The kids in the Grading The Week offices are a lot of things, but they are not unreasonable. (Stop snickering.) Few topics are off the table when it comes to taking the Mickey, as our pals across the pond like to say. The GTW team likes to brag that they can take it almost as well as they dish it out.
And, to be frank, there are a lot of things the kids are perfectly fine with shaming CU Buffs fans for right now. Most of them involve the fanatical desire to follow Deion Sanders around like a slice of lemmings, even if that means trailing him to the edge of a seaside cliff and taking the plunge. (He won’t, of course. But he’ll expect you, too. Out of fealty.)
But there are some lows even we won’t stoop to, even with The Cult of Prime breathing down our collective necks. And that includes shaming a fan base for not attending … practice.
And by practice, we mean a spring game. Because that’s what a spring “game” really, truly, is.
Pundits chiding CU, CSU fans for skipping miserable spring games — F.
The GTW crew would bet you Mike Florio wouldn’t pay $15 to sit for 75 minutes straight in an old stadium when it’s 38 degrees, cloudy as a cup of tea, with a wind nippy enough to blow drizzle up your nose. Conditions for Coach Prime’s second game were more Inverness than BoCo, but tens of thousands of brave souls buried themselves inside giant ponchos and sat through it anyway. For a practice. A practice with an admission price.
So imagine our amusement when Florio, longtime NFL blogger with NBC Sports, came out this past Sunday morning and chucked Buffs fans under the bus. “The bloom is off the rose in Boulder,” he wrote, as CU reported an attendance of 28,424 after drawing 47,000 in the snow for the first Prime Era spring game in April 2023.
Couple things. First, a drop of nearly 20,000 tickets is not the rosiest of indicators, even for an exhibition, and Team GTW was shocked to hear Deion admit it hadn’t been sold out a few days before the event. The honeymoon isn’t over, yet. Still, it’s fair to say, after 3-0 turned to 4-8, that neutrals around town remain … skeptical.
But to paraphrase Allen Iverson, we’re talking about practice, here. Anyone who sat through the entirety of the event, which wrapped up not long after the Pac-12 Network live feed ended — it took up a 60-minute block of their Saturday schedule — deserves a free pair of Prime’s Blenders shades for sitting through that slop.
And the same goes for the snow that fell during CSU’s spring game the weekend prior. Although, we can imagine what Rams fans would like to do to those Deion sunglasses right about now.
Rockies and leads — D-.
Say this for the Rox: When they said they were going to make you forget about how bad 2023 felt, it was no joke.
What they didn’t say? That they were going to do it by somehow making 2024 feel even worse.
From last Saturday night through Friday morning, Dick Monfort’s Cockpit Crashers had put up an 0-5 mark for the week, including an 0-3 roadie at similarly flailing Miami, a series that featured two extra-inning defeats, to drop the Local 9 to 7-24.
In trying to process this, the crack GTW statniks whipped out their calculators and a couple bottles of Excedrin. The Rox lost a club-record 103 games a year ago. Fangraphs.com’s projections, as of late Friday afternoon, has the current club on a pace to pip that mark, projecting 104 defeats. PECOTA.com’s computers think they’ll crush it, pegging the Purple for 107 losses, most in baseball and even more than their insular American League cousins, the woebegone Chicago White Sox (102 projected losses).
But it’s not just that the Rockies are bad. You expected that. It’s that they’re losing in the most soul-crushing, fan-killing, creative ways imaginable. They’re making history, setting a new MLB record for trailing in 31 straight games going into Friday’s soggy tilt at Pittsburgh. And for that, even the cynics on Team GTW have to tip our caps.