Sports Media Review

Coaching Double Standard

As I have written about before, there is a new double standard in sports. On the one hand, it’s wrong for players to criticize coaches, a violation of the fundamental principles of authority and of talking “man-to-man” with whomever it is you have a problem, rather than publicly airing your grievances. On the other, there seems to be no such constraint on coaches criticizing players. Giants’ coach Tom Coughlin, emblematic of this double standard, was very upset with Tiki Barber after the Giants week ten loss on Monday night to Jacksonville. Barber attacked Coughlin’s play-calling, especially his decision to abandon the run for essentially the entire second half. Then, after this past Sunday’s historic collapse at Tennessee, Coughlin criticized Manning at a post-game press conference for his late game interception, which set up the field goal that completed the Titans comeback victory.

I have no problem with Coughlin criticizing Manning. After all, Eli is killing the Giants right now, and a coach has a right to be frustrated. But, where did this norm about criticizing coaches come from?

Page 2’s Gregg Easterbrook is all over this double standard in this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (TMQ):

“Outcoached! It's been the buzz phrase of the past few weeks, and this week several NFL coaches were significantly outcoached. None, however, admitted as much. Bear Bryant maintained that after a victory the players deserve the credit, and after a loss the coach deserves the blame. Today every NFL coach praises the Bear, then conveniently overlooks his maxim. At the least we should hold to the axiom "win as a team, lose as a team," and assume that in a loss the coaches must have coached poorly. There's no shame in this, since coaches have good games and bad games just as players do. But you'd never know that from NFL coaches. For them, somebody else is always to blame.”

 

Easterbrook highlights poor decisions by Lovie Smith, Jim Mora, Jr., Jack Del Rio and Coughlin in their teams’ week eleven losses.

 

About Mora, Jr., whose father (ex-coach, of course) famously called Michael Vick a “coach-killer” two weeks ago, Easterbrook said:

“Jim Mora Decried as "Quarterback Killer": Two weeks ago TMQ noted that Atlanta coach Mora the Younger made a puzzling decision at the end of the first half against Cleveland, ordering an onside kick with nine seconds remaining and the Falcons holding but one timeout. The Browns recovered in position for a Hail Mary, but suppose Atlanta had recovered -- what would have been accomplished? Atlanta went on to lose. Now it's Sunday and the reeling Falcons are at home against the United States Saints. The Saints lead 14-6 and hold the ball at midfield with seven seconds remaining in the first half. The clock is stopped owing to an incompletion, but Mora calls timeout, allowing New   Orleans extra time to set up a Hail Mary play. Touchdown, and suddenly the Falcons are in deep trouble with the score 21-6 at the half. Note: I don't wish to alarm you, but New Orleans now has the NFL's No. 1 passing attack.

As the Falcons have dropped four straight, everyone's focusing on criticizing Michael Vick. What about all the odd coaching decisions made by Mora and his assistants? Vick wasn't the one who ordered himself to take seven-step drops on passes against New Orleans -- something he's never been good at, and which plays away from his strength, the sprint-out pass. (Sprint-outs keep Vick closer to the line and also simplify the field, requiring him to look at only half the coverage, not the entire coverage as in a deep dropback.) Trailing 14-3, Atlanta had third-and-goal on the Saints' 2, on a day the Falcons would rush for 281 yards and average 6.2 yards per rush. Just run the ball! It wasn't Vick who not only called a passing play but a seven-step drop play that required him to run backward to the New Orleans 10; sack, and Atlanta settles for a field goal. You're on the 2, why are you instructing your quarterback to run backward to the 10? Last season's incident in which Mora the Younger did not know that a tie would keep Atlanta alive for the playoffs, and was screaming into a cell phone on the sidelines as he sent in the wrong decisions knocking the Falcons out of the postseason, is hardly the only weird coaching by Mora. Plus, a good coach focuses the criticism on himself, away from his players, a la Bear Bryant. Time to look away from Vick and toward the Atlanta sideline.”

Coughlin’s weekly chat with Mike and the Mad Dog included an interesting exchange in which Mike Francesa told Coughlin that Football Night in America the previous night, Jerome Bettis had criticized Coughlin for this double-standard essentially arguing that it was wrong for Coughlin to tell all his players to keep it in-house, while he publicly attacked his players. Between them, Mike and Chris probably said a half a dozen times that they didn’t agree with Bettis, but just wanted to know what Coughlin thought. Coughlin said that’s was just wrong, but he had no answer because, whether you think the different standards are warranted – the facts are not in dispute: Coughlin publicly criticizes his players, but insists that they not return fire.

This norm seems stronger in football than in the other sports, perhaps because the culture and sensibility of football is closer to that of the military than is the case in any other sport. And, as Colonel Nathan Jessup famously told Lieutenant Caffey many years ago, in the military "if people disobey an order, people die." But, I think it's also true that football players work really hard in a given week, perhaps harder than other athletes and they endure a lot of pain. We focus on the instances in which a player appears not to be giving effort (for example, Plaxico Burress at time) but, the reality is that football players are killing themselves out there. So, I am sure it's frustrating for them to feel like all of their efforts have gone for naught because their coach didn't put them in the best position to win.

In any event, I think the foundations of our Republic will somehow survive an uptick in criticisms of coaches by players.

I am glad to see Easterbrook call this out. His column’s final line:

“Next Week: Tom Coughlin blames the Trilateral Commission.”

The Wages of Wins (and Conventional Wisdom)

Warning: shameless lengthy quoting of myself below.

I received in the mail today the book The Wages of Wins. Written by three economists, including the widely published sports economists David Berri and Martin Schmidt, it’s the sports world’s answer to Freakonomics, 2005’s smash best-seller by economist Steven Leavitt.

I mentioned the book a few months back in discussing the issue of competitive balance in baseball (which the authors regard as a) better than is commonly thought and b) far less subject to payroll discrepancies than is commonly thought), and I won’t dwell on that particular topic now. I’ve read about 100 pages so far and it’s a great book: accessible, compelling and funny.

There are a few key points the authors emphasize over and over again:

1) conventional wisdom in sports is often wrong (more on that in a moment)

2) we do need numbers to tell us who is good and who isn’t (more on that in a moment, too)

3) competitive balance is weakest by far in basketball, but competitive balance is not all that important to a league’s economic well-being and, furthermore, in sports in general is a function of factors no one ever really discusses (more on this in a future post)

4) that they (the authors) hate the New York Yankees (no further commentary required)

It is clearly one of the key goals of the book to scrutinize what the authors regard as some of the key pillars of conventional wisdom in sports. Early in the book, they quote at length the legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Here, in part, is what JKG had to say about  “conventional wisdom,” a phrase the authors say Galbraith himself coined, in 1958:

“…men react, not infrequently with something akin to religious passion, to the defense of what they have so laboriously learned. Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human behavior, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of acceptability…”

A commonly heard contention in the social sciences in general is that it gets it backwards to argue that we believe what we see. In fact, it’s closer to the truth to argue that we see what we believe. In other words, our perceptions often colored cloud our judgment and our ability to see beyond our particular biases and pre-conceived notions. This is why, in addition to warranted skepticism about conventional wisdom (as long as that skepticism is well informed and well substantiated), we need data to keep us honest. Related to this latter point, the authors quote sports writer Allen Barra at some length:

“’Stat nerd” they (critics of the statheads) snort contemptuously at me…but the truth is that they depend as much on numbers as anyone else…What else, after all, are you going to rely on? What, in the final analysis, are statistics but a record of what a player does when you’re not watching him? And we don’t have time to watch 99% of the players 99% of the time.”

I’ll get into some of the particulars of the book over the next couple of weeks, but I wanted to highlight these two larger and related concerns (on conventional wisdom and reliance on systematic data) because they crystallize well many of my criticisms of the way sports (not to mention politics) are covered.

One of things that struck me about the criticisms of Moneyball whenthat book came out three years ago was the anger directed toward the author and, by extension, Beane’s methods themselves, for displaying a kind of pointy-headed arrogance about sabermetrics’ understanding of baseball. But, as I wrote earlier this year in the Gadflyer the charge of arrogance arguably better applies not to the data crunchers, but to their critics:

“There are interesting parallels between [the global warming] debate and the one in Michael Lewis' Moneyball, the book that explicated Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane's philosophy for evaluating talent and putting together a consistently competitive baseball team on a limited budget. On one side of the divide that Lewis sets up in the book (and over-states to some extent) are the traditionalists, that is, the scouts, who observe young players in person and assess their future potential based on what their eyes and experience tell them. These are blue-collar, beer drinking guys who've spent a life time in the baseball equivalent of the trenches – in broken down hotels and half-empty ballparks in the middle of nowhere. On the other side are the so-called sabermetricians, the new wave of baseball analysts and personnel people who rely on sophisticated computer analysis of a player's previous record to project their likely future performance. Lewis portrays the scouts as resentful at the young whipper-snappers who don't actually know anything about the sound and feel and smell of the game, so wrapped up are they in their ivory tower models.

The scouts and [global-warming skeptic Bill] Gray see the computer driven intellectuals as elitist and arrogant and out of touch with how things really work. But, the striking thing about the scouts and about Gray is this: the powerful and unstated arrogance in their outlook. Their eyes tell them everything they need to know about how the world works. That humans can deceive themselves, or miss crucial details of a complex picture, or maintain perceptions colored by bias of one sort or another is implicitly ruled out here….

Neither global warming scientists nor sabermetrics claims to have God-like powers of foresight. Instead, they utilize probability theory to argue that, over the long run, the patterns and trends they see have increasing relevance. They can't know what will happen tomorrow. But, they can make plausible guesses about what, on average, is likely to happen over time. That's a very different kind of knowledge claim than the one that Bill Gray imputes to his ideological opponents. Gray can't predict the future either. But, he wants us to trust that he can, because he's flown into hurricanes and if anyone fails to see what he's been through, what he knows in his gut, well, they can't be acting in good faith.”

As I say in the Gadflyer piece, the performance analysts and stat guys (and global warming scientists) can, of course, be arrogant, not to mention wrong. But, The Wages of Wins, like the more rigorous performance-based turn in analyzing sports more generally, is serving an important function: scrutinizing our own pre-conceptions (a worthwhile endeavor in all areas of human thought) and holding accountable the too common seat-of-their pants analysis of the sports commentariat who think that because they say so, no further exploration (or explanation) is required.

Headbands and Taped Ankles and Insubordination (Oh My)

In case you missed it, Bulls forward Ben Wallace violated team rules by wearing a headband Saturday night. This outrageous act of insubordination by Wallace appears to represent the bubbling over point in a feud between Wallace and Bulls’ GM John Paxson that dates to the early preseason.

According to K.C. Johnson in the Chicago Tribune:

“Wallace has felt unfairly singled out by team rules that have taken away his pregame music, his headband and his tape-free ankles.”

Johnson also notes that the Bulls rules are not uncommon in professional sports:

“Skiles, who gave his team Sunday off, declined to discuss the reasoning behind the Bulls' no-headband rule. It's not uncommon for professional sports franchises to impose such rules.

George Steinbrenner doesn't allow the Yankees to wear facial hair. The Knicks demand players wear suits while traveling. And White Sox and Bulls Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who is believed to be behind the no-headband rule, asked catcher A.J. Pierzynski and Joe Crede to get haircuts during last spring training.”

Whether these recent tensions are a cause or an effect of Wallace’s poor recent play is hard to say. But, his poor performance is noteworthy. Wallace had zero points and, more notably, zero rebounds in a loss Friday night, and the $60 million free agent signee has been a disappointing player so far on what has been a very disappointing Bulls’ team. Wallace has never averaged ten points a game in his career, but his 5.5 per game average this season is his lowest figure since he was a bench player in Orlando seven years ago. And, his 9.2 rebounds per game is also well below the 11-15 rebound per game average he put up in his six years in Detroit.

The Trib’s long-time basketball writer Sam Smith, author of the classic, The Jordan Rules, sees Wallace’s selfishness as a problem that needs to be stamped out immediately:

“But Ben Wallace's bold act of defiance, ignoring on Saturday in New York the team's long-held rule against wearing headbands, may be a defining moment for the future of these Bulls, who seemed to offer so much promise with the free-agent signing last summer of Wallace, the reigning NBA Defensive Player of the Year.

The Bulls at least need to fine Wallace, if not suspend him, for an egregious act that is way beyond a simple stunt of dissent or petulance.

And I'm not overdramatizing here.”

And, why is that?

“Wallace, the second-highest-paid Bull after Michael Jordan in franchise history, essentially challenged the organization that did so much for him while he still does so little for them and, in effect, organized an insurrection against its coach. It's not a matter of slapping down a misbehaving player or trying to show who's in charge. It's a challenge to the very functioning of a team by what is supposed to be its premier player.

And perhaps if Wallace were playing like the premier center the Bulls expected, this may not have been an issue. The first time I heard "Life is not fair" was from former President Jimmy Carter. Another great philosopher, Phil Jackson, explained the "pretty girl gets kissed."

There are different rules for different people and we see it all the time. There were different rules for Jordan, and it gave me a good book title. There are different rules for LeBron James, Shaq and Kobe Bryant. But you better produce.”

It’s just downright incoherent for Smith to argue that Wallace needs to be disciplined to prove that nobody is above the rules on the one hand, but insisting that rules are never applied uniformly on the other. If Ben Wallace is the highest paid player in franchise history after Jordan, and the privileged are entitled to live by different rules than the rest of us, doesn’t Wallace pretty obviously fall into the privileged category?

And, if by all accounts Wallace and the team have been clashing about rules since training camp, it can’t seriously be argued that Wallace’s lack of performance is what’s prompting the crackdown on his behavior. After all, the crackdown clearly came before there was any performance to judge, save for the six years in Detroit that earned him the $60 million.

But, the real issue here isn’t the incoherence of Smith’s arguments. What’s incredible is that Smith can write with a straight pen that Wallace’s wearing a headband is an “egregious act” and that Smith isn’t “over-dramatizing.” Is this what it’s really come to for contemporary sportswriters? That they have so much resentment toward professional athletes that they regard the wearing of a headband (Wallace says he needs it to keep sweat out of his eyes, a reasonable enough concern) as an act of insubordination? Is this why Smith decided to become a sportswriter – to police the most trivial behaviors imaginable as if they are of earth-shattering significance?

Smith tips his hand when he says that the Bulls have done “so much” for Wallace. Please spare me this crap. If the Bulls hadn’t signed Wallace, another team would have, and for comparable money. The Bulls aren’t running a charity. They gave Wallace that money because they thought he would push them to the next level of playoff contention. They made a business proposition, and Wallace took it.

If it’s true that Wallace really is sulking about these rules, it’s fine to criticize him for that and to expect him to play with the effort and intensity he demonstrated so consistently in Detroit. Of course, Smith doesn’t see Wallace that way:

“Before this season started, Wallace in an ESPN interview blasted Saunders and commended all his former coaches, bringing giggles to all as Wallace had previously blasted them. He's an oversensitive, easily embarrassed, remote soul. I noticed him seeming to limp during the Friday game when he was benched and he was off for some MRI Sunday. His history, despite the supposed "warrior" mentality, is to come up with some small injury when things aren't going well to explain the issue, usually poor free-throw shooting.“

But, let’s compare Smith’s assessment of Wallace with someone with a little bit less of an axe to grind, ESPN.com’s John Hollinger:

“All you need to know about Wallace's defense is that for three seasons he made it horrifically intimidating to play against a team that started two of the skinniest waifs you'll ever see. He's a freak of an athlete who has the quickness to defend guards on switches, the strength to battle on the blocks with the league's biggest centers, and the leaping ability to reject shots from all corners.

Wallace's ability to police the basket area from the weak side is especially amazing, although this sometimes leaves him vulnerable to second shots when he goes for a block and misses -- he was the only good rebounder in the Pistons' starting five. For the season, the Pistons were 10.1 points per 100 possessions better with Wallace on the court, a jaw-dropping figure that underscores his defensive value.”

Smith may be right to suggest that Wallace knew what he was getting into when he came to Chicago, though it’s not clear how clear the Bulls were about the headband rules and it appears that the baffling compulsory ankle-taping rules are new.

But, the Bulls, like the NBA more generally are, it seems to me, simply driving off a cliff with the new strictures on player behavior. Can the league and its franchises really have this much contempt for their players that other than throwing a lot of money at them, they feel compelled to prevent even the slightest expression of individuality, no matter how inconsequential?

And, doesn’t someone like Smith wonder why he’s still bothering to write about sports, when his pre-occupations run to such trivialities?

Three Worthwhile Links

1) Roland Beech, of the great NBA website, 82games.com, tries to zero in on why there’s such a strong home court advantage in the NBA. The data suggest that officiating bias is not one of the reasons for the home team advantage. Plenty of charts and tables to chew on.

2) Robert Lipsyte, on ESPN.com’s page 2, has a fascinating article about high school football, based on his novel Raiders’ Night, on the same subject. Lipsyte quotes Michael Miletic, one of the key consultants for Lipsyte’s book:

“We're seeing an escalation of what is pure and simple child exploitation…Coaches and school administrators are doing it for personal – sometimes financial – gain and parents are doing it for emotional gain. In some cases it becomes child abuse….

"It's very seductive when adults promise a kid fame, power, glory. But what they are really doing is derailing and skewing his development, taking away his chance of having healthy relationships, moral values, of a grounded control of his own life."

"….They see what's going on. How can they trust authority figures? What's interesting is in the past 10 years or so, the moral authority of coaches has eroded and parents are taking over, using the coaches as vehicles for their kids' advancement, threatening their jobs if they don't win. The parents are putting pressure on the coaches as well as the kids. No wonder there's steroids and abusive behavior."

Lipsyte provides fresh perspective here by arguing that all of our cultural laments about “kids today” assume that bad behavior merely takes place in a vacuum. But, the context here is that there is more and more money and influence at stake in high school sports.

Lipsyte notes that:

“All this is happening right now because high school sports is the next gusher in the jock entertainment complex. The ground is already rumbling. It took H.G. Bissinger's classic, "Friday Night Lights," 14 years to make it from the page to the big screen, but now it's a network TV show as well. Its time has come. Hoover High of Birmingham, Ala., arguably the best prep team in the country, has its ownMTV show, "Two-A-Days." Last year, an ESPN reality show, "Bound for Glory," featured the football team of Montour High in McKees Rocks, Pa., trying to return to its state championship days with Dick Butkus as coach, Reebok uniforms and a new $40,000 scoreboard.

Meanwhile, ESPN and Fox Sports will be televising 21 high school football and basketball games nationally. Nationally. Sports Illustrated has joined USA Today in publishing high school rankings (they already proliferate online) and stories of high school and college scouts at Pee Wee games are no longer strange but true.”

This reminds me, incidentally, of a note in Rick Reilly’s column in the latest Sports Illustrated. In it, he calls out various “Lard brained ferret[s]” for ruining sports (and the world more generally). Among those he attacks: Dan Hinkle, commissioner of a youth football league in Fairfax, Va. Hinkle’s 12-year old son, Scott, is in the league, and his coach decided one game to switch him from offense to defense. The result: the elder Hinkle fired his son’s coach. Why? According to a pre-season email from Hinkle to the coach, James Owens: “Scott does not sit out on defense, ever…He goes in, and stays in. That includes all practices, scrimmages and games. This entire league exists so he can play defense…”

 

<>3) Also, from Page Two, Tim Keown, on the incredible contracts being doled out to baseball players this week. </>

Keown puts the money issue in proper perspective:

“Most of the money stuff in sports shouldn't bother anyone. There's nothing worse than hearing some doddering old crank rail on about how much money some pissant utility infielder makes when Ted Williams couldn't crack a hundred grand. It's tiresome, and it's pointless and it's not your money anyway.”

 

But, Keown is fairly dazzled by who’s getting big contracts. And, I share his amazement at the perhaps the silliest contract of all – Juan Pierre’s:

“Chew on that for a minute, because it might be the most amazing one: $9 million a year for a singles-hitting leadoff man with a good glove, a poor arm and sporadic knowledge ofthe strike zone. Dodgers GM Ned Colletti said Pierre is a guy "with great qualities as a human being." Sounds like Gandhi, and he couldn't drive the ball into the gaps, either.

If Pierre loses a step and a half at some point over the next five years, he'll become a late-model Omar Moreno. In more modern terms, the Dodgers will be paying $9 million for an outfield version of Neifi Perez, only without the glitzy power numbers.”

Keown also recognizes the larger meaning of all these big contracts:

“So the next time you hear your team's management complain about the public's refusal to grant tax money for a new stadium, remember this week. The next time your owner complains about his finances and preaches prudence and budget restraint, think about this week.

Oh, I know what you're thinking – the teams spending the most money are the teams in the biggest markets with the biggest revenues. Don't be fooled, though. If there's $45 million out there for Juan Pierre – and God bless him for getting it – and $51.1 million for the right to pay Matsuzaka even more money, they're all making money. Some more than others, but there's more than enough for all of them.”

Dennis Byrd

Outside the Lines this morning featured a profile of Dennis Byrd. Byrd was a very good defensive end for the Jets who, in his fourth year in the NFL in 1992, suffered a broken neck following a collision with a teammate in a November game against the Chiefs.

Three months later, he hobbled to a podium after a grueling rehabilitation regimen. But, Byrd has lived with daily pain ever since. That pain is often excruciating, affecting his thighs, back and hands, and he walks with a severe hobble. Byrd has a quite extraordinary attitude and appreciation for what that injury has taught him – about his wife, his kids, his newly cultivated talents (he’s a sculptor and a high school football coach). But, his reality is, as he puts it, a “prison” in which pain features as a constant.

I know I’ve discussed the physical toll that football takes on its competitors. But, to put this in some context, one of the reasons why owners’ dishonesty about their finances, and the discourse surrounding labor-management negotiations in sports bothers me so much is that the risk-equation here is so one-sided. It’s the players, not the owners, who are sacrificing their bodies. It’s the players, not the owners who, in football especially, but to lesser degrees in other sports, risk the possibility of a lifetime of pain and discomfort. In this light, I find it frankly sickening that anyone would ever draw an equivalency between what the players are asking for and what the owners are asking for.

I understand where this anti-player bias in discussions of contracts and sports business comes from: it’s the athletes, not the owners, with whom we identify (or want to). It’s the athletes whose circumstances most fans want to relate to. And, given these realities, it’s the athletes who are the focus of fans’ ire. After all, how could a pro athlete, making millions of dollars ever complain about anything, with gorgeous women throwing themselves at him all because he gets to play a game he loves?  Millions would kill to be able to do what the professional athlete does and, it often appears, takes for granted. And, from chicken-processing to meat-packing, there are groups of workers in this country toiling for a pittance, often sacrificing life and limb while their bosses reap huge profits. I get that.

But, comparing professional athletes to other workers is not the proper context for reporting on and analyzing labor-management disputes in sports. The question is simply who is more deserving of the spoils to be divided between players and owners: the players, or the owners? All you have to do is see Dennis Byrd hobbling painfully through his life fourteen years after his last game to answer that question. There is no more spoiled or coddled group in America than owners of major sports franchises: already impossibly wealthy, they insist on every edge, every break, to guarantee their profits, all while telling their players, the only ones making real sacrifices and taking real risks that they, the players, should be grateful for what they have.

If an ordinary Joe wants to tell a Jeremy Shockey or a Kevin Brown or a Terrell Owens that they should just shut up and play – fine. But, coming from a sports owner: no dice. They’re simply not in a credible position to make such judgments. And, sports media ought not to write as if they are.

A Little More BCS

Florida Gators coach Urban Meyer is doing a lot of complaining about the BCS these days, as Ivan Maisel reports over at ESPN.com. And complaining about the BCS is a national pastime. One problem: Meyer's criticisms don't really make sense.

As Maisel tells it:

"Urban Meyer is a big believer in doing things the right way. Win the game. Don't embarrass the opponent. Move on to the next game.

Yet when No. 4 Florida took over the ball on downs at the Florida State eight-yard line with :58 to play and a 21-14 lead, Meyer forgot all that. He wanted to put another touchdown on the scoreboard so that voters across the country would see a 28-14 victory that might camouflage how much the Gators struggled to put the 6-6 Seminoles away.

"I thought about it," Meyer said. "On the headset, I said, 'Let's go score.' Somebody said, 'What are you doing? Let's win the game and get out.'"

As Maisel tells it, Meyer is concerned about how the need to impress pollsters works against sportsmanship. What should matter is winning games. What does matter is impressing pollsters. And, the latter can mean playing contrary to sporting principles.

Meyer contends that winning games is all that can be asked given the rugged schedule Florida faces: 

"Here's our style," Meyer said. "Let's see, you got at Tennessee, you got Kentucky, who's 7-4 [7-5 after the loss to Tennessee on Saturday], you got Alabama, LSU, Georgia and Auburn and at Tallahassee. So much for style. You want to put that against anyone in the country, let's go ahead and go. … The style points? That's what's wrong with it. [If] that's what making decisions, I want to stand by my comment a week ago. Implode it. It's over. If that's what making a decision, style points, which that's what I imagine it is, you got a problem. Let's call it winning and losing and playing a difficult schedule."

A couple of problems with Meyer's defense.

1) the Gator's schedule is not that hard. Yes, the SEC is a killer conference, but according to the Sagarin ratings, not including today's games, of the top ten teams in the Sagarin ratings, only Texas and West Virginia are rated as having a weaker schedule. Like all of the major powers, Florida has some patsies on its schedule (Central Florida and Western Carolina), as well as a couple of teams that have performed way below expectations, like Alabama and Florida State. And, while Vandy played some tough close games this year and pulled off a surprise win at Georgia, they've only won three games this year, and two of their wins came against Tennessee St. and winless Duke.

And, speaking of sportsmanship, did Florida really need to beat Western Carolina 62-0 in order to impress pollsters?

2) contrary to popular belief, winning close games isn't a strategy. In fact, it's often just luck, as was painfully evident in Florida's 17-16 win over South Carolina a couple of weeks back. The reason Meyer has to think about piling on points against the shockingly mediocre Seminoles at the end of the game is because Florida is not naturally impressive enough during the competitive phases of the game. I think the voters understand the difference.

Of course, I agree with Meyer that in an ideal world we'd have a playoff, and if we did Florida would be in it (pending the outcome of the conference championship game). But, Meyer is making it sound like his team is being penalized because he's such a scrupulous and fair-minded guy who chooses to play close games that don't humiliate opponents. And, Maisel is playing along by playing the role that journalists too often assume for themselves, as stenographers to the powerful. Instead, Maisel should be scrutinizing Meyer's spinning. Florida is a great team that's played a tough schedule, but then so are USC, Michigan and Ohio State, none of whom has gone out of its way to humiliate its competition any more than the Gators have. They've just been more impressive. Playing ragged, close football games, even if against good teams, isn't a choice. It's just the best Florida's been capable of. And, it doesn't make them better than the teams ahead of them in the polls.

Still in Holiday Mode

A few notes from around the sportsworld.

In Newsday, Wallace Matthews slaughters the Mets:

“On the joyous occasion of Thanksgiving Day, let us take a moment to thank the New York Mets.

For nothing.

Last week, the club gleefully announced its sweetheart stadium deal that will hand over to them, rent-free, tax-free and finance-charge free, a virtually limitless source of income for the next several generations of Wilpons.

And in return, they give us Moises Alou.

And Jose Valentin. And Orlando Hernandez. And let us not forget Damion Easley.

These four gentlemen have one important thing in common. They are all old, verging on ancient. The youngest is Easley; he turned 37 on Nov. 11, a month after Valentin. The oldest, of course, is El Duque, whose official age is also 37, but whose actual age can only be verified through carbon dating. Then there is Julio Franco, the only active Met who can get into Shea on a seniors pass. ”

And this:

“As bad as the Mets season ended, so far their off-season has been worse. The best deal they have made was to trade away poor old Bill Shea for 20 years worth of $20 million checks.

When they announced the stadium deal last week, plenty of Mets fans swallowed the Wilpon spin, that even though their would be 10,000 fewer seats, higher ticket prices and, possibly, personal seat licenses, it would all work out for the best because now the team would be able to spend money in Yankee-like excess.

So far, they have spent like the Florida Marlins and signed like the Kansas City Royals. They take and take and take from the good people and bad politicians of this city, and they give you back Moises Alou.

Even on Thanksgiving Day, being a Mets fan remains a thankless task.”

Few fans are going to cry in sympathy with the plight of Mets’ fans. Under Minaya, they have figured out that they play in a large market and can be a financial juggernaut on theorder of the Yankees. And, with a core of Beltran, Reyes and Wright, they are very well situated for the next five years. But, I am always interested in the kind of populist resentment on display from Matthews here. And, from the standpoint of public priorities and moral decency, it’s going to be a bad few years in New York. The Yankees and Steinbrenner are also getting an unconsiconably generous deal from the City to build their new stadium, and Bruce Ratner, the Nets owner, is in the process of pulling off a bigger political boondoggle than either Wilpon or Steinbrenner, as he puts together a multi-billion dollar development deal to bring the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn.

I know, I know – we’ve got bigger fish to fry – like T.O.’s latest tantrum or the pressing social necessity of making sure NBA players never again utter a disrespectful word.

Speaking of misrepresenting and soft-pedaling wealthy interests, Commissioner Bettman was on with Mike and the Dog two days ago. Mike and the Dog can be critical of powerful and wealthy interests at times (Mike especially was opposed to the West Side stadium project), but they can also be painfully naïve and ill-informed about the business of sports. I’ve written at length before about the dishonesty of Bettman’s claims about his franchises finances during the 2004-05 NHL lockout. Now that there’s a salary cap, everything is hunky dory of course, so the fact that the NHL is on Versus, for crying out loud, is no problem for the commish because the new labor deal guaranteed his owners profits, irrespective of their actual level of competence in running their businesses. Mike embarrassed himself during the Wednesday interview by asking Bettman “so, can the franchises make money now if they’re well run,” as if this was an impossibility previously.

Forbes magazine recently published a report on the state of the NHL. Unsurprisingly, it was a rosy one, as the “cost certainty” associated with the new labor agreement makes buying an NHL franchise a more enticing proposition than it was previously (and it was still a decent investment prior to the lockout). One particular note in the Forbes report caught my eye:

“Another benefit of the salary cap is the ability some team owners have to leverage their arena. Earlier this year, George Gillett, who bought the Montreal Canadiens and the Bell Centre for$181 million in 2001, borrowed $240 million (most of which was secured by the arena). The financing allowed Gillett to pay himself a $72 million dividend.”

I have put in a call to an accountant friend to explain this to me in more detail, but let me promise you this: that $72 million that the Canadiens’ owner is able to pay himself is not going to be counted as hockey revenue. This is perhaps the single biggest issue that sports journalism misses about the nature of sports ownership: the opportunities for income created by ownership of a major sports franchise goes well beyond the revenues directly associated with the games themselves. But, and this is critically important: it is the possession of the sports property that allows the ownership to make the money it does. Thus, when you hear Bettman utter the phrase “hockey-related revenue” as the basis for determining the 54% share the players are entitled to, rest assured that that figure is leaving ungodly sums of money off the table.

I think the contracts being signed this off-season in baseball, from the Soriano deal, to the similarly massive Carlos Lee deal (six years, $100 million), to the dumbest one of all: the Juan Pierre deal, are a bad use of resources. But, count me off the bandwagon of anger at the size of contracts doled out to professional athletes. They make the money they do because they possess a skill that is exceedingly rare among the larger population, and a skill that many millions of people will pay to see. Echoing George Will’s comments on the Ken Burns baseball documentary series, I am a firm believer in Marx’ labor theory of value – that the value of a product is (essentially) solely a function of the labor applied to it.

If we’re going to talk about outrageous money in sports, can we please keep the focus where it belongs: on the outrageous accounting gimmickry, political insiderism and spin that allows the impossibly wealthy sports owners to portray themselves as publicly minded and just trying to get by.

On an unrelated note, I don’t think I’ve ever written the word “tennis” in any of my posts dating back to my first one in May.

But, after his year-ending win last week, I was thinking about the historic run that Roger Federer is on. Golf has become far more popular than tennis over the past decade, largely dueto Tiger, but the difference in the level of attention that Tiger gets compared to Federer is not a consequence of difference in their performance level. Both are historically great competitors having historically great seasons. Both are now light years ahead of their competition. According to SI’s L. Jon Wertheim, after Federer’s win over James Blake in last week’s Masters Cup in Shanghai, the difference in the world rankings between Federer and No. 2 player Rafael Nadal is the same as the difference between Nadal and the No. 50 player in the world (Tiger’s so far ahead of No, 2 Jim Furyk, that I can’t count that far down in the rankings to find the comparable player to tennis’ No. 50).  He’s made a record $8 million this year (Tiger’s earned about $10 million in winnings this year, in addition to the $6.23 quadrillion he makes in endorsements), has a match record of 92-5 in 2006, has won 12 tournaments and would be ranked No. 1 in the world even if you threw out his performance at all four grand slam events this year (three of which he won). Like Tiger, he’s fast closing in on the all-time record for career grand slams.

Wertheim writes: “But this was the year Federer revealed himself as not just a singular talent. At some point in Michael Jordan’s career we came to see him as something more than a magnificently skilled basketball player. We glimpsed the ambition and poise and the self-sufficiency and the work ethic – the alchemy that produces greatness. Federer has reached that plane, too.” 

The fact that Federer is not American and that, furthermore, there are no great American male tennis players now has clearly hurt the sport, especially in terms of US coverage. And, whereas the nature of golf will allow Tiger to compete at the highest level for at least another decade, the 25-year old Federer has perhaps a 3-4 window in which he can continue to dominate. It’s too bad the public is largely missing this – we’re watching arguably the greatest tennis player of all time in the dead center of his prime, and no one’s noticing.

Turkey Day Tidbits

1)  Colin Cowherd had Jeff Garland of Curb Your Enthusiasm on today. At one point in the conversation, Garland noted that he (Garland) was an unusually large Jew and said that other than Brad Garrett (of Everybody Loves Raymond fame) there weren’t really any bigger Jews out there. Cowherd then offered “what about Dolph Schayes?” (a basketball legend from the 1950s). That was, I gotta say, some astonishingly fast thinking on Cowherd’s part since I find it highly unlikely that Cowherd knew this was the direction that the conversation would take. Harris Barton, a offensive lineman for the 49ers in the 1980s and 1990s was Jewish, so he could have been part of the conversation, but it took it wasn’t until a minute or two later that his name popped into my head. (I occasionally talk to Synagogues and other groups about Jews in sports, so this happens to be an area of interest .

On a separate note, Garland and Cowherd both agreed that they liked the BCS and did not care to see a playoff for a novel reason: that they liked the ambiguous ending. Garland noted that, in the same vein, he prefers foreign films to American ones, because you’ve got to figure out for yourself what it all meant on the drive home.

I confess I haven’t heard that one before. And, I don't really know what to say about it.

2) I was reading through the Salt Lake City Tribune to see what their writers had to say about the surprising Utah Jazz, 11-1 so far, despite playing without (arguably) their best player, Andrei Kirilenko. There’s was nothing of particular note on that front, but I was struck by a column from the keyboard of Lya Wodraska, written ten days ago and titled “NBA Sets Bar on Discipline for the NFL.”

Wodraska whole heartedly endorsed Commissioner Stern’s efforts to change the NBA’s “thuggish” reputation. Referring especially to the new zero-tolerance policy concerning arguing with referees, Wodraska wrote: “if players such as [Rasheed] Wallace are the subject of a few unjust whistles, we shouldn't feel sorry for them. His team's brawl with the Pacers two years ago did more harm to the league's image than any pain a few fines are going to cause him.”

As I mentioned when recounting Jeffrey Williams law review article about the NBA and race , prosecutors considered that brawl to have been the responsibility of the fans that night, and not the players. It’s clear that Wodraska is not interested in such nuances, however. She’s content to take at face value the idea that reputation and reality are indistinguishable from one another. (And, to clarify here, one can argue that the commissioner cannot afford to make that distinction, for the business reasons I’ve discussed in the Williams post, but what’s Wodraska’s excuse?)

But, what really caught my eye was her comment about the reasons why the NFL needed to learn some lessons from the NBA:

“The league has had its share of scuffles, outbursts and spitting incidents in the past, but bad behavior is reaching a new high mark this season.
    We've had the stomping on one player's face by Tennessee's Albert Haynesworth, the kneeing to the groin of Seattle's Jerramy (sic) Stevens by Oakland's Tyler Brayton and a temper tantrum directed to the refs by Pittsburgh's Joey Porter that drew him a $15,000 fine.
    Then there are all the transgressions made by Dallas receiver Terrell Owens, the most recent being the outburst he had after coach Bill Parcells admonished him for celebrating a touchdown by acting like he'd fallen asleep in the end zone.”

I’ve commented before that it’s bizarre how sports commentators lump things together that ought not to be lumped together, especially when it comes to Owens. Is Albert Haynesworth’s stomping on a guy’s head, resulting in the stompee receiving 33 stitches, really in the same category as T.O getting mad on the sideline? Is there a union rule for sportswriters that I am unaware that mandates mentioning T.O. in any column about behavior issues in sports, no matter how far removed his antics from the more serious ones under discussion?

And, by the way, is T.O. really hurting his team now? Do you think Tony Romo - who’s looking an awful lot like the last guy to replace Drew Bledsoe as his team’s starter – is bumming that he has T.O. on his team? Owens is on pace to catch about 90 passes, for about 1200 yards and 15 TDs this year. What a disgrace.

Look, if you want to call T.O. immature and self-absorbed, I won’t argue with you. But “all the transgressions?” Please.

Wodraska’s column is an unfortunate example of recycled conventional wisdom, with nary an original thought or serious effort at analysis anywhere in sight.

MVP Voting

Plenty of reaction to the MVP votes in, especially Justin Morneau's close win over Derek Jeter.

In a column before the AL vote was announced, ESPN.com’s Rob Neyer analyzed the top candidates through the prism of two Aristotelian categories: intuitionists vs. empiricists. Neyer suggested that intuitionists searched for the meaning of “value” in more philosophical terms, while empiricists preferred to eschew difficult to pin-down notions of value and instead decide who the best player was, based on quantifiable indicators of performance. Neyer argued there was an unusual confluence this year since, according to either worldview, Jeter would seem to make the most sense, as both an intangibles guy, and as the player with the best numbers, at least according to the sabermetric view of things. (For example, according to Win Shares, Jeter’s 33 puts him first in the AL, with Joe Mauer close behind at 31). But, Neyer presciently observed: “This year happens to be a wonderful case where the intuitionists and the empiricists, looking at different evidence and arguing from different original premises, probably will arrive at roughly the same conclusion. Jeter's probably going to win, and Mauer's probably going to finish second or third. But remember, the great majority of MVP voters are intuitionists. So don't be too surprised if Morneau's 130 RBI carry the day.”

Describing MVP voters is one of way of characterizing them. There are less charitable ones. Keith Law, a Baseball Prospectus alum who’s now an ESPN.com writer as well, regarded the outcome of the AL vote as a disgrace:

“The reality of baseball is that a great offensive player at an up-the-middle position is substantially more valuable than a slightly better hitter at a corner position. And when that up-the-middle player is one of the best fielders at his position in baseball, there's absolutely no comparison. Joe Mauer was more valuable than Justin Morneau this past season. If you don't understand that, you don't understand the first thing about baseball.

Mauer had a 54-point edge in OBP over Morneau, which overwhelms the advantage Morneau had in slugging percentage (a 52-point edge). But Mauer won the Gold Glove for his position this past year, and he is arguably the best-fielding catcher in the game when you consider all aspects of catching. Catchers who field and hit the way Mauer does are extremely valuable, just as shortstops who hit like Derek Jeter does and play passable defense are extremely valuable. First basemen who hit like Morneau just shouldn't win MVP awards in years when there are Mauers and Jeters and other candidates to choose from.”

And, he reserved particular contempt for a few of the voters:

“Incidentally, the following voters should be removed from the voting process permanently:

• The guy who put Jeter sixth.
• The guy who put Mauer 10th ... and the five guys who left him off their ballots entirely.
• The three guys who put Frank Thomas second.
• The guy who put A.J. Pierzynski 10th.

And while we're at it, how the heck did Thomas -- the third-best designated hitter in the American League -- end up fourth in the voting? It's just more evidence that the bulk of this year's voters don't understand what is actually valuable in baseball: Players who hit and play good defense up the middle are the most valuable position players in the game.”

Likewise, Tom Verducci of SI thinks the voting was a setback for the voters’ collective good sense:

“Baseball writers sadly are still stuck in the 20th century…They continue to vote by scanning the home run and RBI leaders for somebody from a first-place team. RBIs are terribly overvalued. Both Jeter and [Twins catcher Joe] Mauer, who were standouts at premium positions and far more consistent than Morneau, were robbed by this vote. I can't fathom how someone could have Jeter as low as sixth, that five people would not put Mauer anywhere on their ballot and that somebody thought a DH for a losing team who missed the last month [the Indians' Travis Hafner] should get a second-place vote. Morneau hit .235 as deep into the season as June 8 and was outhomered by Jeter down the stretch despite the myth of his huge second half. Good player, good season, but a lousy vote."

That Morneau was so bad for the first two months seems to have worked in his favor, at least according to some. Mel Antonen, of USA Today and one of the voters, told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times that he put Morneau first because:

“’It wasn't so much about numbers,” said Mel Antonen of USA Today, who voted for Morneau. “It was about all the things Morneau did as far as contributing to a winning team. The correlation between his taking off and the Twins' starting to win was too much to ignore.’

Morneau, who batted .239 in 2005, was hitting .235 on June 8. The Twins were 11½ games out of first place in the A.L. Central with a 26-33 record. The only A.L. teams with worse records were Tampa Bay and Kansas City.

But starting June 9, Morneau batted .364 and the Twins went 70-33 to win the division by a game.”

Jim Souhan, of the Minneapolis Star Tribune also talks about the relationship between Morneau’s turnaround and the Twins’ soaring second half fortunes:

“Five months ago, members of the organization questioned whether he would ever become a competent hitter, and the Twins were baseball's most unwatchable team.

Today, Morneau is the franchise's first MVP in 29 years and the Twins are -- did that really happen? -- the AL Central champs.

No one disputes the timing of either turnaround.

On June 7, Twins manager Ron Gardenhire called Morneau in for a wake-up-and-smell-the-crisis meeting. By the end of the night, the Twins were 25-33, 11 ½ games out of first place.

On June 8, Morneau went 1-for-5 in the last game of a series in Seattle, where Morneau, a native of nearby Vancouver, British Columbia, was known to cavort with his Canadian buddies. He was hitting .235.

"That was a bit of a wake-up call," Morneau said. "There was a lot of stuff going on off the field that didn't need to be. My focus wasn't what it needed to be.

"They opened my eyes. They said, 'You can be this good.' "

On June 9, Morneau took early batting practice with Twins hitting coach Joe Vavra. Morneau ingested a simple thought -- "Stay back" -- and hit eight consecutive balls over the fence.

"I said, 'Let's try to do the same thing over and over,' " Morneau said. "And then the same thing tomorrow. And I did the same thing the next day, and ate the same things, and kept with the same routine."

That night, Morneau went 2-for-4 with two walks and two homers, including the game-winner against Baltimore. He got 12 hits in his next 21 at-bats, including four homers. From June 8 to the end of the season, he led the majors with a .362 average, while hitting 23 homers and driving in 92 runs. The Twins finished 71-33 and caught Detroit.”

I think Neyer’s analytical framework here is, to a degree, misplaced. I have paraphrased Bill James before in connection with MVP voting and I’ll do it again: the issue in analyzing baseball players' performance isn't really between those who think stats matter and those who don't. Everyone uses stats to judge baseball players, including MVP voters. That's how, as BP's Jim Baker notes (more on him below), the top three RBI guys in the NL were 1-2-3 in the MVP voting. And, that's how Morneau won: as the No. 2 RBI guy in the AL, and No. 1 among players whose teams made the postseason. The question is how people use stats to evaluate performance. Antonen, who said stats weren’t so important, perfectly exemplifies the point.  How, after all, could it not have been about the numbers, as Antonen claims? How does Antonen know Morneau did so much for his team, after June 8, except by reference to his numbers? If the argument is that the Twins took off when Morneau took off, then what Antonen is really saying is that he looked at Morneau's stats starting in June. After all, what intangibles did a power-hitting, slow-footed first baseman bring to a team that had two other fantastic players (Mauer and Santana) on it, guys who were great all year? Performance from June on is still about the numbers. It’s just a highly selective use of them. As Verducci notes above, and as I’ve pointed out numerous times before, RBIs continue to dominate voters thinking about the award. That’s not a matter of intuitionists vs. empiricists, really. That’s about bad, or lazy empiricists. (Just as, in 2005, the AL Cy Young voting featured the top three winning pitchers in the league finishing 1-2-3 in the balloting, while the guy who was obviously the best AL pitcher in 2005, Johan Santana, got snubbed. This isn’t intuition. This is just not bothering to do more than five minutes of homework).

The award of the NL MVP to Howard was less controversial. BP’s VORP has Pujols as the slightly better offensive player (and he’s a better defender), but Pujols and Howard were 1-2 in the majors in that category (Jeter was a hair behind Howard in third).

Still, as Jim Baker notes, it’s hard to shake the feeling that RBIs (and homeruns) ruled the day. And, as Baker notes, if you’re going to look at RBIs, the least you can do is put those in context a little bit:

“This year's voting, it would appear, came down to raw counting stats. As Rany Jazayerli suggested in a BP e-mail exchange on the award, it seems that Runs Batted In was especially important in the minds of voters. The one-two-three finishers in voting were also one-two-three in RBI. Ryan Howard drove in 149 runs to Albert Pujols 137, and Lance Berkman's 136.

If voters are going to put all their eggs in one basket, they're going to need to dig further down into that basket. If that basket is going to be RBI--as it too often is--then attention must be paid to how the players arrived at their RBI figures. For instance, Howard batted with more men on base than anybody else in the National League: 509. That's over 80 more than Pujols and Berkman, 99 more than fifth-place vote getter Miguel Cabrera, and 132 more than fourth-place finisher Carlos Beltran.

Was Howard especially proficient at getting men home? Not really. He was 15th in the league in the percentage of ROB (Runners on Base) that he drove in. Had Berkman (2nd in percentage of runners driven home) and Pujols (3rd) come to the plate with as many men on base as Howard had, they would have each amassed 154 RBI at their rates of runners driven in. Cabrera, the best in the league at delivering baserunners, would have had 135. Beltran (4th) would have had 143.”

Look, Morneau was terrific this year. But, he probably wasn’t one of the ten best players in the AL, was assuredly not the best player on his own team and won because of his power numbers while playing for a contender.

In this connection, I need to say something about Jeter (some of which will repeat what I’ve said about him before).

As Jeter has gone from being deified as the ultimate intangibles player to being thought of as overrated (judging by the 9% of major leaguers who told SI that earlier this year), he has morphed into an underrated player. Actually, it's more complicated than that. Jeter has now twice in seven years arguably deserved to have won the MVP. But, his intangibles, so much the focus of attention, may actually be hurting his ability to achieve recognition for the things he does so concretely well. Looking back at the 1999 vote, it's almost bizarre, really, that a shortstop who hit .349, drove in a 100 runs and had a .438 on base percentage for a team that won its division by four games would be almost an after thought in the MVP voting. According to win shares, Jeter’s 35 tied for the best in the AL, and yet he finished sixth in a year when Ivan Rodriguez became the third Texas Ranger in four years to win an MVP award he didn’t deserve.

All the things that Jeter is best known for - team captain, author of one of the highest profile defensive plays of all time (the flip), World series MVP, etc. - may have obscured the fact that in 2006 he was, when one accounts for all of his measurable offensive contributions, from his ability to get on base to his near impeccable ability to steal bases, the best offensive player relative to his position in the AL, and by a comfortable margin. 

Deadspin deadpanned yesterday that: “It continues to strike us as amazingly unfair that a man like Jeter, a scrappy underdog that doesn't get much recognition, just can't get the respect he deserves. We hope that someday he'll no longer be ignored by the national media and maybe even finally garner some endorsement opportunities. Maybe a perfume, even?”

No, there is really nothing unfair about the hand Derek Jeter has been dealt in life (well, nothing unfair to him, anyway). But, all of these things, and all the hype about the stuff you presumably can’t measure, are getting in the way of seeing how good Jeter, at his best, really is. Seven years ago, what cost Jeter was playing on a team whose inevitable march to the World title meant that no individual player could possibly be said to have mattered that much to the team’s fortunes. Yesterday, what cost Jeter was that people only think about his intangibles, but vote – contrary to Antonen (and Neyer)  - on the most obvious tangibles: power stats.

There are worse things in the world than Jeter finishing second in the MVP voting. But, the voters got this one wrong. 

Update:

Mike and the Dog interviewed the Chicago Sun-Times writer who had Jeter sixth on his ballot. I consider this, by the way, far less egregious than the writer who left Pedro off his ballot altogether in 1999. And Mike and the Dog are wacky and off-base in their own way about a number of points here. But, it's Cowley's insistence that the numbers don't matter when, every time he's backed into a corner, he defends himself by saying "look at the numbers" that amplifies my points above. These guys all rely on numbers. If Cowley thinks Jeter's 14 homeruns are the most relevant fact about him (he mentions them derisively early in the interview) then he's just clueless. No excuse for this kind of ignorance in 2006.

BCS and Social Security Reform (I'll Explain)

As I mention in my bio, I write occasional political commentary for a blog called the Gadflyer. One of the things I have written about quite a bit is social security “reform.” I put the word “reform” in scare quotes because, while some people are sincere in their belief that the social security system is broken and needs to be fixed, the motives of many pushing reform are, to put it politely, questionable. Furthermore, I don’t believe it’s broken at all, and the more arguments I hear that try to make the case that it is, the more convinced I am that there aren’t any good arguments for why social security needs to be reformed.

Why do I mention that here? Because the more arguments I hear in defense of the BCS and, more generally, in opposition to a college playoff system, the more convinced I am that there are no good arguments in defense of the BCS at all. Two of those attempted defenses were aired on Mike and Mike yesterday. The first, that the NCAA opposes a playoff system because of academic concerns, can be dismissed out of hand. And, in fact, Dickie V had a good rant on this during yesterday’s show. He noted that his daughter, who plays tennis has to miss more class time than does his son-in-law, a football player. Furthermore, the obvious time period for a playoff would be during the December-January school break. And, as Vitale pointed out, if the other divisions in college football can manage one, there’s no good reason why Division I-A can’t. I would add that however weak the academic arguments were before this year, the NCAA’s approval of a 12th regular season game makes a final mockery of those arguments. As Golic aptly summed it up yesterday: “the idea that there’s no playoff because of academics is just an insult to our intelligence.”

A second line of argument got much more of a hearing because Greenberg is, as he describes it, a convert to the BCS. And, his teaser for this particular argument (advanced by Bob Davie), was that this was the best argument there was for keeping the BCS and rejecting a playoff system.

The argument: that regular season games, like Michigan-OSU, would mean much less if there were a playoff, because the entire focus of the season would be on the playoffs and jockeying for position in that playoff. So, as Davie had previously argued, if there were a playoff, no one could blame Coach Carr or Coach Tressel for resting players. Therefore, Greenberg kept asserting, “everything would change” in the college regular season. Golic vehemently disagreed and so do I. First, there is no possibility that Michigan-OSU would ever be anything but a death match between the two schools, under any circumstances. As Golic kept pointing out, this year was a fluke – as big a game as UM-OSU often is, there’s rarely as much at stake in terms of the national picture as there was this year. And, that fact doesn’t change the fact that the teams, the schools, the fans and the communities all regard it as the big game every year. Second, even under a playoff system, there would be many years in which the winner of the OSU-Michigan game would get into the playoff system and in which the loser would be left out. (repeat argument for the top two teams in every other major conference). In other words, thinking strictly in terms of the post regular season implications, it would rarely be the case that the battle for the conference championship would not also have decisive post-season implications. Third, Greenie made the argument that many people question the value of the conference tournaments in basketball. For example, it’s often true, Greenberg said, that when a team makes a great run through the conference tournament, only to be eliminated in the first round of the NCAAs, that perhaps that team should have saved itself for the big dance. And, conversely, it’s often true that teams that exit their post-season conference tournaments early end up making a big run in the NCAAs. Greenie’s right: people do often question whether the conference tournaments are worth the effort with the NCAAs looming. But that fact undermines Greenberg’s argument, because the fact is that, especially in college, teams and players always want to compete and always want to win.

If it were true that a post-season playoff would turn schools into rational actors, saving themselves for the games with the higher stakes, we ought never to see the non-bubble teams compete hard in the conference tournaments. But, the fact is, we do every year. Why? Because, as Golic pointed out – college sports is different than pro sports in that regard. The professional regular seasons are a pre-tournament for the post-season, which is what every professional franchise plays for. College sports is different. Of course everybody wants in, whether to a bowl or a tournament. But, the notion that coaches would rest their players rather than compete for conference championships or to battle their key rival is to misunderstand college sports.

There is no better example of how little, in fundamental respects, the post-season figures into the calculations of coaches and programs as they approach games against a big rival than Duke-UNC basketball. While many argue that UM-OSU is the No. 1 football rivalry in Division I, there is really no disputing the No. 1 rivalry in men’s college basketball.

But, here’s a funny thing about that rivalry – with extremely rare exceptions, there is almost never anything tangible at stake in any given Duke-UNC game, especially as it pertains to the NCAA tournament. In almost every season, each program is a lock for the tournament. In almost every season, each team is very likely to be a high seed, if not the No. 1 seed in its region.  In other words, this one game on the teams’ schedule is of no larger consequence to either team’s chances once March Madness begins. So, we don’t really need to speculate about what might happen to a great rivalry if we already had in place a post-season tournament that was the undisputed culmination of the season. We already have that. And, despite the presence of a culminating, winner-take-all national championship, and despite the fact that to a far lesser extent in college basketball than in football, the regular season, once you’re in the top four in your conference, means very little, there is one thing you can set your clock by twice every college season: that every Duke-UNC game is a war, an incredibly intense, hard fought fight to the finish. There is no rivalry in sports that so consistently delivers close, tense, taut games at such a high level of competition. By the logic of Greenberg’s arguments, especially since Duke and UNC always play each other on the last day of the regular season as they’re already awaiting their inevitable invitations to the NCAAs, we ought to see the starters get minimal minutes and play at half speed and, by extension, ought never to see the kinds of games we do in fact get year after year.

Like myself, Greenberg grew up in New York, in a pro sports town. By his own acknowledgment, it’s taken him a long time to grasp the special fever and excitement of college athletics. But, he’s still missing the boat on this one.

If there is a good argument in favor of the BCS and against a playoff, it has still yet to be made.