they certainly have a capable squad, it’s a side -- possibly with the exception of an on-form Yaya Touré -- without a truly world-class player. Anything better than a solid group-stage showing would be a great success.

Key facts

Coach Sabri Lamouchi

How they qualified Playoff winner, CAF

2010 World Cup result Group stage

Best player Yaya Toure

FIFA ranking 17th

Ghana

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Ghana

Ghana’s road to the World Cup was relatively smooth, as the African nation easily won their Round 2 group with a four-point cushion over Zambia. Their much ballyhooed final-round playoff tie against Egypt never really materialized, either, as Ghana hammered The Pharaohs in the first leg and never looked back.

No doubt many U.S. Soccer fans looked with some level of annoyance or disappointment as former USMNT head coach Bob Bradley — Egypt’s head coach — once again was denied by Ghana.

The Black Stars first qualified for the World in 2006 and have failed to miss out on a place in the finals every opportunity since. They also had excellent success in their first two appearances, reaching the Round of 16 in 2006 and the quarterfinals in 2010 (at the expense of Bradley and the USA). The bar is thus set fairly high for this group of players, which will attempt to defy the odds and try to advance even further in Brazil.

Ghana is an extremely experienced side led by veterans Michael Essien and Sulley Muntari — two players with extensive top-flight club experience in Europe — supported by a talented roster that includes Juventus’ Kwadwo Asamoah and Schalke 04’s Kevin-Prince Boateng. Striker Asamoah Gyan will also need have a strong tournament for the Black Stars to try and meet or exceed their previous results.

Key facts

Coach Akwasi Appiah

How they qualified Playoff winner, CAF

2010 World Cup result Quarterfinals

Best player Kwadwo Asamoah

FIFA ranking 23rd

Nigeria

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Nigeria

Winning their first African Nations Cup this year since 1994, Nigeria’s optimistically styled Super Eagles appear to be flying high. They’ve qualified for four of the last five World Cups, and though they haven’t made it through to the knockout stages since 1998, their recent silverware has left the most populous nation on the African continent optimistic of a good World Cup showing.

Stephen Keshi’s team is pretty inexperienced when compared to some of the sides in the draw, such as their African neighbor, Ivory Coast. Though Nigeria has a couple of veteran stars like Lille goalkeeper Vincent Enyeama and Chelsea midfielder John Obi Mikel, they largely have relied on younger players -- the highlights including Liverpool’s Victor Moses and Lazio’s Ogenyi Onazi -- in their recent endeavors.

Nigeria brought a younger squad than anyone else to the Confederations Cup earlier this summer, and their impressive pedigree at youth level was illustrated by winning the Under-17 version of the World Cup for the fourth time earlier this year. But, does their current crop stand any chance of success in Brazil next summer? Sorry, Super Eagles, but probably not. Lacking any world class players means they’ll do well to improve on a group stage exit.

Key facts

Coach Stephen Keshi

How they qualified Playoff winner, CAF

2010 World Cup result Group stage

Best player Ahmed Musa

FIFA ranking 33rd

Chile

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Chile

The road to World Cup qualification has been a rocky one for Chile, but it’s excelled under new management, winning five of their last seven qualifiers. Jorge Sampaoli has guided Chile to 16 of their 28 points in qualifying, despite being manager for less than half of their games.

If you enjoyed Chile during the last World Cup, you're going to like them just as much this time around. Sampaoli is a noted admirer of 2010 Chile manager Marcelo Bielsa and employs a similar high-pressure system with a three-man defense. Many of Chile's players became national stars while playing under Sampaoli at Universidad de Chile before moving on to play in Brazil and in Europe.

Barcelona's Alexis Sanchez is the team’s biggest star, and he's playing much better than he was at this time last year. Juventus midfielder Arturo Vidal is arguably their most important player, providing some tenacity and the ability to play anywhere in the midfield.

This World Cup could also provide an opportunity for Angelo Henriquez to become a global star. The 19-year-old forward came up under Sampaoli at La U as a 17-year-old before moving on to Manchester United. He's been excellent on loan at Real Zaragoza in La Liga this season, and a solid World Cup could see him secure a place in Man United's senior squad.

Key facts

Coach Jorge Sampaoli

How they qualified Top four, CONMEBOL

2010 World Cup result Round of 16

Best player Arturo Vidal

FIFA ranking 12th

Ecuador

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Ecuador

The main story, sadly, of Ecuador’s qualifying campaign for Brazil 2014 was the untimely passing of Christian Benitez. A fine talent, the striker was not only a key player to the team, but more significantly, an important member of the squad whose death shook many of his teammates.

Understandably, Ecuador’s form dipped after Benitez’s passing, shrouding what had seemed like assured qualification in doubt. Still, Ecuador maintained their undefeated record at home – attributable, also, to the difficult altitude of Quito – although they were dismal playing away, failing to win at all on the road but clinching qualification thanks to a superior goal difference to Uruguay, whom they beat 1-0 in the penultimate round of qualification.

Benitez’s death also meant changes to Reinaldo Rueda’s system, which had previously used the clever forward in a second striker position. For the second half of qualification, Antonio Valencia was somewhat unexpectedly shifted inside – as very much a natural wide player for Manchester United, it seemed disastrous on paper, but his power and physical strength proved useful in helping protect a midfield that had sometimes felt overrun. Rueda’s main problem, though, comes in wide areas, where left-winger Jefferson Montero headlines a generation of quick Ecuadorian wingers who are exciting going forward but tend to leave their full-backs woefully exposed.

Still, after the tragic events of August, just being there in Brazil will be enough for Ecuador.

Key facts

Coach Reinaldo Rueda

How they qualified Top four, CONMEBOL

2010 World Cup result Did not qualify

Best player Antonio Valencia

FIFA ranking 22nd

  • Editor Kevin McCauley
  • Producers Brian Floyd, Chris Mottram
  • Writers Kevin McCauley, Ryan Rosenblatt, Graham MacAree, Kirsten Schlewitz, Tim Palmer, Jeremiah Oshan, Zach Woosley, Peter Berkes, Uros Popovic, Jack Sargeant, Andi Thomas
  • Project Manager Chris Haines
  • Lead Designer Georgia Cowley
  • Lead Developer Josh Laincz
  • Designer Ramla Mahmood
  • Special Thanks Tate Tozer, Brian Anderson, Cory Williams

Sunday Shootaround: Brad Stevens' Celtics work only toward the future

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Celtics' new coach looking beyond this season

The Celtics are 9-12, which is neither good nor bad. It simply is. They are the definition of mediocrity in a conference that is home to two great teams, a handful of lousy ones and a morass of meh. Thanks to geography and nothing more, the Celtics are remarkably in first place in their division, which makes them a "playoff team" roughly a quarter of the way through the season.

There are some coaches, maybe most, who would disregard the record and focus instead on the positioning. That’s totally understandable. This is a business in which they are judged by owners with outlandish expectations and fretful GMs who seem to be forever chasing one more piece to the puzzle that will get them an extension.

Brad Stevens is not one of them. It helps that he is working for a GM who has a bigger picture in mind and for owners who allow Danny Ainge to execute his plan. It also helps that Stevens has a 6-year contract in place and an expectation that he’ll be allowed to see this rebuilding project through to the end so he doesn’t have to worry about the day-to-day minutia that consumes so many of his colleagues.

This was his response to a question about whether he pays attention to the standings after his team beat the Bucks on Tuesday and took over the top spot in the Atlantic Division from the equally underwhelming Toronto Raptors:

"I know. I know. But it has no bearing on my life. Literally none. What it is, it is," Stevens said. "You can take a snapshot of where you stand versus the competition, but it has nothing to do with your preparation on your next opponent, it has nothing to do with getting better tomorrow, it just is what’s happened. And so, yeah, I do. I know, but I have no reason to know."

It’s worth noting that the Celtics are responsible for two of the three wins Milwaukee has earned this season. It’s also worth pointing out that until Friday night’s win over the Nuggets, they had beaten two other teams could be objectively defined as decent in Miami and Atlanta. Stevens understands that, and it’s the most important development for the Celtics so far this season.

When Ainge unexpectedly hired Stevens in the offseason from Butler University he wasn’t just hiring a talented young coach. He was trying to create a culture from scratch that in time will help attract other players to the cause. The Celtics had it all with Doc Rivers and their veteran stars, but when they left so did their identity. Stevens’ growth as an NBA coach is the first step in building a new one.

He has been exactly what was advertised. Stevens is prepared and focused. His demeanor is so calm and even-keeled that when he cracked a mild joke in his pregame scrum with reporters it took everyone more than a full beat to realize that he was being funny.

Stevens is all midwestern manners. He took the time to get to know the names of all the beat writers, even those that don’t travel with the team. He answers their questions in the same placid tone that reveals nothing at all but sounds nice all the same. This is an odd juxtaposition in a place as cynical as Boston. As Rick Pitino so memorably put it once, "The negativity in this town sucks."

"[It] has no bearing on my life. Literally none." -Brad Stevens on the Celtics' place in the standings

The real takeaway is that Stevens has created a harmonious working environment in what could easily be a toxic wasteland. The Celtics roster is full of young players and veterans on their way to somewhere else, yet they all seem to like him. Even the ones that aren’t getting any time haven’t spoken up or tried to undermine him.

The trick is blending the talent on hand into a functioning whole without sacrificing the larger goal of development. That means starting rookie Kelly Olynyk when he was healthy and using Jared Sullinger as an undersized five, while bringing his veterans off the bench.

"I really like what they’re doing from a team situation by playing 10 guys," said Hall of Fame coach Hubie Brown who on hand Friday to call the game for ESPN. "By playing 10 guys they’re developing the young people on the first unit and backing it up with older players. When you put in so many young players you have to give them November and December to adjust to the coaching staff, to terminology to offensive and defensive philosophies. Then, how they handle close game situations from eight minutes down, all of that has to come from the head man."

Against the Nuggets, Stevens rode his reserves through most of the fourth quarter while they held off the Denver run. He turned it back over to the starters to close it out. It was a small move and an obvious one in the context of the game, but it also showed a flexibility that has been a hallmark of his tenure so far. An analytical mind doesn’t coach by the book. It adjusts and it adapts.

He made a smart decision early in the season when he inserted Jordan Crawford into the starting lineup and moved Avery Bradley off the ball. Crawford has been a revelation, averaging better than 13 points and 5 assists while keeping his turnovers to a minimum and his shot selection acceptable. It’s the best stretch of basketball he’s played as a professional.

The move also freed Bradley. Barely 23 years old, we are finally getting a chance to see him in extended minutes in a set role without the added point guard responsibilities that clearly don’t fit his skillset. He has good nights and bad nights like the team itself, but the effort is always there.

Lacking a viable center, Stevens has used Sullinger at the five and the second-year player has been the team’s best player. With Sullinger taking up more minutes inside, the team’s defensive rebounding has gone from woeful to encouraging despite their undersized personnel.

Then there are the forwards. Rather than shoehorn Jeff Green, Gerald Wallace and Brandon Bass into set positions, he has used them interchangeably and has them switching on screens to take advantage of their versatility. The player who earned the nickname "No Pass Bass" has even become an unlikely playmaker out of the post.

That’s the rough idea of what a Brad Stevens team looks like. It’s a team that moves the ball, pushes the pace and tries to take advantage of players’ strengths. Set positions are less important than skills. Space is everything. That’s the ideal, but it hasn’t always worked that way in practice.

They entered the weekend ranked No. 26 in offensive efficiency per Basketball-Reference and lack both 3-point shooting and a singular player who can break down defenses. They take a ton of mid-range shots and make them at about a 40 percent clip, which isn’t good enough. Aside from the occasional Jeff Green explosion, the Celtics are kind of boring offensively.

"We’ve got to really get better," Stevens said. "Offensively, I think we’ve done a better job in the last two weeks of understanding where our spots are and taking advantage of them. We go through lulls where we pass up shots and then we end up taking a shot that’s not as good as the one we pass up. We’ve gone through lulls where we’ve not screened or cut as we need to and we need to be good at all that stuff."

He added, "We’re going to be a team that has to score with our strengths. Once we get outside of those or pass those up, then we’re going to have trouble scoring points."

Stevens said all that before Friday night’s game when the Celtics went out and tore up the Nuggets for 39 first quarter points en route to 52 percent shooting and 25 assists on 43 made shots. Yet he was bothered by a six-minute stretch in the third quarter when the C’s allowed Denver to get back into the game. Their margin for error is extremely thin, which helps explain their tendency to give up big leads.

What we also know about a Brad Stevens coached team is that they seem prepared on a nightly basis, even when they don’t execute or have the talent to compete with some of the better teams. They have run a handful of gems in late-game situations that suggest a creative instinct with the clipboard in crucial moments. They rank in the top 10 in defensive rating despite not having much of an interior presence, which speaks to scheme and effort.

"What you like to hear is that people are happy with their effort on a nightly basis. That’s key," Brown said. "That’s coaching, making people accountable, and then he has an excellent demeanor about himself personality-wise. He’s low key. Right now he’s handling everything and he’s learning as he goes along. Any time you do this -- I’ve done this with young teams -- it’s a daily challenge to develop the talent, make them accountable and give them the discipline, which equals chemistry. That sounds simple, but it’s difficult to do."

And now we need to talk about Rajon Rondo, who has been a visible presence at practices and games and is scheduled for a checkup with Dr. James Andrews in the next few weeks. We will have a much better handle on Stevens and his team when Rondo is back to full speed.

We will finally get to see the Rondo/Bradley backcourt in action for extended stretches. We will finally get to see how Green and Rondo play off each other in the open court, and we may finally see how Sullinger acts as a pick-and-roll partner in the halfcourt. We will also see whether the Stevens/Rondo relationship will work. It’s been our feeling since last summer when Stevens was hired that the two are perfectly aligned in terms of temperament and philosophy to enjoy a long and successful tenure together.

"All of this will unfold as they go through November, December, January and then the All-Star game," Brown said. "Because what you’re looking for now is from the All-Star game to the end of the year, major improvement. Now you’ve added offensively and you’ve added defensively, but now everybody’s paying attention one through fifteen of who’s going where in the playoffs so now you can’t steal games. From February on, that’s when the push comes."

The standings? That’s not Stevens’ concern. At least not now.

OvertimeMore thoughts from the week that was

At some point in life things stop working. Plans go awry. Grand visions of success give way to cold doses of reality. Limbs and ligaments stop functioning like they used to in the past. Kobe Bryant has come to be defined by his refusal to accept any of that.

In his prime he chased away Shaquille O’Neal and made do with Smush Parker and Kwame Brown. He validated his stance by winning two more titles and then clung stubbornly to the idea that they could do it again when everyone knew it was over. Rather than accept a secondary role and ride out the rest of his career next to one of the game’s remaining dominant big men, he refused to cede ground to Dwight Howard.

He is noble, stubborn, brilliant or infuriating depending on how you perceive him.

From the beginning of his career it’s been impossible to have a rational conversation about Kobe Bryant. Everything from his paycheck to his hero ball tendencies have spawned a million blog posts and think pieces about the nature of stardom in the modern NBA, and it’s a debate that’s become more tiresome than illuminating. He’s a force of nature and resisting it is akin to spitting in the wind and hoping you don’t get drenched.

As he prepares to return from a torn Achilles, Kobe’s career finally has a moment in time that resonates in a way that all the count the ringzzzzz arguments never could. It’s his refusal to give in to circumstances, time or even the harshest of injuries that mark him as a true original.

The game went on without him and it will continue to go on long after he’s really gone, just like it did for all the rest. But it is infinitely more interesting when he’s a part of it.

Viewers GuideWhat we'll be watching this week

MONDAY Nuggets at Wizards

Let us take a moment during John Wall’s breakout season to remember the parade of knuckleheads that dominated the Wizards roster in his early days. In his rookie season, Wall ran a team comprised of Nick Young, Andray Blatche, Jordan Crawford and of course, JaVale McGee. All four have their talents and abilities. All four have found gainful employment in productive roles with other franchises. But having all four on the same team with your 20-year-old franchise savior is like … it’s a really bad idea, OK?

TUESDAY Heat at Pacers

With the exception of a few obvious ones -- Celtics-Lakers, etc -- rivalries come and go in the NBA as players change teams and teams change coaches and personalities. These days they are less about proximity than postseason history and there is none bigger in the East than the Heat and the Pacers. This has everything: The two best teams in their conference by far, an up and comer in Paul George against the reigning king in LeBron James and when you get down to it these teams really don’t like each other. So, why isn’t this on Christmas Day?

WEDNESDAY Clippers at Celtics

If you ask people in Boston who was most responsible for the Celtics’ success during the Kevin Garnett/Paul Pierce/Ray Allen/Rajon Rondo era, you’re likely to get a variety of responses. But if you ask people who was the enduring symbol of that team, my bet is most people would say Doc Rivers. He had his team’s respect -- and they were not an easy bunch. He had the media’s respect and we’ll turn on you in a heartbeat. He had the fans respect and they may be an even tougher audience. For those years Doc was the Celtics and now that he’s in LA, some people will try to turn this into a referendum on how he should be received when he returns to Boston. That’s easy: Standing ovation.

THURSDAY Rockets at Blazers

If you’re Darryl Morey, what do you want for Omer Asik? The smart money would seem to be a stretch four who can play alongside Dwight Howard, but considering the solid contributions of players like Terrence Jones and Omri Casspi, maybe the Rox already have that answer in house. Would a bonafide perimeter stopper be the better play to shore up that leaky defense? For all that he’s done to rebuild the roster, this is the deal he has to get right.

FRIDAY Timberwolves at Spurs

We’ve reached the point in the season where it’s officially time to worry about the Timberwolves. Their defense still rates reasonably well by most metrics, but their lack of depth and killer schedule has undone what had been a strong start. The always insightful Britt Robson respectfully put it on Rick Adelman a few weeks back, which underscores just how tenuous this whole team really is at this stage.

SATURDAY Lakers at Bobcats

Let us take the opportunity to offer more praise for Bobcats coach Steve Clifford. By most objective measures, the Bobcats have less top-end talent than the other rebuilding teams in the East. Even high lottery picks Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Cody Zeller are slotted for role-playing status as their careers develop. Even with Al Jefferson, Charlotte is the worst shooting team in the league and a tick above abysmal on offense. But the Cats are in most games and even winning their share because of surprisingly stout defense. That’s a reflection of coaching, preparation and of course, execution and trust. It’s amazing what a coach with actual coaching experience can accomplish when given a chance.

SUNDAY Warriors at Suns

Insert your own League Pass joke here.

The ListNBA players in some made up category

It’s become all too easy to take LeBron James for granted, but James just keeps doing his thing and shockingly getting even better. His 3-point shooting is up. His free throw rate is higher than ever. His overall shooting percentages look like a 7-foot-6 big man who does nothing but dunk. So let’s give the man his due with a look back at his top five games this season.

1. Nov. 25, Phoenix: Scores 35 points on 11-for-14 shooting and helps the Heat pull away with a perfect 11-for-11 from the free throw line. He told reporters afterward that, "I'm in a very, very comfortable position right now with my game." No kidding.

2. Nov. 15, Dallas: Drops 39 on the Mavs in just 18 shots and clinches the win by backing down Monta Ellis and raining a Dirk-shot over the guard’s head. Maybe LeBron should imitate other superstars just to keep things interesting.

3. Nov. 5, Toronto: Scores 35 points, grabs eight boards and hands out eight assists against only one turnover. The truly impressive work happened early in the fourth quarter when James and crew held the Raptors scoreless for almost five minutes.

4. Nov. 16, Charlotte: Scored 30 points in 31 minutes on 13-for-18 shooting and could have had more if he wanted. That’s the thing with LeBron’s game these days. He waits for it to come to him and calls upon it at will.

5. Nov. 27, Cleveland: Just your standard 28-8-8 and oh by the way, he outscored the Cavs starters by himself.

ICYMIor In Case You Missed It

Up With Magic

An insightful look at Victor Oladipo’s development and Arron Afflalo’s rise by Tyler Lashbrook of Orlando Pinstriped Post.

The Tax Man Cometh

When should you pay the tax man? Cap master Mark Deeks breaks it down.

Playing Against Themselves

The Heat’s biggest obstacle? That would be themselves. James Herbert explains.

Spew York

The Drive & Kick talks to Howard Beck about the Knicks, Nets and dumpster fires.

The Drummond Rule

How do you fix the scourge of intentional fouling? Tom Ziller has an idea that’s so simple it’s brilliant.

Say WhatRamblings of NBA players, coaches and GMs

"We’re a pretty damn good team. And we can beat anybody."-- Portland guard Wes Matthews after the Blazers knocked off the Pacers.

Reaction: We covered Portland’s hot start in depth a few weeks ago, but unlike other would be contenders (ahem, Golden State and Minnesota) the Blazers haven’t crested yet. Credit to Terry Stotts and his entertaining offense, and also props to LaMarcus Aldridge who has reignited the great power forward debate. (For the record, I’ll still take Kevin Love first but LMA is moving up the charts).

"A lot of guys expect us to tank for (Duke’s) Jabari Parker or (Kansas’) Andrew Wiggins. You might as well throw that out the door. I don’t know why people are talking about them. We’ve got competitors around here. We just want to win."-- Celtics forward Jared Sullinger.

Reaction: Sullinger is talking about the nattering no-nothings of talk radio and talking head shows who are shocked and dismayed -- SHOCKED, WE TELL YOU! -- that the Celtics aren’t gawdawful enough to have a lottery pick all wrapped up 20 games into the season. By their own admission some of these people don’t follow the NBA, understand the salary cap or how teams are constructed in the modern age. So, whatevs.

"Lawrence has been reassigned to doing daily reports. He won’t be sitting on the bench or practice."-- Jason Kidd, explaining his demotion of assistant coach Lawrence Frank.

Reaction: The real shocker in all of this is that Lawrence Frank got a 6-year deal as an assistant coach. Who does that? Oh right, the team that willingly pays $1.25 when a dollar will suffice.

"I don’t speak Italian."-- Kevin Garnett after Andrea Bargnani was ejected for trash talking him.Reaction: KG got punked by Bargs. It pains me to even write that. The Nets are so depressing.
"Everything. I eat meatballs. I never had eaten meatballs before. A lot of burgers. Shrimps. I never tasted shrimp before."-- Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo.Reaction: Giannis is delightful.

This Week in GIFsfurther explanation unnecessary

Patrick Beverley

No wonder 4-year-olds are so terrible at basketball.

Dwyane Wade

Oh, Heat.

Benny the Bull

Taking the public proposal to its illogical extreme.

Andrea Bargnani

Vengeance for all of the Euros KG has taunted over the years.

Designer:Josh Laincz | Producer:Chris Mottram | Editor:Tom Ziller


College Football Bowl Schedule 2013-2014

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Monday, December 23rd

All times Eastern. * = Taking another conference's spot.

Executive Producer:Luke Zimmermann

The only game in town: 8-man football is a way of life in Eastern Montana, where small towns fight to survive

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On a recent Saturday afternoon, 12 miles from the Canadian border, the hometown Scobey Spartans prepared to kick off to the Wibaux Longhorns in an 8-man high school football game. The Spartans were 0-6 coming into that game, but they had not always been bottom feeders of Montana's Class C Eastern Division. Only 10 years ago, they won a state title and in the 1990s they regularly played close games against the Longhorns. Corey Begger, who played offensive and defensive end for Wibaux back then, remembers one game when the wind gusted so powerfully across the prairie, punts landed behind the kickers. "There were dust clouds blowing across that field," he says, gesturing north toward Canada. "People parked busses and trucks behind the end zone to block the wind." He says Scobey had more kids going out for football then. He says it "was very different." Wibaux only won by two.

Montana 8-man football is played on a field 80 by 40 yards. All but three linemen are eligible to receive passes, and most teams run far more than they throw. When either team is ahead by 35 points or more, a mercy rule takes effect, and the clock runs without stopping until the end of the game.

making a living solely from raising beef and growing wheat has proven more difficult with each generation tasked with trying.

So far this year, Wibaux has mercy-ruled six teams in a row. None of the players or coaches or any of the 20 or so parents who made the three-hour drive north expected the game against Scobey to be any different, and soon after the Spartans kicker sent the ball end-over-end into the waiting arms of the Wibaux return man, the game was already over. Senior Jake Bakken, who also plays quarterback and safety, paused to let a wedge develop, and took off. His blockers slammed into Spartan players and kept running. Junior Trent Farnworth, who sports a mullet and who everyone calls "Boz," lowered his shoulder and flattened an undersized opponent. Wyatt Miske, a 235-pound lineman, did the same, clearing a route for Bakken, who seemed to glide through space. Ten seconds and 76 yards later, he was in the end zone. Two minutes after that, the Longhorns were up 16-0.  A quarter later, with nine minutes remaining in the first half, the score was 42-0.

Wibaux is like Scobey. It's the same as Plevna and Ekalaka and Hysham; a no-stoplight town on the extreme eastern side of Montana, the flat, dry side, where making a living solely from raising beef and growing wheat has proven more difficult with each generation tasked with trying. In a county with barely a thousand people spread across nearly 900 square miles, half live in Wibaux.

By nearly any metric — population, school enrollment, the age of the people who live there — Wibaux and so many other towns in that part of the state are dying. But Wibaux is also different. Of the eight schools that originally played in the Montana Class C Eastern Division, seven of them are now too small to field 8-man teams and have either dropped to 6-man or quit playing altogether. Only one team has bucked the trend. In one way, at least, Wibaux still thrives.

***

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storefront bars where you can buy a box of bullets with your beer.

Beaver Creek meanders through the center of town like a snake in tall grass. Wibaux was built around its curves, and there was a time when residents were sustained by its slow current. It's as wide as a tennis court and people say you can catch walleye and northern pike in the deep holes. It flows under Highway 7, past an old grain elevator, the fueling station and a dirt-pocked little league field with a rusted chain-link backstop. The creek comes within a block of downtown — its storefronts mostly vacant but not yet shuttered — and the trucks parked outside of the Shamrock and the Rainbow clubs, storefront bars where you can buy a box of bullets with your beer and where wall calendars track the birthdays of the regulars and their families.

Today, Beaver Creek is mostly used for cooling off in the summer. Wibaux is sustained by something else.

Veterans Memorial Field lies within the footprint of a dilapidated gravel and clay track on the opposite side of downtown. On the rare days when the wind doesn't blow, you can hear the growl of semis on Interstate 94, and the whistle of a coal train miles before it speeds through town without slowing down.

The week after beating Scobey, the Longhorns returned home for the final game of the regular season against a mediocre co-op squad from Froid and Medicine Lake (high schools combining student bodies to field teams is common practice in Montana Class C). As is usual during the regular season, no one in Wibaux expects much of a game — since 2001 they've only lost six times — but, like parishioners outside of their church, people still gather.

An hour before kickoff, Dodge and Chevy pickup trucks are backed up to the edge of the track, camping chairs unfolded in their beds. The adults, some parents of players, huddle around tailgates. Young girls sit in the bleachers and wear hoodies and lean into one another to fit under blankets. Younger boys roam the sidelines in packs. Behind the uprights, they play games of two-hand touch that seem never to begin or end.

Sbnation-wibaux_-_08_mediumThe LaBelle brothers.

"They don't want to let the older generation down by having a losing season."

South of the field, below a soft rise at the top of which stands a statue of Pierre Wibaux — a prominent rancher, who in 1895 decided Mingusville was an unsatisfactory name for a place — a group of blue-and-gold faithful gather between trucks and under a party tent and eat sausage and chili. Among them is Tracy Bakken, wife of assistant coach Shane Bakken, and mother of Jake, Jeff and Joe, all of whom play or played quarterback for the Longhorns. She stands with her mother, Sally Witkowski, a self-proclaimed "sports buff," who has lived in Wibaux all of her adult life. When asked how a town that in most years has fewer than 30 teenage boys can win so often, Witkowski replies as if anyone who didn't already know wouldn't understand the answer. "They're winners, they all are," she says. "They take football real seriously."

Tracy responds by describing her family. She says that when her middle son Jeffrey was in junior high, he stood on the sidelines at games, heard the crack when his older brother, Joe, slammed his helmet into the helmets of his teammates and watched as he ran onto the field and led the Longhorns to victory after victory after victory. She says her youngest son, Jake, did the same. "It's just pounded into their heads," she says. "They don't want to let the older generation down by having a losing season."

Senior lineman Heath LaBelle knows this pressure. His teammates call him Vito — for his resemblance to the MTV reality star — and at nearly 300 pounds, he's of typical size for men in the LaBelle family. His oldest brother, Jordan, graduated in 2007 and played for a state championship in 2006. Their middle brother, AJ, played for three titles before graduating in 2010. When the three of them sit together, they make furniture seem like playthings and Longhorn football seem like the center of the universe.

"It's expected. It's weird to say, but Wibaux football is just expected," says their father Greg. "We're expected to do well, and it doesn't matter who's on the team," he adds, pointing out that this pressure gave all his sons an edge. "Jordan will always say he's better than AJ and AJ says Heath isn't as good as the other two. It's community wide — that's your competition."

No LaBelle boy has lost more than five games in four years of football. And while no LaBelle has won a state title, they continue to measure success on whether or not the team finishes as the best in the state. When asked if it's possible that the Longhorn brand may be changing — considering that in 2012, Wibaux High was the smallest high school playing 8-man football in Montana and three of the four teams that made it to the semi-finals that year drew from students bodies more than twice Wibaux's size — they are incredulous. "They've said it for years, ‘They're not going to be as good, they're not going to be as good,'" says AJ. "I think Wibaux has the mentality. I don't care how many kids are in your school. Being in Wibaux is different. We have the tradition. It's a football town."

Today, that tradition and the power it wields over younger generations is evidenced by other familiar names on the Longhorns roster. There's a Bakken and a Bertelsen, a LaBelle, two Miskes, two Nelsons, two Dschaaks, two Schneiders, and a Quade — Jhett — whose uncles were Longhorns. His father, Kevin, also played and is remembered by people in town as the consummate Longhorn fan. In 2006, during a semi-final home playoff game, he hired a plane and a photographer to take aerial photographs of the 3,000 people in attendance. In photos from that day, the field is unusually green and surrounded by people on all sides. It seems to be the only thing in town still growing.

***

The tallest structure in Wibaux is a water tower, at the center of which the word "Wibaux" is painted in red so that it faces the interstate. Second tallest is the grain elevator on the other side of Beaver Creek. Otherwise, Wibaux creates a squat horizon line of two-story buildings and trees. Driving south on Highway 7 or east on I-94, it's a matter of seconds before Wibaux disappears in the rearview mirror.

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When head coach Jeff Bertelsen was in high school, he and some friends plotted to climb the tower. There was nothing much to see, they just wanted to see if they could get all the way to the top. Their plan, though, was foiled by a passing deputy sheriff, and the group scattered, running down streets and through yards to escape. Only a single member of his crew got to the top. Bertelsen laughs when he tells the story. The water tower itself is empty.

Bertelsen moved to Wibaux from the mountains and trout streams of western Montana when his dad got a job as a county agent in 1987. His freshmen year of football was the last year for then-coach Rob Bushman, the man who most Longhorn fans credit with inventing the Wibaux brand of football. "We ran the ball," he says. "Up the gut, hard-nose football." The next year, under a new coach, Wibaux suffered its first losing season since anyone could remember. It would be their last.

Everyone in town — including his players — calls him Bert. He has a face like Paul Giamatti, but he has the physique of someone you wouldn't want to mess with. He wears khaki cargo shorts to every game, no matter the weather, and when you ask him if he would change anything about his job with the Longhorns, it'd be painting the fields. He is not just the coach, but also the grounds crew. "That's the worst thing I do at this job. I measure and paint that field before every game," he says. "It used to take me six hours."

Thirty minutes before the Froid/Medicine Lake game, Bertelsen addresses the Longhorn players in a cramped locker room beneath Wibaux High's gymnasium bleachers. The game is meaningless; Wibaux has had the Eastern Division's No. 1 seed clinched for weeks. Some teams would take the starters out in the first half in a game like this, no matter the score, to preserve them for the playoffs. Not Wibaux. Bertelsen searches for a way to motivate — to remind his players that even in games that don't matter, final scores transcend win/loss columns. Complacency, not the opposition, represents the real challenge to Bert's boys.

"They're gonna come, and they're gonna come hard. You have to take that out of them. They got nothing to lose. This is their state title game for their seniors. It's the last high school football game they'll play," he says and reminds them that they, too, will someday take the field for the last time. "Think how'd you play that game."

Sbnation-wibaux_-_20_mediumHead coach Jeff Bertelsen in his signature khaki shorts.

Bertelsen knows what it's like to play that game, and unlike anyone else in the locker room, he knows what it's like to win it.  In 1991, his junior year, the Longhorns cruised to the school's first state championship. They did it again the next year, and although Bertelsen had already left to play at Dickinson State, the Longhorns did it again in 1993. Bertelsen was a star defender, and he still remembers the rush of bringing home the state title. "Once you know what that feels like, there's sort of nothing else like it," he says. "You want to have that feeling again. I want these kids to have that feeling."

The Longhorns won the program's fifth state title in 2001, Bertelsen's first year as head coach. Since then, they've gone 125-18 and have made it to the championship game five more times, but have yet to win again. "It's title or bust every year. I've heard people say, ‘Oh, he can't win the big one.' You feel the pressure and you know it comes with the job," he says. "I think sometimes I just try to be naive about it — to protect myself. Just do what we do every day and try to get better."

After Bertelsen addresses his team, Rob Bacon, a first-year assistant coach, speaks to the players. He played for the 2006 Longhorns, which Bertelsen describes as "the best Wibaux team to not win a title." After winning a semifinal game, the Longhorns lost the title in overtime. Bacon remembers returning to Wibaux late the night after the loss, the fire engine escort for the Longhorns' bus and the people who had stayed up to honk truck horns and welcome the boys home. "It was bittersweet," he says. "If you grow up saying you want to be good at football, that's one thing. But we grow up saying we want to win state. We know we're going to be good at football. We want to win state."

"We know we're going to be good at football. We want to win state."

Sbnation-wibaux_-_01_medium

When Bacon talks to the Longhorn players about their opponent, he channels the frustration that comes with coming up short in the face of extraordinary expectations. "They have a new coach this year and maybe he thinks things have changed, but they haven't. It's gotten uglier ... Take some pride in that, you are the guys who are going to be knocking their dicks in the dirt. Make them get it. Make every member of that team get it," he says. "Let them know what we're about."

The players stand up and touch hands and count to three. They march out of the locker room and turn right to exit the building and run across a parking lot onto the field. Turn left instead, stairs lead to the polished wood surface of the Wibaux gymnasium, where five state title banners hang from a cinder block wall: '91, '92, '93, '00 and '01. Most people in Wibaux find it disappointing there aren't more, but most people in Wibaux, like assistant coach Shane Bakken, also think it would be cheap to hang runner-up banners. He played quarterback in the '80s and has watched his sons play in four state title games. He believes there is only one way to measure a successful season. "Once you get a taste, that's the drive. You want to get back there again, and we have it. If you're not playing to win it every year, why play?" he says.  "No one remembers second place."

***

The Longhorns score on the first series of the game against the Red Hawks. They proceed to recover the ball on an onsides kick and score again. On the first Red Hawk possession, they struggle to crack the line of scrimmage and are forced to kick from inside their own 5-yard line. The punter receives a low snap as blue jerseys crash the backfield. He doesn't appear to panic so much as make a calculation and then a quick decision. He turns his back to the field, drops the ball to his foot and gingerly boots it out of the back of the end zone. The first quarter ends with the score 38-8.

When the Longhorns are playing well, it's like watching a video game between a committed gamer and someone who left the controller on the coffee table — something doesn't quite seem fair. On a special teams play, Chase Bertelsen, who has the same stacked-brick physique as his father, Jeff, draws gasps from the sideline when he topples a Red Hawk gunner flat on his back. Jake Bakken fields a kickoff and moves through traffic like a spooked antelope, his strides covering more ground than seem possible. The Red Hawks don't tackle him so much as shoo him out of bounds.  Although every team has its stars, not every team wins so gaudily game after game, year after year. Not every team is the Longhorns.

A few minutes into the third quarter, the score is 57-8, and Bertelsen begins to take the starters out of the game. Bakken and Bertelsen, LaBelle, Miske, Farnworth and Colton Tousignant, the starting running back who is as adept at breaking up passes as he is at running around tacklers, have their places taken by underclassmen.

Colton's younger brother, Chas, a 100-pound freshman, gets in at running back. He receives a handoff and is knocked over before he makes it to the end. He is promptly taken out. When he was younger, Chas watched his older brothers play football at recess. He remembers they would pretend to be Longhorn players of the day — Travis Bertelsen, Rob Bacon, Derek Hartse — and when his brothers got to high school, Chas played recess ball himself and pretended to be his brothers — superstar athletes playing on the biggest stage in the universe. As a ninth grader, he only sees the field when the Longhorns have mercy-ruled a team, if at all. But wearing that jersey is a dream realized, and he's already experienced the chemical surge of winning and the rush it gives him. "It just comes to you," he says.

Nearly to the end of his first season, he does not yet know what losing feels like.

***

Sbnation-wibaux_-_29_medium

The pavement of Hodges Road ends just after it passes the football field on the western edge of town. From there, the county uses crushed red rock to cover its clay surface. Four and a half miles west, Hodges intersects Ranch Access Road. Ranch Access winds over gentle rises and across dry creek beds for almost nine miles before dead-ending in a gulley of ash trees at the Tousignant family ranch. It is here, on land like this, land the family refers to as the "home place," where the boys who have always played football at Wibaux are born.

Bill Tousignant's mustache frames the corners of his mouth, and he is fond of telling the story of how he met his wife, Lisa, on horseback, a few miles from where they now live, just before a hailstorm. He says that despite the county's efforts, the road to his family's home is sometimes impassable. When it rains too much, the clay turns to wet cement and cakes on truck wheels until they no longer spin. When it snows, the road is sometimes unplowed for days, and his boys have to clear stretches of it themselves. It's not uncommon, he says, for his family to be stranded on their ranch "for a day or two."

Sbnation-wibaux_-_33_mediumThe Tousignant brothers.

when the weather is right, they work for 20 hours a day.

Hours before the game against the Red Hawks, Bill and his sons, Colton and Chas, woke before dawn. The boys each have a mat of tightly curled hair and electric blue eyes, which never shy from eye contact. That morning, a veterinarian was due at the ranch to do a pregnancy check on their stock of heifers. As dawn became day, the Tousignant men guided the 1,200-pound animals down a shoot of wrought iron fence, at the end of which each head of cattle was examined with an ultrasound wand. They had to work quickly, because the boys had a game.

Bill and Lisa are proud of their sons. As did their older brother before he left for college, Colton and Chas do every job the ranch demands. In February and March, they take turns waking up every two hours throughout the night to check on the pregnant cattle, and if one is in labor, they help relieve her of the 80-pound calf. They have never been on a spring vacation, and they spend their summers cutting hay and rolling it into enormous cylindrical bails. Some weeks, when the weather is right, and the grass is neither too wet with dew or too dry and brittle, they work for 20 hours a day.

On a recent Sunday morning, Bill drives his Dodge up a steep, dirt incline and gestures across a draw to where a church-sized stack of bails slumps in the wind. "That's no small feat," he says of the work his boys do each summer and adds that there are more stacks around the ranch. He says Colton and Chas cut 2,500 acres of grass last summer and put up 7,000 bails of hay. Sometime in the following months, when snow covers the ground, they will unfurl the bails one-by-one. The Tousignants' cattle will survive through the winter because of the work the boys did in the summer.

Ranch life is cyclical. Every task — preg-checking heifers, branding calves, trucking steers to auction — exists on the rim of a wheel, pushed around its axis by the changing of seasons. A job is completed only so the next one can begin, and some jobs, like mending the 40 miles of fence on the Tousignants' property, are never finished. The Tousignant boys aren't football fans — there is little time for that luxury, and these are not boys accustomed to sitting around. They show no allegiance to any team other than the one they play for. On weekends, when they are not playing football and if there is no work to be done, they'd rather play paintball or ride ATVs or hunt than sit and flick between televised football games. Colton doesn't care about Peyton Manning's comeback or concussions or who will win the Heisman. He'd rather show you the skin of a bobcat he trapped in a snare not far from his house. The pelt is silken and mottled tan and gray with dark spots. He says it's a female and rubs a hand over the teats on her belly. He says it might earn him $500 but a big tom could get $1,000. "They kind of dock you because she was milking," he says.

In Wibaux, the Tousignant boys are called "ranch kids," and while they are not the only ranch kids on the Longhorns, they are of a vanishing world. Corey Begger, the team's statistician, remembers just a few decades ago, when he was playing, there were more boys like the Tousignants, himself included. "There's not as many farm kids now as there used to be back in the early '90s. When I grew up, we were always on the farm," he says. "Wheat and putting up hay, working cows. We always had other kids helping us." He's not sure why, but he thinks that families are smaller than they used to be. And, he says, "Kids just aren't coming back to work on the farm." Wibaux, where nothing ever changes, is changing in this way.

The ways small towns die are unmistakable.

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The ways small towns die are unmistakable. One day, a family moves away, and no family moves in. The next day, the closed sign in the window of the town's only restaurant stays facing the street, and the post office announces it will only be open four days a week. The school shrinks until there are too few kids to field sports teams. So they practice with schools from neighboring towns, compromise on new uniform colors and mascots. They punctuate the team's new name with a slash. Then goes the gas station and the library. And, in time, the school closes because all of the children are gone.

Wibaux is not Ingomar. It is not Opheim or Custer, towns much closer to drying up and blowing away. But it has gotten steadily smaller, its residents steadily older, and the land there is as unforgiving as anywhere else in that part of the state. The median age in Wibaux is over 50, about 14 years older than the national average, and getting older. High school enrollment is down to about 50 students — 30 years ago there were more than 80, and today, in the playoffs, Wibaux routinely plays against school with twice as many students. But Wibaux survives, and compared to so many other towns, almost seems to flourish. Not because of sheep or cattle or wheat, but because of America's appetite for something else.

***

In 1953, four years after engineers in Pennsylvania successfully used a technique for extracting oil from subsurface rock called hydraulic fracturing, a geologist named J.W. Nordquist discovered a shale formation beneath wheat fields belonging to a North Dakota farmer named Henry Bakken (no relation to the Wibaux Bakkens). In time, it was determined that the formation covered nearly 200,000 square miles and stretched from western North Dakota to southern Saskatchewan to eastern Montana. Estimates put the amount of extractable oil in the hundreds of billions of barrels.

Companies like Halliburton, Exxon, and Tesoro laid claims, and in recent years, towns like Williston and Watford City, N.D., and Sidney, Mont., have transformed into boomtowns, full of people from someplace else, where men live in trucks and trailers or else commute long distances to earn a wage.

One hundred miles to the west, Wibaux is sustained by its proximity to the explosion of industry. Bill Tousignant doesn't spend his days on the ranch. He spends about 300 days a year working as a consultant on drill rigs. He says that if he could stay home, he would. Ranching is what he loves, but without the work in North Dakota, he isn't sure his life as a rancher would persist. AJ LaBelle says he'd love to find a job in town, but "they're paying $16 an hour at the McDonald's in Dickinson." He works inspecting and selling tubing for pipelines, while his brother, Jordan, commutes to Dickinson, N.D., to work as a mechanic. Their youngest brother, Heath, wants to do the same.

Wibaux may be slowly dying, but it is also still a living place, with a high school and a post office and, significantly, a line of trucks at the ticket booth on Saturday afternoons in the fall. As long as there is football, traffic passing on I-94 will know the name "Wibaux" on that water tower means something. But what will happen when more people move off the ranch, have fewer kids and the enrollment at the high school drops to 40, to 30? What happens when the Rainbow closes, or the Shamrock? Or when there aren't enough boys to work a ranch when their father is away?

Some people say it will never happen — they refuse to admit the possibility, just as their ancestors once refused to bend before the wind. Jeff Bakken, who played quarterback and graduated in 2008, says Wibaux will never go the way of Terry, Ekalaka or Savage — former 8-man schools who can no longer field 8-man teams. He says the 6-man game, with every player eligible to catch a pass, "isn't even football."

"There is nothing else without football," he says. "I mean, what else is there?"

"If Wibaux had eight players on their football team," he says, "we'd still play 8-man football."

Jordan LaBelle agrees, because without Longhorn football, the place he grew up would cease to exist. "There is nothing else without football," he says. "I mean, what else is there?"

But others acknowledge change is coming. Wibaux High currently has large junior and freshmen classes, but elementary school numbers are critically low. Jeff Bertelsen isn't sure how much longer he will coach, but he says a drop to 6-man would force him to retire early. He is willing to concede the inevitability of the move. "It's a numbers game. Saturdays will still be here. If we're playing 6-man, they'll still be here," he says. When asked what would happen if the Longhorns were playing losing 6-man, he laughs and looks up at the ceiling. "I don't know," he says. "It's never happened."

Begger wears a Longhorn sweatshirt everywhere. He travels to every away game and records every yard gained, touchdown scored and tackle made by the Longhorns. Before home games, he listens to a recording of the 2006 radio broadcast of the playoff game in which the Longhorns snapped the 44-game winning streak of a team from the western side of the state. When he talks about Wibaux football, the corners of his mouth turn up slightly and his eyes widen, as if suddenly awakened. Standing in the lobby of the high school, he takes pleasure in revealing that the longhorn steer whose head is mounted on the wall was raised on his family's ranch.

He doesn't like to think about what may happen to his team. The idea of losing Longhorn football — the thing that in some ways has defined his life — is unbearable. But he knows it's possible. He remembers the days when Scobey played the Longhorns tough for four quarters — when they had more kids out for football. He doesn't want to predict the future, but Begger is willing to imagine it. "I can't even fathom coming into the locker room without thinking we're going to win. Nobody here believes it. It's going to be tough when it becomes a reality. I think all them dreams will — " he says and catches himself. "Once that dream goes away, do you ever start dreaming it again? I don't know."

Sbnation-wibaux_-_10_medium

***

The ceremonies before a high school football game never vary, no matter who is playing or what they are playing for. Hours before kickoff, people mingle in the parking lot and on the bleachers, picking up conversations left off the week before. Some of them are friends and some only know each other because they feel connected to the same school, the same team and the same game. They huddle around each other until their chatter is disrupted by the chanting and shouting of the hometown players as they sprint from the locker room onto the field. It starts again, the rituals that bring them to this place each fall. The captains, sons who were themselves sons of fathers who played on this field, in freshly washed uniforms, shake hands and flip a coin. The ball is placed on a tee and the teams line up on opposite sides of the field. A whistle blows and the ball is kicked into the air and the players hurdle down the field toward one another.

The end of the game, though, has nothing to do with its beginning. Time simply runs out and suddenly the white lines painted on the grass mean nothing. The final seconds tick off the clock and the shrill of a whistle announces that the game is over, the score Wibaux 65, Froid/Medicine Lake 16. The Red Hawk and Longhorn players stand up straight, take off their helmets and reveal mops of sweaty hair. They shake hands. Parents and siblings walk onto the field and wrap arms around their shoulder pads. A group of girls surround a player and hug him so that he smiles awkwardly and appreciatively. The scene is celebratory but also cathartic. It is as if everyone gathers on the field after the game to reassure each other that it is still here — that whatever had been anticipated has come and gone, and that in another week or another year, it will happen again. No one seems to notice the younger boys, whose game of two-hand touch continues and has spilled onto the field and licks at the edges of the crowd.

As the sun begins a slow dip toward the horizon, the wind dies down and trucks begin to pull away from the track. Some folks head downtown, to the Shamrock Club or the Rainbow, to have a beer and talk about the game and prognosticate about the playoffs. Despite another blowout, Longhorn defensive backs were beat twice, resulting in Red Hawk scores. In two weeks, the Longhorns will host a playoff game as the No. 1 seed in the east, and Shane Bakken knows other teams will not be so forgiving. "I was pissed that they scored twice," he says. "We have stuff to work on. Our season really begins in two weeks."

Others drive back to their houses on cracked pavement, past the water tower and across Beaver Creek. And still others, like the Tousignants, pull away from the field and have miles of dirt and clay and red gravel to cover before reaching home. It's a road they drive every day, and they've seen it unplowed and indistinguishable under a blanket of snow. They've seen it turn to muck in a heavy rain and stick to the tires of their truck. Sometimes that road is impassable, but on a Saturday in October, it's clear and cuts through a wind-swept grassland that in a muted autumn light suggests nothing more than a season that may well never end.

On Nov. 23, Wibaux lost the state championship game against Ennis 68-56, the Longhorns' fourth loss in the title game in the past six seasons.

Producer:Chris Mottram | Editor:Glenn Stout | Copy Editor:Kevin Fixler | Photos:Jamie Rogers

They're playing basketball: An oral history of Kurtis Blow's 'Basketball' on the 30th anniversary of the groundbreaking video

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The intersection of hip-hop and basketball has been well-documented. Rappers want to be ballers, ballers want to be rappers, and every MC worth his salt has name-checked the NBA. From the early hip-hop days ofBig Bank Hank getting a color TV to watch the Knicks, through Ice Cube's good day when the Lakers beat the (dearly departed) SuperSonics, and on to young global dudes like Joe Budden honoring Drazen Petrovic and Action Bronson repping Arvydas Sabonis, rapping basketball is a time-honored tradition. And yet, for all the rhymes devoted to hoops, one 30-year-old song reigns supreme.

(Kick it.)

They're playing basssketballlll, we love that bas-ket balllllllll ...

(Step up to the mic, John Condon.)

Now rapping basketball, No. 1, Kurtis Blow.

(Do your thing, Kurt.)

Basketball is my favorite sport, I like the way they dribble up and down the court ...

This is the story of "Basketball."

THE MAN

In 1984, Kurtis Blow dropped his fifth album "Ego Trip." The Harlem native was already hip-hop royalty as the first rapper signed to a major label, the first to tour the United States and Europe, and the first with a gold record, his 1980 smash "The Breaks." Other hits include his debut record "Christmas Rappin'," the Run-DMC collaboration "8 Million Stories," and "If I Ruled the World," which would be famously sampled by Nas. Blow's had a long career and remains one of the few rap game elite who actually were down from day one.

KURTIS BLOW: I've always been a big music lover thanks to my mom, who'd been a great dancer in Harlem at the Renaissance, the Savoy and the Cotton Club. She was popular throughout the neighborhood. I followed in her footsteps. Guys used to come get me for the local dance competitions, I became a B-Boy. I also used to play all the music for the family, spinning James Brown, Motown, the Isley Brothers, Jackie Wilson — all the stuff my mom loved. The first time I ever DJ'ed was in 1972 at my buddy Tony Rome's birthday party. I was 13 and I put together two component sets, my mom's and his mom's, and we had continuous music throughout the party ...

WILLIAM "BILLY-BILL" WARING (Lyricist, "Basketball"): Kurtis and I are lifelong friends. We grew up together, maybe 100 yards apart. We started out breakdancing in 1972, house parties and block parties.

BLOW: William is three years older than me and he was the only kid my mom would let me hang around with because he was headed to college. He was doing something good with his life, not like a lot of the other thugs and criminals in Harlem. Billy-Bill was the guy who got me into all the parties to breakdance.

We learned to appreciate the elements of hip-hop before such a thing existed.

WARING: Eventually, we were dancing in the clubs. We learned to appreciate the elements of hip-hop before such a thing existed, but we didn't start writing anything down until the late 1970s.

BLOW: I was doing my thing in Harlem and the Bronx, keeping up with what the better known DJs were doing, when I met Kool Herc. This was seven or eight years before the first hip-hop record came out, but I knew that here was something new and fresh. As a DJ, I was already different because I wasn't playing disco. Billy-Bill and I saw ourselves as rebels, that was our ideology for people who came to our more obscure parties, what I called "ghetto discos."

MICHAEL OBLOWITZ (video director, "Basketball"): I was part of the No Wave movement, which came out of the downtown arts scene, punk rock and experimental film and the like. Around that time, the first hip-hop shows were taking place in the South Bronx. I‘d become good friends with Charlie Ahearn, who would go on to direct "Wild Style," and we'd cruise up there on the subway to these concerts. It was amazing, an art form that only existed in the Bronx, parts of Brooklyn, and the upper reaches of Manhattan. It was super dangerous, and I was definitely the only white kid from South Africa up there, but I'd never felt anything like it. Television was banned under the apartheid government and I was coming from a place of surfing in the morning and diving for lobsters for lunch. Here we had chain-link fences surrounding these basketball courts, and hundreds of people jammed in there to hear Afrika Bambaataa or Grandmaster Flash. I saw Kurtis Blow rap "The Breaks" up there, it was insane energy.

PAUL EDWARDS (author, "How to Rap" and "How to Rap 2"): Kurtis Blow wasn't particularly ground-breaking on a technical level, but that wasn't what he was going for, he was going for hits, sort of like the Will Smith of his day. He was a "party MC" who made dance songs that people could sing along to — and I don't say that disparagingly at all, it's a very important area of hip-hop and he was crucial in making it a viable force in the marketplace and music industry. People like to focus on the more virtuoso lyricists of the time, such as Melle Mel, Grandmaster Caz, and Kool Moe Dee, but the genre needed the balance brought by people like Blow in order to spread it far and wide and get it on the radio.

BLOW: I went to City College of New York, where I met Russell Simmons. I majored in Communications and Broadcasting and learned that building up a track record in the boondocks was the path to follow. Every record store had its own chart, its own top 10, which coincidentally, is how I learned to read, by studying the charts. I figured out to compete in the big city with the 40 or 50 other popular DJs, I needed to come in with a couple of No. 1's in a secondary market. So Russell and I opened up a club in Hollis, Queens called Night Fever Disco, where I worked on being a DJ and an MC for about two years. A writer from from "Billboard," Robert Ford, did a story on hip-hop and they listed the best DJs in the city, including a young college kid, Kurtis Blow Walker.

It sold like a son of a bitch that summer, everywhere I went "The Breaks" followed me out of those giant boom boxes.

J.B. MOORE (producer, "Basketball"): I was in ad sales at "Billboard," but I'm a musician by trade. Robert Ford covered the R&B charts and together, we'd discovered this new thing coming up from the streets, like in the early days of rock ‘n' roll. I believe Robert wrote the first ever article about hip-hop for an aboveground publication. We both knew it was going to be big, we could smell it. We wanted to produce a rap record, talked to Russell, and decided Kurtis was the guy. He was an incredible performer. I'd seen him wake up groggy as hell in the nurses office at Wollman Skating Rink, shake it off, and absolutely kill on stage. I knew it would be easier to sell the label on a perennial, so our first record was "Christmas Rappin.'" We followed that up in the 1980 with "The Breaks." It sold like a son of a bitch that summer, everywhere I went "The Breaks" followed me out of those giant boom boxes kids carried around back then. If PolyGram would have backed it, that song would've gone platinum.

BLOW: Having a major label means having major press. PolyGram was flying me all over. I'd get to the office and there would be a full day of press in every city, TV, magazines, newspapers, it was documented all over the world. London, Paris, Belgium ... I'm traveling to places I've only read about and there's paparazzi clicking my picture? It was incredible.

MC SERCH (rapper, former member of 3rd Bass, talk show host of "Serch"): In the beginnings of hip-hop, Kurtis Blow was a bigger-than-life character, almost iconic. He wasn't a battle rapper, he was designed to be a party rapper. Kurtis' influence on hip-hop is in his showmanship and the fact that he made songs, he didn't just rap over beats.

THE GAME

Coming of age in New York in the late-60s/early-70s meant rooting for Knicks teams that competed for, and actually won, NBA championships year-in and year-out. Kurtis Blow remains a Knick fan for life, but his deep love for the game was actually inspired by a high-flyer from Long Island who never called Madison Square Garden home.

BLOW: I played everything as a kid: baseball, tennis, track, swimming, football, and basketball. I was actually a better football player than basketball, because I'm kind of short, you know? As a spectator, I liked them all, but basketball became my favorite after I met my idol. I loved Walt Frazier, Dick Barnett, Earl Monroe, those Knicks teams of course, but I was a big, big fan of Julius Erving. Dr. J., he was the guy and I hated — hated— that he was in the ABA. Things would have been much better for everybody if Dr. J. was winning those championships rings in the NBA where he belonged.

WARING: In 1973, the Rucker Tournament moved from 155th Street to CCNY and Dr. J. was who everybody wanted to see. When Julius would come to Harlem, he'd have people sitting on top of the roofs and in the trees overlooking the courts. People couldn't get seats, but they had to get a glimpse of him. I was totally inspired by Dr. J., he was doing things on the court I'd never seen before.

Then Dr. J. said, "I'm glad to meet you little Kurt, you keep up the great work."

BLOW: At 14, I was in the CCNY summer youth program, which had all kinds of sports activities. My track coach, Barbara Floyd, had gone to college with Julius Erving at UMass. Coach Floyd knew I was Dr. J's biggest fan. One day, we'd returned to CCNY from a meet where I'd won three big trophies. All the sudden, here comes Dr. J. getting ready to play in the Rucker. He's walking down the block and stops to get a hot dog. I tell Coach Floyd, ‘You know him! Call him over! Call him over!' She said, ‘Julius, come over here and give me a bite of that hot dog!' He took a bite, and handed her the rest. She introduced me, and Dr. J. saw my trophies and said, ‘Man, you had a good day.' I could hardly breath, ‘Iwonthe50yarddash Iwonthe100yarddash Iwonthe4by400relay itwasagreatday.' Then Dr. J. said, ‘I'm glad to meet you little Kurt, you keep up the great work.' From that moment on, basketball and music was it. I grew up without a dad, so I created these fictional "Pops" in my head. James Brown and Dr. J. were two of my Pops.

THE SONG

"Basketball" was the second single off of "Ego Trip." Breaking it down into its components, the song is made up of the concept, the lyrics, the hook/chorus, the sound effects, and the guys-at-the-playground-riffing-about-hoops that closes it out.

"You need to make a song about basketball, it's the No. 1 sport for African-Americans and nobody has done it yet."

BLOW: The idea came from my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time. She said, "You need to make a song about basketball, it's the No. 1 sport for African-Americans and nobody has done it yet."

MOORE: First time Kurtis mentioned it, I knew it was a terrific concept precisely because it hadn't been done. I thought it could have a larger life than some of our other records. We'd been disappointed with the reception to "Party Time," which we thought would be a breakout hit, but I still had confidence in the basketball idea. I was a fan, but Robert Ford knew everything about the sport. One time, he was in Indiana at a VFW or something and he got into a conversation about basketball. He knew more about the Indiana teams than they guys at the bar. Ford knew oceans about hoops, so if he believed the record would be a good thing ...

MC SERCH: Kurtis always had that amazing ability to pick regular everyday themes, like Christmas or basketball, and turn something ordinary to extraordinary.

Lyrics_mediumHover to read "Basketball" lyrics

BLOW: Billy-Bill and I think a lot alike and we talked basketball all the time, so he knew exactly who to put in the song. He chose the players and included all the greats. We wanted the guys we grew up watching who were all out of the league by the time the song came out, and the best of that time.

WARING: The only explicit thing Kurtis told me was Dr. J. had to come first.

BLOW: Almost every guy in the song is in the Hall of Fame, except for maybe Darryl Dawkins — but we had to have him, he was the first guy shattering backboards — and Ralph Sampson. But during that time, Sampson was the hottest cat. He was destined for the Hall of Fame, it's hard to believe he didn't make it. He got hurt a lot, and got sidetracked or whatever, so he's forgotten a little bit, but in college, Sampson was the man. End of story.

WARING: I wrote the lyrics quick. Sometimes creatively, it just comes to you. Only a few little things got changed. I didn't write the line "Or when Willis Reed stood so tall ..." at first. My original was "When Marv Albert made the call, Yes and It Counts! That's basketball." When I submitted it, I guess they knew the legal ramifications of getting clearances from Marv or whatever, but there's also an old practice where producers put in a line or two to get a songwriting credit. I'm not mad at ‘em. I was cool with the change because it was still about the Knicks.

MOORE: We recorded it at the Power Station, which has a 8088 Neve console that allowed us to just kick the shit out of the track. The tremendous equipment and supremely talented engineers allowed us to do some mind-boggling stuff. We wanted "Basketball" to sound a bit removed from what was going on then in hip-hop. It all starts with that catchy vocal hook.

Blow was instrumental in introducing choruses to hip-hop, as most of the earlier records were just one long continuous rap with no hook.

EDWARDS: Blow was instrumental in introducing choruses to hip-hop, as most of the earlier records were just one long continuous rap with no hook. Kool Moe Dee even calls Kurtis, "The inventor of the rap hook."

BLOW: The hook was all mine. That was my thing, hooks were my specialty. I did the hooks on "8 Million Stories," "Fat Boys," "Fat Boys are Back," "If I Ruled the World ..." Simple sing-y melodic hooks stick in your head.

MOORE: To our very good fortune, we had Alyson Williams doing the backing vocals. She nailed it. I also had Jimmy Bralower, the drum machinist, make a sample of a basketball being dribbled on the studio floor. We got the best recording of it we could, pre-digital, and sent it off to be burned into a chip. Every drum on the record has a bit of that basketball in it. I don't know if it made any difference, it's hard to tell, but it was a nice piece of ear candy.

WARING: I was thrilled when I came into the studio and they had John Condon doing his thing, "Now rapping basketball ..." I don't think he knew what he was getting into, but he was the voice of the Knicks, the guy we saw from the Garden every Sunday, and I knew fans would love it. He died a few years later, so we have history on top of history on that track.

MOORE: One underrated or forgotten part of the record is the riffing, the guys just talking hoops.

WARING: I wanted to rap on the record, but they didn't let me. I did get on the track though, at the end. That whole section was ad-libbed. I'm the guy who says, "Did you see that kid Michael Jordan?" He was still in college. I'm a prophet, for better or worse.

EDWARDS: If you're making a concept track, which this essentially is, then it helps to stay on topic, which "Basketball" does. It includes a surprising amount of detail with its references. It's nothing intricate, but it moves way past the simple "wave your hands in the air" style of most party tracks.

MOORE: Everything just came together, that song kicks ass six ways from Thursday.

MC SERCH: The main thing that makes "Basketball" so special is that Kurtis was reflecting on what we all dug about the game. He was talking about athletes of the time, running plays, streetball vs. NBA ball, taking the temperature of fans and what they loved about the sport both on-and-off the court.

THE RECEPTION

Kurtis Blow actually had bigger selling records, but "Basketball" took off in ways no previous recording of his ever did.

BLOW: "Basketball" got huge radio play. But as a record, it didn't sell like "The Breaks," which as a 12-inch almost went platinum at 940,000 units. "Basketball" was also put out as a single, but only 50,000 records were released. Once those were gone, the record company put out more copies of the album "Ego Trip," which went gold.

WARING: Kurtis ended up meeting a lot of NBA stars, they loved it. I didn't travel around with him as much, but I remember the Knicks had a backup forward named Eric Fernsten who got us tickets to a game. That was cool.

It was bigger than the NBA though, it became the theme song for teams everywhere.

BLOW: I met ‘em all, Ewing, Starks, MJ, Oakley is a good friend of mine, Isiah ... I made a point to reach out to the guys in the league. It was bigger than the NBA though, it became the theme songs for teams everywhere. College, high school, summer youth, elementary school. I heard all the time from professionals and amateurs that "Basketball" was the backdrop for the layup lines. I can absolutely say it's the No. 1 layup line song of all time.

WARING: I don't think it's the best song I ever wrote, but it certainly had the most impact.

BLOW: When the song was peaking, the NBA started flying me around to do shows. They would send me to a game like the Cleveland Cavaliers vs. the New Jersey Nets, games that weren't even close to being sold out. I would do a live performance right after the game to fill the arena. We sold out the San Antonio Spurs stadium and Goerge Gervin came to the show. The Iceman was the first player mentioned in "Basketball" that I met. That was amazing, but in Philly, Dr. J. came backstage and gave me a huge hug. He thanked me for putting him in the song and he's still a good buddy of mine today.

THE VIDEO

At a time when few black artists, and no rappers, were seen on MTV, a crazy "Basketball" video was shot featuring cheerleaders, martial arts, Adam West-esque Batman graphics, players dunking on short hoops, nunchuks, a blue sky, a lightning bolt jumpsuit, an old-timey photographer, random black-and-white shots of Michael Ray Richardson, Lite Beer from Miller jerseys, a mascot in a chicken costume, the Fat Boys, Whodini, and a man inexplicably eating a giant hot dog slathered in mustard.

I knew next to nothing about basketball. I was basically straight off the boat from South Africa, I'd never seen it.

OBLOWITZ: I made this experimental avant-garde punk film called "King Blank" that played as a midnight movie double feature with "Eraserhead" at the old Waverly Theatre. Somebody saw it, and off of that, hired me to direct these really slick videos for Carly Simon of all people. I think I may have directed the first videos ever shown on VH1. Anyway, from that, I got hired to do "Basketball," which was ironic because there is a sequence in "King Blank" set to rap music, which I also don't think had been done before. At first I thought I was being hired to do a video for a re-release of "The Breaks," so I was really excited. I even wrote a treatment for it. I so wanted "The Breaks," it would have been a game-changer, a life-changer, and the song talks about universal experiences. I knew next to nothing about basketball. I was basically straight off the boat from South Africa, I'd never seen it. I came from a country where black people were basically enslaved. The main sport the government supported was rugby, a brutal sport of the white ruling class where big drunken burly descendants of Germans and Dutchmen banged their fucking heads into one another like Vikings. And here you have a finesse sport where tall graceful descendants of Nigeria fly around the court. It was so far out of my frame of reference. To me, basketball was the hip iconic image of America. When I got to New York City, streetball was everywhere, it was part of the Bob Dylan line, "Music in the cafes and revolution in the air." It was fucking great.

BLOW: The video was shot before the song became a hit, so the NBA didn't want anything to do with it. Our initial idea was to get footage of all the players in the song and we couldn't get clearance for anyone except Michael Ray Richardson. That was the only guy they gave us, so we used his photos. He's not even in the song. Not quite the same as having Dr. J. soaring to the hoop.

MOORE: Unfortunately, Kurtis split with Robert and I before the video was made. Had we known what was going to happen I think we would've marched into the studio with a gun to put an end to it. Ford had all these personal connections to the NBA and I think he could have gotten the footage, which would have made for an all-time classic video.

OBLOWITZ: It was the first thing I ever made through my own production company and we had a $25,000 budget. My concept was to use those motifs from the Bronx, the chain-link fence, the gang-bangers, the martial arts. I wanted it to be edgy. I wanted to get some of those gnarly dudes from the Bronx involved, recreate what I'd seen, but PolyGram had other ideas.

All the cheerleaders in the video are white. Oh, do you know the problems I had with black women around the country?

BLOW: I didn't have any understanding of why the director wanted the martial arts and the gangs and stuff. Looking back, it's a little bit cheesy to me, but I was excited to have cameras focused on me, now I'm a super-duper-star. Let's do it.

OBLOWITZ: One thing the label demanded was blonde MTV babes.

BLOW: All the cheerleaders in the video are white. Oh, do you know the problems I had with black women around the country? All the African-American militants started coming at me, saying I wasn't real and I sold out ... I wasn't thinking about all that, I was just happy we had cheerleaders. I mean, c'mon, they were cute girls.

OBLOWITZ: One of the cheerleaders is a light-skinned black girl, but I guess that's a cop-out. I decided to just go with it, to make it a pastiche of all the things I'd seen on TV and at Madison Square Garden. This is what PolyGram wants? Let's have fun with it, let's just make it a blur of colors, cheerleaders, a guy wolfing down a huge hot dog, a guy in a chicken suit, the Fat Boys shuffle, and a fetishization of television itself. It was supposed to be funny, but Kurtis and I had a seriousness of purpose, to get in heavy rotation on MTV.

BLOW: It was cool to get my friends in the video, the Fat Boys and Whodini came and did a guest appearance, but some stuff I didn't understand. What was with that guy in the chicken suit?

WARING: I wasn't in the video. I'm not disappointed about that.

OBLOWITZ: I couldn't believe how much flack we got for the white cheerleaders, for selling out, for not being street enough. I got slammed, but what choice did we have? Without the record label, the "Basketball" video doesn't exist. Besides, we had a hell of a lot of fun making it. I built a court and we had hoops of all different sizes. We had vivid colors and a real Pop Art aesthetic. It was all stylized. I shot from the ground, and used slow motion, and we had trampolines, all to give the appearance of guys flying through the air. And they were real players, semi-pro or something, who showed up with matching jerseys, which I thought was fantastic. Whodini is here? Let's put them in. The Fat Boys? Go for it. One thing I remember from the shoot is how much pizza The Fat Boys ate. Mountains of pizza and piles and piles of cardboard boxes.

MOORE: When I first saw it I was pissed off, "What the fuck is this?" It was so stupid, so not Kurtis Blow. I knew it wouldn't do a whole lot of damage because it never played on MTV.

When I first saw it I was pissed off, "What the fuck is this?" It was so stupid, so not Kurtis Blow.

BLOW: I believe that was the first rap video that got on MTV, but Run-DMC claims it was one of theirs, so I don't know, but there was no rap videos before us, that's for sure.

OBLOWITZ: We did what we set out to do, it played on MTV and millions of people got to see Kurtis Blow, this ball of energy who hadn't been exposed to the country.

EDWARDS: It's a slick, commercial rap video, before that kind of thing became widely prevalent. Girls, basketball, flashy editing for the time ... it even has a martial arts thing going on in the background at times, nearly 10 years before there was such a thing as a Wu-Tang Clan.

MOORE: So this was all PolyGram's doing? My apologies to the director. I take it all back. I've been bad-mouthing the poor guy since 1984.

OBLOWITZ: It was sanitized, sure, but I still think the "Basketball" video works as a surreal moment of its time. The HOF International Film Festival in Germany recently did a retrospective of my work, and "Basketball" was one of  two videos of mine they selected, the other being "Chill Out" by John Lee Hooker and Santana, and it's not like MTV ever showcased blues legends either. I blew it up to 2K, real cinema HD, and it really popped. The crowd went nuts. The world at-large loves it. I love it. The video was fucking full-on fresh. Even today, it really flows. "Basketball" doesn't have over two million YouTube views by accident.

THE LEGACY

On its 30-year anniversary, "Basketball" is still played wherever people gather to shoot or watch hoops. And while Kurtis Blow hasn't had a hit rap record in years, he's had a long career performing Christian music, leading the Hip Hop Church, a musical youth ministry for any church to teach kids about the gospels, Jesus, and salvation, all with a hip-hop flair. He's even branched out into rock music, collaborating with Bride Dressed in Black on the new release "Hip-Rock."

BLOW: A classic song never dies, but "Basketball" did get new life when Michael Jordan put it in NBA 2K12. It's the first thing you hear when you pop in the game. Nothing lasts forever though. Last year, I was at All-Star weekend, I introduced myself to LaMarcus Aldridge, told him I did "Basketball" and that I had him on my fantasy team. He just shook my hand and walked away. Younger kids don't know me, but the OGs do, so it's all worth it.

WARING: Kurtis and I have talked about updating it, getting all those guys we missed out on like Barkley, Olajuwon, LeBron, Duncan ... I think we could pull it off.

BLOW: I have connections with the Miami Heat and I've thought about a new version and letting guys like LeBron and Wade rap on the record.

MOORE: I think a 2013 "Basketball" is a great idea and I'd love to do it. I think the world is ready for a record that's all whacked up like we used to do it, old-school style.

MC SERCH: Rap in the 1980s existed in a New York bubble, you didn't think about rhyming for California, Texas or Florida, it was for your city, your borough, your neighborhood, for the dudes on your block. In 3rd Bass, we made a song about streetball, "Soul in the Hole," and other artists have attempted to make songs about the sport, but Kurtis still owns it. The original survives. It's not that the record was that great as it was great back then. I'm always happy to hear it on Backspin in that moment, but I don't want to hear it 60 times a week. It takes me to when I was young, so I don't know if it's a good idea, no matter how talented Kurtis is, to duplicate or remake it. Maybe if he did it with A$AP Rocky or Action Bronson, some of the young guys to get their take on basketball, that would be interesting ... I'm torn to say the least. I think he should leave it alone. Certain things should just live in their own cosmos.

His songs stand the test of time. I take a lot of pride in the music we made together.

WARING: We were first, we were pioneers in that way. It was a group of talented people doing what they do best. We taught people the history of the game.

MOORE: To this day, I regret that I didn't listen to Russell and move Kurtis in a harder-edged direction, which is where rap was going. But his songs stand the test of time, why else would we be talking about "Basketball" 30 years later? I take a lot of pride in the music we made together.

OBLOWITZ: I was a draft dodger from South Africa, I skipped out on my country because fighting on behalf of an apartheid government was not something I was ever going to do. But living in downtown New York City back in those days was still living apart from the United States. The country ended at the Verrazano Bridge. We never left. Working with Kurtis Blow was my gateway to America. It opened all kinds of doors for me and got me all kinds of work.  After "Basketball," for the first time, I felt like I had a place in America.

BLOW:The live performance of "Basketball" is big time. Everyone knows the hook, so when it starts I ask all the ladies to sing along, then I do a thing where I ask the crowd, "What is the name of your favorite team?" And say I'm in L.A., I go through the Knicks, Heat,  Bulls, and say the Lakers last. Huge crowd roar. Then I ask their favorite player, "Is it LeBron?" Booooo "Kevin Durant?" Booooo "Kobe Bryant?" Big cheers. Then I end it with, "I know everyone loves Michael Jorrrrrrrrrrrrrdan!" The fans scream, go nuts. "Basketball" is a house rocker.

After all these years, people still love it. I thank God for basketball, the song and the sport.

Producer:Chris Mottram | Copy Editor:Kevin Fixler

This train: When two unlikely teams met in the SEC Championship, we saw a glimpse into the future of the conference

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"This train is bound for _____." The MARTA train splits Atlanta into four quadrants and greets you with this introduction every time you board. It is both a statement of fact and a nod to Atlanta's - and Georgia's - strange, wonderful, contradictory history.

"This Train" is a song that, like Atlanta itself, encompasses the entire South in origin and influence. It was recorded by artists from Mississippi and Tennessee, among others, and it was first made popular by Rosetta Tharpe, an Arkansan by birth. Around the time Sister Rosetta was making headway with the song, Gone With the Wind was debuting in Atlanta, a city of about 275,000 at the time.

This train don't carry no gamblers, no whiskey drinkers, and no high flyers

This train don't carry no gamblers, this train

This train is bound for glory, don't carry nothing but the righteous and the holy

This train is bound for glory, this train

This train don't carry no liars, no hypocrites and no high flyers

This train don't carry no liars, this train

This train is solid black; when you go there, you don't come back

This train is bound for glory, this train

This train don't fit no transportation, no Jim Crow and no discrimination

This train is bound for glory, this train

This train don't care if you're white or black; everybody's treated just like a man

This train is bound for glory, this train

Atlanta in its current state is a heavy city,
lifted up by its accomplishments and weighed down by its flaws.

It is, like the 1930s themselves, a song at once optimistic and tragic, hopeful and pointed. It tells us what is right and almost acknowledges that we're all wrong. It is a heavy, heavy song. And Atlanta in its current state is a heavy city, lifted up by its accomplishments and weighed down by its flaws. Its history as one of America's great cities is short, relatively speaking, but it is loaded with canonical events, history and sports.

Atlanta has tried, and still tries, to get everything wrong. The MARTA takes you through so much of this contradiction. Oakland Cemetary, the crowded, disturbingly pretty home of everyone from Bobby Jones to Margaret Mitchell, is about a mile from downtown, or too far removed from a couple of the stadiums that have to be vacated the moment they are erected. When it gets something wrong, it tries again. When it gets something right, it tries again.

All of our best and worst tendencies are magnified in Atlanta, from our love (and occasional forgetfulness) of history to our dependence on sweet, sweet, empty calories. Atlanta residents seem to resent all there is to resent about this place, then defiantly love it anyway. They want to flee right up until they decide they'll never leave. "I can talk bad about this place, but you better not." That sort of thing.

If you are a fan of an SEC school, Atlanta is exactly where you want to find yourself on the first weekend of December. The Georgia Dome has hosted the last 20 conference championship games after Birmingham's Legion Field held the first two. It is where Florida won its second, third, and fourth SEC titles of the Steve Spurrier era. It is where Kevin Prentiss tiptoed down the sidelines in 1998 and Peerless Price responded in kind. It is where LSU eliminated Tennessee from the national title game in 2001, where Georgia head coach Mark Richt broke through in 2002, and where Nick Saban won his first conference title in 2003. It is where Georgia stunned No. 3 LSU in 2005, where No. 2 Florida took down No. 1 Alabama in 2008, and where No. 2 Alabama whipped No. 1 Florida in 2009. It is where the Honey Badger solidified his legend in 2011 and where Georgia came up six yards short in 2012.

As the SEC positioned itself as the dominant force in college football - and while it may not be the best conference every season (one could certainly make a case for the Pac-12 this season), it is easily the best on average - Atlanta became the capital of the sport. (This is doubly true now that downtown Atlanta has booted baseball, even if only in a, "You can't quit; you're fired!" kind of way.) In the Georgia Dome on the first Saturday in December, a makeshift national semifinal tends to take place; the winner of the SEC Championship Game has made the national title game for eight straight seasons.

When I arrived in Atlanta for my initial SEC Championship experience, it was a full 60 degrees warmer than it was in my home town. The locals were worried about a cold front moving through; it might get into the 40s! But for the weekend as a whole, the weather was neither pretty nor unpleasant. The city is both at all times.

★★★
Seclos_mediumGetty Images

THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR GWCC

The SEC Championship is basically the conference's annual banquet. The Georgia Dome next door is the main ballroom, but the Georgia World Congress Center contains the breakout rooms - the SEC Fanfare event, the school alumni association "tailgates," the pep rallies, etc. - and the refreshments.

People are wearing company colors, wearing placards, and walking by posters and sponsorship signs. (The number of corporate sponsors for this event is, as Gary Pinkel might say, mammoth. Acknowledging each sponsor during the game takes up almost an entire, CBS-sized timeout.) As it will be in the stadium, those in black and gold are drastically outnumbered by those in orange and blue, but that was to be expected. Auburn is about six times closer to Atlanta than Columbia, its ticket base is larger, and its fans didn't have to cross a swath of ice and snow and hell to get to the game.

Members of both sides mingle politely, talking about how concerned they are about the opponent's given strength (Auburn's pass rush and option game, Missouri's defensive front and big receivers) and getting along swimmingly.

This has been a big year for Missouri. In the Tigers' second season in the SEC, they took their first East division title; they have now been to as many conference title games as Mississippi State and South Carolina and more than four other schools (Ole Miss, Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Texas A&M), three of which have been in the SEC much, much longer.

Pinkel and Missouri can compete in the league that was supposed to chew up newcomers and spit them out.

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After the struggles of 2012, in which Missouri suffered a wealth of injuries at quarterback and on the offensive line and limped to a 5-7 finish, its first without a bowl game since 2004, the Tigers didn't only bounce back in Year 2: They surged. And while there were changes in scheme and structure - more blocking from the tight end, tighter splits on the offensive line, etc. - this is a Gary Pinkel team, stocked with two- and three-star athletes and chips on shoulders. The Pinkel process of unearthing diamonds in the recruiting rough, winning a small handful of bigger recruiting battles, developing, developing, developing, and plugging his players into a tactically sound system is not likely to produce a Spurrier-at-Florida-esque run of conference titles. But if 2013 proved anything, it's that Pinkel and Missouri can compete in the league that was supposed to chew up newcomers and spit them out.

(This last point, by the way, has been a source of insecurity for some. CBS color commentator Gary Danielson, who will spend part of the upcoming game chuckling about how Mizzou might regret coming to the league and calling a long, strong touchdown by MU receiver Dorial Green-Beckham a "cute little play," told a radio audience that the early success of Missouri and Texas A&M have weakened the conference. For some in the league, the appearance of strength is more important than strength itself. That Missouri and Texas A&M were able to improve the SEC actually hurt it, because they proved it could be improved.)

Missouri fans, exhilarated, along for the ride, and for now humble and pleasant, have made a lot of new friends. They kept Steve Spurrier out of the conference title game, which made Georgia fans and others rather happy. And they sure seemed to have a lot of new friends in Tuscaloosa the week before the game began.

Mind you, the admiration will wear off. Opposing fans simply haven't gotten to know Mizzou well enough to hate it; if the Tigers continue to win some big games and threaten for division titles, the pleasantries will fade. But for now, there's a freshness and an eagerness to please.

Auburn fans, meanwhile, are wearing shirts that say "Powered by Gusoline" and riding an incredible wave of good fortune perhaps not seen since, well, Auburn's national title run in 2010. That year's Tigers were powered by one of the SEC's greatest players (quarterback Cam Newton) and seven wins by a touchdown or less, improved steadily, and peaked at the right time. They stunned Alabama with a huge comeback and took both the SEC and national titles.

It's not supposed to work this way, by the way. In the years after Auburn's national championship, head coach Gene Chizik changed up the offense - he let offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn leave for a head coaching job at Arkansas State and moved to a "pro-style" offense that wins recruits and has no idea what it wants to accomplish - and generally wasted a couple of years of good recruiting. AU fell to 8-5 in 2011, then 3-9 in 2012, and Chizik was fired fewer than 24 months after lifting college football's crystal ball. Malzahn took over, and while he was familiar enough with the surroundings and a lot of the players, it still seemed presumptuous to assume much improvement in his first season. I was confident enough in marginal first-year progress that I agreed to a bet with an Auburn fan. Now that they have drastically overachieved my own predictions, I will be sporting an Auburn Twitter avatar (limited time only) pretty soon.

I still stand by my thought process, though. Immediate turnarounds are a lot rarer than we want them to be, and let's just say that if you picked a season like this from Auburn, you were using criteria that will make you wrong about 99.9 percent of the time. But you would have been right this time.

Auburn was mediocre to above average in September, good in October, and both very good and blessed in November, winning two games with absurd finishes; the Tigers beat Georgia with a tipped, 73-yard, fourth-and-long touchdown with 25 seconds left, then tied Alabama with 32 seconds left and won with the first walk-off return of a missed field goal in the sport's history. Even with spectacular tactical acumen - something Malzahn clearly possesses - a turnaround like this would both take a bit of luck and prove that the last head coach was mismanaging his talent to a pretty serious degree.

But apparently Gene Chizik might have been doing just that.

★★★
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THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR THE END ZONE

Everything good goes corporate eventually. On Saturday, we witnessed the absorption of MACtion by college football's strongest collection of businesses. We have grown to love those mid-week MAC games on one of the ESPN channels because of the bunches of yards and points, the trick plays, the big turnovers, and the general wackiness. The first half of Saturday's SEC Championship featured all of those things.

Missouri set up a field goal with one fumble recovery and returned another for a touchdown. Auburn ran for yards and yards and yards and seemed to take complete control of the game. Missouri struck back with a key stop and the "cute" bomb from quarterback James Franklin to Green-Beckham, and despite Auburn's running game playing the hot knife in the Missouri defense's metaphorical butter, the score was 28-27, Auburn, at halftime.

You know a game is great when all of the known entities, all of the known stars, come up big.

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Halftime was the damnedest thing. The bands played, and some fans clapped. But in all it was just about the most sedate halftime I've ever seen. After a two-hour first half that featured 55 points and nearly 700 yards, everybody needed to regroup. The action would start again soon enough.

You know a game is great when all of the known entities, all of the known stars, come up big and, in some cases, exceed expectations.

Auburn's Nick Marshall, the magician in charge of Gus Malzahn's offense completed six of six passes (all to star receiver Sammie Coates) for 94 yards and a touchdown while running option keepers for 51 yards and a score in the first half. He would rush for another 50 yards and pass for 38 more in the second half.

Missouri's Green-Beckham, the No. 1 overall recruit in the recruiting class of 2012 by numerous recruiting services, caught a one-on-one touchdown in the first quarter (one that might have been overturned as incomplete had it been reviewed), blazed by the Auburn secondary late in the first half, took a screen pass from west to east and south to north in a 37-yard gain in the third quarter, and finished with 144 yards on six catches.

Auburn's star corner (and Iron Bowl hero) Chris Davis, meanwhile, got the best of DGB on a couple of key fourth downs late in the game and navigated a couple of nice punt returns.

Missouri's Henry Josey, subject of a College GameDay profile earlier on Saturday thanks to his complete recovery from a one-in-a-million knee injury, ripped off a 65-yard run to set up a much-needed Missouri score late in the third quarter.

Missouri's star defensive end Kony Ealy, partner to SEC Defensive Player of the Year Michael Sam, racked up three tackles for loss and stripped Marshall twice. Auburn's four defensive ends, so good against Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel (and others), combined for two sacks and four hurries.

But through all the star power, the afternoon (and early evening) belonged to Auburn running back Tre Mason. The junior from Palm Beach who chose Auburn in January 2011, fresh off of the 2010 national title, was both the beneficiary of perfect play-calling and blocking and a superb breaker of tackles. He rushed for a title game record 304 yards on 46 carries.

Mason's work between the tackles, always good, was superb. His ability to hit the corner before a sealed-off running lane could close was impeccable. He was powerful and fast. If we still made posters like we did in the early-'90s, we could say he posterized each and every Missouri safety, sometimes running through their tackles and often simply leaving them grasping at air. If he wasn't a Heisman finalist at the beginning of the day, he had left no doubt that he would become one by nightfall.

That Missouri was able to keep up as long as it did was confirmation of the resilience and maturity of Pinkel's Tigers. They took a 34-31 lead 10 minutes into the third quarter, but just as it looked like the Mizzou defense was figuring out ways to slow down the Auburn attack, Malzahn's offense responded with perhaps its most brutal stretch of the game. Within minutes, the score was 45-34, and though Missouri responded with Josey's long run and a Franklin touchdown to make it 45-42, Auburn had no plans of stopping. The Tigers from the Plains scored quickly to make it 52-42, and Mizzou finally began to crack. A long, first-down pass to a well-covered L'Damian Washington keyed a key three-and-out, and Missouri's final two possessions ended in fourth-down failures. Mizzou averaged 7.5 yards per play for the game and gained 534 yards, but they forever needed more.

At halftime, it felt like Auburn should be winning by more than one point. In those instances, the second half follows one of two narratives. Either the team that should be winning begins to get frustrated and fray a bit, making uncharacteristic mistakes and allowing the opponent to take control, or it simply keeps grinding and eventually pulls away. Auburn did the latter and claimed the SEC title with a thrilling, exhausting, sea-change of a 59-42 win.

★★★
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THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR THE FUTURE

Points scored in the SEC Championship game: 101. Points scored in Friday night's MAC title game: 74. Points scored in the Big 12's makeshift, winner-take-all title game (Baylor-Texas): 40.

watching Auburn's offense click at this super-human level was startling.

One game does not typically change the world; it does not signal a new way of life. It's just one game. But watching Auburn's offense click at this super-human level was startling. It raised some existential questions in this football fan.

I have 12 games of visual and statistical evidence that I can use to confidently tell you Missouri's defense is pretty good. Ole Miss gained a school-record 751 yards on Troy the week before the Rebels played the Tigers. Texas A&M gained 628 yards on Alabama. In 120 minutes against these two offenses, Missouri allowed 757 yards and 31 points. In 60 minutes against Auburn, Missouri allowed 677 and 59.

It wasn't the fact that Tre Mason went crazy, or that the play-calling was sound that was so startling; it was the ease with which Auburn created numbers advantages. On the first possession of the game, Missouri proved ready for power running. Auburn blocking back Jay Prosch was lined up in the backfield at an H-back position, as Missouri assumed he would be, and the Tigers first stuffed Marshall for a loss, then sacked and stripped him. But by the second possession, Malzahn was already adapting.

First, he lined up Prosch wide, motioning him into, and sometimes back out of, the backfield. Sensing his team was struggling to block Kony Ealy, he made Ealy the read defender in Auburn's nearly flawless zone read, leaving him unblocked and reacting to his reactions. The result, first, was some big gains by Marshall on option keepers. And as Missouri moved to a frequent 3-3-5 look to counter Auburn's counter, Auburn simply used motion to create four-on-two and five-on-three blocker-to-defender advantages. AU still needed its young offensive line to gel at a higher level than what it showed in September, and the line did just that. And the Tigers needed a back as fast as Mason to get to the edge and take advantage, and he did just that. Talent matters, but the way the talent was deployed was stunning.

For the rest of the game, Missouri moved from 3-3-5 to 4-2-5 to 4-3. It didn't matter. By the second or third possession of the game, Malzahn was two or three steps ahead of Mizzou defensive coordinator Dave Steckel, and when Auburn was able to break a (frequent) big gain, the Tigers used tempo to prevent substitution, to keep the same mismatches on the field, and to break Missouri again and again. Knowing it didn't have time to experiment or change defenses much, Missouri stuck to its base zone defense. And it kept getting burned.

After the game, Gary Pinkel was asked how one should go about stopping this offense when Malzahn has it going at this level. His response: "You know what, I'm the wrong person to ask, because I'd have stopped it if I could have. [...] Gus (Malzahn) does a great job with it and [has] a great quarterback. He has a lot of good people that can damage you. They have a lot of talent. You put that with a good scheme, and you've got problems. So obviously, I'm not the coach to ask that."

"I'm the wrong person to ask, because I'd have stopped it if I could have."

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When you pull off a game like this on such a big, national stage, people tend to notice. And when you do this a week after you rushed for 296 yards against Nick Saban's Alabama defense, people perhaps start to copy you as well. As Smart Football's Chris Brown is fond of saying, football is about numbers. If you can create scenarios in which you have more blockers than the defense has defenders, you're in business. But it's not supposed to be this easy, especially against a defense that, for so much of the season, took away opponents' strengths and prevented big plays. Sometimes Missouri's gameplans simply fail; Mizzou fans still haven't moved on from when Navy trounced the Tigers with a completely different style of option football in the 2009 Texas Bowl. But Auburn's precision and execution in this game were so strong that it didn't seem to matter what Missouri wanted to do. This was Steve Stone's curveball, Michael Jordan's shrugged shoulders. From a schematic standpoint, this was one of the most impressive arrangements (and counter-arrangements) of chess pieces I've seen in person.

Football is as cyclical as any sport. It might be the most cyclical of all. Offensive coaches figure out some new ways to move the ball; copycats move in, and after a while, a majority of teams have taken on the look of what was once rare and deadly. It happened with the Split T, it happened with the Wishbone, it happened with the pro-style offense of the late-1980s and 1990s, and it has happened with the spread over the last half-decade or so. (Some were doing it before then, yes.) Defenses always adapt. The 5-2 defense was a pretty logical counter to the Split-T. Wishbones lost a bit of their effectiveness when defenses shifted to faster, more flexible 4-3 defenses. And in recent years, we've seen defenses try to get even smaller and faster to counter the effects of the spread. To some degree, it has worked.

But after a couple of decades of tinkering at virtually every level of high school and college football, Malzahn has settled on a set of components that can keep his offense a step ahead of most defenses. It took a while for his offense to reach this point - after all, Auburn barely beat Washington State and needed a huge passing day from Marshall to beat Mississippi State because the Bulldogs kept the Tigers ground game grounded. Those teams' combined records: 12-12. But in recent weeks, Malzahn, Marshall, Mason and company have reached a new level of understanding.

We'll see if they can keep it up in the BCS title game. When you are in this sort of rhythm, the last thing you want to do is wait four or weeks for the next game; just ask 2008 Oklahoma. We'll see if the Tigers can find the same man-on-man advantages against a Florida State defense that might be the best in the country. And we'll see if they can keep it up next year, once opponents have had time to collectively react and adjust (and catch their breath).

Last year, Nick Saban famously asked, "Is this what we want football to be?" in reaction to the high-paced attacks that had even begun to permeate the vaunted SEC. The reaction from many corners of the college football universe (especially those based online) was a resounding "YES."

After watching this Auburn offense reach its most potent (I think) possible level, I can without hesitation say that I want Malzahn and Marshall and company to reach an even higher place next year, and for two main reasons. First, it's hypnotic and beautiful to watch. This is old-school power and new-school spread and everything in between. But second, I want to see how the great defensive staffs of teams like Alabama and LSU react and adjust. LSU caught an Auburn offense in only third gear or so and built a big lead before having to hold on for dear life in a 35-21 win, Auburn's only loss of the season; Alabama, meanwhile, was victimized in a way that Alabama is rarely victimized. Let's see how they counter.

★★★
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THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR DALLAS

Missouri's seniors look old. And they should. They've been through a lot in their four or five years in Columbia. James Franklin, once a baby-faced freshman who manned the Wildcat formation for a 10-3 Missouri team, has been beaten up through the years. His eyes have sunk back into his face a bit. He has suffered an impressive number of ailments in his career, from a torn labrum to a sprained MCL to a concussion to a severely sprained shoulder. He suffered the slings and arrows of his own fanbase. And then he went a full year without losing a start.

Missouri's seniors look old. And they should. They've been through a lot in their four or five years in Columbia.

Offensive lineman Max Copeland graduated high school in Billings, Montana, and just showed up in Columbia one fall. He started for most of the last two years, first because of necessity (Missouri barely had five healthy linemen in 2012), then because of experience. His beard is wild even by offensive lineman standards, and he has a wound on his nose that reopens each game.

Cornerback Randy Ponder was a walk-on from Edmond, Oklahoma, who was first told he would probably never get a scholarship, then went out and earned it. He kneeled and prayed so long in the end zone before the SEC Championship that a teammate came over and played Coach Norman Dale to his Strap: "God wants you on the field."

Receiver L'Damian Washington became a guardian to his two younger brothers when their parents died with them at a young age. He had ample opportunity to go down the wrong path; he did not. He caught what ended up being the deciding touchdown against Georgia (Mizzou beat Georgia 41-26. Not really a deciding touchdown if you win by two scores, right?) and reeled in a 96-yard touchdown against South Carolina, and with one game remaining in his senior season, he has 853 yards and 10 touchdowns.

Like Washington, Michael Sam was a recruiting afterthought. He fielded spare offers from mid-majors before Missouri swooped in after missing on bigger-name targets and landed him just before Signing Day. Almost 60 months later, he was named the best defensive player in what is generally regarded as the best defensive conference.

This group of seniors helped Missouri to a 10-3 finish and a win over BCS No. 1 Oklahoma in 2010 (Franklin had a key fourth-quarter touchdown in that game), held steady at 8-5 in 2011, collapsed to 5-7 in 2012, and rebounded to win the SEC East. They fit the hell-and-back cliché.

This team was told it didn't belong in its new league by anybody who could get its collective ear.

The "FIRE EVERYONE" portion of the Missouri fan base was out in full force by the second half (probably earlier) on Saturday, and while that's as predictable as the wind blowing in Oklahoma or the weather changing hourly in Missouri, it was still frustrating. This team was told it didn't belong in its new league by anybody who could get its collective ear: national talking heads, regional media, opponents, opposing fans. Given long odds of finishing better than about 6-6 or 7-5, Missouri came within one quarter of finishing the regular season undefeated. After a gut-wrenching loss to South Carolina, the Tigers were forced to win their final four games to take the East division, and they did it, only once winning by fewer than 14 points. With nearly every moment of expected comeuppance, the Tigers responded with victory. That they were only the second-best turnaround story in the Georgia Dome says everything in the world about Auburn but takes nothing away from Pinkel's squad.

Still, from Randy Ponder to Internet fans, everybody knew the gravity of this moment. You don't get many chances at a breakthrough in this conference; you get even fewer chances at an SEC title. Mississippi State has waited 15 years for a second chance. Three schools have waited more than 20 years for a first chance. Arkansas got three chances in 12 years, failed in all three, and have waited seven years and counting for a fourth opportunity.

Missouri will get another chance at some point. Hell, the Tigers might get another chance next year. With a division still in flux and the division's top three teams all losing their starting quarterbacks - Franklin, South Carolina's Connor Shaw, Georgia's Aaron Murray - perhaps the experience Maty Mauk got in replacing Franklin and, at times, thriving will give the Tigers a strong chance at a second straight title. But after 2014, a lot of this year's key pieces leave. Pinkel will be relying on a new cycle of recruits, his first from a new recruiting region, to keep the machine moving forward. There's no guarantee that he will. There's no telling what the future holds, and there's no promising that whatever happens will result in a return trip to the Georgia Dome.

The only guarantee: Missouri will get a shot at old conference-mate Oklahoma State next month in the Cotton Bowl. A win would give the Tigers their 12th and a shot at their second top 6-7 finish in seven seasons. A loss wouldn't take away the 11 games this resilient group has already banked.

★★★
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THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR PASADENA

The breaks went right, of course. With the way Auburn's luck has been over the last month or so, one simply had to assume that the Tigers, likely in need of a Michigan State win over Ohio State in the Big Ten title game to reach the BCS Championship, would get just that. The Spartans rolled in Indianapolis, and Auburn will roll on to Pasadena.

This was unthinkable even three weeks ago. But just when we think we have everything figured out, leave it to Auburn to throw us all for a loop. Gusoline powered Auburn through the SEC's December banquet, and Atlanta was once again the home base for stories of failure and redemption. Auburn will fail again one day, then return to Atlanta some day after that. It is the story of life in the SEC, and on the Plains, both the good and bad parts of the story tend to move along at a pretty rapid rate, just like Auburn's offense did in the Georgia Dome on Saturday afternoon.

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Sunday Shootaround: The Knicks, a disaster in 3 acts

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The Knicks: a disaster in 3 acts.

Act I: Knicks locker room, pregame

Metta World Peace was holding court. We should provide some context here because context is everything, especially when gifted with random Metta World Peace quotes that are of course bizarre and funny, but also illuminating in their way.

“I’m not chasing (a championship). Listen, whatever team I’m on is never rebuilding. When you get Metta World, you’re officially championship mentality. Right here, officially championship. I know everybody’s talking about division in here. I’ve heard that a lot. But that’s not what Metta World brings. Metta World brings a championship. That’s it. One thing. That’s what I do.”

The Knicks are in last place, the coach is on the proverbial hot seat and the inevitable trade rumors have started. The trade rumor in question involves Kyle Lowry, the tough but ornery Raptor point guard who is very much available and would be an upgrade over injured starter Raymond Felton. The price for Lowry includes Felton, World Peace and a future first round pick.

“There’s nothing to deal with. What am I dealing with? Getting paid to play basketball? Is that what I’m dealing with? I know some guys take trade rumors a little more personally.”

On its face that’s not a bad deal. Lowry is better, younger and healthier than Felton and has one less year on his contract. The pick is the cost of doing business, but it’s a defensible move for a team with playoff aspirations that has fallen on hard times, especially in a division as bad as the Atlantic Division when more than half the teams ahead of the Knicks probably wouldn’t be upset if they got their game together and passed them in the standings.

“I love challenges. All the teams that called me last year I wanted something that was going to be an adventure: China, the Knicks and Arena football. That was it. What else is an adventure, you know what I’m saying? This is the adventure that I was talking about. I didn’t know what adventure I was getting, I just wanted to hop into an adventure. And hey, let’s do it. Sometimes it’s good to be ready for the unpredictable.”

Here’s where it gets all Knicky because this is exactly the kind of trade that always comes back to haunt them. They already dealt first rounders in 2014 and 2016, so the earliest pick they can trade is in 2018, which is the one that would get them Lowry. Because the Knicks traded those picks to Raptors GM Masai Ujiri and the basketball world laughed at them, it’s been reported that owner Jim Dolan squashed the deal because he didn’t want Ujiri to make him look bad. Again.

“Patience is a weapon. I learned that from my Laker days.”

Metta World Peace played 11 seconds on Friday against Boston.

“When you take on a challenge some things are out of your control. If you go to work and your boss moves your desk, it is what it is. It’s similar. My desk has been moved from playing to riding the bench. But it’s OK, you know?”

Act II: #TakeThatMasaiUjiri

Mike Woodson decided to start Pablo Prigioni, mainly because Felton is injured and Prigioni is the only capable point guard left on the roster. A man of convention, Woodson rarely deviates from the tried-and-true Basketball Starting Lineup consisting of two guards, two forwards and a center, despite the surprising success the Knicks enjoyed playing unconventional lineups the previous season.

This is well-worn territory for most Knick fans, but it’s worth mentioning because with Prigioni handling the ball the Knicks looked a lot like their 2012-13 selves for long stretches of the game. Carmelo Anthony was in catch-and-shoot rhythm, dropping 20 first half points as New York clawed its way from back from a 17-point deficit. This was a lot better than just five days ago when the Celtics came to New York and won by 41 points on the Knicks home floor.

“We’ll have to play a perfect game,” Woodson had said prior to the action, which was both depressing and not entirely true. His team was hardly perfect and the Celtics aren’t exactly the juggernaut of old, but for about three quarters the Knicks looked surprisingly good. That was when Melo went to Prigioni and suggested that he use him as a decoy and instead feed Andrea Bargnani, who banged home a couple of fateful jump shots:

"Take that Masai Ujiri. Bargnani's two straight jumpers give #Knicks a 69-62 lead. Why are fans thinking Ujiri won that trade? TBD."

-- Marc Berman, New York Post

Predictably, that’s when everything went to hell. The lead evaporated. The Knicks scored just 13 points in the fourth quarter as Bargs and Melo took a dozen shots and made just two of them in a familiar haze of isolations and broken sets.

Melo wasn’t the only one with ideas. J.R. Smith decided -- without prompting -- that the Knicks would be better off if he didn’t shoot, which is a rather astonishing development for a guy who came into the game with 186 attempts in 486 minutes. Of course, he’s made just 34 percent of them so maybe he was on to something. The Celtics came roaring back and held on for a 90-86 victory.

Act III: Postgame

J.R. Smith: “I was going into the game trying to make opportunities for my teammates to excel. We need playmakers more than just scorers. My job is to get my teammates the easiest buckets we can, and we’re not getting those so I took it upon myself to sacrifice my shot to get other guys going. And it might not be the right way, it might be the right way, I don’t know. Just trying to figure this thing out.”

Mike Woodson: “I don’t know what that’s about.”

"My panic button's been on." -J.R. Smith

Smith: “We‘ve got enough guys on the offensive end. In order to get those guys going we have to have somebody to make the plays to get them easier shots and I’ll take that upon myself.”

Carmelo Anthony: “I don’t think it was his fault but we want him shooting the basketball. I don’t want to look up and see he took one shot. We need guys to do what they do well.”

Woodson: “Bargnani passed up on about three shots and we missed the mark for a big, opportunity to go high/low with him when he was wide open and that’s just the difference.”

Anthony: “Everybody’s trying to figure it out. Whether it’s helping us, hurting us, who’s to say. Everybody’s trying to figure everything out in a small period of time.”

Smith: “The pressure should have been on two and half, three weeks ago. My panic button’s been on. We have to figure out as a team how to make it work.”

Anthony: “I mean, It’s tough. If I said it was not tough I’d be lying to you, but what are we going to do? Stop playing now, and stop fighting and stop believing, we can’t do that.”

Kenyon Martin: “When it rains, it pours.”

OvertimeMore thoughts from the week that was

The NBA released its first All-Star voting update and you know what that means: Time for everybody to freak out about who’s in seventh and how many votes Kobe Bryant received. How dare fans not want to watch Roy Hibbert in a fast-paced, defense optional exhibition game! It’s like they don’t break down every game on Synergy.

But picking All-Stars is fun, so here’s how we’d vote.

EASTERN CONFERENCE

FRONTCOURT (Vote leaders: LeBron James, Paul George, Carmelo Anthony)

LeBron James: Obvious.

Paul George: Also obvious, and good on the fans for getting this one right.

Roy Hibbert: Hibbert’s the choice because of his defensive impact, but you could also make a reasonable case for Anthony, Al Horford, Brook Lopez or even Andre Drummond. Melo will probably get the vote and it’s really not worth getting worked up about.

GUARDS (Vote leaders: Dwyane Wade, Kyrie Irving)

John Wall: We’re going with Wall who has posted better numbers than Irving, and has the Wizards generally playing up to expectations. The Cavs have been a huge disappointment and Irving has to bear some of the responsibility.

Arron Afflalo: I’m picking Afflalo over Wade because they’ve had very similar production, but Afflalo has played significantly more minutes. Let’s do the side-by-side comparison heading into play on Friday:

Afflalo: 21.6 ppg, 4.6 rpg, 4.0 apg, .591 TS%, 19.6 PER, 828 minutes
Wade: 18.4 ppg, 4.8 rpg, 5.4 apg, .572 TS%, 21.0 PER, 539 minutes

WESTERN CONFERENCE

FRONTCOURT (Vote leaders: Kevin Durant, Dwight Howard, Blake Griffin)

Kevin Durant: Yes.

LaMarcus Aldridge and Kevin Love: Let’s take these two together since this is where the argument will come into play. Despite Minnesota’s slide, Love is averaging 24 points and leading the league in rebounding while posting a 26.3 PER. Aldridge is averaging career highs in points and rebounds for the team with the best record in the league.

It’s hard to argue against either one of these two picks, but because it’s the West there are other deserving candidates. In some order: Howard, Griffin, Tim Duncan, DeMarcus Cousins and Dirk Nowitzki should all get consideration. (Let’s pour one out for Anthony Davis, who would be awesome in the All-Star game, especially the one that’s going to be played in New Orleans.)

All of these players are great and having fantastic seasons. You can’t really go wrong with any of them, but the rules say you can only have two more and we’re going with Love and LMA.

BACKCOURT (Vote leaders: Chris Paul, Kobe Bryant)

Chris Paul: Still the “third-best player” in the league, but it’s getting tighter.

Steph Curry: He’s behind Kobe, but not by much and it won’t be long until he’s a fixture in the starting lineup. Let’s make a pact that if an aging all-time great who is either the first or second most well-known player in the league and who returned to the lineup after a scary career-threatening injury gets voted in by the fans, that the basketball community won’t shriek in horror about the injustice in the world.

Viewers GuideWhat we'll be watching this week

MONDAY Lakers at Hawks

Let’s give Mike D’Antoni some credit here. The Lakers have been without Steve Nash and Kobe Bryant for most of the year and Pau Gasol is a pale imitation of his former self. Yet thanks to players like Jordan Hill, Wesley Johnson and Xavier Henry they have been hanging around the .500 mark despite a subpar offense and wretched defense. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but here they are. Hill isn’t that much of a surprise. He just needed time and the right system. But Henry and Johnson? Those guys had one foot out of the league. Regardless of what happens, they can thank D’Antoni for rescuing their careers.

TUESDAY Thunder at Nuggets

A man can go crazy trying to figure out the Nuggets. Wiith the slow start and a long winning streak behind them, things have started to slow down. They’re on a four-game homestand and will play 11 of the next 15 in their building. That’s 11 chances to run people out of the gym and into that cold, unforgiving altitude. Let’s see where they are in mid-January before trying to figure them out.

WEDNESDAY Pacers at Heat

Sorry ‘Bron, but this is the best rivalry in the league right now. (See 'Say What?')

THURSDAY Spurs at Warriors

This is the second night of a back-to-back, the third game in four nights, the fifth game in seven and the last road game of a difficult four-game road trip. That sounds vaguely familiar, but there’s no way Pop would rest any of his starters for a TNT game though, right?

FRIDAY Bobcats at Pistons

Disclosure: I didn’t buy into the Pistons’ preseason hype, even though that hype was generated by really smart analysts whose work I admire, respect and trust. Just when I was ready to start gloating, they pulled it together and won six of eight. Then they lost three in a row. Given that the rest of the conference is in such a sorry state, the Pistons have the luxury of time to get things right so I will continue to withhold judgment. Love those Bobcats though.

SATURDAY Mavericks at Suns

The Suns have been hanging around the fringes of playoff contention in what feels like a happy accident, and now comes word via Scott Howard-Cooper that GM Ryan McDonough would consider trading some of the bevy of draft picks he’s acquired for an impact player now. It was always unlikely that he would keep all of them and if he can get an impact player now then why wait for the lottery?

SUNDAY Celtics at Pacers

Brad Stevens returns to the Hoosier State in what will surely be an emotional homecoming -- I can’t even type that with a straight face. Stevens didn’t set out to be the anti-Doc Rivers, and comparisons between the two are grossly unfair, but this will be the opposite of Doc’s teary return to the Garden last week.

The ListNBA players in some made up category

December 15 is the unofficial opening of the trade market as players who signed as free agents are now eligible to be dealt. With that in mind, here’s a look at some of the teams, players and execs who will play a central role in trade season:

1. Omer Asik: The Rockets have reportedly set a deadline of Dec. 19 to move the disgruntled big man -- Mark Deeks explains why that date is significant here -- and there are no shortage of suitors.

2. Masai Ujiri: The man is a wizard. That’s the only plausible explanation for how Ujiri could trade Andrea Bargnani and Rudy Gay and come out ahead in the transactions. Now he’s offering Kyle Lowry and the point guard market has opened wide, thanks to injuries in New York, Golden State and elsewhere. Someone will bite and they will probably regret it in the morning.

3. New York/Brooklyn: In order for there to be a trade there must be a seller and a buyer. This season more than ever, there are way more sellers than buyers, which would normally produce -- wait for it -- a buyer’s market where the well-heeled shopper can choose from a wide assortment of discounted players. That’s normally how things work, unless the shopper is flush with cash and desperate to make face-saving deals in the harsh glare of failed expectations. And that’s why we’re talking about first round picks in the year 2020.

4. Danny Ainge: The Celtics have been notably quiet so far this season. There have been few leaks and the ones that were out there, i.e. Rajon Rondo, were shot down so quickly that they barely registered a blip. Despite their better-than-expected start, the Celtics are not desperate to do anything, and it can be argued that things have actually worked out quite nicely for Ainge’s master plan. Veterans like Courtney Lee, Brandon Bass and Jordan Crawford have played well under first-year coach Brad Stevens and youngsters like Avery Bradley and Jared Sullinger have upped their value with healthy, productive seasons. Since making his big moves last summer, Ainge has felt like he is operating from a position of strength. This is the first test of that resolve.

5. Oklahoma City: The underrated part of Sam Presti’s work is beginning to take shape as Jeremy Lamb, Steven Adams and Reggie Jackson have all assumed larger roles with the Thunder. The question is whether Presti will make a big move that strengthens the roster now at the expense of the future. However, Thabo Sefolosha has stopped making shots, Kendrick Perkins is Perking and you only get so many chances with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. It feels like the time is finally right to make a big move and Presti has the pieces.

ICYMIor In Case You Missed It

ATO geniuses

Welcome to Doug Eberhardt, our newest SB Nation contributor who breaks down the art of the After Timeout play (ATO to those in the know).

Red Rocket Talk

James Herbert Q+A’s are always great, but Q+A’s with Spurs forward Matt Bonner? That’s pure gold, baby.

Masai's Reset Button

It’s right out of the Rebuilding for Dummies handbook every GM receives when he gets a new job. Step One: Trade Rudy Gay.

The Other Jayhawk Phenom

Of all the hyped freshmen in college basketball, none are more intriguing than Joel Embiid. Jonathan Tjarks explains.

Conveyor Belt

Tom Ziller goes in search of those traded Knick draft picks.

Say WhatRamblings of NBA players, coaches and GMs

"We've played (the Pacers) two years in the playoffs and you guys make it into a rivalry. There's no rivalry in the NBA these days. You don't see the competition enough. It's two really, really good teams striving to win a championship. Rivalries? There are no rivalries."-- LeBron James, before the Heat played the Pacers last week.

Reaction: Yeah, this is a rivalry.

"Last night, took it out to the movies. Maybe I’ll get on a boat ride with it. Candlelight dinner."-- Paul Pierce, talking about the glove he wears to protect his broken hand.

Reaction: Pretty sure that was the inspiration for the legendary Spinal Tap album, Smell the Glove.

"It’s also a nice excuse not to play hard. That’s a classic, ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’ Well, you don’t have trouble getting up to the paystub line. You know what you need to do to get your check. You know what to do. They will. They’ll figure it out. That’s one thing. They don’t want to do it that way. I understand that. That’s when you have to accept it or not. But there’s no reason not to play hard."-- Lakers coach Mike D’Antoni.

Reaction: Daaaaaaayum. Psst Pau Gasol, he’s talking about you.

This Week in GIFsfurther explanation unnecessary

Nick Young

Worthy of museum space.

David Stern

The serendipity of myriad TV cameras and the ol' DVR.

Zach Randolph

Not just a Grizzly, but a teddy bear too.

Roy Hibbert

The question is how David West missed the 7'2 giant coming across his field of vision.

Designer:Josh Laincz | Producer:Chris Mottram | Editor:Tom Ziller

2013 SB Nation All-America Team

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We like watching college football, from the kickoff of Sun Belt Tuesday to whenever the last Mountain West game ends, from opening night at Williams-Brice to the second song after Army-Navy. We like reading and watching and studying it and talking about it, too.

We have many different opinions on which players and coaches delivered the best performances this season, as do all of you. Dozens of our network's writers from all around the country filled out ballots for this year's picks. We welcome your feedback in the comments below. Thanks for making us a part of your college football, all year long.

Quarterback & Running Backs

Only Johnny Manziel and Jadeveon Clowney might've generated more discussion in 2013 than Florida State's Jameis Winston. With FSU less than a month away from the ultimate statement game, that's unlikely to cease anytime soon. The rest of his backfield here, Boston College's Andre Williams and Arizona's Ka'Deem Carey, each dominated despite facing frequent eight-man fronts.

Jameis Winston

Florida State Seminoles

237/349 (67.9%), 3,820 YDS, 38 TDs, 10 INTs, 193 rushing YDS, 4 rushing TDs
  • Jameis Winston, Florida State - 22 votes
  • Jordan Lynch, Northern Illinois - 11 votes
  • Johnny Manziel, Texas A&M - 7 votes
  • Derek Carr, Fresno State - 4 votes
  • Marcus Mariota, Oregon - 2 votes
  • Teddy Bridgewater, Louisville - 2 votes
  • AJ McCarron, Alabama - 1 vote
  • Chuckie Keeton, Utah State - 1 vote

Andre Williams

Boston College Eagles

2,102 YDS, 17 TDs, 175.17 YDS/G
  • Andre Williams, Boston College - 34 votes
  • Ka'Deem Carey, Arizona - 14 votes
  • Carlos Hyde, Ohio State - 11 votes
  • Tre Mason, Auburn - 4 votes
  • Bishop Sankey, Washington - 4 votes
  • Melvin Gordon, Wisconsin - 4 votes
  • Kapri Bibbs, Colorado State - 4 votes
  • TJ Yeldon, Alabama - 3 votes
  • Ameer Abdullah, Nebraska - 3 votes
  • Jordan Lynch, Northern Illinois - 3 votes
  • Lache Seastrunk, Baylor - 2 votes

Ka'Deem Carey

Arizona Wildcats

1,716 YDS, 17 TDs, 156 YDS/G, 173 receiving YDS, 1 receiving TD
  • Andre Williams, Boston College - 34 votes
  • Ka'Deem Carey, Arizona - 14 votes
  • Carlos Hyde, Ohio State - 11 votes
  • Tre Mason, Auburn - 4 votes
  • Bishop Sankey, Washington - 4 votes
  • Melvin Gordon, Wisconsin - 4 votes
  • Kapri Bibbs, Colorado State - 4 votes
  • TJ Yeldon, Alabama - 3 votes
  • Ameer Abdullah, Nebraska - 3 votes
  • Jordan Lynch, Northern Illinois - 3 votes
  • Lache Seastrunk, Baylor - 2 votes
  • QB
  • RB
  • RB

Wide Receivers & Tight End

We planned on awarding two wide receivers and two tight ends, but due to a tie, we're spreading our offense out. Mike Evans might not have the eye-popping numbers of fellow first-teamers Brandin Cooks and Davante Adams, but when you put 566 yards and five touchdowns on the country's No. 2 and 3 teams, you're in.

Mike Evans

Texas A&M Aggies

1,322 YDS, 12 TDs, 110 YDS/G, 20.34 YDS/R
  • Mike Evans, Texas A&M - 22 votes
  • Davante Adams, Fresno State - 13 votes
  • Brandin Cooks, Oregon State - 13 votes
  • Allen Robinson, Penn State - 8 votes
  • Willie Snead, Ball State - 4 votes
  • Sammy Watkins, Clemson - 4 votes
  • Jordan Matthews, Vanderbilt - 3 votes
  • Jeremy Gallon, Michigan - 1 vote
  • Antwan Goodley, Baylor - 1 vote
  • Odell Beckham Jr., LSU - 1 vote

Davante Adams (tie)

Fresno State Bulldogs

1,645 YDS, 23 TDs, 137.1 YDS/G, 13.48 YDS/R
  • Mike Evans, Texas A&M - 22 votes
  • Davante Adams, Fresno State - 13 votes
  • Brandin Cooks, Oregon State - 13 votes
  • Allen Robinson, Penn State - 8 votes
  • Willie Snead, Ball State - 4 votes
  • Sammy Watkins, Clemson - 4 votes
  • Jordan Matthews, Vanderbilt - 3 votes
  • Jeremy Gallon, Michigan - 1 vote
  • Antwan Goodley, Baylor - 1 vote
  • Odell Beckham Jr., LSU - 1 vote

Brandin Cooks (tie)

Oregon State Beavers

1,670 YDS, 15 TDs, 139.2 YDS/G, 13.92 YDS/R
  • Mike Evans, Texas A&M - 22 votes
  • Davante Adams, Fresno State - 13 votes
  • Brandin Cooks, Oregon State - 13 votes
  • Allen Robinson, Penn State - 8 votes
  • Willie Snead, Ball State - 4 votes
  • Sammy Watkins, Clemson - 4 votes
  • Jordan Matthews, Vanderbilt - 3 votes
  • Jeremy Gallon, Michigan - 1 vote
  • Antwan Goodley, Baylor - 1 vote
  • Odell Beckham Jr., LSU - 1 vote

Jace Amaro

Texas Tech Red Raiders

1,240 YDS, 7 TDs, 103.3 YDS/G, 12.65 YDS/R
  • Jace Amaro, Texas Tech - 59 votes
  • Eric Ebron, North Carolina - 34 votes
  • Nick O'Leary, Florida State - 12 votes
  • Devin Funchess, Michigan - 6 votes
  • Gator Hoskins, Marshall - 4 votes
  • Austin Seferian-Jenkins, Washington - 4 votes
  • Ted Bolser, Indiana - 1 vote
  • WR
  • WR
  • WR
  • TE

Offensive Line

The pieces of our starting offensive line powered four of the country's 15 best offenses, according to Football Outsiders. (And then there's Arkansas.) Two were blue-chip recruits, one's the son of a Pro Football Hall of Famer, and all will be among the first players drafted at their positions.

Jake Matthews

Texas A&M Aggies

  • Jake Matthews, Texas A&M - 26 votes
  • Cyrus Kouandjio, Alabama - 8 votes
  • Taylor Lewan, Michigan - 6 votes
  • Cameron Erving, Florida State - 4 votes
  • Jack Mewhort, Ohio State - 1 vote
  • Matt Patchan, Boston College - 1 vote
  • Tyler Loos, Northern Illinois - 1 vote
  • Cedric Ogbuehi, Texas A&M - 1 vote

Cyrus Kouandjio

Alabama Crimson Tide

  • Jake Matthews, Texas A&M - 26 votes
  • Cyrus Kouandjio, Alabama - 8 votes
  • Taylor Lewan, Michigan - 6 votes
  • Cameron Erving, Florida State - 4 votes
  • Jack Mewhort, Ohio State - 1 vote
  • Matt Patchan, Boston College - 1 vote
  • Tyler Loos, Northern Illinois - 1 vote
  • Cedric Ogbuehi, Texas A&M - 1 vote

Cyril Richardson

Baylor Bears

  • Cyril Richardson, Baylor - 18 votes
  • David Yankey, Stanford - 16 votes
  • Ryan Groy, Wisconsin - 3 votes
  • Xavier Su'a-Filo, UCLA - 2 votes
  • Dominic Flewellyn, Bowling Green - 1 vote
  • Josue Matias, Florida State - 1 vote
  • Jarvis Harrison, Texas A&M - 1 vote
  • Anthony Steen, Alabama - 1 vote
  • Tre' Jackson, Florida State - 1 vote
  • Gabe Jackson, Mississippi State - 1 vote

David Yankey

Stanford Cardinal

  • Cyril Richardson, Baylor - 18 votes
  • David Yankey, Stanford - 16 votes
  • Ryan Groy, Wisconsin - 3 votes
  • Xavier Su'a-Filo, UCLA - 2 votes
  • Dominic Flewellyn, Bowling Green - 1 vote
  • Josue Matias, Florida State - 1 vote
  • Jarvis Harrison, Texas A&M - 1 vote
  • Anthony Steen, Alabama - 1 vote
  • Tre' Jackson, Florida State - 1 vote
  • Gabe Jackson, Mississippi State - 1 vote

Travis Swanson

Arkansas Razorbacks

  • Travis Swanson, Arkansas - 6 votes
  • Hroniss Grasu, Oregon - 5 votes
  • Bryan Stork, Florida State - 5 votes
  • Tyler Larsen, Utah State - 2 votes
  • Weston Richburg, Colorado State - 1 vote
  • Zac Kerin, Toledo - 1 vote
  • Mike Matthews, Texas A&M - 1 vote
  • OT
  • OT
  • OG
  • OG
  • C

Defensive Line

Pittsburgh's Aaron Donald blew up more plays per game behind the line of scrimmage than any defender since 2007. He's joined by a leader of what Nick Saban called the SEC's best front, a Big Ten beast who was the subject of an SB Nation longform, and the state of South Carolina's surprise sacks leader.

Michael Sam

Missouri Tigers

45 tackles, 18.0 TFL, 10.5 sacks, 1 fumble forced
  • Michael Sam, Missouri - 12 votes
  • Vic Beasley, Clemson - 11 votes
  • Marcus Smith, Louisville - 9 votes
  • Jackson Jeffcoat, Texas - 6 votes
  • Jeremiah Attaochu, Georgia Tech - 2 votes
  • Leonard Williams, USC - 2 votes

Vic Beasley

Clemson Tigers

36 tackles, 19 TFL, 12 sacks, 4 forced fumbles
  • Michael Sam, Missouri - 12 votes
  • Vic Beasley, Clemson - 11 votes
  • Marcus Smith, Louisville - 9 votes
  • Jackson Jeffcoat, Texas - 6 votes
  • Jeremiah Attaochu, Georgia Tech - 2 votes
  • Leonard Williams, USC - 2 votes

Aaron Donald

Pittsburgh Panthers

54 tackles, 26.5 TFL, 10 sacks, 16 QB hurries, 4 fumbles forced
  • Aaron Donald, Pittsburgh - 21 votes
  • Ra'Shede Hageman, Minnesota - 8 votes
  • Will Sutton, Arizona State - 7 votes
  • Nikita Whitlock, Wake Forest - 4 votes
  • Louis Nix III, Notre Dame - 4 votes
  • Jay Bromley, Syracuse - 2 votes
  • Martin Ifedi, Memphis - 1 vote

Ra'Shede Hageman

Minnesota Golden Gophers

34 tackles, 11 TFL, 2 sacks, 8 passes broken up, 2 kicks blocked, 1 INT
  • Aaron Donald, Pittsburgh - 21 votes
  • Ra'Shede Hageman, Minnesota - 8 votes
  • Will Sutton, Arizona State - 7 votes
  • Nikita Whitlock, Wake Forest - 4 votes
  • Louis Nix III, Notre Dame - 4 votes
  • Jay Bromley, Syracuse - 2 votes
  • Martin Ifedi, Memphis - 1 vote
  • DE
  • DE
  • DT
  • DT

Linebackers

Is this the deepest position group of the year? The middle of the defense made for our tightest vote, and our second-team linebackers could serve as a starting trio without dropoff. Fun fact: our No. 1, the explosive Anthony Barr, has only been playing the position for two years now.

Anthony Barr

UCLA Bruins

63 tackles, 20 TFL, 10 sacks, 6 fumbles forced
  • Anthony Barr, UCLA - 22 votes
  • Khalil Mack, Buffalo - 20 votes
  • Trent Murphy, Stanford - 20 votes
  • C.J. Mosley, Alabama - 18 votes
  • Ryan Shazier, Ohio State - 8 votes
  • Chris Borland, Wisconsin - 8 votes
  • Shaquil Barrett, Colorado State - 4 votes
  • Shayne Skov, Stanford - 4 votes
  • Myles Jack, UCLA - 3 votes
  • Kyle Van Noy, BYU - 2 votes

Khalil Mack

Buffalo Bulls

94 tackles, 19 TFL, 10.5 sacks, 5 fumbles forced, 3 INTs, 2 TDs
  • Anthony Barr, UCLA - 22 votes
  • Khalil Mack, Buffalo - 20 votes
  • Trent Murphy, Stanford - 20 votes
  • C.J. Mosley, Alabama - 18 votes
  • Ryan Shazier, Ohio State - 8 votes
  • Chris Borland, Wisconsin - 8 votes
  • Shaquil Barrett, Colorado State - 4 votes
  • Shayne Skov, Stanford - 4 votes
  • Myles Jack, UCLA - 3 votes
  • Kyle Van Noy, BYU - 2 votes

Trent Murphy

Stanford Cardinal

58 tackles, 21.5 TFL, 14 sacks, 2 fumbles forced, 1 INT, 1 TD
  • Anthony Barr, UCLA - 22 votes
  • Khalil Mack, Buffalo - 20 votes
  • Trent Murphy, Stanford - 20 votes
  • C.J. Mosley, Alabama - 18 votes
  • Ryan Shazier, Ohio State - 8 votes
  • Chris Borland, Wisconsin - 8 votes
  • Shaquil Barrett, Colorado State - 4 votes
  • Shayne Skov, Stanford - 4 votes
  • Myles Jack, UCLA - 3 votes
  • Kyle Van Noy, BYU - 2 votes
  • LB
  • LB
  • LB

Defensive Backs

The top defensive backs on two of college football's best defenses and maybe the two best ballhawks give us a secondary that could shut down any passing attack. Justin Gilbert led what was the Big 12's best pass defense in yards-per-attempt and second in passer rating.

Justin Gilbert

Oklahoma State Cowboys

6 INTs, 7 PBUs, 40 tackles, 3 total TDs
  • Justin Gilbert, Oklahoma State - 16 votes
  • Darqueze Dennard, Michigan State - 14 votes
  • Lamarcus Joyner, Florida State - 9 votes
  • Jason Verrett, TCU - 7 votes
  • Ifo Ekpre-Olomu, Oregon - 6 votes
  • Lorenzo Doss, Tulane - 3 votes
  • D'Joun Smith, FAU - 2 votes
  • Blake Countess, Michigan - 2 votes

Darqueze Dennard

Michigan State Spartans

4 INTs, 59 tackles, 10 pass breakups, 2.5 TFL, 2 forced fumbles
  • Justin Gilbert, Oklahoma State - 16 votes
  • Darqueze Dennard, Michigan State - 14 votes
  • Lamarcus Joyner, Florida State - 9 votes
  • Jason Verrett, TCU - 7 votes
  • Ifo Ekpre-Olomu, Oregon - 6 votes
  • Lorenzo Doss, Tulane - 3 votes
  • D'Joun Smith, FAU - 2 votes
  • Blake Countess, Michigan - 2 votes

Anthony Harris

Virginia Cavaliers

8 INTs, 80 tackles, 6 pass breakups, 3.5 TFL, 1 sack, 1 forced fumble
  • Anthony Harris, Virginia - 11 votes
  • Ha Ha Clinton-Dix, Alabama - 10 votes
  • Calvin Pryor, Louisville - 3 votes
  • Deone Bucannon, Washington State - 3 votes
  • Ty Zimmerman, Kansas State - 2 votes
  • Vinnie Sunseri, Alabama - 2 votes
  • Terrence Brooks, Florida State - 2 votes

Ha Ha Clinton-Dix

Alabama Crimson Tide

2 INTs, 45 tackles, 4 pass breakups, 1.5 TFL
  • Anthony Harris, Virginia - 11 votes
  • Ha Ha Clinton-Dix, Alabama - 10 votes
  • Calvin Pryor, Louisville - 3 votes
  • Deone Bucannon, Washington State - 3 votes
  • Ty Zimmerman, Kansas State - 2 votes
  • Vinnie Sunseri, Alabama - 2 votes
  • Terrence Brooks, Florida State - 2 votes
  • CB
  • CB
  • S
  • S

Specialists

Though special teams seldom gets the credit it deserves (we miss you, Jim Tressel), it proved to be one of our most contentious votes. Three or four kickers warranted top honors, and a number of punters are just as deserving. And the most notorious return play in college football history isn't enough for Chris Davis to make the cut.

Jeff Budzien

Northwestern Wildcats

23-25 (92%), 35-35 PATs, 32.31% touchbacks
  • Jeff Budzien, Northwestern - 5 votes
  • Anthony Fera, Texas - 4 votes
  • Jeremiah Detmer, Toledo - 3 votes
  • Nate Freese, Boston College - 3 votes
  • Roberto Aguayo, Florida State - 3 votes
  • Zane Gonzalez, Arizona State - 2 votes
  • Austin Lopez, San Jose State - 2 votes
  • Andy Phillips, Utah - 2 votes
  • Marvin Kloss, USF - 2 votes

Drew Kaser

Texas A&M Aggies

47.39 yards per punt
  • Drew Kaser, Texas A&M - 7 votes
  • Austin Rehkow, Idaho - 6 votes
  • Zac Murphy, Miami (OH) - 6 votes
  • Mike Sadler, Michigan State - 3 votes
  • Pat O'Donnell, Miami - 2 votes
  • Cody Webster, Purdue - 2 votes
  • Tom Hornsey, Memphis - 2 votes

Ty Montgomery

Stanford Cardinal

31.16 yards per return, 76.7 return yards per game, 2 return TDs
  • Ty Montgomery, Stanford - 6 votes
  • Carlos Wiggins, New Mexico - 5 votes
  • Ryan Switzer, North Carolina - 5 votes
  • Chris Davis, Auburn - 4 votes
  • Sammy Watkins, Clemson - 1 vote
  • Stacy Coley, Miami - 1 vote
  • Brelan Chancellor, North Texas - 1 vote
  • Justin Gilbert, Oklahoma State - 1 vote
  • Trey Williams, Texas A&M - 1 vote
  • K
  • P
  • RET

Individual and Conference Awards

Let's keep going. And because this is SB Nation, you get our choice for the best GIF from 2013. It's only natural.

Offensive Player of the Year

Jameis Winston, Florida State

The electric freshman doesn't have the biggest stats and didn't play the toughest schedule, but he helped his team trash its opponents so badly that he rarely played full games.

Defensive Player of the Year

Aaron Donald, Pittsburgh

The best player none of your friends are talking about. Had he played for a slightly better team, everyone would compare his year to Ndamukong Suh's Heisman-finalist season.

Coach of the Year

Gus Malzahn, Auburn

A year removed from losing all eight of its conference games, Auburn is one win away from its second national title in four years.

GIF of the Year

The kick six

As if it could be anything else. Sorry, Alabama fans.

SB Nation's All-America Second Team

Offense

QB Jordan Lynch, Northern Illinois
RB Carlos Hyde, Ohio State
RB Tre Mason, Auburn
WR Allen Robinson, Penn State*
TE Eric Ebron, North Carolina
OT Taylor Lewan, Michigan
OT Cameron Erving, Florida State
OG Ryan Groy, Wisconsin
OG Xavier Su'a-Filo, UCLA
C Hroniss Grasu, Oregon (tie)
C Bryan Stork, Florida State (tie)

Defense

DE Marcus Smith, Louisville
DE Jackson Jeffcoat, Texas
DT Will Sutton, Arizona State
DT Nikita Whitlock, Wake Forest (tie)
DT Louis Nix III, Notre Dame (tie)
LB C.J. Mosley, Alabama
LB Ryan Shazier, Ohio State
LB Chris Borland, Wisconsin
CB Lamarcus Joyner, Florida State
CB Jason Verrett, TCU
S Calvin Pryor, Louisville
S Deone Bucannon, Washington State

Specialists

K Anthony Fera, Texas
P Austin Rehkow, Idaho (tie)
P Zac Murphy, Miami (OH) (tie)
RET Carlos Wiggins, New Mexico (tie)
RET Ryan Switzer, North Carolina (tie)

* = One slot fewer due to tie in first team

Rest of the best

The American Offensive Player of the Year:
Teddy Bridgewater, Louisville
The American Defensive Player of the Year:
Marcus Smith, Louisville
The American Coach of the Year:
George O'Leary, UCF

ACC Offensive Player of the Year:
Jameis Winston, Florida State
ACC Defensive Player of the Year:
Aaron Donald, Pittsburgh
ACC Coach of the Year:
David Cutcliffe, Duke

Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year:
Bryce Petty, Baylor
Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year:
Justin Gilbert, Oklahoma State
Big 12 Coach of the Year:
Art Briles, Baylor

Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year:
Braxton Miller, Ohio State
Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year:
Chris Borland, Wisconsin
Big Ten Coach of the Year:
Mark Dantonio, Michigan State

Conference USA Offensive Player of the Year:
Rakeem Cato, Marshall
Conference USA Defensive Player of the Year:
Lorenzo Doss, Tulane
Conference USA Coach of the Year:
David Bailiff, Rice

Independent Offensive Player of the Year:
Keenan Reynolds, Navy
Independent Defensive Player of the Year:
Kyle Van Noy, BYU
Independent Coach of the Year:
Ken Niumatalolo, Navy

MAC Offensive Player of the Year:
Jordan Lynch, Northern Illinois
MAC Defensive Player of the Year:
Khalil Mack, Buffalo
MAC Coach of the Year:
Pete Lembo, Ball State

MWC Offensive Player of the Year:
Derek Carr, Fresno State
MWC Defensive Player of the Year:
Shaquil Barrett, Colorado State
MWC Coach of the Year:
Matt Wells, Utah State

Pac-12 Offensive Player of the Year:
Marcus Mariota, Oregon
Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year:
Anthony Barr, UCLA
Pac-12 Coach of the Year:
Ed Orgeron, USC

SEC Offensive Player of the Year:
Johnny Manziel, Texas A&M
SEC Defensive Player of the Year:
C.J. Mosley, Alabama
SEC Coach of the Year:
Gus Malzahn, Auburn

Sun Belt Offensive Player of the Year:
Antonio Andrews, Western Kentucky
Sun Belt Defensive Player of the Year:
Andrew Jackson, Western Kentucky
Sun Belt Coach of the Year:
Mark Hudspeth, Louisiana-Lafayette

Voters: Andrew Callahan, Anson Whaley, Anthony Dias, Avinash Kunnath, "BCBull," Ben Phillips, Brian Favat, Brian Towle, Bryan Steedman, Bryan Vance, Chris Fuhrmeister, Christopher Hondros, Collin Sherwin, Dan Lyons, Daniel Tummeley, Eric Ostby, Evan Budrovich, Graham Coffelt, Graham Filler, "Green Akers," Hilary Lee, Ian Boyd, Jack Follman, Jamie Plunkett, Jason Kirk, Jerry Steinberg, Jimmy Kelley, John Cassillo, Jon Morse, Kerry Crowley, Lucas Jackson, Luke Zimmermann, Marshall Weber, Matthew Eliason, "matthew_k," "MikeTTU," Paul Guttman, Pete Volk, "Phony Bennett," "rcb05," Rodger Sherman, "Salt Creek and Stadium," "spfleming," "SpreadsheetAg," Thomas Beindit, Tom from The Daily Gopher, Travis Miller, "WacArnolds," "WVUIE97," Zach Harig
Executive Producer:Luke Zimmermann | Editor:Jason Kirk | Developer:Josh Laincz | Designer:Ramla Mahmood | Special Thanks:Georgia Cowley, Chris Mottram

Qatar Chronicles: Part I, Destination everywhere

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David Roth traveled to Qatar for a closer look at the World Cup's future home. Below is the first installment of his five-part series.

★★★

The defining thing about airports is that no one really wants to be there. Everyone in every airport would rather be somewhere else, someplace more like home, and preferably soon. This goes for all the people selling denatured food to people who don't much want to eat it; all the travelers who would just as soon be wherever they're going; the tired-eyed gripe-magnets overseeing security; the wan salespeople in the Duty Free grimly spritzing cologne on scowling Russians.

Airports' international terminals are mostly the same sort of non-place. That place is an expensive one. It is a world Free of Duty, but also inhabited and ruled by the sullen and uncompromising familiarity of global luxury brands. Those can be found in the Duty Free stores, not so much being sold as announcing to travelers coming or going what kind of place they're moving through -- a world merciless and seamless and innocent of discount, recognizable and ubiquitous and familiar in the least-comforting ways.  Those shirts are made in the developing world for Hugo Boss, and they cost $155. The sunglasses say Prada and Ray Ban on them, and will run around $200. There are Mont Blanc pens gleaming sleekly from inside glass cases, and the choking floral omnipresence of cologne and perfume, and also there are these giant goonish jugs of Johnnie Walker Blue Label that cost $600 and are too big to be anything but exemplary how-you-like-me-now purchases. (They might as well have Maybach Music logos on them.)

Everything's expensive-looking and artful enough, but there is something both robotic and almost poignant about it.
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There are handbags blocky and impossibly expensive, sitting on little platforms, red and fat as spotlit hunks of pastrami.

There is probably a video playing someplace, too, and that video will be weirder than you'd expect: The Mentalist chasing a beautiful woman through Paris so he can give her an umbrella in a rainstorm; androgynous dancers, poker-faced while performing elaborate choreography in front of a gleaming black sedan.

Everything's expensive-looking and artful enough, but there is something both robotic and almost poignant about it. It's the same feeling you'll get while watching a movie in which a robot appears to experience fear or doubt or some other human emotion. The cold futility of human-ish things washed over the steel and circuitry of a bloodless precision-engineered future that does not necessarily require us. It's hard to say why that might inspire any emotion besides a sort of pity. It's complicated.

The idea of the great international Duty Free experience, it seems to me, is to communicate a simultaneously comforting and unattainable/aspirational depiction of globo-luxury. The brands you see in the international terminal are international themselves because they are recognizable as the More Expensive Option most anywhere in the world. They symbolize the idea of linked ubiquity and wealth, the promise that money is always with us, wherever we might find ourselves. If you want to get something with one of these resonant names on it in an airport -- something that says Dior or Armani -- you will be buying either cologne or perfume, quite literally paying for the smell of internationally recognized wealth.

The poignant part is that luxury, at least as these brands define it, is pretty transparently a joke. All the flouncing and smoldering and whimsy in perfume ads, all those global ambassadors of elegance smugging over their fat-faced wristwatches -- it's not just that this sort of thing isn't reality for the vast majority of people on Earth. It is that it is so wildly and weirdly unreal that it's nearly impossible to do anything but laugh when confronted with its sweep and pomp. Keira Knightley escapes a handsome suitor (wait, why?) and lifts off in a waiting hot-air balloon (oh?) and smiles mysteriously and we are supposed to think of something, and want that thing we're thinking of. It is difficult to see how that might work.

To be in the Duty Free nowhere of the international terminal is to see all that very plainly -- all these expensive things, honestly far too expensive to buy, price-tagged and just sort of presenting themselves for their own sake. These stores are in the airport mostly to remind you that they are there, that luxury brands are wherever you are going, as cruelly overpriced and possessed of the same symbolic heft at one end of your journey as on the other. They are the constants, the things that money makes everywhere, de-linked and uncoupled and sublime and ridiculous, unreal by design. They signify wealth and airless consensus; they're a reminder that, wherever you're going, it will probably be important to have as much money as possible.

Okay. Now imagine a country like that.

★★★

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Or, look at it another way. Imagine a country without water that for most of its existence was a harsh place paced off by nomads. Islam came there sometime in the seventh century and stayed. Other rulers came and went, too; there are fireworks along the gulf on December 18 to celebrate National Day, which is when the country kicked out the regional rival that had dominated it for nearly a century. In the souks, in early December, you'll see the chintzy-shiny outfits for sale that little kids will wear on National Day; Doha's kids will be dressed like little bedazzled flags. There are scarves and t-shirts with pictures of the emir, mustachioed and unsmiling.

This remote place was suddenly very much of interest, and just unbelievably gob-smackingly ridiculously wealthy.

Anyway, the British came, inevitably, and stayed for a time, too. As the British tended to do, they turned some towns into cities, even small ones on the coast that existed modestly, off the trade generated by pulling things from the sea. (Fish or pearls, mostly). There were never a lot of people in this country, or in its largest city. This is a tough place to live: exactly as arid and hot as you might imagine, even in the capital, even along the Corniche that curls along the Arabian Sea, where there's at least a breeze.

The British left for good only two generations ago. The country was different, because it had discovered that it was located over the largest natural gas deposit known to exist in the world. This remote place was suddenly very much of interest, and just unbelievably gob-smackingly ridiculously wealthy. And so it went about making itself over into a place that looked more like the wealthy nation that it suddenly was.

There is a way that this can be done very quickly, but it's not necessarily the sort of thing that your freer countries can do readily. You will need a great many workers to do it. You will need to wring a lot of out of them. You will need the absolute right to raze whatever is in the way of the five-star hotel or glass-clad office building or statement-making architectural masterpiece or mall or soccer stadium that should rightly be there, as well as the means to build that thing.

Qatar, which is an emirate and an absolute monarchy, can do all that. There is a vast and opaque state. Politics, such as they exist, are of the bureaucratic and Palace Intrigue variety. There's also consultative semi-parliament, to which citizens were supposed to begin electing some members in 2005, and then in 2013, and anyway maybe sometime in the future.

There are laws, and they are enforced, but there is not quite accountability as it's commonly understood elsewhere. Mistakes get made in the churning. There is a great deal of money, though -- Qatar has the highest per capita GDP in the world and 14 percent of (citizen) households are millionaires -- and a great deal of ambition. And so there is a great deal of churning.

That is both how and why Qatar built and is building Doha so fast. It is also how China built cities for millions of people from something like scratch, and how nearby gulf states such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai became the glassy, glossy petro-boomtowns they are. To build a nation quickly, and from scratch, requires a certain amount of planning, but mostly it is a matter of doing and making. Planning is important, but it tends to seem less important as things speed up.

And so big buildings are built on delirious spec, little streets suddenly have entirely too many Mercedes Benzes on them. There is no way to tell how many malls are too many, and the government is not saying no to any kind of development, really, and so it's left up to the market and the market says YES, HELL YES and up they all go.

Architects and artists work for hire, and can be hired; wealthy people and universities and petroleum types will go where the money is, wherever the money is, and they will want places to eat and sleep and play and park their boats. The necessary labor can be imported from abroad, and very inexpensively; contractors will facilitate both that human inflow and its implementation. It can be done, if you can afford it and if you really want it.

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There is going to be some natural shock at this sudden city, and some distaste at the way in which it's being made.

And if you really want it -- if you really want it done, grandly and quickly, to your specifications -- you can do it this way, and quickly.

Except that the rest of the world, which is slower and different, did not and mostly does not do it this way. There is going to be some natural shock at this sudden city, and some distaste at the way in which it's being made -- rightly, in some instances. The government is not necessarily capable of or interested in keeping the closest eye on those contractors, whether for reasons of cynical expedience or the sheer impossibility of keeping up with anything as fast and vast as what has been loosed. Also those contractors do not necessarily have to do all the things they have to do elsewhere; there are laws, even somewhat strict laws, but they are not fully enforced or enforceable. And so the contractors don't do what they have to do.

Human Rights Watch notices the results of this: the horror of the market left fully alone, of workers sleeping 12-to-a-shipping-can somewhere out of sight or in un-air-conditioned rooms next to old chemical waste and dying over and over on the job, whether in falls (over 1,000 laborers died this way in Qatar in 2013, a rate nearly three times that of similar fatalities in the UK) or when their hearts blow up under the unbearable heat, the unbearable pressure of making a world city happen immediately.

The contractors sometimes don't pay the workers when they should, or at all. The contractors, due to a Qatari law called kafala, sponsor these laborers' presence in the country, and the laborers cannot change jobs or leave the country unless the contractors let them, which they of course won't. The contractors can make the laborers sign statements saying they'd been paid wages they hadn't been paid, which they of course do. The International Trade Union Confederacy notices this and calls Qatar a "slave state." Amnesty International notices and puts out, just before Thanksgiving, a 169-page report called "The Dark Side of Immigration," which credits the Qatari government for seeming to want to do things the right way, but points out that contractors have a hugely casual relationship with the nation's labor standards, in large part because the state has been unable or unwilling to enforce any other kind.

It is all happening so spectacularly fast, maybe too fast, but the idea has always been to do it quickly, to get the buildings up and shining and full, to make Doha the sort of showpiece city that Qatar can afford. The idea is just to do it, to make someplace great -- peaceful, beautiful, luxurious and yes expensive, and so finally a brand in itself to the extent that people will hear "Doha" and understand it the same awed and abstracted and faintly reverential way they understand DIOR or PRADA or JOHNNIE WALKER BLUE LABEL. At which point... well, what, then? That's a goal, but is it an ending?

And so Qatar is also that. But we are not even there yet. I got in late, wrung out. The map on the little monitor in the cabin showed us flying over some of the world's unhappiest and most dangerous places -- the little animated plane moving over and around the smoldering names of Baghdad and Isfahan and Damascus, en route to what is by some measures the richest and safest and fastest-growing city in the world, the capital of the country that will host the 2022 World Cup. So we're there, now. We are really in Qatar.

Producer:Chris Mottram | Design:Josh Laincz | Editor:Spencer Hall | Photos: Getty Images

Qatar Chronicles: Part II, Buying a masterpiece

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David Roth traveled to Qatar for a closer look at the World Cup's future home. Below is the second installment of his five-part series.

Previously: Part I, Destination everywhere.

★★★

On the first bleary trip into the city, in a cab that sped me along the Corniche to what turned out to be the wrong hotel, the cheerful-seeming cabbie pointed out various things. There on the left, watched over by no fewer than 11 towering construction cranes, was the glass-clad desert rose of the Qatar National Museum, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, half-bloomed already and open sometime in 2014. Then on the right: the Museum of Islamic Art, lit by searing spotlights planted on green lawn. And near that, a massive box that seems to be wearing the signature multicolored dots of... wow, no, that really is a giant exhibition of the British artist Damien Hirst, in the Al Riwaq exhibition hall.

Hirst is famous for his bisected cows sealed in lucite, his massive sharks floating in formaldehyde, his various installation pieces made of prescription pills and diamonds and dead butterflies and living flies and various forms of meat. Thoughts on how good those works are or aren't vary from observer to observer. Their general assaultive garishness is universally agreed upon, though, and they have, either despite that or because of it, been among the most expensive pieces of art sold anywhere in the world over the last two decades. It makes sense that they'd be in Qatar, and also it really does not.

It makes sense that they'd be in Qatar, and also it really does not.
Damienhurstsharkie_mediumDamien Hirst's formaldehyded shark. (David Roth)

Because I had barely slept over the course of two long flights, and because I was so startled to see this towering polka-dot art hangar dedicated to this particular artist, I must have said something about it to the driver. Either he didn't quite understand what I was saying or didn't feel like sharing his opinion on Damien Hirst, either of which would have been reasonable. He answered back, "in Doha, everything is new, new, NEW."

Which is a non-sequitur, but also both true and actually a pretty good answer to someone wondering what a comprehensive exhibition of one of the art world's most relentless provocateurs -- or "provocateur" or ex-provocateur, I'm not telling you what to think about this dude and his multimillion dollar formaldehyded sharks -- is doing in a traditional and conservative country. This exhibition is new, after all, and it will not become old.

Something else by someone else, some other artist of international renown will be in that big space in a month or so. That will be new, too. It will be a very handsomely mounted and thoughtfully curated exhibition, just as the Hirst exhibition was very handsomely etc, and it will also be big. It will also, like all museums in Doha, be free to visit.

And people will visit. The nearby Museum of Islamic Art is the showpiece, a big sand-colored cathedral of a place designed by the architect I.M. Pei. It's nearly windowless and, on the inside, cooled seemingly less by air conditioning than the hushed temple chill that seems naturally to attach itself to such places. It is only five years old, but owing to the ambition of both its aesthetics and mission -- nothing less than relating a thousand or so years of Islamic history through art -- there is a hallowed, austere hush about it already.

The art inside is old and beautiful, if abstracted in the way that very old things invariably are. Whatever critical intent or cultural significance or satire or other subtext was or was not once attached by this unnamed 13th century Iraqi artist to this statue of an impish monkey in what appears to be a hat, was lost long ago. What's left is interesting enough -- it's a mischievous monkey in a hat, it will always work -- to attract a large and varied crowd to the museum.

This one looked like the Qatar that Qatar would like us to see.

Where things were notably paler at the Hirst exhibition, this one looked like Qatar, or like the Qatar that Qatar would like us to see. Women in niqabs moved in quiet, whooshing groups or laughing pairs or pushed twisting, burbling kids in strollers; it's anecdotal, but I observed that Fendi handbags have penetrated this particular market segment to an impressive degree.

There are also men in traditional white dishdasha and men in casual clothes; women in head scarves or more conservative abayas or even-more-conservative niqabs or full burqas. There are Germans and sun-crisped Brits, because it is a museum in a foreign country and so of course there are. And there I am, too, gulping water and a little hungry and fresh off a dual-language chastisement -- in English and then (a little show-offily, I thought) in German -- for attempting to enter the museum through the wrong entrance. I look at the calligraphy for a while, the beautiful ripple and rise that comprise words that have been written and rewritten for a thousand years and more, the subtleties that make the letters beautiful. I wonder if I'm seeing it.

This is Qatar, and so there is a restaurant on the fifth floor by Alain Ducasse, a French chef whose golden-fingerbowl approach to fine dining was too high-toned for Manhattan even during the turn-of-the-century boom years.

In the rotunda there are the sounds of voices doing that museum mutter that people do, in various different languages. Also a tour group starting out (in English) and little reports of kid-noise; whining and sudden exultations and high laughs, the usual sort of thing. Little kids slide giddily on the slick stone floors. Look through the narrow window that looks out the back of the museum and onto the Arabian Sea and there is a towering Richard Serra sculpture on a spit of land that sticks out into the green water. There is also, faintly and small as a toy, the buzzing back-and-forth of someone skipping a Jet Ski through the museum's artificial moat. When you've had enough, you can leave.

★★★

There are more than two ways of thinking about art, but two useful ways to think about it are as something people make and something people consume. They are fundamentally connected and interdependent, obviously. But it is, for a variety of reasons, somehow easier and more pleasant to think about the former than it is the latter.

This tension is reflected and refracted through all types of human expression, sports very much included. We as humans enjoy being surprised and moved and shown things that we hadn't previously seen, or things that helped us to see, in the everyday familiar, little kindlings of grace or transcendence that had previously been hidden. We watch the things we watch (or listen to what we listen to, or do what we do or go where we go) to find this sort of startlement. As well we might.

What would you really want to spend money on if not something that makes you think and feel things you otherwise wouldn’t, or couldn’t?

It's generally to our credit that we know this sort of thing has value, and are willing to pay for the privilege of being transported and surprised. We are willing, sometimes, to pay quite a lot. Again, this is pretty excellent of us, and one of those human behaviors that both makes sense and is sort of reassuring. More urgent material essentials aside, what would you really want to spend money on if not something that makes you think and feel things you otherwise wouldn't, or couldn't?

But there's a difference, in magnitude of expenditure but also just a difference, between spending money on museum admission and spending money on art. In the notably cool Al Markhiya Gallery, down an alley from a Yemeni restaurant in Doha's Souk Wakif, two Qatari artists had mounted a show of very distinguished, and expensive, paintings. The gallery aims to showcase the work of young and Qatari artists whenever possible. Most had sold, despite prices ranging north of 60,000 Qatari Riyals, which is more than $16,000. I talked to Addis, a graphic designer for the gallery and Qatar native whose resemblance to former Top Chef contestant Sheldon Simeon gave him an instant shortcut into my heart.

"You'd think more would sell to Qatari buyers, because this is Qatar," he laughed. "They can afford it." But instead, he said, most of the work is sold to "people from outside," he said. "Lot of Scandinavians."

What do Qatari buy, I asked him.

He laughed again. "Phones! And credit."

★★★

Miaqatar_mediumMuseum of Islamic Art (Getty Images)

In November, the New Yorker ran an inexplicably fascinating feature about the Swiss-born, New York-based gallerist and art dealer David Zwirner, who recently sold a triptych by the painter Francis Bacon for a record $146 million. What's interesting about the article, though, is less the massive figures quoted and more its exposure of how the art market works -- as an unregulated and, unsurprisingly, often unethical and wildly speculative global trade between the supremely rich. The assets in play happen to be some of the greatest treasures of our shared human heritage, but again: what's more valuable, or more readily bought and sold, than that?

After that historic sale, the New York Post quoted an unnamed source attesting that the unknown private buyer for the $146 million triptych was Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, a 30-year-old Qatari. She wasn't, as it turned out; this is the Post we're talking about. But it wasn't a bad guess.

The QMA spent 30 times what New York City's Museum of Modern Art did in 2013.

The Sheikha, who is the sister of Qatar's emir, is the head of the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), and oversees an annual budget estimated to be around $1 billion. The New Yorker article notes that Zwirner was recently named the second-most influential person in the art world by ArtReview; Sheikha Al Mayassa was first. She wears the traditional black abaya, is a Duke graduate with an advanced degree from Columbia, and gave a TED Talk called "Globalizing the Local, Localizing the Global" in 2010. She oversaw the QMA's purchase of one of the prescription pill installations on display at the Al Riwaqh Hearst retrospective; it cost $20 million. No one in the art world spends nearly as much money as the sheikha does. No one can. The QMA spent 30 times what New York City's Museum of Modern Art did in 2013.

The Sheikha has bought pieces of art that the QMA doesn't show in Qatar, and pieces it can't show in Qatar. Though it was planned as a permanent piece of public art when the QMA purchased it, the Algerian-born artist Adel Abdessemed's "Coup de Tete" -- a massive sculpture depicting Zinedine Zidane's infamous World Cup headbutt of Marco Materazzi -- lasted just a little over three weeks on Doha's Corniche before being taken down. Qataris complained that it violated an Islamic tenet that forbids the depiction of humans and animals in statues. The argument was that the statue was idolatry, and it was an argument the QMA had no choice but to accept. Think of the whole affair, maybe, as the Yankees spending a bunch of money on Jaret Wright and Carl Pavano some years ago -- an expensive miss, to be sure, but one remedied easily and swiftly enough with another purchase of similar size.

"As the art market and art scene generally has globalised, we are seeing a dominance of that sense of art as being something that is exchanged," ArtReview editor Mark Sappolt told The Guardian. "What's happening with Qatar epitomises that. It is symptomatic of a trend that you can have someone buying up western art, importing it to what is essentially the middle of the desert."

To bring the World Cup to Qatar, the emir is prepared to spend hundreds of times what his sister spends on art; one estimate places the total associated costs at around $220 billion, with a fucking B. The same principle applies, broadly, to both endeavors. And while soccer is not a western art form -- it belongs to the world; some things are true even if Sepp Blatter says them -- Qatar's hugely expensive, ethically suspect and generally queasy procurement of the 2022 World Cup reflects the same general trend. It's not a new thing, really: what is for sale will be sold, for as much as possible and to whoever values it the most. And, tautology of tautologies, what is most valuable is what's most valuable.

★★★

After dinner in Souk Wakif -- more about this later, but it's a new simulacrum of a traditional Arabian market built, with occasionally obvious Disneyfied detail, on the footprint of Doha's vanished original standing souk -- I went back to visit 7, the Richard Serra sculpture that towered, twisted and dramatically lit, out on that long finger of land in the park built around the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA). It's the tallest sculpture that Serra ever made, seven twisting panels of thick oxidizing steel that present as a closed column from afar but which is, like many of Serra's sculptures, actually open for viewers to enter.

Soukwakif_mediumSouk Wakif (David Roth)

It is, also typically for Serra's pieces, a weird and warping thing to be within -- the sky appears and disappears at various points, closing on a narrow septagon at the top. It is warm and close there at the bottom of the silo, as the steel holds onto the heat of the day even hours after sunset. It was balmy and beautiful all that day -- all throughout my visit, in fact; there was no sense of how furiously, ridiculously and relentlessly hot it is in Qatar for most of the year. I could only imagine how the whole thing would shimmer during Qatar's long summer, when the average temperature sits around 106 degrees.

Late in the afternoon, the park around MIA filled quickly with families and kids. Lush green grass -- the springy, mossy kind you'll find on golf courses in South Carolina -- does not really belong in this climate, but an ambitious enough sprinkler system can put it anywhere. It's almost everywhere along the Corniche. As the big black plastic "superbales" of peat moss and teams of jumpsuited laborers working in clouds of dust and car exhaust will attest, that grass will soon be everywhere along the Corniche that it presently is not.

MIA Park's lawns undulate and roll, which makes a proper soccer game difficult to get going. On the positive side, the green space is vast enough to fit a bunch of overlapping, hugely improper games. Pudgy and spindly and otherwise kid-shaped kids in Messi jerseys chase pudgy kids in different Messi jerseys. Dads in dad attire are in the game, too, directing traffic and making sure the smaller kids -- boys and girls both, tear-assing around in sneakers that light up with each footfall, or barefoot -- get some touches. I sat on the faintly damp tangle and watched and then closed my eyes for a while. A little kid dropped a woman's shoe a few feet to my left and smiled. He paced off several steps and dropped its partner. This would be a goal; I was on the field of play.

Those games were over after dark, although some of the tables families had set up hours earlier were still there, still wreathed in conversation. In the lamplight along the path out to the sculpture there were middle-school kids on bikes, at loose ends as middle-school kids invariably are. There were other kids attempting to fancy dribble and stutter-step past their buddies. There were young couples in casual western-style clothes or variously austere traditional garb, walking to the point and back, hand in hand or arm in arm or at a modest distance. (Or both looking down at their phones.)

This is the image you've seen of Doha, all ultramodern skyscrapers filigreed and bright and flashing with LED life.

There were a great many baby carriages, whether parked on the high berm beyond the cafe or in motion. The Arabian Sea was all around, flat as a fitted sheet and reflecting the glassy pulse of the West Bay skyline. This is the image you've seen of Doha, all ultramodern skyscrapers filigreed and bright and flashing with LED life. Stray cats, skinny and staring, skipped around on the rocks. Ancient-looking dhows were done up like Mumbai cabs, their little lights blinking out on the bay. Arabic pop dipped in and out of earshot, from the cafe and maybe the distant dhows, many of which have jarringly good sound systems. At the end of that narrowing piece of land was the Serra sculpture: steely and reaching, strange on the inside, still hot to the touch even in the dark.

★★★

And that is how I expected to end my day, happy if maybe a little lonesome for the simultaneous proximity to all that humanity and distance from the people with whom I generally share those moments. But, while walking back to the hotel, I heard what first sounded like impatient, beep-intensive traffic -- that is, sounded like Doha -- but eventually revealed itself as something else.

These were air horns, not car horns, and the more the rhythm of these wamp-wamp-wamps emerged, the more it became clear that they were coming from a soccer game. So I walked past the hotel and down an increasingly dingy avenue I'd wandered my first night in Doha, past industrial supply stores and dim small hotels and the garish Oscado Saloon, which was not a saloon but a salon whose young haircutters -- all sporting identical Drake-ish squared-off cuts -- hung over a rail smoking cigarettes.

And then a left along Al Muthaf Street. There were no more hotels. There was a shisha bar in which men smoked hookah dispassionately under fluorescent light; there was a far brighter Pakistani grocery. There were low dun-colored apartment blocks, nameless and with all the windows unlit, either abandoned or occupied by people who used them only for what hours of hard sleep they could get.

This neighborhood was it -- the place where the less well-paid foreign laborers lived, and how they lived.

This was what every service employee I talked to -- Pakistani, Filipino, Nepali, Kenyan, Indian, Ghanaian, Bangladeshi -- told me when I asked what they thought of Doha. "Only work," a Ghanaian cabbie said. "Work and sleep." A Filipino cabdriver, blasting a homemade CD of Queen songs, bemoaned the lack of karaoke options. This neighborhood was it -- the place where the less well-paid foreign laborers lived, and how they lived. A place to sleep and maybe eat, quietly and out of the way. The streets were dusty and tired. A woman in an abaya, her sleeping daughter slung over her shoulder, climbed grim yellow steps into an apartment building. An airplane roared up over the rooftops, huge and shockingly close.

The drums and air horns were loud at this point, and I was following them toward the lights of what I saw, now, was a small green stadium built right up to the sidewalk. This was Doha Sports Stadium, and it was less impressive than it sounds. It was a cinder-block oval, faded and slouched, with a balding green rectangle at its center.

It was, also, crushingly and implausibly full. If ticket-takers had ever been at the gates, they'd long since gone home; the match was nearly over, and not only the concrete bleachers but the concourse down to the sidewalk was choked with shoulder-to-shoulder dudes. I craned and tiptoed and saw players sitting on the field, watched by somewhere between 2,000 and 200,000 men. I tiptoed again and saw a player doink a penalty kick off a crossbar. I asked the man to my left what teams these were, and he told me they were from India. This was as much as I ever learned; the score was not in the Doha papers.

I do know how the match ended, though. After the missed kick, some spectators left. Another fan invited me to stand next to him on the bleachers and I scrambled up with his help. I watched the goalie dive to the right and the kicker calmly roll the ball left. "Weeeeeen Yellow!" my bleacher buddy said, and patted me on the back.  Air horns wamp-ed without cease. Drums, too, or whatever was being used as drums -- there were too many men to see who was even making the noise, besides everyone. Team Yellow mobbed itself in the far corner.

I thanked everyone in sight, reflexively, and floated up and out in the crowd, amid smiles and emphatic conversations in dialect. This is not the sort of soccer experience that the Al Thani family will spend 12 figures to bring to the country in 2022. These also are not the people who will make noise at those games, although when the games come the men in Doha Sports Stadium or men like them will bring those visitors tea and turn down their beds and drive them to and from the new airport. They will take tickets on the metro system that Qatar is building for the World Cup. They will do most everything, because that is how it works over there.

This was the same game that would bring all those people to Qatar, of course, but also different. What the emir is buying from FIFA is a complicated investment product, which can indeed be bought and brought to the middle of the desert without any diminution in value. It is a thing traded among very rich people, like art or any other commodity.

This is not an idle comparison. Art has value because it has value; Qatar's whole brave, fraught investment in the World Cup has no value if not for the game that brought all those tired men to the Doha Sports Stadium that night. But the game, by itself, is just one of the world's favorite things to do; the World Cup is not just soccer. And anyway Qatar is not just buying the World Cup. It's an investment, like every dollar the nation spends on any other masterpiece.

Producer:Chris Mottram | Design:Josh Laincz | Editor:Spencer Hall

Sharing Derek Sheely: A helmet-to-helmet hit took the life of a 22-year-old football player. Two years later, friends and family keep his memory alive, one story at a time.

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Ken Sheely sits on a couch with a photo album on his lap. He flips the pages. His son, Derek, gets older with each turn. Smiling at the beach. At Disney World. At Gettysburg. There's even a picture of him in a baseball uniform. He played that sport only one season.

The bigger Derek gets in the pictures, the more he looks like himself. Permanent teeth replace baby teeth, and the smile grows into the one beaming from a picture in a frame above the fireplace, the one that hints at mischievousness. His wavy hair becomes more manageable. His neck thickens. His knife-flick dimples, the same ones his mom has, sink deeper into his cheeks.

His mom, Kristen, and dad tell me stories about these pictures. The surprised look on his face as he opens a present? Totally faking it. He knew he was getting the video game. Another about Derek and his sister, Keyton, getting up before dawn on Christmas, even when they were grown.

Ken pounds his fist into his leg and Kristen cries and they both laugh. All the while stories about Derek tumble out of them.
Cruise_2011_344_mediumDerek, Kristen, Ken, Keyton in 2011.

Most of the pictures are pre-growth spurt. Some are during it, as he grew from a boy into the 5'11, 225-pound man he was when he died playing football.

We talk about Derek for hours. Ken pounds his fist into his leg and Kristen cries and they both laugh. All the while stories about Derek tumble out of them. They start one and that reminds them of another, which reminds them of a third story, and by the time they finish the first one they've thought of yet another still.

We also talk about their bottomless and permanent grief over his death, their fury over the circumstances and their desire to make sure no parent has to endure what they are. Not what they have endured, but what they are still enduring, and what they will endure for the rest of their lives.

I have already talked to many of Derek's friends, teammates and coaches. My notebook overruns with stories about him, some his parents know, some they don't.

They ask what I've been told. I tell them a story about Derek staying up into the wee hours with his high school buddies at a hotel on the beach, unable to sleep, bouncing around the room, singing songs by an artist whose name I can't recall. "It was probably Pastor Troy," Kristen says.

She's right.

I pull out my notebook and find a quote from one of Derek's friends about Derek's well-known ability to bullshit people. I read it to them: "You'd be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.' And you'd go back to your room and think about it. Then you'd come back out and say, ‘What are you talking about?' And he'd say, ‘Yeah, I was BS-ing you.'"

Ken says, "That was probably Dwayne."

Right again.

As I get ready to leave, Ken and Kristen Sheely make a request I've never heard in all my time as a reporter. After my story is published, if I have leftover stories about their son, would I share them?

Stories are all they have left of Derek now. They want as many as they can get, even though hearing them burns open wounds.

★★★

Derek started playing football in a Pee-Wee league near York, Pa. A 49ers fan, he wore a Steve Young jersey to practice every day. The coaches didn't know his name yet, so they called him Steve Young. He asked his dad to position lawn chairs in the backyard like linemen, so he could practice running through the holes.

He loved video games and got good grades. "The only time I ever got a call from a teacher was because he was too sarcastic in class," Kristen says. "One time we went in for a conference and the teacher confided in us that the other kids didn't understand that he was just joking. They weren't quite up to speed. What are you going to do? I, of course, encouraged him."

The Sheelys say their son carried himself with confidence, even back then, when he was small for his age. Shortly after the family moved to Germantown, Md., a bigger kid came up to him on the bus and said, "You're in my seat." Derek, a middle schooler, stood up. He looked down at the seat. He said, "I don't see your name on it."

Two kids roughed him up for that. The bus driver didn't see anything, and the principal denied there was a problem, so nothing happened. The kids went after him again, and this time the bus driver saw it. They got kicked off the bus for the rest of the year. All the other kids thanked Derek for standing up to those kids, because they had been bullying everybody on the bus for two years.

Dwayne Washington's family — the Dwayne of the bullshitting story — moved to Germantown around the same time as the Sheelys, to escape a rough neighborhood. As Washington describes it, this was a key time in his life. As a young black kid, Washington wondered how he would fit in with his mostly white classmates.

His first friend in Germantown was Derek. "No matter where you are, there's always going to be a bad crowd," Washington says. "He definitely got me on the right levels as far as who to hang with."

★★★

Dts-084_mediumDerek in his Northwest jersey."In my 15 years of coaching, if I've coached 1,500 kids, he's a top 10, top 5."

When Derek joined the Northwest High School junior varsity football team, he was still small. Then-coach Randy Trivers loved his work ethic and pulled him up to the varsity team at the end of his sophomore year, though he didn't get on the field. When he finally grew, he became an important leader and player. He played fullback and linebacker, and his teammates voted him one of five captains for his senior year.

"He's not that guy who's going to impress you with numbers, his 40 times," says Andrew Fields, then-Northwest's offensive coordinator. "But whatever needed to get done, he got done. In my 15 years of coaching, if I've coached 1,500 kids, he's a top 10, top 5, not just in football smarts, but book smarts."

His friends say he was a natural at school, particularly in history classes. One called him "easily smart," yet he worked hard anyway. Northwest gives out an award each year to the senior who best combines on-field performance with a high GPA. Sheely won it.

Derek ate lunch often with his teammates in Trivers' office, where they teased each other and their coach. Bus rides home after wins were a hoot. Chris Patterson, a co-captain with Derek, told me the players copied the "Jump in, Jump Out, Introduce Yourself," chant from cheerleaders. Instead of introducing themselves, as cheerleaders do to opposing squads, they introduced various teammates and unloaded insults to the delight of everybody on the bus.

"I don't think of him with his shoulder pads and helmet on," Fields says. "I think of him in a meeting, or at a banquet, or at an event, with his teammates, with a smile on his face, holding court."

★★★

When Derek's high school football career ended, it seemed his football career would, too. He wasn't big enough or fast enough to play DI football. In the winter, some small schools showed interest in him, but Derek decided to enroll at Penn State, where his parents went, where he had always wanted to go.

He started classes in the summer, and when August rolled around, he told his parents he changed his mind. Dwayne Washington and a bunch of his other high school teammates were going to Frostburg State, a DIII school in western Maryland. He wanted to enroll there and play football with his friends.

His parents did not like the idea. They worried transferring was his attempt to relive his high school years. They believed the education he would get at Penn State would be much better than the education he would get at Frostburg State. They tried to talk him out of it.

They told him if he stayed at Penn State, he would get a full-ride "parent scholarship," but if he transferred, he'd have to pay for his education himself. He would have to buy his books and pay the first $3,000 each year. They would loan him — not give him — the rest. The loan would be interest free, but he would have to pay it back in three years.

Derek told his dad, If I loved golf or basketball or tennis, I could keep playing it forever. But I love football, and this is the last time I can play. If I don't play, I'll regret it.

Ken drew up a contract laying out the rules, hoping to convince Derek to stay at Penn State. In addition to spelling out Derek's financial obligations, the contract demanded he maintain a minimum GPA. If he dropped below it, he'd have to leave Frostburg State. Ken made Derek initial each page and sign the last one, so he couldn't come back later and claim he didn't know what he was agreeing to.

Ken wondered if he was being too tough. "Is he really going to be able to make it on his own? Is he really going to be able to balance his checkbook and not spend it all on video games?"

To his parent's delight, he did it. "He had never worked a day in his life, so $3,000 a year might as well have been $1 million. To his credit, he made it happen. He signed it. He did it. He started working summer jobs. He started busing tables and made $3,000 the hard way," Ken says. "Each summer he got a better summer job and a better summer job. The point of the story was, just doing this would be a better education than he gets in college."

And every job meant more stories, stories people still talk about when they talk about Derek, like the one told by Katrina McFarland, a waitress at now-closed Café Mileto in Germantown. As a busboy, Derek befriended her. He delivered food occasionally, and she let him borrow her car to do so.

One time when he returned to the restaurant, he intentionally parked her car so close to the next car, within only a few inches, that when she left work to go home, she couldn't even squeeze between the cars on the driver's side, much less open the door. She had to climb through the passenger's side to get in.

★★★

Dts-163_mediumFrostburg teammates Anthony King, Dwayne Washington, Derek, Josh Volpe.

Derek thrived at Frostburg State. On the field, he twice was named to the academic all-conference team. A fullback, he gained a reputation as one of the toughest guys on the team. He blocked for two of his closest friends — quarterback Josh Volpe and running back Anthony King, both of whom he also blocked for at Northwest.

A fullback, he gained a reputation as one of the toughest guys on the team.

When Derek scored a touchdown, he and Dwayne Washington, who also went to Frostburg State and played linebacker, had their own handshake, their own dap — Washington's right hand would smack Derek's left, then vice versa, then they'd lean back. They also had a gentlemen's agreement not to hit each other in practice. Rashad James, a defensive back, wasn't so lucky. He tried to avoid contact with Sheely. "It was like running into a Mack truck," he says.

Off the field, Derek had no problem maintaining the minimum GPA required by the contract he had signed. Washington tells a story about when they got report cards. "He said, ‘Man, I got a 3.9.' I'd be like, ‘Man, you're upset about that? If I got a 3.9, my mom would buy me a new car.'"

Washington says he probably would not have graduated from college without Sheely's help. As part of his course work, Washington often had to produce short films and documentaries. Sheely always made time to appear in them. In one, Sheely calls football, "the greatest game ever invented on the face of the earth."

He might have had a future as a teacher. Garfield Lampkin, a running back at Frostburg State, said he and Sheely had the same professor for a political science class, but were in different sections. They reviewed the study guide together, and Sheely insisted that Lampkin repeat the information back to him. When Lampkin struggled with a particular part, Sheely re-taught it another way. "He wouldn't let me leave until I understood it," Lampkin says.

He called his parents once and told them about an encounter with a professor after she returned his paper with "F, plagiarism," written on it. It was a Russian literature class, and he dropped several very specific Russian history references into the paper. She accused him of lifting them from another source without providing a citation.

His friends admired his ability to get good grades, play football and enjoy the college life all at once.

Derek didn't panic or get mad. He told her he was taking a Russian history class so he knew all that stuff already. Why should he have to cite stuff he knows? She changed the grade to an A.

His friends admired his ability to get good grades, play football and enjoy the college life all at once — and in that order. He set aside time for each activity. If his girlfriend came over when he was playing Xbox, one friend told me, Derek would say, "You know this is my Xbox time, right?"

In his final summer, he interned at the Department of Energy, where his dad worked. That got him interested in civil service. After graduation, he wanted to work overseas for the CIA.

★★★

In August 2011, Derek returned for a fourth and final season at Frostburg State. He already had enough credits to graduate, but he returned to play football as a fifth-year senior. He figured he would add another major as he played a final season. A few days after his parents dropped him off at school, Ken and Kristen dropped off their daughter, Keyton, at Penn State.

Ken's phone rang.

It was a surgeon. He wanted permission to operate on Derek. During practice, he had suffered a terrible head injury. He was unconscious and had massive swelling. Ken pulled over and listened as the surgeon spoke. He said that he doubted Derek would survive the procedure.

Ken and Kristen rushed to the hospital in Cumberland, Md., just short of two hours from State College, Pa., panicked that Derek would die before they got there. He survived the surgery and was transferred to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, in Baltimore.

Doctors there propped him up in an attempt to use gravity to get the swelling in his brain to go down. Seeing him vertical startled his friends.

Sitting by his bed, Ken and Kristen talked to their son. They told him they loved him. They told him they were there for him. They told him he was a fighter. They played Pastor Troy.

They bargained for his life.

That week, an earthquake and a hurricane hit Baltimore. Dwayne Washington said he thought the earthquake represented Sheely's fight. He sat with Derek for hours.

The Sheelys told family and friends to come to the hospital to say goodbye.
Sheelylocker_medium

On Saturday, Aug. 27, as Hurricane Irene threatened to batter Maryland, the Sheelys told family and friends to come to the hospital to say goodbye. Derek was going to die.

"People kept flooding in and flocking in," Ken says.

"It was unbelievable," Kristen says.

So many people showed up the hospital employees asked what was going on. It got so crowded that they ushered some of them to a separate room. Ken couldn't believe, and still can't, that a young person touched so many people.

Everybody wore their despair. "When you looked into his mother's eyes, you could just tell, it was like a piece of her was not there," Washington says. "You just wanted to do something for her, to make her smile, to give her a glimmer of hope."

So Derek's friends started telling stories about the man they called "Sheely." His friends and family laughed and cried at the same time. In the last hours of his life, Derek Sheely's parents got to know him better. "We always thought he was great and wonderful," Kristen says. "But then you hear these people you don't even know telling such detailed stories ..."

There were the stories about him helping people with schoolwork, about how he was never in a bad mood and about how he knew when to put his arm around people and when to kick them in the pants.

Washington told a story about cereal.

He loves Frankenberry. He can never find it at the store so he orders it online. On Super Bowl Sunday, while Washington was out of town, Sheely threw a party. One of their teammates drank a few too many beers and broke into Washington's private stash of Frankenberry.

Sheely kicked him out of the party.

Someone told a story about the day Sheely was hanging out in the football facility. A freshman walked in and asked directions to the training room. Sheely told the kid to go outside, take a left here, turn left there, turn left again, take another left one more time, and then he'd be there. A few minutes later, the kid walked back in the same door he had just gone out of and saw Sheely still standing there. The training room he wanted directions to was, and had been, right in front of him. On the spot, Sheely had sent him in a circle.

Everybody understood that one because everybody has a story about Sheely bullshitting someone, making up a story on the fly and convincing everyone it was true, like the time he got a friend all excited to buy the phone with three cameras that was coming out. Or the time he sent a teammate to the practice field in full gear when there was no practice. Or the time he outlined Frostburg State's plans to scrimmage Penn State.

Even his parents sometimes couldn't tell when he made stuff up. He knew so much history and was so good at telling stories, they didn't always know when he embellished them.

"It came to the point where I'd just stop listening to him — ‘You're not going to get me this time,'" Lampkin says. "That's not the guy you wanted to ask [a question] if you were a freshman."

Volpe, the quarterback, spent several minutes freaking out one day when he discovered a crack on the screen on his laptop, steeling up his nerves to tell his parents he needed a new one. Sheely let him twist for a while before telling him that he had moved all the apps and downloaded a fake screen with a crack. "Whenever you talk about him, it's going to bring a smile to your face," says King, the running back. "He always brought comedy into the room."

Sheely made strange bets and then was too stubborn to lose them. That explains why he once devoured a dozen or so steaks in one sitting, ate every meal for weeks without using utensils and attended every Penn State football game one season wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

He did great impressions — characters from "The Godfather," "The Simpsons," his friends and family. Nobody was immune.

Even Ken Sheely tells a story about that: "I would just go crazy on the stupidest stuff. One day I remember I was home, and there were three bottles of chocolate in the pantry. I said, ‘Why do we have all these?' Kris would say, ‘Derek likes chocolate, it was on sale, so I got some.' Half an hour, an hour later, he's rummaging around in there, and he'd see that there were three bottles of salad dressing, and they were the salad dressing for me. He would kind of mimic me, go all crazy. He would get his point across, but you couldn't help but laugh at yourself, because you could see what you looked like."

Some of the stories that came out at the hospital were the type college kids don't usually tell parents, stories about, um, going out and having a good time, maybe drinking a beer or two, staying up into the late hours, bouncing around the room, singing Pastor Troy.

Ken and Kristen weren't surprised. They told their son's friends a story about the time they came home from a weekend away and suspected Derek had hosted a party. Ken noticed a coaster was missing and the refrigerator was slightly askew. The evidence hinted at a party, but it proved nothing. The Sheelys never knew for sure whether the party happened. As Ken finished telling this story at the hospital, many of the heads in that crowded room dropped. That told a story all by itself: They had all attended the party.

★★★

The cause of death was traumatic brain injury caused by a helmet-to-helmet hit.

On Aug. 28, 2011, the day after everyone gathered at the hospital, Derek Thomson Sheely died. He was 22. The cause of death was traumatic brain injury caused by a helmet-to-helmet hit.

The Sheelys say school officials told them nobody knew what caused such a severe injury. It was a freak accident, the kind that happens, albeit rarely, in a violent sport. The Sheelys had no reason to believe otherwise. In interviews immediately following Derek's death, Ken made a point to say Derek's death was an accident and no one was to blame. He and Kristen went home and grieved.

Ken harbored anger at Derek for putting himself in jeopardy. He thought Derek should have known he was in danger. But then he and Kristen learned more and more about head injuries and concussions, and they learned that Derek's head injury meant he might not have been able to think clearly enough to stop playing, that his injury itself prevented him from knowing he was too injured to play. Soon after Derek died, Ken and Kristen started a head injury foundation in his name.

★★★

Sheely_medium

There is a page on The Derek Sheely Foundation website that asks visitors to "Please continue to say his name," and "Please continue to share stories about Derek with us." Seven months after Derek died, one story came in anonymously. A co-worker of Ken's at the Department of Energy, who had helped set up the website, saw it first and showed it to Ken. Ken read it. The writer said he was a player on the team and described a horrible sequence of events that led to Derek's death, of Derek hurting his head at practice, bleeding from the forehead, and a coach berating him for wanting to sit out. One line in particular has been repeated often in media stories: "Stop your bitching and moaning and quit acting like a pussy and get back out there!" the email quoted the coach as saying.

At first, Ken didn't believe it. The email was anonymous — anyone could have written it. He thought the events described were simply not true. Ken says Derek loved football and had an incredibly high threshold of pain, so the idea a coach would accuse him of begging out of practice was ludicrous.

Ken called Kristen and told her not to read the email — she had access to the website's email, too — and for months, she didn't.

An attorney named Paul Anderson contacted the Sheelys. He closely follows football's ongoing concussion problem and reached out to them when he heard about their foundation. Still, even after receiving that email, the Sheelys didn't see any need for a lawyer. Yet after Kristen shared the email with Anderson, he asked for permission to do some digging. He called players. With the email as a starting point, he uncovered a story about Derek's death that bore little resemblance to what the Sheelys had been told by Frostburg State.

Anderson learned that in the days before his collapse, Sheely came out of drills four times, bleeding from the head each time. He had a bruise on his forehead and had complained of headaches for days. He talked to the trainer about it repeatedly. But he was never checked for a concussion. Coaches kept putting him back into practice, including a drill in which running backs run over each other, and the person being run over is not even allowed to defend himself. (The drill was changed after Sheely died.)

Garfield Lampkin, also a running back, noticed his friend was woozy, not right. "I was like, ‘Dude, just sit out. It's not even that serious. It's just practice. Sit out," Lampkin says. "The next play, that happened."

Sheely took off his helmet and collapsed.

★★★

Ken and Kristen first started The Derek Sheely Foundation because the more they learned about head injuries, concussions and second-impact syndrome, the more they wanted to raise awareness about concussions — the causes and symptoms and how important it is for athletes not to play when they have one, regardless of the sport.

It wasn't about football. "I don't want to come across as a kook who wants to end football," Ken says. "Derek would be horrified if that happened."

The Sheelys do, however, want to change the culture of ignorance and faux toughness that pervades football. They propose a head injury "hero" program to reward players who have the courage to sit out with concussions — as well as coaches who force players with concussions to sit out. They created a concussion awareness kit and send out as many of those as they can to youth programs and high school programs and anyone else who will take them. They sponsor a charity run in their son's name and endowed a scholarship at Frostburg State in his honor.

★★★

On Aug. 22, the two-year anniversary of Derek's injury, the Sheelys sued the NCAA, Frostburg State head coach Tom Rogish, Schumacher, assistant trainer Michael Sweitzer and the helmet manufacturer.

They can't believe the NCAA investigates parties thrown by agents, but not the death of a player.

The Sheelys say they didn't want to sue, but they say they ran out of options in their quest to find out what happened to their son. They wanted — still want — the NCAA or Frostburg State to investigate the case. They can't believe a young man is dead and neither has done anything to find out what happened. They can't believe the NCAA investigates parties thrown by agents, but not the death of a player. They can't believe other coaches get fired for foul language, but Frostburg State coaches have faced no consequences after a player died in practice. (Rogish resigned at the end of this season.)

The NCAA, beyond offering condolences to the family, refuses to comment. So does Frostburg State. The Maryland Attorney General's office represents the coaches and trainer. Assistant Attorney General Katherine Bainbridge filed a response in the case in November. Her filing does not address the story Anderson's lawsuit tells. It says the case should be thrown out because none of the allegations, even if they are true, meets the legal standards for any of the Frostburg State plaintiffs to be held liable.

With the NCAA and Frostburg State unwilling to seek or provide answers, the Sheelys asked the Hershey Medical Center to do a case study on Derek's death. That query is ongoing. In November, U.S. Representative Linda Sanchez of California, who grilled NFL commissioner Roger Goodell about the NFL and concussions when he appeared before Congress three years ago, cited Derek's death when she called on the NCAA to come up with stronger concussion policies to prevent players from returning to play after suffering head injuries.

★★★

After Derek died, the Sheelys expected that cleaning out his apartment would be a horrible task, and it was. They packed up his clothes, his books, his video games. But they found more than that. They found a ledger Derek had been keeping, and the ledger told yet another story. It showed that not only was Derek paying his way through college, he was paying some of his roommate's bills, too. He didn't have the money, so Derek helped him out.

Looking at his son's careful handwriting in the ledger, Ken thought about the anxiety he felt when he forced Derek to sign that contract to allow him to go to Frostburg State. "I was just dumbstruck, thinking how much I was worrying about him, if he was going to be able to manage his life," Ken says. "Here he was not only managing his life, but taking care of other people."

Two years after the Sheelys found that ledger, Dwayne Washington is buying a house. The only reason he has credit good enough to do so, he says, is because those were his bills Derek was paying.

★★★

Kristen took Derek to get his driver's license when he was 17. When he got to the part about whether he wanted to be an organ donor, he checked yes. He told his mom that if he died he wouldn't need the organs anyway.
At the hospital, as his death approached, doctors took Ken into another room and presented him with a list of organs. Which would he like to donate?

Whatever Derek could give, Ken gave. He checked yes to everything.

When Ken finished signing the papers, he and Kristen stood with their son for the final time. "We were told we could be with him. But only for a few moments," Kristen says. "Because they had to do what they had to do."

Sheely2_medium
The letters tell stories of lives that Derek changed.

As soon as the Sheelys left the room, doctors went to work. The organs always come out in the same order: Heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, kidneys. They don't necessarily go to recipients in that order, because the recipients could be as close as the next room or as far as several states away. The heart can live for five hours in between bodies, and with good planning and preparation can be taken up to 500 miles. The other organs last longer between removal and transplantation, and other tissues, such as tendons, can be kept and used for months. Due to the amount of medication doctors gave Derek after he was injured, some of his organs could only be used for research.

Donor families and recipients are anonymous at first — and they only meet about 30 percent of the time. Donate Life Maryland, which oversees transplants in Maryland, coordinates the first point of contact. If the donor family and recipients choose, they can reveal their identities to each other after that.

In the 27 months since Derek died, the Sheelys have heard from five other recipients. Like that horrible email about Derek's death, letters about his gifts of life arrive anonymously. "They're excruciating. You go right back to the hospital in a second," Kristen says. "Even though you just read the news that a man can see now, because of Derek. And I want Derek."

The letters tell stories of lives that Derek changed. A man can play soccer thanks to Derek's ACL. Two men can see because they have Derek's corneas. Two men are alive because each has one of Derek's kidneys — one speaks Spanish and the other works at the Department of Energy, where Derek interned and Ken has spent his entire career.

Experts in the organ donation community say a person as young and healthy as Derek could have his organs and tissue go to dozens, even a hundred people. "You could have a whole room full of people with pieces of Derek," Kristen says. "I would really like that Army, that's for sure."

She would love to tell members of that Army stories about the special man whose parts they now carry in their bodies. But Kristen says the thought that some recipients might not respond, might not want to hear Derek's stories, and might not want to tell their own stories of how Derek helped them, scares her. That's why she can't yet bring herself to answer the letters she's received or to send letters to recipients she hasn't heard from yet.

It's safer not to ask and to just know this: Somewhere, out there, the members of Derek's Army are sharing their own stories today, not about Derek, but because of him.

Producer:Chris Mottram | Editor:Glenn Stout | Copy Editor:Kevin Fixler | Photos courtesy of the Sheely Family

Qatar Chronicles: Part III, Only for the rich

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David Roth traveled to Qatar for a closer look at the World Cup's future home. Below is the third installment of his five-part series.

Previously:

★★★

I will be honest: I was going to give Abbas some money even before he sort of saved my life. He was the first person I'd spoken to in something like five hours, I believed his tale of woe, and he seemed like a nice enough dude. Also, like most people, I'm a soft touch for Canadians.

More than that, though, it was too easy, after wandering the shimmering, towering, skronkingly loud and somehow also shockingly desolate construction zone of Doha's West Bay, to imagine Abbas just walking those blocks forever, waiting in vain to see another pedestrian. It was easier still to imagine him walking home later that night, still sick in the gut and broke as a joke, the traffic bright and blazing and close for all seven miles along the Corniche.

But he grabbed my shirt and so prevented me from chest-bumping a white Range Rover that was suddenly hauling tinted-window ass around a blind corner. The corner had been blinded by a banner depicting the tower that would rise there, whenever but probably soon. Work was happening above us in that tower, the intermittent flares of welders working on 20 stories up sparking through the open floors and off the raw ceilings like practical lightning. I could not see this from where I was standing, of course. It was later, when I was once again impossibly lost, that I realized I was standing across a wide and buzzing avenue from the same building, and that its upper extremities were alive with work.

Anyway, we watched the Range Rover that didn't hit me as it elbowed into the loud traffic; another nearly identical SUV followed hard behind and did the same. It is possible that they were racing. It says something about how people drive in Doha that it's tough to know for sure.

At the moment, though, small and isolated as we were on an unfinished sidewalk, it just sucked.
Unfinishedwestbay_medium

I know that I saw other cars that definitely were racing. Two black Corvettes, identical, roaring after each other; a pair of motorcyclists, gone loudly and in an instant. Always, there were drivers who were not so much racing each other as racing the inevitable consequence of their own ultra-aggressive driving. In retrospect, I guess this was Doha's inner life playing out in swerving real time -- a city going in its various directions, the million stories in any city, all of them in this case pure 2 Fast 2 Furious fan fiction. At the moment, though, small and isolated as we were on an unfinished sidewalk, it just sucked.

I was out of sorts when I bumped into Abbas, both of us walking down a semi-alley between an unfinished convention center -- a shift of jumpsuited workers were arriving on white buses, incongruously bouncy Bollywood filmi songs bumping from the stereos, the men's faces mustachioed and blank in the windows -- and the sprawling City Center Mall.

I was, again, facing the eight harrowing lanes of Omar Al Mukhtar Street.

This was the third or thousandth time I'd hit this particular howlingly lively dead end. There was construction dust and concrete barriers and thrumming traffic and blinding sodium lights illuminating a trench that, another of those ubiquitous signs noted, would eventually become the track for Doha's planned metro system. What it meant was that I would have to once again switch back across the ass end of some other construction site or parking lot, and then do all this over again. And then, after enough consecutive right turns up and over rubble-strewn lots, I'd somehow find myself having to cross these lanes one more time. If you've been lost in a strange city, you know this feeling. The strange part was that I was, for most of the time I was lost, utterly alone on the sidewalks.

"Look at these people," Abbas said as the Range Rovers chased each other off, his voice chopping high in the same chirping register it had occupied for the last few minutes. "Look at how they drive. They don't care about nobody." Which is not fair, exactly, and also: "these people." But it had been a long day.

It was now dark in the West Bay, although the construction sites, which were everywhere, provided little bursts of scorching light and activity. I had been more or less lost -- first without a sense of where to go, and then without a sense of where I was -- for most of the day. I was prepared to accept Abbas' exhausted assertion that nobody cared about nobody, that this whole city was a terrible stupid cruel tasteless prank, a cruel and crass neoliberal gouge-scape, its architecturally distinguished skyscrapers a Potemkin fraud, each an elegant and bejeweled and jutting middle finger at the idea of a city as a place where people might live.

Also I had accepted that we would never get home. Or that we would, Abbas and I, finally somehow walk home, running out of sidewalk here and there as you do in Doha and so scrabbling up rocky moraines or darting out of traffic or being forced into the more dangerous realms of Extreme Jaywalking. Both of us doing that for something like seven miles, both of us hungry and cursing the city and meaning it, but only I being able to go home.

One alternative that occurred to me was to give Abbas cab fare -- it wasn't that much -- and to walk until I either figured it out or gave up. I could have paid for my own cab, too, of course, if I could find one. I was not thinking right. "Only for the rich," Abbas was saying, the shiny SUVs rushing by in the new dark, weaving, honking at each other but not really bothering with us, two poor idiots trying to walk through a neighborhood that didn't exist yet.

★★★

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In all the time I spent walking around Qatar looking western and lost and so probably pretty vulnerable, Abbas was the only person to ask me for money. Even in the souk, where ordinarily merchants would be demanding that I touch or try on or sample or smell whatever they were selling, the mood was oddly sedate. One man wiped some strange chartreuse root-derived essential oil on my hand without quite asking me if he could, but he also said both please and thank you. There are no beggars in Qatar in part because there are virtually no unemployed people in Qatar -- the unemployment rate as of June 2013 was an astonishing 0.1 percent.

There are no beggars in Qatar in part because there are virtually no unemployed people in Qatar.

This is very much by design. People like Abbas -- a Canadian citizen born in Pakistan, he introduced himself by flashing his passport -- are not allowed in the country without a job. They are very much their sponsor's responsibility, and expressly not the responsibility of the state. There is no path to citizenship in Qatar, and so for the vast majority of the people in the country -- for Abbas and the Filipinos working in the Starbucks at City Centre and the well-paid American geologists working for the national petroleum corporation and the South Asian laborers building the 84,000 hotel rooms Qatar will need for the 2022 World Cup -- the relationship with the state is strictly a business one. Foreign nationals looking to work in Qatar cannot enter the country without a work contract with their future employer. When the contract is fulfilled, and only when the contract is fulfilled, they can leave.

This is a thing that happens to the poor, faceless laborers imported from Bangladesh and Nepal to work on unnamed infrastructure projects -- the new stadiums for the World Cup have not yet broken ground -- but not just to them.

The Algerian soccer player Zahir Belounis was marooned in Qatar for 19 months after a dispute with his team, which refused to pay him $164,000 in back pay and also refused to let him leave the country. He finally got out in November, about a week before I arrived. "I heard that maybe Qatar will change the rules for footballers," Belounis told the BBC after his release. "But for me, the value of a football player and a worker is the same. If you cancel the system for a football player, you need to cancel it for everybody." For all the many real and laudable reforms already underway or planned in Qatar's labor system, the kafala, or sponsorship, system doesn't seem to be going anywhere. It reduces massive migration into a frank business transaction, and that is how Qatar wants it to work.

It reduces massive migration into a frank business transaction, and that is how Qatar wants it to work.

This sounds a lot cleaner and clearer than it is in reality. In Doha News, a very good English language paper widely read among expats, a longtime Qatar resident of Jordanian descent explains how the system doesn't work as part of his argument for the creation of a new, "permanent resident" status:

I have spent nearly all of my life in Qatar. I have been through the school and university systems and eventually got a job here, and am trying to get my career on the right track. If one day, I decide to change jobs and am unable to get a No Objection Certificate from my current employer, I would have to leave the country and could not return to work for two years... That possible future makes it difficult for people like myself and others in the same boat from feeling stability and security in our lives. That little niggling doubt, that it could all come crashing down over a piece of paper, is always there.

It is maybe surprising to learn that Qatar has comparatively progressive labor laws on its books. Workers may not work more than 48 hours per week. There are 10 hours of legal overtime at a rate of time-and-a-quarter, a mandated "rest day" each week, and guaranteed "breaks not less than one hour and not exceeding three hours, for prayers, rest and meal taking." The Ministry of Labor has struggled, for various reasons, to enforce these laws during the current period of furious expansion, although there have been indications -- and even some criticism in what's generally a quiescent national press -- that the state regards this as an embarrassment.

More importantly, the regime is moving -- both through the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee Workers' Charter (very happily given to me by the PR people for the World Cup bid) and another, not-yet-public charter at the Qatar Foundation -- to make dramatic and laudable changes above and beyond improved enforcement of the laws already on the books, changes aimed at breaking the broader institutionalized system of exploitation that exists in the international labor market.

Still, the fundamental economic relationship is not likely to change: while in Qatar, the contractor is effectively the sovereign authority for the workers in its employ. Qatar is home to something like 250,000 Qatari, and 1.8 million independent contractors.

Abbas is one of those. He was due to start a job in several weeks at one of the city's posh shopping malls, and would soon be joined by his wife of three months -- "She is just 21," he told me, "and very nice," before noting with not a little frustration that his very nice wife had not wired him the $200 he needed to pay for necessities. His time in Qatar had not been a positive one. He was paying 1,500 Riyals -- about $500 -- a month to rent a bedroom in an apartment near the airport, probably not all that far from Doha Sports Stadium.

“This whole country, it is too fucking expensive. Only for the rich.”

"Right away I eat one meal and I get infection," he told me. "I am in hospital for 14 days, spend fucking 9000 Riyals because I have no insurance. I make a mistake, now I have nothing until the job. This whole country, it is too fucking expensive. Only for the rich. You can't even get a job without money." The food at the City Centre mall is too expensive and no good, he tells me. As established earlier, the drivers are terrible. The bus system -- surprisingly comprehensive, if seemingly not widely utilized -- requires the purchase of a multi-ride card for 30 Riyals, even though individual rides cost just three Riyals. "It's bullshit," he concludes, referring to the food at City Centre and the new bus card system and, it seems safe to say, everything else.

This is the (unverifiable) experience of one unlucky guy, of course, and he was quick to allow that he had it better than many others. When his job starts, he will have a place to stay with his wife and what he described as a good salary. He will pay no taxes, like everyone else in Qatar. After all that he's been through, and with all the problems he has with the country, Abbas plans to settle in Doha. He and his wife are adopting a girl from their village in Pakistan -- "my little niece" -- and the plan is to bring her up in Qatar, where she will never be a citizen but will almost certainly be better off in a number of ways than she would have in a small village in Pakistan.

This is the puzzling crux at the heart of Qatar's growth. It is almost certainly different for the city's sex workers -- they're there, of course, reportedly in the bar at the W Hotel -- and may be different for the nation's many domestic workers, a community about which Amnesty International will issue a report in 2014. But for all the big and small miseries that routinely befall them in the country, and despite the essential and fundamental shittiness that awaits them there, the people who will make the World Cup possible came to Qatar because they saw an opportunity that did not exist in their homelands. Knowing what they know thanks to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and The Guardian and the rest, they are still doing this. If Qatar itself can sometimes seem like a very architecturally distinguished funhouse specializing in refractions of globalized neoliberal economics' various false inevitabilities and forced choices, what brings these workers there is notably less complicated, simpler and crueler. They are making a new country happen, but the choice that brings them there is not new at all.

For those men -- and they are overwhelmingly men -- Qatar is as good a place as any "to make develop," as a Filipino cabbie put it to me. He'd been in the country for eight years, and while there was nothing there to do besides work and sleep, he said it worked well enough for him. He had an apartment and was making enough money to send a good amount home and still get back to Manila every two years. This may not sound like a good deal to you, but of course it's not your deal to make.

★★★

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I left my hotel on a beautiful late morning for the long walk to West Bay, and saw the city rising and risen as I walked. There was work being done everywhere. Construction cranes are a sort of skeletal super-skyline everywhere in the city, if nowhere more so than in West Bay; they are there to complete Doha, and in a sense spindly shadows on the horizon already complete it, serving as they do of a reminder of how much is not yet finished.

There was work being done everywhere. Construction cranes are a sort of skeletal super-skyline everywhere in the city.

Smaller construction machinery was everywhere on my walk: digging up the in-progress park along the Corniche, or rising and falling behind various barriers, or idle while workers caught a few minutes of mid-day rest, sprawled in earth-mover-shaped shadows. On a small island near the West Bay, I saw a lone tree, no buildings, a rudimentary boat landing and an orange construction vehicle.

The closer I got to the West Bay, the more clear it became how unfinished it was. The Corniche was bustling, here, with westerners jogging or riding bikes and Muslim families sprawled on the sod in the sort of slow-motion picnic I'd seen in MIA Park the day before. But the buildings that comprised the already recognizable and intensely photogenic skyline -- the pyramidal Sheraton on one end, looking every bit the Reagan-era architectural marvel it is, and the tubular Doha Tower in its light-up scrim and the twisting glass of the Qatar World Trade Center at the bright middle -- were not representative of the neighborhood. There was, more to the point, not a neighborhood to represent.

I crossed the Corniche and found that the buildings were mostly inaccessible. Several of the ones that stood out most dramatically from far away were, up close, revealed to be either unfinished or just not open. At one dramatic sand-colored tower that rose nearly 50 stories from a dramatic Taj Mahal of an entrance, a fountain trickled over purple mosaic tile and plastic sheeting blew in the breeze where the doors should have been; the front gate was high and locked up tight. Some of the tallest and most dramatic buildings on the skyline were half-clad in glass; the upper floors were naked and visible straight through. The stooping cranes dressed them, slowly.

One avenue in from the Corniche and there were smaller buildings, government ministries, all older and less ostentatious and very much closed. Back around into Al Reyyan and there were a few hotels along the coast, either office buildings for sleeping in or identikit colonial fantasia along the lines of the Four Seasons.  In between was, almost exclusively, construction -- buildings in various frantic, sparking states of becoming, but decidedly not yet places to be.

The city just sort of stopped west of the Hilton. There were some trailers and then there was just raw beach, lovely and seemingly un-owned. Well west of that were the lights of the luxury beach community at Katara, and far beyond that -- bright and characteristically unfinished -- were the new towers on The Pearl, a man-made island with its own Twitter account and what it touts as "one of the most exclusive marinas in the world." A very distant Doha, but still Doha, just further along and further out.

In the Doha in which I was lost, laborers -- faceless and shrunk and more movement than shape so high up -- could only sort of be seen. They were there, but not strictly visible. The sidewalks were windswept and empty; at first a few westerners bustled by, but then no one. Turn a corner and find a bunch of jumpsuit-clad South Asian workers eating identical brown-bag lunches and drinking chai out of paper cups. Turn another corner and they were gone -- up in some building or swapped out for the next shift's team on one of the white buses that hissed and parked along the otherwise quiet streets. The loud avenues belonged to Mercedes and Range Rover; the side streets belonged to graceless farting Mitsubishi Fuso trucks and slug-like Tata buses.

There was no street food; no one is sponsored by a contractor to shave shawarma at streetside. There was not even any street-level retail to speak of. After blowing off the dining options at City Center, I wandered in vain looking for a restaurant, any restaurant. One option, which seemed to be named Spice Boat: Heaven's Kitchen, was in the first floor of a luxury residential building, and appeared somehow not to have a pedestrian entrance. The only other options were in hotels: a $20 burger in the smoky Zamaya bar at the Hilton, where expats drank Foster's on tap and quietly watched Bayern Munchen win a Bundesliga blowout, or an expensive sushi set at the Four Seasons. I passed and passed, and was famished when I finally ran into Abbas off that alley.

I got lost again and again on the same unnamed streets. The landmarks seemed to change: a giant orange crane showed up and got to work, rendering a familiar streetcorner new and strange. I noticed a luxury mall across an impossibly impassable avenue -- construction and construction barriers, six lanes of traffic, ditches like open wounds -- and wrote it off as another place I wouldn't be able to eat. After I don't know how many turns and turn-backs, I somehow found myself at the mall's entrance. I walked into The Gate -- "We're Almost Ready, Are You?" a banner read outside the just-opened Audi Boutique, which was indeed a boutique that sold Audis. A man at a piano began playing a psychedelically twinkly version of Lionel Richie's "Hello." The food options were a place called Montreal Bread Company and one of those bizarre crypto-pizza places that disproportionately show up in Asian luxury malls. I left and got lost again.

By then I was really hungry, it was really dark and there were no cabs to be had. I walked towards the skyline's bright, empty towers, the traffic too fast for cabs to stop along the Corniche and nonexistent on parallel avenues. The stadium lights were on at the Khalifa International Tennis and Squash Complex, but nothing was happening there.

There was no one around to hear or see or notice. I was the last pedestrian in Doha.
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Then I was back on the Corniche, walking alongside a wall painted by little kids to illustrate various lessons -- the importance of exercise and eating a healthy diet, things like that. I was talking to myself at this point, I'm fairly sure, just little dumb affirmations and profanities, mostly. I know that after crossing a difficult intersection I indulged in some frankly weird overemphatic Kobe-style hand claps.

There was no one around to hear or see or notice. I was the last pedestrian in Doha.

On the Corniche, I quickly ran out of sidewalk. This had happened all day; Doha is not so much an emerging city as an erupting one, and the pedestrian pathways frequently either dwindle into sand or are interrupted by sudden piles of unplaced or displaced paving stones. I found myself waiting for a backhoe to finish doing its thing so that I could pass. It stopped, turned to me, and dipped in a sort of dinosaurian bow. I took a few steps towards it and saw the man in the backhoe's cab signaling, courtly, for me to pass. I waved and he waved back, and I passed under the rumbling orange machine's resting trunk. A few minutes later, I somehow found a cab. Some minutes after that, I was ordering a kebab at an Iraqi restaurant in Souk Wakif.

I can tell you what it tasted like -- lamb-y and delicious, soft with fat and braced with onion and spices, frankly fucking heavenly between torn bits of flour-y clay oven khubz bread -- but that would not convey the relief I felt upon tasting it. I had walked into and out of a Doha that did not yet exist, where I saw a great many people grimly building a planned city for people who also did not yet exist: the guests who would stay in those unfinished hotel rooms, during the World Cup and maybe after, people who would work in those still-naked offices and who would someday cook dinner in the condominiums presently swept through by the breezes off the Arabian Sea.

I left that city and made it back to the other one, the one that already existed. I ate in an artificial market, built by an authoritarian government on the footprint of another market that had been there for hundreds of years before being razed for something newer and cleaner. I ate there, at an outdoor table oversweetened by the sickly shisha smoke from the restaurant next door. I watched tourists and non-tourists walk by over clean new cobblestones. I watched two men in dishdasha laugh and drink tea. A couple at the next table playfully debated ordering dessert in German, then ordered it in English. And I was free to come and go as I pleased. I was the luckiest man in Doha.

Producer:Chris Mottram | Design:Josh Laincz | Editor:Spencer Hall | Photos: David Roth

Qatar Chronicles: Part IV, They wanted it more

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David Roth traveled to Qatar for a closer look at the World Cup's future home. Below is the fourth installment of his five-part series.

Previously:

★★★

Well, it's complicated. Just because it's FIFA and it's the World Cup and so of course it's complicated. But a short version I guess would be that FIFA is FIFA, which is to say it's this sort of smuggo mafia of puffy, predatory globo-elite males in suits, all of them dedicated to extracting some sort of rent from the world's totally helpless and justified love for soccer. And FIFA being FIFA, it has all these wildly un-transparent internal processes -- everything done by design in secret, endless dodgy handshake deals between men whose handshakes are mostly worthless -- that seem almost to incent lawlessness.

There is no reason to assume that this organization is awarding World Cup bids, or doing anything else, for anything like the right reasons.

And so the result of this is that the very fact that the World Cup is awarded in the way that it is, by the people that award it, creates this ambient sense of corruption. It's just very difficult to imagine this bunch of crooks using the system they built to make a reasonable decision for the right reasons. And this is true even if they make the right decision! Because it's the bribe-takingest, patronage-swappingest and generally sketchiest organization of its type in the world, it's basically impossible to assume FIFA picked Qatar to host the World Cup in 2022 because of how good Qatar's bid was. There is no reason to assume that this organization is awarding World Cup bids, or doing anything else, for anything like the right reasons.

It seems reasonable to suspect anything, in fact. There are both good reasons and bad reasons to believe that Qatar crossed various ethical lines in its pursuit of the World Cup, but maybe more to the point what lines are we talking about, exactly? None of these suspicions would seem quite so credible, let alone suspicious, if not for FIFA's involvement.

But yeah, of course voters were not persuaded solely by Qatar's stirring and well-produced 35-minute video pitch and the star power, fulsome Francophone praise and granitic grin of Zidane. Of course not. Who and what are we talking about, and can we maybe talk about it like grown-ups?

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★★★

I was sitting on a prefab veranda behind a hotel called the Grand Heritage, drinking sweet Moroccan tea, when I said some version of the words above. It was a beautiful late afternoon in Doha, and the sun was setting over the Aspire Zone, the sprawling sports facility built in 2004 by Qatar's previous Emir. I could hear birds singing in the trees surrounding the Aspire Zone's new soccer fields; a woman who worked for the 2022 bid later told me that this birdsong was fake, piped in through speakers planted around the premises.

I was speaking to James Dorsey, a Moroccan-born writer on soccer in the Middle East and professor at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He is an old hand in the Gulf, and first visited Doha less than a decade after independence. "This was 1981," he told me. "They called the Sheraton," a grim pyramidic Reagan-era ziggurat at the far end of the Corniche "an architectural marvel." I was trying to answer a question he'd asked, and had admittedly run long in my answer. He shook his head: no. "That's how Qatar got the World Cup," he said. "I asked why Qatar got it."

Qatar was willing to -- if only because it needed to -- spend in the hundreds of billions-with-a-B dollars for the same thing.
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This is an easy enough question to answer in one sense, both the how and the why, for all its apparent and crude sportscaster-y overdetermination: Qatar wanted it the most.

This is not just a cliché: each nation bidding on the World Cup makes some calculation regarding how much it's worth to them, and the World Cup was worth far more to Qatar than it was to, say, Australia. We can see this simply in the calculations that both contenders made: Australia was willing to spend in the tens of millions of dollars to get itself World Cup-ready, and Qatar was willing to -- if only because it needed to -- spend in the hundreds of billions-with-a-B dollars for the same thing.

"Every bidder does a cost/benefit analysis," Dorsey said. "Australia puts a dollar figure on that: $45 million, that's what it's willing to gamble in hopes that it wins the bid. Could they put $200 million on the table? Of course they could. It wasn't worth it to them. But if you're doing this as a key pillar of your defense and security, your cost/benefit is very different. It's worth that much more."

Qatar would, of course, also have to spend that much more to make it work. There were three large-ish stadiums to be expanded to World Cup standards, and nine new stadiums that needed building. All of this would happen in a nation roughly the size of Connecticut, and which is for the most part frankly uninhabitable. Leaving aside the question of whether or not a World Cup should be held in a small desert country that does not yet have a full slate of sidewalks in its capital city or a handle on how to enforce its own labor laws, it seems more or less reasonable that it would cost $220 billion to stage it there. This is to say nothing of the solar-powered cooling system that would make it possible - "harvesting the power of our friend the sun," per Qatar's 35-minute bid video - which could indeed "change the world forever" if ever it came into existence, and which hasn't yet come into existence. (Doha's Al Sadd Stadium has air conditioning below seats and on the field of play, but it's generator-powered.)

In his since-redacted piece for ESPN, the British journalist Phil Ball described that video as a truly inspiring cinematic work. Having seen it, I can say that it is honestly pretty good, if maybe a little heavy on the inspiring lite-Arabic music. But the video, besides showing Qatar's will and capacity to make its case -- compare this example of Qatar's pitch to this example of Australia's, note the difference in conception and execution -- is not wholly bombast, big talk and wishful thinking. Yes, it makes a big deal out of both the novelty and sustainability of holding all those games so close together, but this is another one of those things that happens to be true regardless of which sketchy soccer entity is saying it.

To have the World Cup in Qatar is to have the World Cup in very close quarters, which is not necessarily bad -- fans could indeed see two or three games in a day, and could conceivably swipe their Qatar MetroCard to see those games without so much as getting into a car. In the video, Pep Guardiola smilingly makes this very point. Granted, this would involve taking a Metro that does not yet exist to stadiums that do not yet exist, and then watching two teams play in a microclimate made bearable by world-changing technology that also does not yet exist. But a salesman is got to dream, and also, crass as it may seem, if such an implausible multi-layered miracle can be bought, Qatar would be one of the nations that both could and would buy it.

But, again, with all the things in this world on which to spend money -- Damien Hirst installations are just the beginning -- and with the dismal track records of such expenditures paying off for the nations that spend on this sort of thing, given all that: why so much, and why on this?

★★★

The answer is complicated, and certainly more complicated than Because The Emir Wanted It. Of all the risible sentences in Ball's retracted report from Qatar, the one that came to seem the most ridiculous after talking with people working for the World Cup bid -- call it Q22 if you really want to sound like you know what's up -- and familiar with Qatar was this: "at the swish of the emir's gold pen, new laws come into effect." Bizarre huzzah-for-authoritarianism tone to the side, this is not really correct. It's confusing a country without democracy for a country without politics. Qatar has only the barest cosmetic modicum of the former, and a suffocatingly large amount of the latter.

A staggering 20 percent of Qataris are related to the ruling family.
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Domestically, that politics expresses itself through a vast half-Soviet, half-Dilbert bureaucracy -- "everyone has to change one sentence in everything," one person told me, "and then they get to say 'I fixed it'" -- and factionalism within the ruling Al Thani family.

Complicating things further, the Al Thani family is, and pardon my political jargon, freaking huge -- a staggering 20 percent of Qataris are related to the ruling family. Some Al Thani's write defiant defenses of Qatar's conduct against "imperial Western Islam-o-phobia" in the Qatar Chronicle; other people with the same last name will argue for more moderation. (Sometimes it's even the same Al Thani doing both.) None of these Qataris vote, of course, but that is not to say that their opinions don't matter. "There are different schools of thought within society, and they run the gamut," Dorsey told me. "The emir ultimately has to balance that. This is a country that is not immune to coups."

So it's complicated, and of course it's complicated. Qatar's regional situation is even more so: the nation is, geographically and politically and in terms of sharing its massive natural resources, caught between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the only two nations on earth that adhere to the strict Wahhabist sect of Islam, but religious affinity aside, Qatar's relationship with this ambitious, idiosyncratic and not widely loved regional power is as complicated as the rest of the world's. This is one of the most difficult places in the world, and Qatar -- which was not really a nation 50 years ago, and is figuring out both how to become one and what kind of nation it wants to be -- is in one of the more difficult spots in that difficult region.

This doesn't excuse any of Qatar's excesses, but it might help explain them somewhat. It's possible to view Qatar's collection of international luxury symbols -- Qatar's sovereign wealth fund owns Harrod's department store in London and Paris Saint-Germain soccer team in Paris and those diamond-encrusted Damien Hirsts and, yes, the World Cup -- as simply rich people collecting rich people things.

But there's almost certainly more to it than that. Qatar's quest to become a global brand, not in the glib corporate-Twitter-account sense of #brand but in terms of becoming a thing recognizable as an agglomeration of attributes and values and so on, can and probably should be understood not strictly as an exercise in autocratic vanity, but as a sort of public diplomacy and as an attempt to assert soft power.

This is another way to look at all those donations that Qatar may or may not have made to all those national soccer foundations during the FIFA bidding process, or to view Q22's promise to donate the upper tiers of the modular World Cup stadiums -- 170,000 prefab seats, ready to be filled -- to nations TBD after the World Cup. This helps Qatar avoid what one Q22 PR person described as "the white elephant issue," while also functioning as yet another valuable gift from a country that cannot afford to be averse to buying friends.

That sort of financial diplomacy -- or, if you prefer, "spreading around bottomless oil money in a desperate but not unwise attempt to create alliances" -- worked exceptionally well for Kuwait. It worked both in terms of raising its international standing and ensuring that, when the region's reigning bully came kicking in the door, the rest of the world came to throw him out. Qatar's vast wealth will do more to protect its future than its poignantly small army -- less than one-twentieth the size of Saudi Arabia's -- ever would, or could. Of course the World Cup is not just a collection of soccer games. But it's not just a boondoggle, either.

★★★

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It's a sprawling, rather endearingly over-the-top mall that features both a canal system and a hockey rink.

The Aspire Zone, which Qatar built to host the 2006 Asian Games -- by all accounts a great success -- consists of sprawling buildings built for swimming, diving, basketball, team handball and other sports, a number of Technicolor-lush soccer fields (both field turf and grass), the Aspire Sports Academy, and the requisite miles of windswept flagstones. Here and there people burble up: Aspire Academy kids heading to or from practice, expat kids fresh out of the pool marching out of the Just Family Fitness Center making fart noises with their armpits, the idle security guards that are everywhere in Doha. One of them chases me, slowly, off the Aspire Academy campus. He's exceedingly polite about it.

The other notable feature of the Aspire Zone, besides the towering and rather garish Torch building, is the Villagio Mall, which is "inspired by Venice" in the same way that the food at The Olive Garden is inspired by that of Mario Batali. It's a sprawling, rather endearingly over-the-top mall that features both a canal system and a hockey rink. It would be possible for someone with a good enough arm to step out of the Applebee's in the Aspire Zone and throw a baseball over a South Asian man paddling a gondola and through the window of a Tom Ford boutique. There was a terrible fire there in 2012; adults and children died in a nursery that was not built to code. The people responsible, who included a member of the Al Thani family, went to jail for it.

Walk through Villagio and you will see the things you usually see at malls -- also a hockey rink and a Pizza Hut serving a "minted beef flatbread" and other strange things -- and for the most part hear only one language spoken. Seats are segregated by sex at the multiplex, but the films showing (I saw an Aussie buy a ticket for Bad Grandpa) are in English. Cash register conversations and the ubiquitous welcome-to-the-store greetings and prices and menus are all in English. This is not the native language of Qatar, of course, but it has become something very much like it.

"A local Qatari checks into this hotel, he doesn't do that in Arabic," Dorsey said. "You go shopping, you're shopping in a foreign language in your own country. The issue of Qatar for the Qataris is real, there's a real fear of losing identity, of losing control. It's unique to this part of the world. There is no other part of the world that has this demographic layout. When you talk about national identity here, you're talking about existential fear. On one level, it's simply 90 percent of your population is foreign and you're six percent of the labor force. You've got all the money in the world, but on the other hand, deep down, you know that it can't go on this way."

When you talk about national identity here, you're talking about existential fear.

What Qatar wants with the World Cup, and why it wants it, is yet another a complicated thing. But Qatar is a complicated place -- a deeply conservative nation confronted with the necessity of wild, enormous change, all of it due immediately. The 2022 Committee talks about the World Cup as a catalyst of change, and is not totally blowing smoke. But, as can be seen everywhere in the erupting-market chaos of the city, there is a point at which change is no longer a choice or a thing that can be directed, but a sort of gravitational fact.

At that point, things change much more than they are changed. Money can be spent to try to shape the change that's coming, but there isn't enough money in the world to stop it. There's something poignant about watching Qatar figure this out. It wants the world to come, and then it wants the world to leave; it wants to be seen, and it wants to be left alone; it wants to consume all the extravagances of modernity without losing any of its traditions. This is a complex and contradictory and maybe impossible collection of wants, but that's how wanting works. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with getting. That takes care of itself.

Producer:Chris Mottram | Design:Josh Laincz | Editor:Spencer Hall | Photos: Getty Images and David Roth

Qatar Chronicles: Part V, On their own terms

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David Roth traveled to Qatar for a closer look at the World Cup's future home. Below is the final installment of his five-part series.

Previously:

★★★

To arrive in Doha is to walk into the airport of a vanished nation. The arrivals terminal can be reached only after a long bus ride through a sprawling tarmac-and-sand moonscape. At one point, the bus will pass other buses on a four-lane road on which only airport vehicles drive.

This was the first of several times during my visit to Qatar that I was reminded, incongruously, of the scrubby, sweltering strip mall goofscape of Southern California's desert nowheres. There are similar rectangular storage facilities for living, similar oafish two-story highwayside retail, a similar Gaussian distribution of your shittier fast food franchises. I counted three Hardee's, three Pizza Huts, two KFCs, a Popeye's and a Ponderosa Steakhouse. In the wide spaces between and around all the gloss and new marble, there is a shockingly large amount of Riverside in Doha.

The arrival terminal in Doha, too, could be in San Bernardino, if San Bernardino were a Muslim monarchy. It's a skinny orphan out of a past that Qatar has dedicated itself to making unimaginable, and crowds further out into the desert every day. That is not what the departure terminal is like.

That one is and feels newer, glassy and high-ceilinged and futuristically impersonal, and so is probably more like what the sprawling and characteristically ambitious new Hammad Airport -- "runways amongst the longest in the world," a plaque on the wall promises, because of course -- will be like when it opens. Receive the necessary x-rays and pick up the exit stamp on your passport and you walk into a frenetic Duty Free mall that spans the length of a football field. There are perfumes and watches; there are souvenir t-shirts that read:

QATAR
I Love Camels
I Love Camels
I Love Camels

It is one of just two places selling bottles of liquor in the entire nation.

and there are five different types of dates from Saudi Arabia (I recommend these, they're delicious) and cigarette cartons wearing garish warnings ("CIGARETTES ARE HIGHLY ADDICTIVE DON'T START") and the inevitable Toblerones the size of Dustin Hoffman.

Most notably, there is a bustling liquor store. It is one of just two places selling bottles of liquor in the entire nation, and you'll need to show your boarding pass to buy whatever you want to buy, be that one of the weird blended scotches that seem to exist only in foreign Duty Frees -- King Robert II, Passport, the delightfully named "Hankey Bannister" -- or some of the more expensive whiskies in the world.

There are no real deals to be had here, and I didn't feel like carrying a bottle of Hankey Bannister around for the next 22 hours, but I did settle in that section to watch what must have been the foremost whiskey salesman in Qatar doing his thing. Insistently, and with what might have been entirely fraudulent knowledge, he maneuvered a man from the triangular mid-shelf whatever of Glenfiddich to the left, and then to the left again, where he framed up a choice between an old and ostensibly limited Macallan single malt and a $160 bottle of 15-year-old Jura.

The shopper was wary; the salesman was insistent. The salesman popped his finger off the dark blue box that held a bottle of Macallan; its price was probably something like two weeks' pay for him. "One taste," he said, "you will know that this is different." The shopper drifted unconsciously back rightward, and the salesman kept talking. The salesman placed the Jura back on the shelf behind him in what was in retrospect a very risky no-look pass.

★★★

Maybe this failing sale is a microcosm of the whole Qatar thing.

There are several things to make of this, depending on what you want to make of it. Maybe this failing sale is a microcosm of the whole Qatar thing. Here was a laborer from the global south, far from home and in strange clothes, doing his utmost to provide an Internationally Recognized Luxury Experience to a wary out-of-towner, at no noticeable discount beyond the symbolic freedom from duty. The Single Malt Salesman of Doha was selling good stuff, although he had likely never tasted of it. But he was also bluffing hard, overplaying his hand in an atmosphere of buzzing artifice and extraction as the sale slipped away, pursued too hard and feeling maybe a little hustled.

Or it's not that, and it's just the market doing what the market does, the usual back and forth devourings. At least officially, Qataris do not drink, and neither do they make it easy for non-Qataris to do so. The one liquor store in the nation, QDB, is by all accounts a pain in the ass. This other one exists only for those who will not drink the booze that they buy there in Qatar. This is the fundamental duty-freedom of the market: whiskey (and gin and cognac and wine and everything else, it was a big store) is a thing people like to buy in airports to bring home. And if they want to buy, it would seem foolish not to sell.

There is a potential workaround for everything in Qatar, a price that when paid opens options up. That happens to be true more or less everywhere, but if you want all this to reflect some appalling cynicism or telltale hypocrisy or sinister expediency on the part of the Qataris, then it could very well reflect all that. But why would you want it to reflect that?  This is not to say that the enterprise isn't cynical or hypocritical or sinister/expedient. It's just to say that it isn't unique.

★★★

Qatardutyfree_medium(Photo by RoB, via Wikimedia Commons)

It would also seem worth mentioning that there are bars in Doha, although they are all in hotels and offer from my limited survey exactly none of the things people go to bars to enjoy. Besides alcohol, that is, although drinks are comically expensive: a Manhattan made with Canadian whiskey cost nearly $20 at the smoky, grumpy bar in the Doha Hilton.

In that bar, a half-dozen men grimly, wordlessly smoked cigarettes and drank pints of Foster's while watching Bayern Munich win a Bundesliga game 7-0. This was during my lost afternoon in the West Bay; I wanted a beer as badly in that moment as I ever have, and was far enough into my wanderings that I might have settled for a Canadian Manhattan, and another. But I left the bar without having, and no longer wanting, either.

Qatar will make available to visitors all the things visitors want, but they will always and only do it on their terms.

Which is another push/pull transaction playing out in the Doha fashion. Qatar will make available to visitors all the things visitors want, but they will always and only do it on their terms. It will be possible to get certain western things, but it will also be illegal to get them. An expat I spoke with explained the equipment necessary to watch a Big 12 football game in Doha. You will need, for starters, a stateside Slingbox workaround and some light smuggling, but it can be done. Friends of a friend live together as a gay couple in Doha, despite the fact that homosexuality is illegal in Qatar. Things can be done. People are doing it.

A great deal is possible in Doha, but the hosts will decide when and how it becomes possible, and the more you hurry them the slower they will go. These hosts, gracious as they are in some ways, will do only what they want to do, when they are ready to do it. They keep their own counsel, and will decide what they want to do per that counsel, and then when they are ready and not a moment earlier, they will do it. They will not go through the usual conciliatory motions at any point; they will, in fact, possibly act considerably less conciliatory than they actually are, for their own reasons.

When Qatar's willfulness manifests as the slow-walking of reforms and enforcement that could not just improve but save the lives of the nearly two million people pulling this dream nation out of unyielding sand, it seems unconscionable, repellent and even hateful. When it plays out as ambitious and concerted strategic action on reforming those very problems, which actions are undertaken in secret because they did not want to be seen as pressured into action, it is notably stranger.

"The Qataris are their own worst enemy," James Dorsey, the Middle East soccer commentator, told me in the Aspire Zone. "They actually have a reasonably good story to tell in terms of what they're doing on labor, and they're not telling it."

I was in touch with a number of people who do or have done business in the Gulf, none of whom were willing to speak on the record, a number of which pretty transparently resent this ritualized performance and signature shadowplay, and who see the Qatari as -- context and culture and circumstance aside -- kind of jerks.

But Qatar's sheer bloodymindedness and unyielding will -- and this is true even if every single allegation and suspicion of bid-rigging, bribe-greasing, favor-trading FIFA fuckery is true -- are what won Qatar the rights to spend its $220 billion on the World Cup in 2022. Look at it out of context, and it's hard to imagine a more inexplicable winner. Here is the most important sports event in the world: played in a tiny country, in impossible conditions; in massive stadiums that have not yet been built, and which will be accessed through a vast network of state-of-the-art infrastructure that also does not yet exist. (This includes fans staying in one of 84,000 or so new hotel rooms that have not yet been constructed.) Those nonexistent stadiums, Qatar still insists, will be cooled with a solar-powered technology that has not yet been invented. There would seem to be no limit on what limitless money can buy, but it is hard to escape the sense that this, right here, may be that limit. And yet.

And yet Qatar won this, willed it and won it knowing what that would cost and what it would mean.

And yet Qatar won this, willed it and won it knowing what that would cost and what it would mean. The nation seems committed to making it work, and it may well be that it could work. Whether they deserve it or not is both a strange question and now beside the point. They won it, however they won it, and their task now is to earn it. If Qatar takes that challenge as seriously as they did the bidding process, we might admit the possibility that they somehow pull that off, too.

There is both single malt scotch in the Wahhabi emirate and some strained but functioning justification for it. There are wills and there are ways, and if the will runs the right way, this will have worked. That process will almost certainly bring, in its own frustrating time, more rights and better lives for the people who do the dirty, dusty, dangerous work of making this strange new country from scratch. That is important.

That is the most important thing under discussion here. If what's given on the human rights front will invariably be given grudgingly and too late and in a way that will probably seem somewhat peculiar, Qatar will at least give it. They'll give it in their way, because -- in its wealth and its weirdnesses, its uglinesses and uniqueness and strange stilted beauty -- Qatar will defiantly and always and only be Qatar.

That means it will be an idiosyncratic sort of apartheid state, top-heavy and authoritarian and unfree, wildly rich and wildly unequal, great and small at once. Qatar wants more than anything to remain Qatar, and for that reason I believe it will. That may not be a place you'd want to live, but they don't really want you to live there, either.

In its profound multi-layered opacity and Byzantine family-business politics, Qatar will always be an especially foreign nation among foreign nations. But there is something recognizable in its defiance, its dedication not to be told what to do or be seen to have been told what to do. Nations in general tend to be this way -- self-justifying and self-defeating and selfishly stubborn and blinkered and too slow to change, even when they know they must. One good reason for this is that humans also tend to be that way.

★★★

I got a box of Saudi dates at the Doha Duty Free. My wife loves them, and I became a fan on my visit, devouring them wherever I saw them, which was most everywhere. At the duty free register, in the maelstrom of all this merciless and blearily automatic multilingual commerce -- it was also 1:15 in the morning, I should note -- I asked the cashier about the swaggering whiskey salesman. Who is that guy, or something like that.

The cashier smiled and rolled his eyes, either at the mention of the salesman or at this goofus American making such strange conversation in the middle of the night. "Well, he...," the cashier began, and a European couple suddenly beached themselves next to me, bumping the cash register's podium with a meaty and near-simultaneous thud. They asked the cashier if they could pay there. He said yes and they got in line behind me. It was time to complete the transaction.

So I paid my money down and got what I wanted. The cashier asked how I wanted my change: in dollars or Riyals.

Producer:Chris Mottram | Design:Josh Laincz | Editor:Spencer Hall | Title Photo: Royonx, via Wikimedia Commons
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