About FGCU (and some bad analysis)

Deadspin has a fairly interesting article up today about Florida Gulf Coast University, this year's surprise entrant into the NCAA Tournament's Sweet Sixteen. Touching on some topics that I've previously discussed in posts here and here, author Jonathan Mahler puts a different spin on this Cinderella story.

Don’t waste your time wooing Nobel laureates to your faculty or trying to recruit National Merit Scholars to a college they’ve never heard of. Do what any self-respecting entrepreneur would do: Devote your resources to building a first-class Division I basketball program.

It’s not going to happen overnight, but FGCU pulled it off pretty quickly... The Eagles basketball program started in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and had to apply more than once before being accepted into the National Collegiate Athletic Association—at the Division II level. Even after being granted permission to move up to Division I, the team had to wait three years before becoming eligible for postseason play.

Florida Gulf Coast University won its first NCAA tournament game in the school’s second year of eligibility, a mere 16 years after graduating its first student. Harvard won its first tournament game this year, too—371 years after its first commencement...

Just how valuable is a strong showing in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament? As it happens, Butler, whose improbable run to the 2010 Final Four is still the stuff of legend, has studied this very question. Its near-championship run—it lost in the finals to Duke—generated precisely $639,273,881.82 in publicity for the university. That’s to say nothing of the increases in merchandise sales and charitable giving, or the 41 percent surge in applications.

Interesting stuff, although as I've pointed out in my previous posts, not all schools are as successful at this game as FGCU has been—many more have thrown untold millions at their athletic departments and had hardly any success at all on the field or as an institution. On balance, it's pretty much a zero-sum game—some win big, but many others lose just as much.

Of course, where the author really lost me wasn't in this conclusion, but in his odd insistence that this Cinderella run somehow should have been foreseen by all of us, or that it was somehow inevitable. Mahler writes:

[Head coach Andy] Enfield hasn’t exactly had to scrounge for talent at FGCU. His team’s point guard, Brett Comer, grew up playing youth basketball with Austin Rivers, a current starter for the New Orleans Hornets and the son of former NBA star Doc Rivers. The father of one of Enfield’s bench players, Filip Cvjeticanin, played alongside Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic on the Yugoslavian national team that won a silver medal in the 1988 Olympics.

These are some pretty tenuous links here, my man. I, for example, grew up playing baseball against this guy, in games umpired by this guy, and I coached this guy at a baseball camp when I was in high school. My father, meanwhile, shared a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1983, when I was two years old.

Do these connections alone make me a top-tier athletic talent, or a budding superstar journalist? Of course not. All they do is illustrate what we already know about the world, which is that it can be a pretty small place sometimes. If you play sports for long enough, you're pretty much guaranteed to line up with or against somebody who's pretty talented—and if not, you've probably got a relative who did (hey, come to think of it, my uncle did play hoops against Patrick Ewing in the Boston city championship way back when... maybe I've got more of a future in basketball than I'd realized).

As for FGCU, if they had really figured out a way to somehow magically attract top athletes to their school, they wouldn't have been recruiting kids who "grew up playing youth basketball with Austin Rivers", they'd have been recruiting Austin Rivers himself. This isn't to say that these FGCU kids aren't talented—in fact, they are. I've been amazed by what these guys have done, and it's no fluke. I can't wait to watch them continue their run tomorrow night against Florida (late game, eh, CBS? I see what you did there...), and I hope they take this thing all the way to Atlanta for the Final Four.

But to pretend as though FGCU was some sleeping giant—with tons of top talent that nobody bothered to talk about—obscures the real lessons that we could be learning here. Namely, that a coach and a team playing incredibly well as a unit while having fun and playing with reckless abandon can do some pretty special things on a basketball court (and that the NCAA probably screwed up a bit with this year's seeding of the tournament). Not to mention, this isn't exactly a unique story in recent years—George Mason, VCU, and Butler all preceded (and exceeded) FGCU in this regard. Sure, FGCU reaching the Final Four would be unbelievable, and I'm certainly rooting for it, but we're not there yet.

When a big sports story like this one comes along, a lot of bad journalism is bound to be written, so this particular article is hardly a surprise. I just wish that, for once, we could all just enjoy an awesome story on its own merits, without having to draw some bigger (nonsensical) lesson about it all. Unfortunately, that's just not what we in the internet age like to do.

[Deadspin]

The tail is still wagging the dog at UF

Well, this is a fun one. I've written a couple of times before about the role of athletics at our nation's universities, and whether the tail may be wagging the dog. On both occasions, I discussed the University of Florida, which has been one of the more aggressive institutions in terms of spending on athletics while making cuts elsewhere (like, in academics).

UF clearly believes in the "front porch" theory of running an academic institution, which I've discussed (and partially debunked) in my previous posts. But even for them, this most recent decision is a head-scratcher, and makes one wonder just what the hell the senior administration at UF is thinking.

The University of Florida announced this past week that it was dropping its computer science department, which will allow it to save about $1.4 million.  The school is eliminating all funding for teaching assistants in computer science, cutting the graduate and research programs entirely, and moving the tattered remnants into other departments. 

Let’s get this straight: in the midst of a technology revolution, with a shortage of engineers and computer scientists, UF decides to cut computer science completely?... 

Meanwhile, the athletic budget for the current year is $97.7 million, an increase of more than $2 million from last year.  The increase alone would offset the savings supposedly gained by cutting computer science.

Yeesh. Ironically, Florida Governor Rick Scott just last week approved the creation of a brand new state college, Florida Polytechnic University, specifically to address the state's significant shortage of qualified workers in the so-called "STEM" fields (science, technology, engineering, and math).

Perhaps UF's cutting of the computer science department was done as part of a broader re-allocation of resources within the state's education system, perhaps not. Either way, something doesn't smell quite right here--why spend millions to create an entire new college when you can just keep (or expand on) what you've already got? It makes little to no sense to slash this department entirely (especially a department that caters to a growing industry) while plowing even more money into athletics, and the indignation throughout the blogosphere is entirely warranted. What is going on here?

[Forbes]

Way to go, Florida

The internet is clearly asleep this week, probably because nobody is actually at work (or, if they are, they're not actually doing anything, sort of like me). Far be it from me to wake up a sleeping giant, but I thought I'd pass along this fantastic article from Florida, which is seemingly hell-bent on setting a new low for state governments.

Florida school districts will be able to sell the naming rights for public school cafeterias under a bill filed this week.

Irv Slosberg, D-Boca Raton — who has also filed a bill that would allow advertising on the sides of school buses — filed the "Student Nutrition Enhancement Act" on Tuesday.

It would allow school boards to decide the details on naming rights, including where the name is displayed. It says revenue generated shall be used "to enhance the school district's school food service budget and to meet the nutritional needs of students."

In the midst of historically deep budget cuts for Florida schools, "this is a way to get private businesses to partner up with governments," Slosberg said Wednesday.

Oh my dear God. For what it's worth, Slosberg has previously called for Florida to sell the naming rights to just about everything, from state roads to beaches to--in his words--"anything the state of Florida owns that we could possibly sell". Like, you know, children.

Why not just institute a statewide public school dress code policy, and then sell advertising space on the school uniforms? That way we can raise new revenue to help pay for, I don't know, art and music classes, and our kids can all get gussied up like their favorite NASCAR drivers. I should probably shut up, before I give ol' Irv any more bright ideas.

This bill is honestly fairly inevitable, as it follows logically in the theme of moral relativism when state budgets are on the line--first it was drugs, alcohol, and gambling, and now coming soon to a state near you, whoring our kids' futures out to corporate interests.

What worries me most about this particular bill, though, is that there is a direct connection being made between the source of the revenue and the uses of said revenue. In most cases, that's a good connection to have, as taxpayers can better understand what they're paying for, and can therefore make better-informed decisions about whether or not a proposed program is a good idea.

But in this case, because it's corporations that are being considered, I worry that participating companies will make their sponsorships contingent upon certain specific uses--for example, "we, Frito-Lay, will sponsor your cafeteria, but only if you serve at least 35% Frito-Lay products in said cafeteria". In fact, such a setup is basically inevitable once you've opened up this Pandora's box. The potential for kickbacks and unintended consequences is staggering and frankly frightening.

But then, Congress has already told us in very clear terms that our school cafeterias are for sale to large corporate interests, when it openly declared that it considered pizza to be a vegetable. I probably shouldn't be so surprised to see desperate people with unfunded pensions so eager to sell out their own children's future, but I am nevertheless.

Cities, states, and countries have promised more than they can afford, but nobody wants to admit it or pay more in taxes to cover it. That leaves us with little choice but to begin chipping away at many of our once-cherished values, compromising the integrity and well-being of future generations in the process. Sad.

[Tampa Bay Times]

A summary of the foreclosure mess

I've stayed largely quiet on the foreclosure mess to this point, in large part because it's sort of hard to know where to start. So many people have taken so many liberties with the lending and foreclosure process that the result is just a head-shakingly labyrinthine disaster area that casts significant doubt on the health of our housing market going forward.

So rather than try to catch up with a ridiculously long blog post enumerating all the ins and outs of the situation and my feelings about them, I'm going to instead post this presentation from the Florida Attorney General's Office. It's both comprehensive and easy to understand, and it lays things out in a very clean way. The first 25 pages or so are essentially background, and it's followed up by significant evidence of fraud and other unethical or criminal behavior. Interesting and important stuff.

Foreclosure Report From Florida AG

The next step, of course, is actually prosecuting some of these cases in meaningful ways, something that AGs in many states have thus far been reluctant to do. In many cases, their reluctance has stemmed from political pressure--politicians and companies alike (not to mention certain individuals) have a lot to lose from a "double-dip" in housing that proper prosecution of this fraud might cause, and they've shown that they are willing to go to great lengths to avoid it. But you can't allow these sorts of crimes to persist simply because you're afraid of the economic effects of stopping them--remember, that's in large part how we got into this mess in the first place.

Keep an eye on this case in the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which could potentially void certain foreclosures and score a "win" for homeowners' rights in this mess. We can't allow our rights to be trampled in order to ensure short-term economic (and housing market) stability. The rule of law and due process must be preserved at all costs, period; let's hope that's what happens here.

[The Big Picture]