Month: July 2007

At a time when the sports leagues are under seige from drugs, gambling and violence, the loss of one of the really "Good and Decent Guys" in the game seems to hurt a lot more.

However, the other way to look at the death of Bill Walsh today, is that sports fans, especially football fans, have a chance to recollect and reminisce about a football genius that was both intellectual and classy.  

It’s hard to imagine Bill Walsh ever leading a team who’s star players flirted with the law, or engaged in all out illegal behavior.  You think of "Walsh’s guys" – Montana, Rice, Craig, Lott, Clark, Young, etc….guys you couldn’t root against even when you were supporting another team.

Over the weekend, babeball inducted two of their own high-class players into their Hall of Fame – Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn. When reading the Sunday features about these two gentlemen of the game, it was difficult not to make mental comparisons to the players today that would fill their shoes.  Besides someone like Ichiro and Craig Biggio, it’s hard to imagine who will be grabbing the torch.

But back to football – where the Walsh legacy will live on thanks to the long list of Bill’s apprentices who went on to long coaching careers in the NFL.  Perhaps more and more of these coaches will remember back to lessons Walsh taught, choosing players who love football and achievment, and see that long-term financial rewards come from being good people and players at the same time.   Maybe the fans will start to look to Lindsay, Paris and other Hollywood convicts for their crime fix, and revert back to admiration of the players who excel on the field and serve as good role models without trying to.

If there’s anything the loss of Bill Walsh this week can remind us, it’s that good guys win lots of games.  And fans spend a lot of money to watch teams win games.  Maybe losing one good guy this week will help teams and players look to character as an imprtant trait, and we’ll soon be able to look back at last week as the low point in professional sports, the point where things actually turned around. 

I’m ashamed to admit that I’m a month behind the release of a new CD from one of my favorite bands, the Editors.  If you haven’t heard of them, definitely give them a listen.  The new CD, "An End Has a Start," continues their dramatic, heavy, yet oddly upbeat sound.  A pretty unique band, so I hope you’ll give them a listen on Rhapsody or your favorite streaming service.

I got hooked after seeing them in Manchester in Fall 2005, playing to a PACKED house.  Then they went and played 7 straight sold out nights in London.  Definitely worth a checking out if you like live music.

It makes me sick when companies are so successful at being sleezy, that they can afford to advertise in Google Mail, and have a high enough conversion rate that the venture is profitable.

I hesitate to give the url, of my latest nnoyance, because they are probably good enough marketers that they’ll receive a ping and then launch some kid of attack on me.  So, here it is, but you can’t cllick on it.  http://your fortune revealed [dot].com.  You have to actually copy and paste this in and remove the spaces. 

These guys are pretty high on the scumbag meter.  Unsuspecting people will enter their cell phone number and start getting texts, which they will start paying for if they aren’t careful and take action.

I click on a lot of links in Google Mail to see what works from a marketing perspective.  Frankly, Gmail is starting to take on a more Hotmail-like feel with the continual ads for shady thing like this.  It’s too bad that Gmail doesn’t have some sort of "customer filter" where we could choose to block ads from disreputable companies.  Or, if a company gets enough block requests, their CPC should rise.   Ad based email programs work if the ads are unobtrusive, or even better, relevant.  When they are scams, they just turn people to other email programs.

Rant over, I hope this campaign fails.  I for one, will click on the ad every time I see it, so they pay the $.25 over and over again but never get a conversion. 

So, it turns out that a few million NBA fans may have been right all along.  All of the compaining about NBA officials making ridiculous foul calls to affect a game, might be actually true.

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=2943095

So, how big a deal is this? I think the most important question is, "Is there only one ref involved?" It seems impossible that one guy could bemixed up in this, doesn’t it?  And it seems further unlikely that the mob launched this idea in 2006. There’s a real possibility that this goes back 10-20 years, with 1-10 refs per year.  I mean, why not?

And how does the NBA address Mark Cuban now?   If this guy did any important games that the Mavericks were involved with, Cuban has every right to be suspicious.

Bottom line – the technology is around now where millions of fans are a more reliable barometer of whether a player or ref is doing his job well.  The fans may need to have a bigger play inhow we police these things.