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[Game Preview] Week 5 - Philadelphia Eagles(1-2-1) at Pittsburgh Steelers (3-0)
Philadelphia Eagles (1-2-1) at Pittsburgh Steelers (3-0)
It’s that time again for the battle of the Keystone state. The Eagles are looking to build on their first win of the season when they upset the 49ers last week on Sunday Night football, while the Steelers are looking to get back on the field as their game with the Titans was postponed due to the Titans being morons. The game will be a match up between two of the best defensive lines in the NFL this season. Eagles lead the league with 17 sacks, while the Steelers are right on their tail with 15 sacks despite playing one less game. The Eagles patch work offensive line held up last week against the 49ers but they were without their best pass rusher in Nick Bosa. This week, Jordan Mailata and the rest of the line will be tested early and often and will need to hold up to give Carson Wentz time to find his band of rag tag WRs. However, he may get some help this week with the return of Alshon Jeffrey who could be playing his first time since suffering a Lisfranc injury last season. Jeffrey will give Carson something he has been severely missing this season in a big WR who can make contested catches along the sidelines. The Eagles may also see the return of JJAW and Desean Jackson as both have practiced in a limited capacity this week after missing last week’s game due to hamstring injuries. Carson and the Eagles offense will need all the help they can get facing one of the league’s top defenses in a year where they have struggled to get much going in the first four games. On the other side of the ball the Eagles will face one of its toughest tests this season especially Darius Slay who will be following JuJu Smith Schuster. If Slay can shutdown the JuJu the Eagles offense will have a good chance of holding the Steelers in check and give a chance to their offense to win the game. We will see if the Eagles can hold on to the belt of PA this Sunday in their toughest test this season. Go Birds!
Record VS. Spread: Philadelphia 1-3, Pittsburgh 2-1
Where to Watch on TV
FOX will broadcast Sunday’s game to a regional audience. Kenny Albert will handle the play-by-play duties and Jonathan Vilma will provide analysis and Shannon Spake will report from the sidelines.
Calling the game on 94WIP and the Eagles Radio Network will be Merrill Reese, the NFL’s longest-tenured play-by-play announcer (44th season). Joining Reese in the radio booth will be former Eagles All-Pro wide receiver Mike Quick, while Howard Eskin will report from the sidelines.
Location
Station
Frequency
Philadelphia, PA
WIP-FM
94.1 FM and 610 AM
Allentown, PA
WCTO-FM
96.1 FM
Atlantic City/South Jersey
WENJ-FM
97.3 FM
Levittown, PA
WBCB-AM
1490 AM
Northumberland, PA
WEGH-FM
107.3 FM
Pottsville, PA
WPPA-AM
1360 AM
Reading, PA
WEEU-AM
830 AM
Salisbury/Ocean City, MD
WAFL-FM
97.7 FM
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, PA
WEJL-FM
96.1 FM
Salisbury/Ocean City, MD
WAFL-FM
97.7 FM
Salisbury/Ocean City, MD
WEJL-AM
630 AM
Salisbury/Ocean City, MD
WBAX-AM
1240 AM
Williamsport, PA
WBZD-FM
93.3 FM
Wilmington, DE
WDEL-FM/AM
101.7 FM
York/LancasteHarrisburg, PA
WSOX-FM
96.1 FM
Philadelphia Spanish Radio
Rickie Ricardo and Bill Kulik will handle the broadcast in Spanish on Mega 105.7 FM in Philadelphia and the Eagles Spanish Radio Network.
Location
Station
Frequency
Philadelphia, PA
LA MEGA
105.7 FM
Allentown, PA
WSAN
1470 AM
Atlantic City, NJ
WIBG
1020 AM; 101.3 FM
Steelers Radio
Steelers Radio Since 1995, Bill Hillgrove has served as the Voice of the Steelers and has handled play-by-play duties for the broadcast. Former Steelers All-Pro offensive tackle Tunch Ilkin joined the broadcast team in 2001 as an expert analyst. His former teammate, Craig Wolfley, has served as a sideline reporter since 2005. In 2019, Missi Matthews joined Craig Wolfley as an additional sideline reporter.
National Radio
ESPN Radio will broadcast the game nationally with Sean Kelley handling the play by play and Ben Hartstock will provide analysis.
November 19th 1933 at Baker Bowl, Philadelphia, PA . Philadelphia Eagles 25 - Pittsburgh Pirates 6
Points Leader
Philadelphia Eagles lead Pittsburgh Steelers (1498-1116)
Coaches Record
Doug Pederson: 1-0 against the Steelers
Mike Tomlin: 1-2 against Eagles
Coaches Head to Head
Doug Pederson vs Mike Tomlin: Pederson leads 1-0
Quarterback Record
Carson Wentz: Against Steelers: 1-0
Ben Roethlisberger : Against Eagles: 2-2
Quarterbacks Head to Head
Carson Wentz v Ben Roethlisberger: Wentz leads 1-0
Records per Stadium
Record @ Lincoln Financial Field: Eagles lead Steelers: 2-0
Record @ Heinz Field: Steelers lead Eagles 2-0
Rankings and Last Meeting Information
AP Pro 32 Ranking
Eagles No. 20 - Steelers No. 6
Record
Eagles: 1-2-1
Steelers: 3-0
Last Meeting
Sunday, September 25th, 2016
Eagles 34 - Steelers 3
The Eagles blocked a Chris Boswell field goal on the opening drive to deny the Steelers three points. The Eagles drew first blood with a Caleb Strugis field goal to make the score 3–0. Early in the 2nd quarter, Rookie Quarterback Carson Wentz threw a 12-yard touchdown to Jordan Matthews to extend their lead to 10-0. The Steelers answered with a Chris Boswell field goal to make it 10-3 which ended up being their only scoring play of the day. Strugis notched another field goal to bring the score to 13–3 at the half. Early in the 2nd Half, Wentz threw his second TD of the day, a 73-yard touchdown to running back Darren Sproles. Following a 3 and out by the Steelers, rookie running back Wendell Smallwood found the endzone for his first career rushing touchdown and it extended the Eagles lead to 27–3. On the Steelers next drive, veteran quarterback Ben Roethlisberger fumbled the football which the Eagles recovered. The Eagles would add another score on a Kenjon Barner rushing touchdown. The Eagles defense which had shutdown and frustrated the Steelers offense most of the day forced one more turnover to seal the game when Roethlisberger threw an interception to Rodney McLeod. The Eagles added another field goal for a final score of 34-3.
The Eagles traveled to western Pennsylvania to take on longtime in-state rival Steelers at Heinz Field. After a scoreless first quarter, the Steelers were able to get on the board first with Rashard Mendenhall's 13-yard touchdown run for a 7–0 lead followed by Shaun Suisham's 20-yard field goal for a 10–0 lead at halftime. The Eagles went to work in the 3rd quarter as Michael Vick found LeSean McCoy on a 15-yard touchdown pass to shorten the lead to 10–7. The Steelers increased their lead with Suisham kicking a 37-yard field goal to make the score 13–7. The Eaglesl took the lead with Vick hooking up with Brent Celek on a 2-yard touchdown pass for a 14–13 score. However, the Steelers were able to drive down the field and Suisham wrapped up the game with a game-winning 34-yard field goal for a final score of 16–14.
Eagles - The Eagles traveled across the country following an embarrassing tie to the Bengals in week 3. Doug and Carson looked to redeem themselves against a team that was suffering from almost as many injuries as the Eagles. The Eagles struck first with Carson running the ball in on an 11 yard scramble. Doug felt that he needed to dust off his balls and show everyone that he did in fact still have them after pussying out last week, deciding to inexplicably go for 2, but it paid off to put the Eagles up 8-0. The 49ers answered with a score of their own when rookie WR Brandon Aiyuk hurdled Eagles safety Marcus Epps and found the endzone. After halftime the 49ers came out firing and took their first lead of the game with a George Kittle TD. The Eagles answered with a field goal to bring the score to 14-11. After the Nick Mullens fumble the Eagles took advantage as Carson Wentz dropped a dime to Tyler Fulgham for a 42 yard TD pass to give the EAgles a 18-14 lead. On the very next drive Mullens threw his second interception of the game right to Alex Singleton who took it to the house for a pick 6 and put the Eagles up 25-14. On the next possession, Jim Schwartz switched to his shitty sticks defense despite the 49ers putting in their 3rd string QB Beathard. Schwartz gifted Beathard easy throws as he quickly moved the ball down the field for an easy TD. The Eagles recovered an outside kick, but went three and out. Schwartz continued to see the error in his sticks defense as Beathard again moved the ball with ease, but thankfully the Eagles players made some plays breaking up some key passes and bailing out their coach’s poor decisions.
Steelers - Steelers game week 4 was postponed because the Titans are morons.
Connections
Eagles DT Javon Hargrave was drafted by the Steelers in the 3rd round of the 2016 NFL Draft and played 4 seasons with the Steelers before signing with the Eagles this past offseason.
Eagles senior director of player personnel was the General Manager for the Steelers from 1991-1999 and is from the Pittsburgh suburb of Mt. Lebanon.
Eagles RB Coach Duce Staley played 3 seasons for the Steelers from 2004-2006 winning Super Bowl XL with them in 2006.
Eagles TE Coach Justin Peele signed with the Steelers in 2012, but was released with the final cuts following training camp.
Eagles RB Miles Sanders is from Pittsburgh and attended Woodland Hills HS.
Steelers G/C Stefan Wisniewski played three seasons for the Eagles from 2016-2018 winning Super Bowl LII with them in 2017.
Steelers OT Alejandro Villanueva was signed by the Eagles in 2014 and placed on their Practice Squad before being signed off their PS by the Steelers later that season.
Steelers Practice Squad RB Wendell Smallwood was drafted by the Eagles in the 5th round of the 2016 draft and played 3 seasons with them from 2016-2018.
Steelers Special Teams Coordinator Danny Smith was the Special Teams and DB coach for the Eagles from 1995-1998.
2020 Pro Bowlers
Eagles
Steelers
DT Fletcher Cox (Starter)
C Maurkice Pouncey (Starter)
OG Brandon Brooks (Starter)
G David DeCastro
C Jason Kelce (Starter)
DT Cameron Heyward (Starter)
LS Rick Lovato (Starter)
OLB T. J. Watt (Starter)
TE Zach Ertz
FS Minkah Fitzpatrick (Starter)
SS Malcom Jenkings (1st Alt)
CB Joe Haden (1st Alt)
OT Lane Johnson (1st Alt
General
Referee: Ron Torbert
Philadelphia owns a 48-28-3 all-time record vs. Pittsburgh in a series that dates back to 1933. The Eagles have won 4 of the last 6 games against the Steelers, as well as 7 of the last 10.
The last time these two teams met was on 9/25/16 at Lincoln Financial Field, when Philadelphia defeated Pittsburgh, 34-3, in the second game of Carson Wentz’s NFL career and the second game of Doug Pederson’s tenure as the Eagles’ head coach.
Philadelphia is aiming for its first road victory at Pittsburgh since a 26-23 overtime win at Three Rivers Stadium on 11/12/00.
The Eagles (17.0) and Steelers (15.0) enter this week’s matchup ranked 1st and 2nd in the NFL in sacks, respectively. This is the first time Philadelphia has led the league in sacks during Weeks 1-4 since 2011 (15.0, tied with Washington). It is also the Eagles’ most sacks through 4 games since 2008 (also 17.0).
Pittsburgh native Miles Sanders ranks 5th in the NFL with 236 rushing yards since his season debut in Week 2, trailing only Dal-vin Cook, Aaron Jones, Nick Chubb and Joe Mixon.
Draft Picks
Eagles
Steelers
WR Jalen Raegor
WR Chase Claypool
QB Jalen Hurts
OLB Alex Highsmith
LB Davion Taylor
RB Anthony McFarland Jr.
S K’Von Wallace
G Kevin Dotson
OT Jack Driscoll
S Antoine Brooks
WR John Hightower
ST Carlos Davis
LB Shaun Bradley
WR Quez Watkins
OT Prince Tega Wanogho
LB/DE Casey Toohill
Notable Off-season Additions
Eagles
Steelers
S Will Parks
FB Derek Watt
DT Javon Hargrave
G/C Stefan Wisniewski
CB Nickell Robey-Coleman
TE Eric Ebron
CB Darius Slay
Dt Chris Wormley
Notable Off-season Departures
Eagles
Steelers
S Malcom Jenkins
DT Javon Hargrave
CB Ronald Darby
G Ramon Foster
RB Jordan Howard
TE Nick Vannett
WR Nelson Agholor
OL B.J. Finney
OL Halapoulivaati Vaitai
LB Tyler Matakevich
LB Kamu Grugler-Hill
CB Artie Burns
RB Darren Sproles
S Sean Davis
DT Timmy Jernigan
FB Roosevelt Nix
LB Nigel Bradham
Milestones
Eagles WR Desean Jackson (6397) needs 68 yards to move up to 3rd on the Eagles all-time receiving yards list all-time passing WR Mike Quick
Eagles WR Desean Jackson (34) needs 2 TDs to move into a tie for 7th on the Eagles all-time receiving TD list tying WR Jeremy Maclin
Eagles DE Brandon Graham (54) needs 1 sack to move to 4th on the Eagles all-time sack list passing DE Hugh Douglas
Eagles DT Fletcher Cox (49) needs 1.5 sacks to move up to 6th on the Eagles all-time sack list tying DE Greg Brown
Eagles DE Vinny Curry (27.5) needs 2 sacks to move up to 18th on the Eagles all-time sack list tying DT Jerome Brown
Steelers DT Cameron Heyward (54.5) needs 3 sacks to move up to 5th on the Steelers all-time sack list passing OLB LaMarr Woodley
Steelers DT Bud Dupree (34) needs 2 sacks to move up to 10th on the Steelers all-time sack list passing LB Lawrence Timmons and LB **Kevin Greene)
Stats to Know
Battle of the Defensive Lines
This game will feature two of the top Pressure-generating Defensive Lines. Watt, Dupree, and Tuitt are all in the top 10 DLmen in pressures, with 18, 17, and 17. Meanwhile, the Eagles feature 3 in the top 20. Graham, Jackson, and Cox have netted 15, 14, and 13. Considering Philadelphia's makeshift OL and that QB Wentz has a remarkable 20.0 passer rating under pressure, this could get ugly.
Matchups to Watch
Steelers Offensive Line vs Eagles Defensive Line
As the Eagles defensive line goes so goes the defense. That statement has always been true for the Eagles under Jim Schwartz, but that has never been more emphasized this year given the lack of talent elsewhere on the defense especially at LB. This defensive line has been firing on all cylinders with a league leading 17 sacks through 4 games. This has been especially the last two weeks, helping to limit any potential damages they may take during games. Two weeks ago, Burrow was sacked 8 times; they followed that up with 5 more sacks this past Sunday night. Additionally, Philly pressured Niners starting QB Nick Mullen on 50% of his drop backs, a massive figure. They'll need that juice to carry over this week again and like it did the last time these two teams faced each other 4 years ago. It also must be said the Eagles need their talented defensive line to control the LOS to prohibit any Steelers rushing attack. Fletcher Cox, Brandon Graham, and Malik Jackson are all off to hot starts on the season. Newbie Javon Hargrave, making his first return trip to Pittsburgh this Sunday, had a slow start missing the first game of the season due to a training camp injury, but he has started to heat up the last two weeks. Derek Barnett had probably his best game one week ago and is looking to build off that as the season continues. If it does, then it'll look like Barnett has taken a long-awaited jump in play. Josh Sweat is starting to prove his own hot start isn't a fluke either. Genard Avery decided to throw his name into the ring last week getting multiple pressures and notching a sack and 5 QB hits against the 49ers Control the LOS and you can control the game. That has to happen again on Sunday if the Eagles want a chance to win.
Steelers bevy of Offensive Skill Position Players vs the Eagles Depleted Secondary
Last week, the Eagles did a great job containing the Niners outside receivers and predictably got obliterated by George Kittle. That last part isn't surprising since Kittle does that to everyone but the Eagles have already shown a total inability to defend TEs and the middle of the field on defense due to being completely devoid at talent at the LB position. Additionally, the Eagles struggle to really cover anyone since they don't have a member of the secondary that can consistently cover like Darius Slay. Granted, Jalen Mills had a decent game last week, but the Steelers offensive weapons are much deeper than the Niners. Dionte Johnson, Juju Smith-Schuster, Chase Claypool, and Eric Ebron will all be very difficult for the Eagles to defend as the game goes along. They each have different skill sets but what they all possess is an ability to consistently get open for Big Ben. We've also seen Juju, Dionte, and Claypool all create big plays after they catch the ball. The Eagles will have to come out with a gameplan to account for this and play disciplined enough to prohibit the big play. There is still a lot of room for error on the back half of this Eagles denese; if they can execute like they did this past Saturday night, that would help limit the potential damage.
Steelers Pass Rush vs The Eagles Revolving Door of Offensive Linemen
If there is one thing the Eagles prioritize more than anything in the draft and in free agency it's building a great offensive line with a lot of depth. This has been a pillar of the organization for over two decades and it has paid off for the Eagles the entire time. Few times in recent history has that philosophy been put to the test and stressed the team like it has so far in 2020. As it stands, the Eagles have, at best, a league-average offensive line and that's largely due to injury as they are currently missing their starting LT, RG, and LG. Sunday has a chance to be the 5th time in 5 weeks the Eagles will have a different starting offensive line combination if Lane Johnson can't go this week. Poor offensive line can cripple an offense. It can derail a passing attack if the offensive line can't keep the offense in a rhythm and keep the QB from being under duress. It forces coaches to give extra attention to the area which takes away from their ability to be creative when they need to leave an extra guy in to block. Additionally, constant OL shuffling and a degradation in talent can hinder a rushing attack since the players on the bottom end of the roster just can't execute at a high level the pillars of the offense. That's a situation the Eagles find themselves in on Sunday against one of the best defensive fronts in the NFL. The Eagles offensive line had their hands full against a Niners line that is still good despite its own major injury issues. At EDGE, the Steelers have a perennial DPOY candidate in TJ Watt to go along with a solid and athletic pass rusher in Bud Dupree. They also have stalwarts in the interior with Cameron Hayward and Stephon Tuitt. Long time NFL veteran Tyson Alualu, former 1st round pick of the Jaguars, has suddenly elevated his game and is off to the best start in his career as well. The defensive front is very disruptive when paired with their LBs who excel in both run support and on blitz in Devin Bush and Vince Williams. Steelers DC Keith Butler is creative with his looks and pressure packages while being blessed without the need to blitz constantly. Even if Lane Johnson starts he won't be 100% and that's a problem for the Eagles. A Lane Johnson at less than 100% is still better than most NFL tackles but it'll likely be taxing to the Eagles since the depth of talent the Steelers have across their defensive line. The Eagles are down to mostly nobodies on offense and really need to get creative to string together some plays to have a modestly effective offense. Even when Wentz is on his A-game, offensive execution will still require near 100% effectiveness just to have a chance. This is perhaps one of the biggest OL/DL mismatches in the NFL in week 5 and one the Eagles don't figure to have a ton of success. If they are able to control the line of scrimmage on offense more successfully than previous Steelers opponents, that would go a long way in pulling out a win.
Bloomberg: Nikola founder Milton's fall reveals what his backers feared
Back in March, long before a short seller would raise questions about electric-truck company Nikola Corp. and hasten its founder’s exit, early investors in the company were expressing concerns of their own. Those investors, led by mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments, were worried that Trevor Milton, for all his brash visionary talk and Twitter braggadocio, lacked the ability that Elon Musk possesses to deliver these sorts of newfangled products to market. They lobbied successfully to remove him as CEO before the company’s June IPO and for Milton’s father to leave the board, according to people familiar with the matter. When the deal was done, Milton only held the title of chairman, the post he resigned this month. The back-room negotiations show that Milton’s past was a concern to investors months before General Motors Co. executives placed a bet on the company in a US$2 billion deal carved out after the IPO. They liked Milton’s vision and his ability to raise cash and felt the venture was safeguarded from his shortcomings in operations by his push upstairs, say people familiar with the matter. Nonetheless, the events that have unfolded since the short-seller report, with Nikola’s stock plunging amid a steady stream of negative headlines, have exposed just how high the risks still were. Now, it’s up to former GM Vice Chairman Steve Girsky, whose blank-check company VectoIQ took Nikola public via reverse merger in June, and Nikola CEO Mark Russell to stabilize the business and regain investor confidence. The plan with GM was to use Nikola’s hot stock and Milton’s ability to raise money to build a hydrogen-fueled trucking business with GM’s technology. “There is obviously someone on the diligence side who isn’t going to get a nice bonus this year,” said Reilly Brennan, founder of the venture capital fund Trucks Inc. “The best possible thing if you’re a shareholder is that Milton is no longer running the company and you have Girsky as chairman and GM providing technology.” The GM deal was originally scheduled to close Sept. 30, and the automaker has said it plans to carry through, but that timing may slip, say people familiar with the matter. BP Plc is still engaged with Nikola in talks to partner on a network of hydrogen fueling stations for fuel-cell trucks the company hopes to sell, but also is slowing the pace for a deal, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. BP and GM declined to comment. Milton’s tale reads like a Greek tragedy. The report by short seller Hindenburg Research accused Milton of overhyping Nikola’s technology and has prompted investigations by the Justice Department and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A cousin has accused him of a decades-ago sexual assault, which he denies. The company’s value peaked at US$30 billion and is now worth about US$7 billion. Girsky and GM Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra have both said publicly that they did plenty of due diligence. People familiar with the matter say that GM found out when scouting the deal that it had better batteries and fuel-cell technology but joined forces because Nikola had a working semi truck and access to capital markets. In addition, GM will get paid to build Nikola’s Badger pickup on existing assembly lines. Milton was so excited to get the Badger pickup program moving that he signed a deal that heavily favored GM, one of the people said. Nikola’s stock and GM’s US$2 billion stake are worth less than half what they were on Sept. 8, when the deal was announced. Milton’s own stake is worth US$1.7 billion, down from almost US$5 billion at one point. Milton said in a June interview with Bloomberg News that he grew up in modest surroundings in Layton, Utah. His family moved to Las Vegas when he was very young and he lost his mother to cancer shortly after moving back to Utah in the sixth grade. He wrote on Twitter he didn’t finish high school, earning an equivalency certification instead, and later dropped out of college. His Twitter account has since been deleted. He grew up in a tight-knit Mormon family, according to Aubrey Smith, his first cousin. She went on social media recently and accused him of sexually assaulting her in 1999 when she was 15 and he was 17. In a public account on Facebook and Twitter, and repeated in a phone interview, Smith said that Milton came onto her at the funeral of their grandfather. He took her shirt off without permission, Smith wrote, and then he touched her inappropriately before someone knocked at the door and she ran out. Milton denied the allegations through a spokesman. Smith said Milton raised money from family members to get his start. He founded and ran several businesses, including a home-security company that Milton claims he sold for US$1.5 million. Next, in 2009, he founded an e-commerce platform called Upillar.com, which Milton claims “pioneered the shopping cart online.” Then he got into clean propulsion but ended up embroiled in litigation with dHybrid Inc., which he founded in 2009. The company retrofitted diesel vehicles with natural-gas-burning turbines, claiming the dual system had greater efficiency. But a deal with Swift Transportation Co. in 2010 ended in court when Swift alleged dHybrid defaulted on a US$322,000 loan and that it retrofitted only half of the agreed vehicles. The case was dismissed in 2015. Milton later tried to sell dHybrid to a company called sPower in May 2012 but that, too, got mired in lawsuits after sPower backed out and accused Milton of exaggerating its technological capabilities. Amid the litigation, Milton started another company with a very similar name, dHybrid Systems, selling it in 2014 to Worthington Industries. During an interview with Bloomberg in June, Milton said that dHybrid Inc. was a success but conceded that, “we ended up closing that one down because of some litigation.” His next startup was Nikola, founding it in 2014 in Salt Lake City before moving to Phoenix. Emulating Musk, he took the name from the electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla, and the company was soon billed as the Tesla of Trucks. His plan was seen as potentially disrupting the entire transportation industry by making trucks that ran on batteries or hydrogen-fuel cells. He also planned to build a network of hydrogen filling stations. Friends and Family Milton had friends and family members working for Nikola despite resumes that didn’t match the job. His brother, Travis Milton, is director of hydrogen and infrastructure. His LinkedIn profile shows that most of his experience was being “self-employed” in Maui. The short seller, Hindenburg Research, said that Travis Milton poured concrete as a contractor. Milton’s father Bill was originally on the board but stepped down when VectoIQ took the company public. The company’s stock prospectus said that Nikola had awarded more than 3 million stock options “to recognize the superior performance and contribution of specific employees.” The list included Travis Milton and an uncle, Lance Milton, the document said, acknowledging that they are relatives. As Milton went public with Nikola’s technology, questions soon arose involving his claims about the company’s fuel-cell system. He bragged in an investor video in 2019 that the company had created “what other manufacturers said was impossible to design.” But while Nikola holds patents in fuel-cell and battery technology, most of its planned hardware was coming from German supplier Robert Bosch Gmbh. Nikola Demonstrations It became clear that Milton had gotten ahead of himself. A 2016 demonstration showed a truck that didn’t have a working hydrogen-fuel-cell system and was missing key parts, people familiar with the matter said in June. Milton said at the time that the parts were removed as a safety precaution. In July of this year, he recorded a video of the semi truck in which he ran alongside the vehicle as it coasted at low speeds in a parking lot. Aping Musk’s combative social-media persona, Milton took a shot at his detractors saying, “these damned trolls, I wonder if they are going to apologize to everyone for the lies they spread the tens of thousands of comments about how fake we are.” Girsky said in the webcast “Autoline This Week,” in which Bloomberg participated, that he has been in Nikola’s fuel-cell trucks and that they work. Still, when the GM deal was done, GM will be supplying all of the technology for every global market except Europe. Nikola’s pickup truck, called Badger, will use GM’s Ultium battery, and the semis will run on a fuel cell developed by GM and Honda Motor Co. Since Milton’s departure, Nikola has billed itself more as an integrator of other technologies into its Badger pickup and semi trucks. For GM’s part, the automaker is protected from any financial downside. GM got 11 per cent of the stock for no cash investment and gets paid for its technology. If Nikola fails, GM won’t lose a dime. Milton has remained silent and is out of the company. He unknowingly presaged his own downfall in the June interview with Bloomberg: “Part of becoming a better person in life is losing everything you have got and having nothing left.” https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/nikola-founder-milton-s-fall-reveals-what-his-backers-feared-1.1500376
Winning at fantasy means making predictions and acting on them prior to other players. To do that, you don't always have the privileges of hindsight and deduction. You will need foresight and inference. I hope to offer a some good if not somewhat inferential arguments for why some early moves on this weekly (if I have time) post. Fantasy thinking is often over-obsessed with statistical correlations at the expense of firm causal understanding of what is happening on the field. The forest is often lost for the trees. A combination of understanding the game of football, recognizing interconnected changes that will influence teams, and eye testing the games themselves is the best antidote to the groupthink, herd-mentality of fantasy football expertism which, time and again, proves spotty at best in anticipating changes. Last week I posted this as "Eye-tested Takes" but I realized that's not what I was aiming for. A variety of posters and services watch the whole game and give you maximally thorough takes on every snap. I won't offer much of an opinion on players/teams I don't watch. I'll always watch enough. However, a lot of what I'll make as the case for picking up (or dropping) a player will be based on obvious things that are happening that rankings-myosis may miss. There's always an elephant in the room that no one want's to acknowledge. This post gives fantasy advice that accounts for the elephants on the field.
Things I'm right about (so far):
1. Rivers Noodle Arm = Colts Lean into Jonathon Taylor:
With the quality of that offensive line, Mack going down, and Rivers looking like shit, Jonathon Taylor may end-up being a top-5 back this year. TY Hilton and Parris Campbell are going to disappoint you.
A bunch of commenters disagreed, insisting Hines was the guy to get and Taylor as a top-5 was nuts. This is an instance of the eye-test making people too smart. Yes, Taylor netted 22 yards on 9 carries week 1. Who cares, he was great in college (larger sample size) and more importantly, Rivers looks SOOO spent that Taylor is the only obvious bell-cow RB for what is probably the best O-line in the league. You want that. Rivers threw it 25 times in week two (down from 44). Taylor had 26 carries, 2 receptions, 110 yards, and 1 touchdown. It was obvious what had to happen in Indy but fantasy groupthink herded everyone toward Hines. If you had the audacity to ignore me on this (/s), the good news is there's still time. His trade value has skyrocketed on most charts but he's not quite valued as a top back yet. If you get the feel someone is under-valuing him, don't wait longer because his first 2 TD game is going to make him inaccessible in a trade. The Colts defense is also looking good enough to maintain a lead throughout a game, opening-up more run play calls. (Rivers sucking is going to do that all the time anyway). And if you still don't believe me, watch his highlights from this week and you'll see why he could be such a focal point. He does a lot of things that coaches like to lean-into: great ball security, adds 2-3 yards to the end of runs, explosive speed when he has big holes. 2.Browns Offense is fine:
Don't panic about the Browns offense. Baker Mayfield looked like trash but the running offense actually looked pretty good at times...Stefanski is the guy you need to believe in... The biggest takeway from the game isn't the Browns offense is bad, its that the Ravens defense is great.
Both Browns running back scored multiple TD's and registered more than 150 yards each week 2. Baker continued to suck and it didn't matter. Stefanski's offense is good and his coaching career is a testament to his talent. All-Ivy-League Football Player. First coaching job was in the NFL. They wouldn't let him leave for 14 years because they knew he was a talent. So don't run from Chubb or Hunt yet. And if you have them both, start them both and don't feel bad (unless you have a clearly better option like Zeke too...then probably favor starting Kareem Hunt the larger your ppr value, but its a tough call). The Browns are a perfect storm that make both startable: (a) Both Chubb and Hunt have top-5 rb talent and it comes across when you watch them on the field. With good combinations of strength and speed, each one is TD risk on every snap. (b) Sefanski divides snaps very well. Both are getting touches-a-plenty. They just signed they're "back-up" RB to a new contract (I mean, how often does that happen in the modern NFL?). KS also divides snaps by drive, unless a drive gets very long, so even if Chubb is doing well, he's going to give Kareem Hunt a whole drive. (c) starting both is fading Baker which is smart. The Browns are going to increasingly realize that their offense is more effective with Baker doing less. They may even move to Case Keenum (their back-up, legit didn't know that last week) and that's fine for Chubb/Hunt. I wouldn't run from OBJ or Jarvis Landry yet either, though Baker's ineptitude has got to make you worry. Think about what Minnesota offenses did over the years with Diggs, Theilen, etc. Both OBJ and Landry are going to be solid bets for big-play TD's (like OBJ's last Thursday) here and there but likely not breaking the top-10. Still, the talent ceiling is high with both so a buy-low scenario where you get them in a trade could pay-off if you bet on Stefanski more than Mayfield. 3. Deandre Hopkins is the WR1
Deandre Hopkins will be the #1 fantasy receiver this year... And most importantly, the offensive situation in Arizona is the perfect storm for his fantasy situation. Kyler Murray is good, but he's not working his way through progressions yet.
Hopkins nabbed a TD but only had 9 targets this week. I'll admit that I only watched Kyler Murray's highlights so forgive me if its there and I didn't see it, buuuuut...He's not completing passes to 2nd and 3rd reads. Its one read then run. That's great for Hopkins' stats because the further into the season they get, the MORE Hopkins is going to be involved on plays designed to chuck it to him, no matter what. Hopkins is one of those guys that's always open, and Kyler is a smart player who knows that AND knows he's not good enough yet to start looking for someone else if Hopkins is "covered". That may hurt the Cardinals at some point. But Hopkins is getting fed this season. And obviously, a rash of injuries at WR has made this look to be a better prediction. Hopkins is already a stud in that offense and he's still learning it. His stock is only going up from here. Its true the WR's new offenses typically do poorly. A couple of reasons why that's not true of Hopkins: (a) he's physically the most gifted receiver in the league. Randy Moss kicked ass his first year with the Patriots. Some players are talented enough that it doesn't take time, as long as they're smart as hell like Randy Moss or (b) Hopkins is an intelligent dude. He negotiated his own contract and didn't fuck it up. He wants to be G.M. Big brained guy, he'll pick up quickly. You can see that on the field, he's constantly looking back at Kyler to make sure he did the right thing on each play. (c) HOF'er in the WR room: Fitz will get him up to speed fast. Quick note about Kyler Murray: He's tearing it up. One encouraging thing that you might not see how little he's allowing himself to be tackled. As a fantasy owner, that's encouraging because it suggests he can sustain a high running floor and not get injured. And there's an added assurance that he's putting those slides for zero yards (for example) on tape because the coaches see that too and are more willing to call more of those plays down the stretch. Still, I wouldn't compare him to Lamar Jackson last season yet. Lamar Jackson was throwing TD's to his 4th and 5th read in week 1 against the Dolphins last season. Murray may hit a scheme ceiling where defenses, especially good ones, start to take away his 1 and 2 and contain his run game (though it is strong and he has good vision).
Things I was totally wrong about: zero things!
HA! Next section!
Things I'm not right about yet but pretty soon I will be:
1. Joe Burrow AJ Green is going to be good.
If you watch the game, you see Joe Burrow fitting the ball into tight windows in clutch situations. In fact, he wasn't finding a lot of open receivers, he was throwing the ball well/correctly into great coverage and making lemonade. Also, AJ Green is looking fully healthy and like his old self.
Well, AJ Green was targeted 13 times and caught...3 of those passes for 29 yards. So clearly, the chemistry between them was oversold by me last week. Still, 13 targets is encouraging and so is the Bengals inability to run the ball. No matter how much they try, they're wretched run-blocking always leaves them down late in games and in 3rd-and-forever situations. They just let a rookie throw it 61 times. Another consideration is that Denzel Ward was covering Green all night:
A.J. Green has had an up-and-down career vs. the Browns. Thursday’s game was on the down side, and it had mostly to do with Denzel Ward. Green had three catches for 29 yards. Overall, Ward broke up three passes against the Bengals. And according to Next Gen Stats, Ward was making life difficult for Joe Burrow all night, forcing eight tight window passes in 11 targets as the nearest defender.
Green is still pretty low on trade value charts but stands to have a huge upside as Burrow's primary target. 2. Rodgers is back.
...are there really any physical traits that are important to his game that would fade significantly at 36 year's old? I didn't see any missing zip off of his throws. I did see fucking darts getting tossed all over the field into tiny windows.
Aaron Jones is the #1 fantasy RB right now so obviously saying Rodgers is fully back is pre-mature. However, he is impressing with some very, very pretty darts. Also, the elephant on the field for the Packers is that Aaron Rodgers is a player driven by ego. Not a knock on him, he's just a guy who needs mojo to play at his finest. Maybe it required the stimulation of an insulting draft pick to prod him back into his HOF form. I'm not saying Rodgers can be a top 3 QB this year with Jackson and Murray running so well, but 4 or 5 doesn't seem out of reach. Rodgers is pff top-graded QB right now btw.
Fresh takes:
1.The Ravens are the best defense in the NFL. The loss of Earl Thomas is doesn't matter as much as what has been gained with Patrick Queen and L.J. Fort. Queen is incredibly fast and explosive underneath, getting into the backfield and making big plays. And L.J. Fort (top rated pff lb right now) combine to give them rangey-coverage, tackling, and pass break-up ability over the middle they didn't have before which has further weaponized they're depth at CB (Humphrey, Peters, Smith). Peters specifically is a ball hawk that's found a great home in Baltimore; he couldn't scheme well anywhere else but Harbaugh has found a way to give him the freedom to ball hawk. Over the long haul, Harbaugh has maintained a great defense, regardless of departures/changes, for years and years. When he has this much talent, his defenses are typically dominant. Be warry of starting iffy players against them at any position. They're worth trading for, I think the turnovedef TD potential makes them worth it. 2. J.K. Dobbins will break-out out as the preferred option in the Ravens backfield. Mark Ingram and Gus Edwards have both proven to be reliable RB's for the Raven offense. But Ingram is 30 with over 200 carries in 3 of the last 4 seasons. Edwards has been reliable, a home-grown UDFA. But at 238lbs and without elite speed, he's leaving many big runs on the table. Dobbins didn't attend the combine. But ran a 4.44 40...in high school:
Dobbins posted a 4.44s 40-yard dash, 4.09s short shuttle and a 43.1-inch vertical jump as a high school senior at the event. There are also many reports that Dobbins squatted over 700 pounds.
He has power running balance and break-out speed that NONE of the other backs in Baltimore have. 4th rounder Justice Hill was their attempt of to develop that speed last year but didn't break out. A couple of elephants make this one a good bet: (a) Lamar's durability -- right now, he's taking a bunch of carries because he's the only one in their backfield that has the speed to break huge runs. If Dobbins can fill that role, Lamar Jackson can afford to take fewer chances and John Harbaugh can opt to only drop him back to pass 7 times in the second half when they're winning, like what happened in week 2. (b) that defense -- Baltimore's defense is going to be great enough this year to take over games, making steady doses of run plays inevitable as they'll spend a lot of games up by 2 scores. Yes, they were up like that a lot last year but their only homerun hitter in the backfield was Lamar (see above, Justice Hill wasn't getting it done). Here's an example: this is a shot from Gus Edwards' 22 yard scamper last week: https://preview.redd.it/mhhhpzmkrxo51.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=3cdf46ac4bcce3e503729f909c0e787f85459eb9 The Ravens offensive line is good at opening holes like this. While it didn't prove important in this game (BAL was up 30-16 at the time), each run like this where a more explosive player could scored is an opportunity cost for the people calling plays. And its not just points left behind, its points scored while Lamar is watching like a fan. Its points that could allow more aggressive defensive play calling. If you're a coach for Baltimore, you don't necessarily want Lamar to have a gaudy stat-line every week if you're winning. If he can throw 16 passes in a game and then sit-out the 4th quarter, that's ideal from the franchise's perspective (though not so much for Fantasy managers). Each Ingram/Edwards run that coulda been a touchdown means there's more time on the field for Lamar, larger portion of the game where they're not playing a dominant lead, and higher chance that they'll lose because points were left on the field. They need someone else hitting home runs in the running game. Am I fading Lamar because of all of this? Not yet. Eye test = that guy is a singular talent. His throwing motion is smooth like Vick's, just a gifted, effortless release. He's also great at mostly avoiding contact (though all contact is bad contact if you're his coaches). Great decision maker too. Makes multiple reads on plays. Can't say enough about how great of player he is. Still, Baltimore is well put-together enough that they may be able to functionally win without him. So don't be surprised if, especially approaching the playoffs, Baltimore starts calling plays that don't involve as much Lamar. What's scary is that they may be a complete football team without him and he's the reigning MVP. Finally, Dobbins had two carries last week. One was for a 44 yard gain where the blocking was good but not nearly as good as the image above. Even if the transition to him isn't fast, he could force the issue like Chubb did his rookie year, gaining 100 yards on 3 carries in a game. No matter what, the Ravens will run by committee but there will come a point where the player to start out of the trio is Dobbins without a doubt. 3. Minshew is the truth and his team situation makes him a great fantasy player. Minshew isn't the most talented QB in the league. But above all things, he is competitive and scrappy. The Jags are good but not great so he's going need a lot of that scrappy-iness (lol, just say that sentence out loud, you'll hear it). James Robinson is very good and they're going to lean on him a lot. But when the time for much needed yards and points, it seems like the Jags tag Gardner Minshew II's Id in at offensive coordinator. Minshew isn't likely going to be top-5 qb but he might make the top 10 and is likely easier to get than other top targets. Part of the reason DJ Chark isn't getting the production folks hoped is because Minshew is effectively spreading the ball around. Good for the jags, bad for fantasy owners. I wouldn't panic. One of his targets I picked-up to stash is Laviska Shenault Jr. He's getting a legit number of carries each week and averaging over 10 yards per reception. He's an interesting pick-up because he doubles as handcuffs for Robinson. Seems like his carry count could go up to 10ish no problem if the Jags lost Robinson. So pay attention to what position he's listed in your league, scoring rules about how carries count in ppr, etc. But he passes the eye test, very shifty and fast on the field. 4. Teams that are quickly turning into dumpster fires that you should across-the-board fade: Jets Gase is the worst. Never underestimate the ability of a shitty boss to ruin a workspace and make everyone fucking hate themselves, even though they're well compensated to play a game for a living. Listen, I know there's always gems on bad teams. But I have high blood pressure. So tuning into games with players I need to play well and watching the offense go 3-and-out 5 times in a row...I'm literally too old for that shit now so I try to stray-away from dumpster fire teams. Vikings Kubiak has got some big Stefanski shoes to fill and he's doing a bad job so far. I wouldn't panic about Dalvin Cook yet but another bad couple of weeks and I'd start shopping him. See the Browns thing above: Stefanski may have made the Vikings offense look better than it actually was for a decade. Combine that with the defense whose secondary would be better if they were scare crows and you're looking at a team that can't plan to run the ball for more than a quarter or 2. Teams to be worried about: Broncos Whew, the injuries. They're basically just starting with new team. We'll see how things go. Detroit Matt Patricia may have lost this team. And coaches like him don't recover team faith/confidence well in a loss-spiral. Texans BoB is going to crash that plane into a mountain while we all watch. Poor Watson, just watching Deandre Hopkins ball-out. One thing you can still bet on for awhile out of the Texans offense; Bill O'Brien is ego- and career-invested in David Johnson doing great things. He'll role with him when he shouldn't to prove to everyone that he was right to trade Nuk. Its dumb. But he's dumb.
Fortune Favors The Bold (FFTB) Predictions
WARNING: What you're about to read is not necessarily good fantasy advice, but things for me to say "told you so" about a week from now. I take no responsibility for any money you lose (and all responsibility for the money you win). Still, Alexander the Great said, Fortune Favors the Bold.
JK Dobbins scores more fantasy points than CEH this week. (This prediction is backed-up by the time-honored tradition of spitting in one's hand and shaking on it so this shit is serious. Its also painful because I'm a Chiefs fan.)
Laviska Shenault scores a running and a receiving touchdown tonight.
Jonathon Taylor is the RB1 this week and its not close.
Danny Dimes throws 3 TD's this week against the 49ers.
I'm probably wrong about most of this shit but FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD! Thanks for reading! If I continue to be kind mostly right and people find it a good read, I'll keep posting these each week. Good luck! EDIT: Thanks for the awards and upvotes strangers! I'll bring the column back next week. Appreciate the comments too, thanks for the banter, shit-talk, and criticism. I'll be spittin in palms again soon. EDIT AGAIN: Thanks again for the feedback. This is fun and I'm going to enjoy doing it again next week. Some of the comments have suggested that the post doesn't really go out on many limbs. I'll do that more in the future. I've also added an extra section with a few "FFTB predictions" for this week.
10 promises you must make to yourself as an Asian man looking to break free.
So I see a lot of stuff on here from dudes trying to talk about making it and trying to be alpha but quite frankly, I see right through some of that. I know a try-hard and an Instagram selfie workout bro type when I see it. The kind that will talk self-improvement and Asian pride one second and be a pussy the next day. So if you are genuinely serious about making it, you will live your life by these rules. "I promise to judge people by their actions and not their words". Case in point, the liberal left. All the tolerance and nonsense they preach about acceptance but how do they treat a fellow Asian man? Like garbage. Don't think I am being Alt Right here either, we know how many white nationalists flood to those places. Instead now, you promise to judge people only by the impact their actions have had on you, yes this even means parents. If your parents are the helicopter parent types making you weaker, you cut those ties and lose contact with them, yeah I went there. If they do not make you stronger and a better version of yourself, they need to be cut out. Even the so called pro-Asian Masculinity types on this sub that shame you for your preference or because you want to get laid? You block them. Why? Because they do not truly want you to be the alpha Asian who gets girls of all types and breaks stereotypes, they are just trying to keep you another stereotype. "I promise to be cold, uncaring, detached, and ignore people or the kinds of people that halt my growth and success". If your Asian brothers are holding you back and trying to keep you the stereotypically shy beta male, you cut them off and act like they do not exist. If your white friends are making jokes at your expense, you block them and act like they do not exist. If women of certain demographics are being bitches to you, you be cold and unreceptive to them right back. If certain people are stopping your growth, you ignore them entirely and limit contact. They do not deserve your energy, patience, or even any words from you other than "cool, I am busy though". The Anna Lu who told you that you were ugly due to being Asian? You watch that self-hating bitch burn and rot as you go for other kinds of women. Avoid all contact with her and act like she does not exist, she gets a detached version of you as deadbeats pump and dump her. If they stand in your way of success and what you want out of life, they can die in front of you and you are not to have any sympathy at all whatsoever. "I promise not to let anyone diss me because of my race or make a race joke until they have really proven themselves to me." Some rowdy black friend making Asian jokes or black guy trying to be funny? You give him a plain look and call him out on that shit. If he says "it was just a joke", you respond with "so are you". Some goofy white guy saying racist comments? Call his ass out on it. Some colleague or acquaintance making Asian jokes? Do not let it slip. Now if this person is a brother or a very close friend who you also make race jokes about, he can do it because you two are that close but if he goes too far, you let him know. You keep the race jokes between the two of you but as soon as others get involved, you call it out. "I promise to go the extra yard and fight hard for the people and groups that make my life better". The Asian mentor who raised you out of misery and made you an alpha? You put your life on the line for him. The pretty white girl who went to bat for you and slept with you as angry white boys boiled with rage? You be her shield. The pretty black girl who shut the racist that was giving you a tough time up? You fight to the last beat for her. The odd white guy who was an exception and stuck up for you? That's your brother now and you bleed for him. The father who almost broke himself in supporting you and showed you nothing but live? You break yourself for him and show him nothing but love. "I promise to spend my money and time on things, movements, events, and entities that have contributed to my well being". Haoliwood with all of its virtue signaling and yet it continues to pedestalize white men while women of color as shown as sex toys and men of color as second class beings? From here on out, you boycott. You do not spend a dime on it. You stream their shit if convenient until they decide to continue to promote Asian men in a positive light. Until then, they do not get a dime out of you. You support brands, movies, movements, and entities that contribute to your well-being and better life. Now after a while this is for you to decide so you determine that. We can agree that Haoliwood hates Asian men so we can boycott them but other things, your say. "I promise to stop worshiping white men and crying about how much easier their lives are, especially in dating". "Wah wah if I was white I'd get 500 matches a day brug!" None of this, ever. You do not go around cozying up to white guys like an Anna Lu in heat, no more. You do not go around from reddit to reddit talking about how much easier life would be and how girls will worship you if you are white. You no longer cry like a bitch for not getting matches for being Asian. No more. You no longer complain endlessly about how the world is stacked against you because you were born with a certain look. If you are not willing to do this, stop reading at this point. Instead, you be that much better to where they cannot ignore you. If you have truly maxed out your look, style, have the best pics, and can confidently approach hot girls at a bar without being nervous, yet still haven't gotten results? Then you can whine. Then after that I will just tell you it's not because you're Asian, it's because you're just ugly so make a million bucks and bang hookers or marry a gold digger. Even after that, you do not cry and worship whitey's life. "I promise to stay true to what I want out of life". You want to be a pornstar and fuck 500 girls? Break the stereotype. You want to be a doctor because you genuinely love science and curing lives? Go for it. Whatever you want, that is your life and your purpose. You go for it unapologetically. Parents in the way? Tell them to fuck off. Friends in the way? Get new friends. It is that simple. You go for what you want and shut out the noise. Truth is, you will always have people opposing you once you are passionate about life. "I promise to be unapologetic about what I like, especially in women". You like blondes? Great. You like black girls? Amazing. You like Asian girls? Spectacular. You promise to yourself that whatever gets your dick hard, you will like unapologetically and with pride. If you like white girls, you do not let the voices on this sub talk you out of your preference. On the same token, if you like Asian girls, you do not apologize for that preference and chase them exclusively as you wish. You owe nothing to no one. The commenter or even senior member on this sub calling you a "Chan" for liking white girls? I bet he does not feed you, put a roof over your head, or even know you personally. You put him on ignore. Same with anyone calling you complacent or saying you cannot get girls of other races because you only like Asian girls. You go for what you want in women, listen to your cock and let the world lose its breath trying to convince you otherwise. "I promise not to judge my brothers for what they like and their preferences". Asian bro likes Asian girls exclusively? None of your fucking business. Asian bro only likes white girls? None of your fucking business. You are not saving a race or doing your brothers any favors by judging them for their preference. As a matter of fact, your vocal disapproval shows what a sorry shitshow your life is that it keeps you up at night that an Asian man only likes white women or only likes Asian women. Men who are that concerned of the preferences of other men, to the point of hostility, are almost always unsuccessful in their own goals with women. I bet the Asian man judging other Asian men for loving white girls failed with them a while ago, misery does love company. From here on out, you do not judge your brothers for what they like in women, stay in your own lane. "I promise to share my success story with the world once I have made it". Once you have made it in whatever your passion or goal out of life is, you are sharing your story. Once you have fucked 500 different women, you are telling the world about it. Once you have lived your badass life, the whole fucking world is hearing about it. Once you have done the badass shit you've wanted to do (by your standard), you are telling the world about it. Why? Because somewhere out there will be a young boy who you will inspire. Also, if this post was good, feel free to post on my sub that I started!
Looking to bet up to 5 oz generic per game, unless otherwise stated. I only bet with established bugs. If odds are different than what's listed, let me know in the comment and we'll agree to the new odds. First Half Bets ✅ Jacksonville vs Cincinnati -1, I want Jacksonville +1 u/morganpeace21 2 ozs ❌ Baltimore vs Washington +7.5, I want Washington +7.5 u/gooselx48 3ozs Full Game: Seattle vs Miami +5.5, I want Seattle -5.5 ✅ ✅ N.Y. Giants vs L.A. Rams -13, I want N.Y. +13 for 3ozsu/mrpibbredvine ❌ Indianapolis vs. Chicago O/U 43, I want the over u/murican_redditor 3 ozs ❌ Seattle vs Miami O/U 54.5, I want the over u/murican_redditor 3 ozs Money line: ❌ L.A. Chargers vs Tampa Bay, my 2 ozs on L.A. Chargers vs your 5.6 ozs (or 5.5 ozs and a 90% dime) on Tampa Bay. ❌ Baltimore vs Washington, my 3 ozs on Washington vs your 21 ozs on Baltimoreu/gorillax both Alternative lines from fan duel: Indianapolis vs Chicago O/U 50.5 +240, my 3 ozs on the over vs your 7.2 ozs on the under ❌ Las Vegas vs Buffalo O/U 43.5 +280, my 5 ozs on the under vs your 14 on the over ❌ Rules: Games must go a complete four quarters for full game/money line bets. Any game postponed more than 48 hours is canceled, unless both betters agree to the move. Overtime points count for O/U bets. If you have any other concerns, let me know before locking in.
How to get your first 10k monthly listeners — in response to a post made yesterday
A user by the handle of u/WeakestBeast made a post yesterday with some helpful tips ey had gathered along their journey to 300k monthly listeners. One of these tips was to build a consistent listenership of about 10-50k people monthly before shopping around to labels — this is good advice, by the way, because a label needs to see that you're gonna make this happen with or without them before they're going invest a dime. But getting that first 10k monthly listeners can seem like an insurmountable first step, so I wanted to talk a bit about our personal journey. — A BRIEF INTRODUCTION I've done this before. Shortly after our first release, we reached a monthly listenership of 50k at our peak. It's been six months since our most recent release (that first album) and we've settled into a comfortable 10-20k listeners consistently. And we do it all ourselves — recorded in my bedroom, mixed on cheap speakers with stock plug-ins, made our album art with an iPhone camera and some worklamps from Home Depot, cold calling playlisters and venues and blogs. Beyond my personal project, I'm involved in several other music projects, which range from 50-100k monthly listeners consistently. While the fact that I've done this is an important qualification to actually talking about, I think probably more important is that I've been involved in a lot of really good bands that never even broke the 2k barrier, and I can tell you why. — A DISCLAIMER ABOUT THE FALSE DRAW OF MONTHLY LISTENERSHIP But there's something we need to address before we get started: monthly listenership is a red herring as far as your musical success, however you may define it, is. It is measuring something, but it has power mostly because we give it power, and an even less precise measure because of that. In all likelihood, your interest as a musician is not just getting your music in front of millions of people who will only ever listen once, but specifically to get it in front of the people who will resonate with your music. The people for whom your songs are meaningful, the people who will become fans. I suspect that for many of us, that is the truer measure of success (even if we aren't always good at shaking off the delusions of fame and influence). Monthly listenership does not measure that. These are listeners, not fans. There are many, many, many musicians with 200k+ monthly listeners out there that struggle to bring 50 people to a show. The rise of the playlist has as a side effect the tendency to render music as "wallpaper", an accompaniment to people's days and not something with which they actively engage. Given, we and the people we want to impress (managers, labels, press) attribute quite a lot to monthly listenership. That's the second failing. Goodhart's Law tells us that once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. Which is to say, when we put so much emphasis on monthly listenership, it ceases to be a good proxy for the quality or actual retentive quality of your music. You can easily imagine that this number could be misleadingly inflated by fame or popularity without any regard for the quality of the music at all. So remember that this isn't the end-all-be-all. Your goal is to reach as many future fans as you can, NOT just random people — and that doesn't always look like 500k people right off the bat. I don't doubt that there's an audience of that many people for whatever your genre is, no matter how weird. There are a lot of people, and if you like it, odds are someone else will appreciate it as well. But finding them is a much, much, much more difficult task than reaching that first 10k of passive consumers. — STARTING FROM NOTHING The first question to ask yourself is what you really want. Do you want this? I know I want it, and I'm going to assume you do too. But it's not going to be easy and it's not going to be fair. If you really want this, you need to turn a critical eye to your own music and excise everything that doesn't work. Commit to making the best possible art you can. You might not think of yourself as a songwriter, but you need to understand how a good song works. You might not think of yourself as a producer, but you need to know how to make things sound good. You might not think of yourself as a marketer, but no one else is going to do it for you and you need to get your music in front of people. You might not think of yourself as an influencer, but you're selling experiences and that's the whole package. So ask yourself right now, what are you the worst at? What are you the best at? Think long and hard about these things, then hit Google and commit right now to getting better at all of it. I am not saying this is a prerequisite. This is a continuous process. The biggest obstacle any of us will face is time, so don't wait for everything to be perfect. A musical career is just growing up in the public eye. But I know you're all doing that already, or you wouldn't be here reading this. So you've finished your project and it sounds good. Great writing, tight production, well-mixed, well-mastered. Nice. You've got some slick album art. You're excited and ready to drop this project. But you're not going to drop this project yet. This is the longest part, it takes patience and it's not nearly as fun as making music. No, you're going to wait. You're going to set a release date for two months, minimum, from now. And then you're going to start planning. — GAINING AN AUDIENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA First, let's get the social media logistics out of the way. Do you have a mailing list? Are you on at least one of the major social media platforms? I recommend Instagram and TikTok, which are by far the dominant platforms right now. Make a YouTube channel. Make a Bandcamp. Make a Soundcloud. Reddit, if you want. You want people to be able to stream your music even if they aren't on Apple or Spotify. Lock down an email address. Make sure your handle is the same for all of these. The trick to gathering an audience on these platforms is to create something of value. And that value is important because it's specific and in-line with your artistic identity. I use our Instagram as a place to keep in touch with our community — I follow and interact with other artists and collaborators, I post daily snippets from the life of the band to our story, little musical videos, I even post about what books I'm reading. People are on Instagram because they're interested in you and your life, so it's nice to see behind the curtain and into the lives of you and your bandmates. TikTok, on the other hand, seems to be entirely driven by a content-based algorithm — this can look like a lot of things: funny little videos, covers of songs you like, dances, vibey lifestyle posts, rating different things, more informational stuff (our most popular by far were about DIY audio engineering). TikTok seems to prefer videos that show your face from the front, by and large, and anything that makes use of its in-app sounds, songs, effects, and features. Just a small tip. Do some duetting and reacting, people like that. What, you're not on TikTok? Get on TikTok! It makes me feel old and out-of-touch, too, but you've got to excise that discomfort and get after it. Remember, we're committed. Facebook is useful for scheduling events, more useful if you have an older audience. But even then, I'd use a mailing list. The nice thing about email is it gets you away from algorithm-driven exposure — now you can contact people you care about directly. YouTube is a great place to do covers and gather fans from other, extant fanbases. I know that fans of Pinegrove or Death Cab for Cutie will find something to like from our music, for example, so we've spent a lot of time and effort putting together some good quality covers. I prefer to use Reddit in this way — I spent years learning a lot from this community and it's great to be able to contribute, now. And who knows, maybe you'll gain some new listeners that way, too. You're welcome to make yourself a website, but to be honest I don't think it's all that important anymore. So you're going to spend your two+ months gathering an audience on all these platforms by posting regularly, engaging with others, and creating high-value content. Sneak in some promotional stuff for your music. TikTok seems particularly lawless — just post your song and people will start demanding you release it. This is a game of inches. It takes time. And don't be afraid to direct your friends and family. Learn how to ask, you're going to need to. Otherwise no one will ever even know you released it. But every person you gather becomes a potential vector of new exposure. ADS As a brief aside, if you have the money, ads can be really useful. The trick is to make it less of an ad and more of a normal post on social media. Engagement with videos is much higher. Spend some time making a short little video teaser and release video for your music. Music videos are even better! Try to spend at least $10 a day and use a targeted audience. If you've run ads before, try especially to focus people who have previously engaged with your material. You can have Instagram and Facebook promote you, you can have YouTube screen your videos before other relevant artists. And feel free to get creative with ads in the real world, too. Leave random letters inviting people to your show. Put up flyers! Collaborate with local artists to make cool merchandise and flyers! — PLAYLISTS, PLAYLISTS, PLAYLISTS (AND BLOGS, AND RADIO) Next, get on SubmitHub. You're going to find yourself a couple blogs — as many as you can — to talk about your release. To be honest, I don't think too many people actively read blogs anymore, but you might gain a little exposure out of it. More importantly, it gives you another measure of legitimacy. People are talking about your music. You're going to share those articles when they're written, and people will be more inclined to check your music out having seen that other people are writing about it. More importantly, find a couple playlisters to add your song. With both of these things, it helps be specific about your targeting — do a little research. And it helps to have a little money for premium credits, the rate of acceptance is so much higher. But if you don't — and that's completely okay — you can earn them by rating others' music on Hot or Not. And you should add your music to SubmitHub's Hot or Not as well. Think of all the other appreciative musicians who are on there listening through Hot or Not. Someone might think your stuff is pretty hot! And then you've got a new fan as well. But playlists. Someone commented in the other thread, "Playlists, playlists, playlists." And if you want to up your monthly listeners and maybe even gain some fans, this is the right answer. So ask yourself, who does your music sound like? Note, this is not who do you listen to, but who do you sound like? I love Frank Ocean and Theo Katzman, both have influenced my songwriting and sound immensely, and I sound nothing like those artists. But fans of Pinegrove might find a particular resonance with our music. I'm a new fan of Phoebe Bridgers (Punisher is such an amazing sounding album. I love Gruska and Mills and Berg's production, wow) but even before I liked her music I understood that others might find similar qualities. What's the strongest quality of your music? Now go forth on Spotify and find user-made playlists that have a similar vibe. Given them a listen. Now's the creepy part — and this process is long and tedious, too. Look at the user. Do they make playlists under their name? Do they have a profile picture? Great. Spotify pulls those things from Facebook. Go find their Facebook profile, friend them, and send them a message cold. Be courteous and respectful, be friendly and genuine. Let them know you've been digging their playlist. You really like X and Y artists, and because of their playlist, you found Z artists and you really dig it. You think your song might be a good fit. Send them a link and say, if you like it, I'd love it if you could add it to your playlist. This feels slimey and weird and it was one of the earliest forms of exposure we got beyond our immediate social circles. Don't forget about Spotify's playlist submission. As long as your submit two weeks prior to release, you'll be put on Release Radar, which will let everyone who's listened to your previously know you've got a new song out. From my own experience, Release Radar can also expose you to new likely fans based on engagement, acting as a little mini Discover Weekly. Discover Weekly is where you want to end up, because Spotify will just continue shipping your song around to new fans as long as there's engagement. These things are both driven by engagement and sharing by users immediately following release, so all that work you put in above is going to be really important! And of course you can submit a song from each release for Editorial Playlist consideration, too! As always, targeting is key. Find the right curated playlist for your specific song, tailor your pitch to that playlist's vibe and content. By the way, I recommend releasing a few singles before the project, and scheduling them to be four weeks apart. This way, Spotify will note the consistent influx of new listeners and the momentum you've built up, so it'll start doing some of the work for you. Plus, it gives you momentum to outside observers. On a sort of related note, reach out to local radio stations! The students who run college stations are eager and have such a passion for music. They are fans just waiting to happen, and you'll find they're often friends waiting to happen as well. It is such a pleasure to sit down and chat with a couple students on the air and it costs you just an hour of your time, an enjoyable one at that. Likewise with podcasters! There are so many podcasts these days and I guarantee you know someone that hosts one. Reach out! — PERFORMING LIVE Back before the beginning of the end of the world, we used to play live. Live shows remain the number one way you'll convert a listener to a fan. Try to maximize your exposure by playing venues with good foot traffic — venues with enough of a reputation that they bring their own listener base on a regular basis, potential new fans for you — and by pairing with other bands in the scene. How do you meet other bands? Be friendly and sociable, go out to their shows, listen respectfully, talk to them after, buy them a drink. You'll find your scene. Their fans will become fans of yours too, and now you two can support one another as acts! Build a community, collaborate, experiment, make new great art together. Play bomb shows together. And that extends to the people listening as well — put aside whatever discomfort you might feel and play your heart out; invite your audience to come and say hello after the show, to say hello to one another and make new friendships. They'll come to the next show, too, and bring friends. I want you to play at least two shows, a month apart, in the time leading up to your release. More if you can travel (e.g., Brooklyn and Manhattan, separate enough audiences. Burlington VT is small enough that you don't want to oversaturate). Put together all that work for a big release show when your project drops — collaborate with other bands you've befriended, get a good Friday or Saturday spot. Hell, schedule a tour! We try not to release music without scheduling a little mini-tour for that weekend. Okay, so maybe you don't have a band, or you don't know how to perform. I encourage you to do it anyway. Remember that we're committed here. You can repackage your music — it doesn't have to sound like the record. We recently played a live show online from my apartment. Unfortunately it's not really practical for us to play drums and thrashing electric guitars here, so we stripped it down, went acoustic, emphasized the harmonies, I play the piano. A different packaging, but I'm just trying to communicate my vision however I can. I've done videos of myself playing all the instruments. Whatever it takes. You can play out live with a laptop as a backing track. You can loop yourself. Maybe you're just a bomb musician, so you can just play and that's compelling enough. I'm not that way but I know plenty who are. You can do it! Just do it! In my experience, colleges and DIY audiences are all really willing and invested fans. Colleges will also pay you quite handsomely! Also the current backdrop to our musical lives is one of global emergency and live shows aren't really happening right now. There are still shows happening, but it's a bit of a different scene. Still, the above applies. Find a venue with a built in audience, find some collaborators within your scene, and put something together! Maybe you record it with your iPhone. You can get a great sound with a phone these days, just spend time getting a good placement. You can do it! Just do it! — PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER Before our first release, I spent multiple hours doing this everyday. I would wake up, submit to blogs and playlisters on SubmitHub every four hours, cold message Spotify playlisters on my bus ride into work. I put together a show at one of the biggest, highest traffic venues in town with a couple bands from the area — friends I'd made by visiting their shows and being a part of the local scene. We collaborated with a local graphic designer to make these awesome posters. I drove around an hung them at the local universities and all around town. I scheduled a mini-tour immediately to follow, hitting some of the major cities on the East Coast. I invited everyone I knew in each city. I reached out personally! I asked them to bring friends! We filmed parts of our future ad material at these shows with the audience participating. After the show, we packed up quickly and spent time hanging out with friends and listeners, meeting the people with whom our music had resonated. I posted to Reddit. Some of those posts flopped — which embarrasses me and I'm telling you about it now because that's a reality of what we're doing and we need to accept that. It's slow. But this is a game of inches and you have to keep going, right? That's the only way forward. TikTok wasn't around yet but you can bet I'd have been posting on there everyday if it had been. I did as many podcasts and playlists as I could. I reached out to local newspapers and did interviews. My friends and I all streamed the new song non-stop on our phones. I asked everyone I knew to share the song if they liked it, telling them it was a small thing they could do for me that would mean a lot for our band. There's really no way around approaching this with humility. Remember your commitment. Excise your ego. This is music, it's a compassionate act to begin with. You have to reach out to others and connect, and it's in forming that community that you will go farther. By the time we released our second single, a month later, all that consistent effort and momentum paid off. Release Radar did a little better. We started seeing some consistent listenership. We were finding our fanbase. Finally, by our third single, things started working for us. We got a huge bump off Release Radar followed by a huge bump off Discover Weekly. We have two songs now that routinely get peddled on Discover Weekly and that has driven us to so many new listeners and fans — all because of that hard work we put in. And I am still doing it everyday, in between producing our new record and my friends' new record and, of course, going to work. It is very possible that we will never have our tinderbox moment, the big break, and find tremendous success, but I am determined to find as many people to connect with as I can and I am going to keep working as hard as I can to make that a reality. You can do it! Just do it! It is slow and hard work and frankly it is mostly discouraging work, too. But if you want it, I promise you can do it. This will work. It will take work, but if you show up and you keep at it you will see results. Good luck!
[Spoilery title warning] The exhaustive proof of when and how Aang unlocks his last chakra. If it's ever confused you, this will fix that.
You may have come here from my first post (which you can find here; it's much shorter), or maybe this post is the first one to show up in your feed. Regardless, thanks for clicking. This could possibly change the way you see the finale. Oh, and let me tell ya: if you thought my first post - scratch that, essay - was long, it was practically a tl;dr. This is it: my magnum opus. My biggest, and hopefully best, contribution to the ATLA fandom is contained within the remainder of this post. There will be some repetition in this post of points I laid out in the other post, but it's kept to a minimum and serves to paint the entire picture. Let's start with a refresher. This is the exact moment I posit Aang masters the Avatar State: Most of the images like these, in this post and the last, are taken from the official “Avatar: The Last Airbender” YouTube channel - specifically their video of the uncut final battle. Prior to this scene, Aang has taken a beating from Ozai in a cat-and-mouse battle, but the tide suddenly turns when a rocky protrusion lands a lucky hit on Aang's scar and unblocks his Thought Chakra, sending Aang into a previous-lives-fueled rage. "It's right here!" some of you might be saying to me in your heads; "His chakra is opened and he enters the Avatar State!" But I'd ask you to take a step back. For the purposes of this write-up, unblocking the chakra will be separate from opening the chakra. Chakras are unblocked by default: this is the state of Aang's chakras before meeting Guru Pathik. If they've been blocked, they must be unblocked before they can be opened. Opening the chakras is the technique Aang learned from Guru Pathik, and opening each chakra is how he masters the Avatar State, which is the step beyond entering the defensive State. Azula prevented him not just from mastering the Avatar State, but accessing it at all; this is the effect of a blocked chakra, whereas an unblocked chakra lets Aang enter the State in dangerous or emotionally intense situations without control over it. I hope that didn't sound too pretentious; it's just that I need to be clear about what I'm talking about. Still with me? Great! It's true that the rock jab in the fight with Ozai does send Aang into the Avatar State, but this is the same defensive version we've seen in all appearances of the Avatar State, bar one (that instance being in "The Crossroads of Destiny"; this episode will be popping up again soon to be discussed). Guru Pathik tells Aang that when he has opened all the chakras, "[Aang] will have complete control and awareness of all [his] actions [in the Avatar State]", yet it's easy to see that Aang does not have control of his actions in this part of the final battle:
He uses several lethal attacks against Ozai (most notably the rock bullets, which obliterate entire monoliths), and Ozai only survives because of his own evasion of these attacks.
When he brings the killing blow down onto Ozai's prostrate body, he has to reject the Avatar State entirely in order to halt the strike. If he were in "complete control," he never would have attempted the killing blow in the first place, and he certainly could have diverted it without leaving the State.
I can't confirm this, but I've read that in the creators' commentary, they state point-blank he wasn't in control of himself for this part of the battle. Since I don't have the source, this isn't as convincing as the other two points, but I believe they're persuasive enough on their own.
So if he doesn't master the Avatar State right then, that means the only other time he could have mastered it was at the end of "The Crossroads of Destiny," right? He was opening his seventh chakra! Indeed he was. Here, though, the problem is that the process was never completed:
We are never told that suffering a nearly fatal injury while in the Avatar State would block your last chakra. If you're in the Avatar State and you almost die but end up surviving, why would such an injury block any chakra, especially the last one in particular? There isn't much logic behind a claim like that. But the argument that says Aang opened his last chakra here, only for Azula to block it, also says exactly what I just described. If Aang mastered the Avatar State in the crystal city and then Azula hit him, then he would have either died and the Avatar State would have ended, or he would have survived and everything nothing would have changed. There's nothing in between. Obviously, he did survive, but something did change (that being the blocked chakra). That means he was not, in fact, in the Avatar State when he got hit. He must have still been in the meditative process of opening it when he got hit, which means this is not the instant when he masters the Avatar State.
It would be one thing if Azula's lightning blocked the seventh chakra because it struck Aang in the chakra's physical location, that being the crown of the head - but it doesn't. He's seen with scars on his back, where the electricity entered his body, and on his foot, where it left his body, but his head is unmarred.* My claim here is that the lightning blocked the chakra because it interrupted the process of opening the chakra in a permanently damaging way. That's why he can't open the chakra afterwards, which means Aang didn't master the Avatar State. *We know with certainty that it's the seventh chakra that's blocked, because Aang says as such in "The Day of Black Sun, Part 1: The Invasion" (as long as we can trust him to understand his spiritual troubles, which I think we can). While that might seem obvious, I bring this up because there's a fringe theory out there that says his injury is blocking another chakra (namely the first, at the base of the spine, even though the scar isn't even at the base) or the flow between chakras, but not the seventh specifically, and that would be why he can't go into the Avatar State.
Aang never takes any meaningful action in the supposed Avatar State in this scene (he levitates, yes, but it's not clear or verifiable that he's in control of it), so it can't be said with certainty that he did gain control over the Avatar State.
The imagery of the show seems to support the fact that Aang was nearly in control of the Avatar State, but not entirely. The vision of himself in the Avatar State that he sees while opening the last chakra, which I'll call Cosmic Aang, accepts Aang into the swirling sphere to imbue mastery over the State in this scene just as it did the first time with Guru Pathik. It's reasonable to believe that whatever would have come next in the imagery would have been our Aang growing to become Cosmic Aang, or taking on the image of Cosmic Aang within the sphere, or something along those lines; most fundamentally, the two of them would become reflections of each other and move together. When Azula's lightning hits, though, Cosmic Aang is toppled and falls, and he is decidely separate from Aang. The two of them fall at different times, in different ways, separately - not as one.
I saved best for last - Guru Pathik, paragon of information wisdom, tells Aang, "Once you open [the seventh] chakra, you will be able to go in and out of the Avatar State at will." Had Aang succeeded in mastering the Avatar State, he should have been able to leave it during his battle with Ozai long before he tried to kill Ozai a dozen times in their battle, let alone at the killing blow like I mentioned before. It's only when Ozai is completely helpless that Aang is able to overpower the State and become himself again. You might be thinking that this proves he is "going out of the Avatar State at will," but this isn't the first time he's left the Avatar State. His emotions can penetrate the Avatar State as early as episode three, when Katara coaxes him out of it after he finds Gyatso's skeleton. Halting the Avatar State on a dime is a very different ability: this is what Guru Pathik is referring to, and this is what Aang would have done the second the previous Avatars started throwing lethal attacks at Ozai if Aang had actually had control over Avatar State.
Oh, and the next sentence in the quote is the one about having complete control in the Avatar State if he unlocks the last chakra, but we already discussed that.
To top it off, there's also the fact that the explanation for the rock jab still holds for this one. Since Aang hasn't mastered the Avatar State when the jab sends him into it, that means at no point earlier in the series did he open his last chakra. This encompasses both the rock jab and the crystal cave sequence. If you've agreed with me - or if I've convinced you of my assertions - up to this point, then that means that you think he didn't finish opening his chakras and that he never mastered the Avatar State at any point prior to or at the moment of the rock jab. You already know when I think he mastered the Avatar State, but I'm going to have to walk you through a fair bit of pre-explanation explanation before we get to the meat of it. Then, I promise, we'll have our answer.
This point is crucial - it's why this specific list is numbered, as opposed to the others, which were bulleted. It's a bit of a reach, but it's necessary, and I explain why it's not actually a reach pretty well if I do say so myself. Here it is: Guru Pathik had perfect knowledge of all the chakras, and his words can be trusted infallibly...except for everything to do with the seventh chakra. To be more specific: everything he says regarding the seventh chakra in particular, beginning with what it is blocked by (earthly attachment) and all the teachings that follow that statement - all of that is born from misinformation. He's right about what it deals with - pure cosmic energy - and that it needs to be opened in order to master the Avatar State, but that's about it. The next couple points elaborate on where the misinformation comes from.
Aang speaks with Avatar Yangchen in "Sozin's Comet, Part 2: The Old Masters," where she tells him that "the Avatar can never [detach themselves from the world], because [their] sole duty is to the world." How, then, has any Avatar in the past mastered the Avatar State through the methods Guru Pathik employs? Avatar Yangchen herself is seen having mastered the State in a vision in Book 2's "The Avatar State"! We have two conflicting opinions: Guru Pathik says detachment is necessary to master the Avatar State, but Yangchen says detachment is impossible for the Avatar. Which one is right? I'm going to go with the person who successfully mastered the Avatar State.
This is not the only aspect of the seventh chakra about which Guru Pathik is mistaken. After Aang chooses Katara over his chakra at the Eastern Air Temple, Guru Pathik tells him, "By choosing attachment, you have locked the chakra! If you leave now, you won't be able to go into the Avatar state at all!" yet this is proven false multiple times. If he's misinformed in one way about how this chakra affects the Avatar State, it's more than possible he's wrong in a second way.
[Speculation Warning] [Except It's A Necessary Elaboration] I think that the seventh chakra is distinct from the other chakras in that it functions slightly differently for the Avatar than it does for the rest of the world. I believe Guru Pathik was correct when he said the chakra "deals with pure cosmic energy", but since the Avatar's relationship to the world and universe is fundamentally different from "normal people's" relationship to the universe, opening the chakra that concerns the universe should be different for Avatars too. I explain in the other post that I think the way an Avatar opens the seventh chakra isn't by letting go of attachments, but by valuing their attachments even more than the Avatar State itself, the ultimate power of the Avatar. Like Yangchen says, the Avatar's duty is to the world before anything else, and since the Avatar State has the potential for both the most good and the most evil, the universe would seek balance by ensuring that the controllable Avatar State was inaccessible to each Avatar until they learned to care for the people of their world.
Hundreds and hundreds of years have passed since the Avatar was an airbender (prior to Aang). That's a very long time for detailed information, like the opening of chakras, to remain intact without continuously putting that information to use. Since airbenders were likely achieving enlightenment continuously throughout the period between Air-vatars, the process for airbenders opening the seventh chakra would have remained well within the Nomads' wealth of knowledge. The information for how an Avatar opens their last chakra, though, was lost to time through disuse over, y'know, multiple centuries.
This is more of a point #4.5 than #6, but whereas the chakras exist for everyone else so that they can become enlightened - Yangchen states, "Many great and wise Air Nomads have detached themselves and achieved spiritual enlightenment..." - Avatars aren't chasing spiritual enlightenment; instead, they're chasing mastery over the Avatar State. I'm not sure we can equate spiritual enlightenment for an Avatar to the Avatar State. I mean, maybe we can, but since this is quite subjective, it's last in line as far as evidence goes, but it's still potentially relevant.
Wow, that's...an absurd amount of set-up. But in spite of all the words in the way, we made it! Time to walk through the energybending scene, and how Aang truly takes control of the Avatar State. Where we begin: Aang has just rejected the defensive Avatar State after nearly killing a helpless Ozai. He has drawn a line in the sand; he will never sacrifice the morality that's gotten him to this moment, even if it's the surest way to victory. I think Guru Pathik would be proud of this decision: before he begins his spiritual mentoring, he tells Aang, "You must gain balance within yourself before you can bring balance to the world." The world still needs the Avatar to lead them to harmony after Ozai's defeat. Aang would never find the strength in himself to restore balance to the nations if he himself was internally unbalance: damaged, unsure, reeling from actions he can't reconcile with himself. His guilt would make him feel unworthy, and he'd be questioning every code to which he held himself while simultaneously trying to establish a better code for the world to live by. I think his decision to spare Ozai was indeed mostly done out of stubbornness and it was a little selfish, but deep down in his psyche, it was also incredibly wise. It also means that his identity as the Avatar has been forever altered: yes, all Avatars are autonomous, but they're somewhat of a product of their predecessors. In rejecting the morality of his past incarnations, Aang has refused to be that product; and since he can't control the Avatar State, he refuses to enter it and let his moral code be lost. This is significant because, without his past lives coming to save the day, he's legitimately alone for the first time ever. He can't depend on the wisdom of those that came before him any longer. It's fitting, then, that his next act is something no Avatar before him has ever done: energybending. Despite the glowing eyes, he isn't in the Avatar State. First of all, the glowing mouth would be new, and second of all, his other tattoos aren't aglow. Then, the glow of energy spreads throughout both of their bodies. They are radiant, and their conflict outshines the comet. Even as his spirit is turned inside out, though, he doesn't enter the Avatar State. His eyes glow, but not his tattoos. The glowing eyes are a product of energybending and not the Avatar State; after all, Ozai isn't an Avatar. You can compare these shots: though the reflections on his arms look like his arrow tattoos, they're not in the same place as in the picture above. That means Aang is doing this outside of the Avatar State. The Lion-Turtle's words float over this contest of wills: "To bend another's energy, your own spirit must be unbendable, or you will be corrupted and destroyed." Before our eyes, Ozai's spirit begins to overtake Aang's, because Ozai is singleminded in his hatred and confident of his destiny. Aang's spirit must not be unbendable yet, because it's yielding to the Fire Lord. But what makes a spirit unbendable? Let's return to the words of the Lion-Turtle, the one who gave Aang the knowledge of this technique: "The true mind can weather all the lies and illusions without being lost. The true heart can tough the poison of hatred without being harmed." What does this mean, and what does it mean to Aang? Is his heart true? Is his mind? Let's start with the mind: If Aang's mind has yet to become "true", that means Aang is still suffering under some illusion(s) and/or lie(s) in this moment. What could that be? Well, there are multiple layers to Aang's "true mind". Even though he's focusing on energybending in this instant, the problem of the seventh chakra is still in the back of his head. Up until the night before the comet, Aang believed that he had to sacrifice his earthly attachments to open the chakra. In talking to Yangchen, though, he discovered that this wasn't the case. In the same conversation, he tells her, "But the monks taught me that I had to detach myself from the world so my spirit could be free!" He's struggling to accept the truth of Yangchen's words because it contradicts everything he learned about spirituality from the monks and about the chakras from Guru Pathik. This is an illusion under which he's still suffering. But that's not all. On a deeper level, Aang has been told ever since coming out of the iceberg that the only way to defeat the Fire Lord is to become more powerful than him. For almost a year, Aang's path has been to develop skills and techniques in order to hit Ozai harder than Ozai can hit him. This subject is reminiscent of the thematic analysis of power in my first post, so I won't repeat it all here. Essentially, as soon as Aang energybends on Ozai, he realizes 1) that the elemental power either of them wields has lost all its significance, and 2) that without lethal force, power alone was never going to bring balance. Now, what about Aang's heart? Is it "true"? Again, this has layers. As I considered what Aang would need to do to open his last chakra, the thought of his struggle with letting Katara go became paramount. And as I dwelt on the problem of his feelings for Katara, it occurred to me that Aang's heart isn't true, not so long as he tries to carve interpersonal love out of it. And truly, what is better to "tough the poison of hatred" than love? A true heart will feel any and every emotion, despite what its owner tries to will it into feeling. Aang has denied his romantic feelings every time they prevented him from mastering the Avatar State (or, at least, he thought they were preventing him), but guess what else Aang has denied by this point? The Avatar State. Aang has decided he'll fight the rest of this fight without the Avatar State, and once he realizes that means his feelings for Katara don't need to be restrained any longer, he lets them come flooding through, and in doing so awakens his true heart. Aang's heart also wouldn't be true without a pivotal decision that had taken place just seconds before energybending: sparing Ozai. That was Aang's heart's most intense trial - deciding to kill Ozai, or spare him - and it braved the test in an awesome display of resolve by shutting down the Avatar State. Yes, Aang's heart becomes "100% true" when he acknowledges his love for Katara to himself while energybending, but when he refused to kill Ozai, he unequivocally slammed the wall on "the poison of hatred". At the culmination of all of this discovery, where Aang was vulnerable... https://preview.redd.it/8iibwwm10im51.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=10038072a990c3e88f5c008d997e7b0ad4a5a2f1 ...he becomes unbendable. Most importantly, he's now in the Avatar State! He entered the Avatar State. He does so without the need to defend himself, and without being caught up in an emotional outburst, like every other time the State has been activated. Coincidentally (but actually not), it happened at the same exact second when his true mind and true heart conquered Ozai. How are these forces connected?
Aang let his feelings for Katara rush in, and thought of her and all his loved ones; they were the reason he was fighting the Fire Lord. His heart was freed, and it became true. Through this action, he unexpectedly opens his last chakra, because he embraces his attachments instead of pushing them away.
Additionally, Aang had already fulfilled the other aspect of my proposed method of opening the seventh chakra - valuing attachments over the Avatar State - when he did it in the most unmistakable way possible by outright rejecting the State. This is another process through which he cemented his true heart.
With his realizations about the nature of the seventh chakra, he "true-s" his mind as he masters the Avatar State.
Here's some icing on the cake: Does this beam look familiar? They're identical! Well sure, the shafts are similar, but are these beams really the same? True, they're not identical. But I'm going to treat it as a case of artistic license; they're identical enough for me! The same beam that appeared when Aang enters the Avatar State for the first time returns to signal the moment Aang enters the Avatar State intentionally for the first time. A light show for Aang's first Avatar State, and a light show for Aang mastering the Avatar State. As a certain science-fantasy icon would say, "It's like poetry; they rhyme." The conclusion of our recreation of this scene is the fully-realized Avatar Aang, victorious. https://preview.redd.it/eesm5vut0im51.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=fdf15223f9af92edc929c0d114cdde8adb09f011 I don't know about you, but for me, reading all this meaning into this episode (while it is a lot) really elevates the final scenes. Going back to watch the fight while projecting this inner journey onto Aang just makes the finale even more special. If you'd like to end your reading here, I'll bid you good-bye, and I'd like you to know that I'm very grateful that you've read through two unbelievably oversized posts (assuming you read the first one!). You deserve a seat next to Bosco at the Earth King's next banquet. If you're thinking about all the possible ways I'm wrong, though...so am I. This theory isn't 100% waterproof...but I'd call it 95% if we make the right concessions. Let's get into the detractors.
One of the biggest ones is the fact that Katara appears to Aang the first time he tries to open the Thought Chakra. Isn't this because Cosmic Aang is showing Aang the attachments he still needs to let go? Only depending on your interpretation. Viewing the scene with my theory about the seventh chakra in mind, it's very possible that Aang is trying to cut his attachment to Katara, and Cosmic Aang is reminding Aang to stay tethered to the woman he loves. The strange shrouding of the vision could be because Aang is trying to disconnect himself from Katara.
How does Aang make progress the first and second times he starts opening the seventh chakra if he's doing it the wrong way? Well, when Aang opens the first six chakras, he sees a vision for each before it actually opens. When trying to open the seventh, he sees visions like the others. But when he's trying to open it with Guru Pathik, he doesn't completely let go of his attachments, so we can't say the chakra actually would have opened if he did let them go. The second time, in the crystal city, he lets go of Katara...in order to save Katara. And himself, and the city, I suppose, but I just don't think we can say with certainty that he actually let go of his attachment to Katara in that scene (even though he thinks he did). So making progress towards opening the chakra doesn't mean he could have completed the process with the incorrect method. Not the sturdiest argument but I think it holds.
Why didn't Aang rise up some column of light after supposedly opening the chakra while energybending like he did when he almost opened the same chakra in "The Crossroads of Destiny"? My response is even less strong than my last, so I'm going to knock off a percentage point to bring my theory from 100% waterproof down to 99%. My best offer is that levitating during the process was a one-time thing to mark the progress Aang had made, so since he'd already made that progress, he didn't go through it again.
Someone might say to me that if I'm all about these visual clues, haven't I noticed that every time some significant change happens to the seventh chakra, we're shown an image of Cosmic Aang - and yet that doesn't happen during the energybending sequence? Yes, I've noticed. Unfortunately, this doesn't have a good explanation either. The best I can put forward is that since mastering the Avatar State had become a second priority to Aang and energybending came first, the audience was shown what's most important in that moment, and it's not Cosmic Aang. I know that's not particularly strong, so that's where another one of the percentage points gets knocked off.
If all the past Avatars knew that the last chakra had to be opened the way I explained it, why didn't they just tell Aang? Well, if we run with that, they also should have been able to teach Aang how to open every chakra, since they'd all done it before. Since he wasn't taught that way, I think it's a good assumption that it's simply not the place of previous Avatars to guide the current one to the Avatar State. Yangchen telling Aang about not letting attachments go might be her intentionally nudging him towards the right way to open chakra #7 without acting out of turn.
"Hey u/no_not_luke, I went back and watched the energybending scene closely too. When Aang is getting corrupted by Ozai, look at his face here!"
\"His arrow is glowing! I thought he shouldn't be in the Avatar State yet!\" To this, I say that 1) it's not glowing as brightly as it does in the Avatar State, so it might just be an artistic decision to contrast the blue tattoo to the blue glow around his body. Then again, that's not consistent with the other images where the blue glow covers his whole body and yet his other arrows don't glow white. Here's what I think is happening. Let's review the sixth chakra real quick: deals with insight, blocked by illusion. Located where? The forehead. Also, there's a precedent for some of Aang's tattoos to glow while others don't. Here's something from this very episode: Forehead and eyes? Check. Hand? Nope. Nor is this the only time we see this happen: another one that comes to mind is when Aang's hand alone glows at the end of "The Swamp". What I think is happening in the first image is that Aang is in the process of untangling the illusions he's been fed, and with his spirit being turned "inside out" (that's the second time I'm using this phrase because I've heard that's how one of the creators described this scene), that process manifests in the form of a slight glow where the chakra is located. It's not related to the Avatar State, and it's not Aang "re-opening" the sixth chakra. It's just that the forehead is where, symbolically, illusions are undone. You might argue that, since the fifth chakra is blocked by lies, his throat should also be glowing (separate from his mouth). But while teaching Aang, Guru Pathik immediately clarifies what blocks the fifth chakra by saying, "The lies we tell ourselves." Aang isn't being dishonest with himself, therefore no throat glow. This brings me to the very last topic of this post, which discusses the biggest threat to this theory. All my ideas came from one quick little detail that I happened to notice: Aang's tattoos glowing after beating Ozai in energybending, and not before. But what if that - all of this - was just an...accident? As much as we like to pretend ATLA is perfect (and it nearly is), it isn't quite, and the animation can reflect that. Here are some times that the Avatar State was represented incorrectly: Aang's arrow isn't glowing. The back of his head doesn't glow, yet in the show, the next shot shows his head's arrow tattoo alight like normal. And finally, from the very episode which birthed this theory: Aang's eyes are white, but not glowing. I only noticed this goof on my ~fiftieth watch of this scene while formulating my ideas and gathering evidence for this post. So if these mistakes are possible, who's to say the moment that forms the foundation of my theory isn't a mistake itself? Well, to be honest...I think there's a good chance it is. The Avatar State looks cool, so why wouldn't Aang be in the Avatar State after he energybends? In my heart, I don't really think it was the writers' intention that the seventh chakra is different for Avatars, and I think Cosmic Aang showed Aang the chained Katara because he was supposed to let her go. This is where the three other percentage points get knocked off of the airtight-ness of my ideas, because I feel like it's a fair number. Despite this, I still side with my theory. I think that the fact that there's this much room for interpretation, mostly because of the inconsistencies that were left in the original story, gives my theory the space it needs to exist and thrive. If the show didn't explain itself on its own, why shouldn't my theory be the one to do it? It actually sews up more inconsistencies in the story than it creates! 95% airtight is still better than 92% airtight, 92% being the number I'd give the show's straightforward-ness of its presentation of this battle and the journey to the Avatar State, based on my subjective feelings. That's why I still want to spread these ideas, despite my doubts. I want fans to be able to have this matter settled. Maybe most fans don't care, but it's a good bet that the ones that are reading this do care :) With that, I'll leave you with a picture of our Avatar demonstrating his mastery of the Avatar State. Regardless of chakras, he has proved he's the Avatar to whom the world owes the end of the war. The End.
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