The NFL regular season has ended. Teams are starting their annual fire sales on coaches and coordinators. Some of the early casualties include Patriots' head coach Bill Belichick, Chargers' head coach Brandon Staley, Washington Commanders' head coach Ron Rivera, Chicago Bears' offensive coordinator Luke Getsy, and others. That's on top of mid-season firings of Raiders' head coach Josh McDaniels and Carolina Panthers' head coach Frank Reich. During the second half of the season, speculation about which coaches would get fired was accompanied by fans arguing over whether these bad teams were "tanking" the season (or should tank the season) to improve their draft picks. The Bears were one of the most talked-about teams in this regard.

I don't pretend to know what goes on behind closed doors in NFL front offices, and no NFL front office has ever (to my knowledge) actually come out and said "we're deliberately tanking this season", so whether or not a team might be tanking is pure speculation. But if you ask me, no professional sports team should ever deliberately tank a season! And this goes double for any team that is operating with a 1st or 2nd year coaching staff or general manager, as is the case for the 2022 and 2023 Chicago Bears.

Many fans speculated (and even wanted) that the Bears would tank in 2022. And after a 1-5 start to the 2023 season, some fans even began to think the Bears were tanking this season too. Reddit was awash with posts insisting that the Bears' should tank in order to get the top 2 picks in the 2024 NFL draft (the Bears own the Panther's first round pick, in addition to their own pick). This would allow the Bears to cut Justin Fields and draft Caleb Williams, as well as get some other top-tier elite talent.

Photo credit: John McGillen, Photography LLC.

Many fans expect the Bears to cut or trade Justin Fields in order to draft Caleb Williams.

Personally, I am willing to go on the record as saying that I do not agree with this popular consensus that the Bears should draft Caleb Williams. I am still on the fence about Justin Fields' potential, and would like to see him stay with the team. I would prefer that the Bears trade down to get more draft capital, and focus on taking an elite receiver (Marvin Harrison Jr.), offensive lineman, pass rusher, and/or cornerback. But my feelings on the Bears' specific 2024 strategy is neither here nor there. The main point is that regardless of the Bears' plans with Justin Fields (or any teams' plans with any roster), no team should ever deliberately tank a season.

The thing about tanking is that "tanking" is practically indistinguishable from actually sucking.

Yesterday, I posted a new video to YouTube which critiques the Training Camp mini-games in Madden 24, and their pitiful attempt at playing off of players' nostalgia for the almost-20-year-old Madden games on PS2. I'm not going to reproduce a transcript of the entire video here, since most of the points in the video were already made in my full review of Madden 24 on this blog.

In summary, the video compares the execution of the mini-games in Madden 24 to the overall execution of the mini-games in Madden 2006, and how these new drills fail to replicate many of the design decisions that made those old drills good. Most notably, the new drills lack any of the classic risk / reward mechanics of the old drills, and the new drills seem designed for the user to just grind them for the maximum reward possible. The critique also compared each new mini-game with the analogous drill from Madden 2006, and how each individual new drill is poorly designed in comparison to the classic drills.

I also rant a bit about the lack of any mini-game for offensive linemen. To be fair to Madden 24, the old Madden games didn't have offensive lineman mini-games either. But then again, those older games also didn't have any mechanics or controls for playing as an offensive lineman. Madden 24 does. So there is no excuse for Madden 24 to not have offensive lineman mini-games.

I do wonder how this Training Camp feature is being received by the Madden community. If the rest of the community dislikes them as much as I do, then I wouldn't be surprised to see EA completely drop this feature from next year's game. Honestly, I don't even think I would miss it.

As my Patrons and YouTube viewers know, I've been working for the past several months on a lengthy retrospective of Star Trek video games. I currently have 2 preview clips of that lengthy retrospective project available to my Patrons, and I plan to give my Patrons exclusive early access to the entire completed project, while the general public will have each episode released one-at-a-time over the course of multiple weeks. So if you want a preview of that project, or early access when it is finished, you can become a Patron and support my content creation.

As part of that retrospective, I've bought a lot of old Star Trek games to play or re-play. A lot of these games are buggy, or don't run well on modern systems. The Steam version of Starfleet Command, for example, required me to modify an ini file in order to prevent the game from constantly crashing. But of all the old, crappy, or broken Star Trek games I've played, the absolute worst has been Star Trek: Bridge Crew for the PS4/PSVR.

I've been buying and playing old Star Trek games as research for a retrospective.

Bridge Crew is a multiplayer VR game that was released in 2017 by Ubisoft for PSVR and PC. It's a live-service game that uses both the PSN servers and Ubisoft Connect servers to run the multiplayer. I initially skipped this game back in 2017 for a couple reasons. The first is that I didn't have a VR headset. The second is that it was based on the reboot Kelvin-verse films, which simply didn't appeal to me as much as the Prime canon. But I found out recently that the game does actually have DLC that includes Original Series and Next Generation content. Armed now with a friend's PSVR headset and the more appealing prospect of playing VR on the bridge of the Original Enterprise and Enterprise-D, I decided to buy the game and give it a try.

Despite being a 6-year-old game on an obsolete console, Ubisoft and Sony are still charging full price for it, $30. So I assumed that the game must still be fully functional and playable. Or at least, I assumed the single-player would be. In fact, PSN actually lists the game as being a "1 player" game. I had no expectation that the game's multiplayer lobbies would be full of prospective playmates, but I figured that I could at least try out the single-player and see how far I could get.

I was more interested in Bridge Crew after discovering it has TOS and TNG DLC.

After playing through the tutorial and getting through the first 2 story campaign missions, I called it quits for the night. When I came back a couple days later, I found that none of my progress had been saved. The game was prompting me to do the tutorial before starting play, my rank had been reset, all the campaign missions after the first had re-locked, and even my avatar had been reset to a random face. Was there a manual save option in the menus that I had missed?

No, there wasn't. After some online research, I discovered that Ubisoft had recently ended official support for the game and had shut down the servers. Apparently, for the PS4 version of the game, all save progress was stored on the Ubisoft servers. With those servers now offline, game progress could no longer be saved. It's unclear to me whether the online multiplayer still works, as that may go through the PSN instead of Ubisoft's servers. There's nobody in the multiplayer lobbies, but it's unclear if that's because the lobbies go through servers that are offline, or if there simply isn't anybody trying to play the game anymore.

I'm not going to hold back on spoilers in this review, so read on at your own risk. If you want my non-spoiler opinion of the game (and didn't already get it from the grade above): it's good. It's not the watershed, lightning-in-a-bottle experience like the first game was though. It makes some smart changes, including some that seem to be based directly on feedback from the first game. But it also undercuts some of those smart changes with other changes and additions that aren't so smart. Bottom line though: if you liked the first game (and who didn't?), then you'll almost certainly also like this sequel.

I always get a little bit worried whenever an adaptation of Spider-Man decides to adapt the Venom storyline. It is usually where an adaptation goes off the rails. And even if it manages to stay on the rails, it's usually one of (if not the) weakest storyline of the adaptation. Whether it's Sam Raimi being forced by Sony to write the black suit and Venom into his 3rd Spider-Man movie, Spectacular Spider-Man depicting Peter and Eddie Brock as childhood friends, or Web of Shadows just being completely bonkers from start to finish, the appearance of the black suit always makes me nervous. Honestly, I think the 90's Animated Series is the only adaptation of Spider-Man that has ever hit the black suit and Venom storyline out of the park. It's Saturday morning cartoon nature means it completely fumbled the ball when it came time for Carnage though...

The black suit and Venom storylines is where a lot of Spider-Man adaptations go off the rails.

Surprisingly, Insomniac's take on the symbiote storyline takes a lot of inspiration from other Spider-Man adaptations, almost as if they think they can take poorly-received Venom storylines and improve on them. It starts off with the Sandman as a prologue villain before setting Harry Osborne up for a turn towards villainy, which closely mirrors Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3. Then it turns Harry Osborne into Venom, as in the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon, before basically turning into Web Of Shadows in the final act. The black suit itself also changes over time to reflect how close it is to taking over Peter's mind, which is an idea introduced in Spectacular Spider-Man. Also, the symbiote is a cure for cancer, and Venom's host being a childhood friend of Peter's are both borrowed from the Ultimate Spider-Man comics (and the Ultimate video game).

So yeah, a lot of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 resembles other adaptations of the Venom storyline, but yet it's still all put together in a way that feels original and works fairly well. It's still nowhere near as good as the Animated Series' Venom arc though, because Spider-Man 2's story and plotting is far from perfect.

I really didn't think this would happen, but UNLV is back to 2nd place in the Mountain West Conference after Fresno State was blown out by San Jose State last night. UNLV is now a full game ahead of Fresno State with only 2 games left on the schedule.

Next week is a matchup against Air Force, who still holds onto the number 1 position in the conference. But, Air Force has looked vulnerable lately, decisively losing to both Army and Hawai'i in the past 2 weeks. What seemed like a sure loss for UNLV earlier in the season is now a very winnable game for UNLV. UNLV's rush defense is one of the team's strengths, and Air Force almost exclusively runs the Flexbone Triple Option.

If UNLV can beat Air Force on the road, it will move UNLV up to the number 1 spot in the conference and give UNLV a tie-breaker against Air Force for home field advantage in the Mountain West Championship. In fact, if UNLV beats Air Force, I think the only way they could be eliminated from the Conference Championship is if they lose to San Jose State, and also Fresno State wins its last 2 games. Fresno's last 2 games are against New Mexico and San Diego State, and both are very winnable games for Fresno.

San Jose is a bit of a surprise contender themselves, having won 4 straight against New Mexico, Utah State, Hawai'i, and Fresno. A win against UNLV in the final week of the regular season could potentially give San Jose a conference championship birth. Suddenly, the matchup against San Jose is actually looking even more worrisome than the matchup against Air Force.

These upcoming games against Air Force and San Jose are going to be among the most important games in UNLV's football history, and will certainly be the biggest games of head coach Barry Odom's inaugural year with UNLV.

I'm hoping to be able to see UNLV host a Mountain West Conference Championship at Allegiant Stadium!

If UNLV makes a conference championship appearance, I fully intend to attend the game. I honestly never expected to see UNLV competing for a conference championship in my lifetime, so whether it be here at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, or at Colorado Springs, Fresno, Boise, or San Jose, I intend to be there.

I'll also be tentatively planning on attending any bowl game that UNLV gets invited to, so long as the trip is affordable. If UNLV goes to the Hawai'i Bowl, I might not be able to afford tickets, since I was stuck having to pay for some expensive home repairs due to storm damage that insurance refused to cover (thank you, climate change!), and then also bought a new gaming PC so that I can play Cities: Skylines II. So I may not have the disposable cash on hand right now to afford plane tickets to Hawai'i. Hopefully UNLV gets an invite to a bowl here in the contiguous states, such that a much less-expensive road trip is viable.