Craig Tyson Adams

He’s as predictable as the tides. Tom Brady is like the sun coming up in the east. He is the football equivalent of death and taxes. Father Time has nothing on him. Brady is like Wyatt Earp in a gunfight. He always wins. Sometimes Tom Brady momentarily falters. Like a car that needs a tune-up. You’ll be sitting at a traffic light and it idles rough. It's not enough to trade the car in, but it makes you realize some adjustments need to be made.  After routine maintenance is done, it’s back to high performance and ruling the road again. In that respect, Brady is like a machine. He had a couple of hiccups. There were two times that the human Eli Manning of the New York Giants somehow made Brady miscalculate. Something about the New York Giants’ defense disrupted Brady’s internal operating code. It didn’t compute. Brady was like a droid in a Sci-Fi movie that suddenly realized it had fallibility. He short-circuited. Then Brady's club got a tune-up. His team, the New Englan

Every ballplayer hears the same thing from coaches throughout the beginning of the player’s career. If you respect the game, the game will pay you back. A small fraction of players makes the majors straight out of the draft. Most make the big show after refining their skills for a few seasons in the minor leagues. A few bounce back and forth between the majors and minors before eventually sticking and finding their place. Then there are the players that have enough talent to keep around, but not quite enough to make the jump to the majors. They’re the depth guys. They are uniquely talented in rare skills, but lacking in areas that would permit them to move forward. They’re like singers that have the chops but sound like someone famous. Like, a talented painter whose works have the same attributes as a master but not the full complement.  They possess an uncommon skill but are common as a player. The player can hit, but can’t field or run. He can field like a vacuum cleaner, but can’t h

Back in 2016, the Los Angeles Rams traded up to take Cal-Berkeley’s quarterback Jared Goff . They paid a king’s ransom for him. A massive trade with the Tennessee Titans that cost them multiple first, second and third-round draft picks over two years to move up in the NFL draft for the right to choose Goff as the number 2 overall pick. The Rams had a lot riding on Goff’s right arm.  Goff hadn’t done well at the NFL draft combine where college players run through drills to show their physicality and mental prowess to NFL coaches. He is 6’ 4” and 215 pounds and mobile enough to appear to be an excellent quarterback. It’s a textbook height and weight that makes NFL coaches work themselves into a tizzy. He looked like he was capable of doing it. If you were making a football movie, Goff was straight out of central casting.  He didn’t stand out at the physical workouts. Goff scored low on the mental aptitude exam. They thought that with the right offensive system and coaching, he should

Shohei Ohtani is the greatest player in Major League Baseball history. There. I said it. He’s not the sport’s greatest hitter. Barry Bonds is. He’s not baseball’s greatest pitcher. Randy Johnson is. Ohtani isn’t better than both individually. Otani can do baseball things those two singularly couldn’t do.  Ohtani is an extremely good hitter, particularly a power hitter, and he can steal bases as he possesses elite speed. He’s the best combination of both power and speed since Bonds when Bonds was in his prime. But, Bonds couldn’t throw a 97 mph moving heater and a wipe-out split-fingered fastball for strikes.  Shohei Ohtani is an effective pitcher. Actually, being effective is an understatement. He’s an excellent pitcher. He’s the best pitcher on the Los Angeles Angels staff, which isn’t saying much, but Otani was the starting pitcher in the Major League All-Star Game for the American League this year, while leading the league in triples. That’s crazy.  In all actuality, Ohtani isn’t

Some guy pitched an MLB no-hitter. His name is Tyler Gilbert . If you don’t know who he is, that’s okay, me either. I’ve been following baseball since 1974. His name has never come up.  There have been a record 8 no-hitters thrown this year. That’s a lot. Like Larry King getting married a lot. The thing that makes Gilbert’s accomplishment for the Arizona Diamondbacks stand out is that it was his first major league start. That’s rare. It’s only happened 4 times since 1876.  The first two times a pitcher hurled an MLB no-hitter in his first start was back in the 1890s. Baseball was different back then. Home runs didn’t happen unless a fielder made a mistake, and the ball got by him. There weren’t pitching mounds back then, and they pitched from 55.5 feet away. Today’s pitchers throw from 60 feet and 6 inches.  Both no-hitters happened on the last day of the season, so my guess is the players wanted to get out of there and get to the pub. There were different priorities before players m

It turned out that tackling topped Tim Tebow’s time at tight-end.  Tim Tebow won the Heisman Trophy as a quarterback in 2007 while playing college football at Florida State. His head coach while playing there was Urban Meyer. The NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars hired Meyer to be their head coach this year.  When Urban Meyer got to camp with the Jaguars, the team had a number one first-round pick in the NFL draft. They also had a dashing cultural phenom and a relatively proficient incumbent quarterback named Gardner Minshew.  The team used the first-round pick on what Jaguars general manager Trent Baalke called the most pivotal pick in team history. Clemson University’s Trevor Lawrence, considered to be one of the best college quarterbacks of all time. Coach Meyer wasn’t thinking he needed another play-caller. Why would he need Tim Tebow?  The Denver Broncos drafted Tebow into the NFL after college. The Bronco's head coach at the time was a former Bill Belichick disciple, Josh McDanie

There was an MLB game played in a cornfield last night. They played the game in Iowa. We know Iowa for its agriculture. A cornfield in Iowa isn’t out of place. Major League Baseball in Iowa is.  The game was between the American League Central division-leading Chicago White Sox and the legendary New York Yankees . People that attended the game drove to a town in Iowa called Dyersville. Attendees parked in a gravel lot and got to walk through a corn maze to get to the field. Once there, there was a temporary baseball field that was constructed especially for the game.  Why go to all this effort? What’s all the fuss about? Why did Major League Baseball have two of their franchises transport their collective multi-millionaire players to the middle of the Midwest to play a single game?  To commemorate a movie, Field Of Dreams starring Kevin Costner , made 32 years ago. Now, I’m not one to make fun of nostalgia. MLB Field of Dreams is just that. I’ve got old records. My movie collec