ESPN radio host Don La Greca hates math. He hates math more than anyone should reasonably hate math, and not in a “it was my worst subject in high school” way. On Wednesday, La Greca went on a rambling rant of the ages during a talk about the Giants’ offensive line.
New York radio host loses it over statistics, starts rant against the Pythagorean theorem
It started with the Giants, and ended up being beef with euclidean geometry.
James Dator has been covering a wide range of sports for SB Nation for over a decade, with a special focus on the NFL.
It begins by slamming made-up stats that bring in so many variables they get silly, which is fair — but then La Greca progressively gets weirder in direct proportions to how red his face is getting. At its zenith he’s raving about the Pythagorean theorem for some reason.
“That’s what we’re do, Michael? We’re gonna be like accountants now in baseball. Uh, what is it — the Pythagorean theorem. THE PYTHAGOREAN THEOREM SAYS the Giants offensive line, that their record should be 1-1. That’s the Pythagorean theorem says that the Giants record should be 2-0. DUHHHHHH! GAHHHHHH! [Unintelligible guttural sounds].”
Like me, at first you probably thought La Greca was just pulling some recognizable math term out of his hat to mock people who like stats. It’s likely La Greca was trying to refer to “Pythagorean expectation,” a baseball concept — but we can’t be sure. Surely he didn’t really think anyone in sports was trying to make a point using the proof to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle in euclidean geometry. But we were wrong. It’s clear La Greca had NO clue what the Pythagorean theorem was — because it got so much better.
“The people that trust the Pythagorean theorem. The people that listen to the Pythagorean theorem. The people that sit there at their desks that only know the naked body through National Geographic that do the math, that come up with the Pythagorean theorem — that’s what they sound like. [More unintelligible guttural sounds].”
A few things Don La Greca doesn’t know about the Pythagorean theorem.
- What the Pythagorean theorem is.
- That it was discovered 2000-1600 BC, not at someone’s desk in 2017.
- People haven’t looked at National Geographic for photos of naked people since Eisenhower was in office.
- Seriously, he doesn’t know what it is.
In an effort to help La Greca we’re going to give him a quick lesson on what the Pythagorean theorem is, so he can maybe apply it to his every day life. La Greca knows two things: Himself, and that the Giants suck — so let’s use those as learning tools.
Let’s say Don La Greca wants to find out the distance between the tip of his nose and the corner of his eye and only has the length of his lose and the width of his eye.
Pythagorean theorem tells us that a² + b² = c². What it can’t tell us is why the Giants’ offensive line sucks — no matter how many sides to the triangle there are.
So, thank you Don La Greca. Your rant will be used by sensible people for YEARS to point out how sports fans are idiots. Thank you for that. We really all appreciate it.
