The definitive NFL fan base map (LOLJets)

With the Super Bowl coming up this weekend, there's no shortage of football-related stories bouncing around. Most of them are utter nonsense, but thanks to Deadspin and the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective, we've actually got one pretty fun study to dive into. Yes, this is more sports nerdness, so jump on board.

Using data culled from Facebook, those good folks were able to put together (and then study) a map showing which NFL teams were the most popular (or most "liked") in each county throughout the nation. That enabled us to see, once and for all, what each team's "fan base" really looked like, geographically speaking. Courtesy of Deadspin, here is that map:

While there aren't too many big surprises there (although Alaska is downright bizarre, including a strange patch of Bills fans in the middle of the state), one thing did jump out at me pretty immediately—where the hell are the Jets fans? Oh, there they are... no, not that big green blob that includes southern New Jersey and Delaware—that's Eagles territory. No, it's that little sliver right on the western end of Long Island, comprising basically one county.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the Jets don't have any fans—it just means there isn't any one area in which they're the dominant team, since they're overwhelmed by Giants fans throughout the New York metropolitan area. In fact, the Jets still check in with the 14th-largest fan base according to the study, despite having no real sphere of dominance. Thanks to the HCSAC people, we have the full breakdown for you as well:

Looking closer at this list, it's pretty clear that winning matters, which shouldn't surprise us. The top 3 teams in terms of fan base also happen to be the top 3 teams in terms of historical Super Bowl appearances—the Cowboys and Steelers have 8, the Patriots have 7. And of the top 12 teams on that list, 9 of them have won multiple Super Bowl titles (only the Saints, Bears, and Eagles have not).

Finally, as the HCSAC folks point out, each team that has won a Super Bowl in the last 9 years currently has more than 1.5 million fans, placing them in the top quarter of the league—since both the 49ers and Ravens currently sit on the outside of that top quartile, it'll be interesting to see what kind of fan base jump they may get by winning this weekend.

All in all, the fan base map jives pretty well with our intuitions—the "New England" Patriots moniker is apt, since all of New England minus a small corner of Connecticut leans toward the Pats (they're also big in Canada, and in the U.K.); the Cowboys dominate a huge portion of the country; and Los Angeles, lacking a team, still seems largely to pull for the Raiders, perhaps pining for the olden days. And despite a brief period of dominance at the turn of the century, the Rams can't seem to secure a fan base, nor can the ever-stumbling Jacksonville Jaguars.

Also, the league's fan base continues to skew toward the northern and eastern parts of the country—I ran the numbers to figure out the total numbers of fans by division, and came up with the following:

The East and North divisions make up the top four, combining for more than 65% of the total Facebook fans. Granted, that's aided in large part by the geographical oddity of the Cowboys being in the "East" division, but even if you were to swap the Cowboys with, say, the Rams, you'd still be looking at a 56.2% edge in favor of the North and East versus the South and West. I think it's interesting that the breakdown is in many ways the opposite of what you might expect to see in college football, where the SEC dominates everything—it's possible, if not likely, that the NCAA is pulling share away from the NFL (and the poor Jaguars) in that region.

As one final note, there are some teams who are simply dominant (in terms of fan support) within their divisions—the Steelers boast 64.8% of the total AFC North fans, followed by the Saints with 60.7% of the NFC South, the Colts with 56.8% of the AFC South, and the Patriots with 52.9% of the AFC East. On the opposite end of the spectrum are the Bills (6.9% of AFC East), Jaguars (9.0% of AFC South), Bengals (9.4% of AFC North), and Redskins (10% of NFC East).

But getting back to this weekend, in case you were wondering what the "fan base" breakdown looks like if you consider only the Super Bowl participants, we've got that for you, too. Once again from Deadspin:

Clearly, the nation is leaning heavily toward the 49ers, which is unsurprising given that they've got almost 30% more total Facebook fans than do the Ravens. I apparently should have split allegiances, given that my hometown of Boston is red and my current home state of Virginia is painted purple. Good prediction, in fact—I literally do not care who wins this weekend. Good talk. Enjoy the game.

[Deadspin]
[Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective]

An update on prohibition

A couple of days after Christmas, I published the one and only post that I intend to write about the tragedy in Newtown (and the surge in support for gun-control laws in its wake). You may have missed it if you were still out celebrating the holidays, so I'll summarize some of my points here.

In the post, I shared some of my skepticism with respect to the efficacy of bans on (or prohibition of) behaviors that many people find dangerous or distasteful. I wrote,

The last thing we need is to institute a counterproductive law that ironically makes our problem worse, not better. History has shown that when people have an intense desire to possess or to do something, they typically will find a way. People and corporations are incredibly resourceful when they need to be, which of course is why we now have corn in our Coca-Cola.

That's a viewpoint that I'd shared here on previous occasions, most notably in the wake of the tragedy at the Harvard-Yale game in New Haven in 2011. In that case, I wrote about the trend toward banning kegs at tailgates, and the at-best-uneven success that they'd had. As I wrote then,

Harvard first banned kegs at its tailgates in 2000, while I was a student there. The primary argument that I remember at the time—when keg bans were very much in vogue at Boston-area colleges—was that kegs were a "symbol of binge drinking", and that eliminating them would temper binge drinking. I called bullshit then, and I'm calling bullshit now. If you want a real "symbol of binge drinking", I'll show you a 9-dollar handle of bottom-shelf vodka. Popov was always a favorite; Aristocrat was a winner, too. 

The irony of kegs—an irony lost on most administrators—is that while they may indeed have looked like a symbol of binge drinking, they were in fact the administration's best friend. Beer, with its high water content and low alcohol content, is in fact the alcoholic beverage least likely to directly result in alcohol poisoning. The administration should have been doing all they could to encourage the drinking of beer, and to discourage the drinking of cheap wine and rot-gut liquor. 

Unsurprisingly to those who knew better, the keg ban was a disaster. In the first year of the keg ban (2002), alcohol poisoning cases skyrocketed, leading to calls from student newspapers to reverse the ban entirely for the next home Game. Some accommodations were indeed made, but not enough to turn back the clock entirely. From what I have learned and witnessed at recent Games in Cambridge, less drinking is happening on-site, and now much more drinking is happening off-site, away from the watchful eyes of Harvard and Boston Police.

I bring up the Harvard/Yale case because just this weekend, a similar mistake was made up in Green Bay during the Packers' Wild Card Playoff game against the Vikings. Concerned about the potential for binge drinking with an 8pm (7pm Central) kickoff time, the team decided to cut off all alcohol sales after halftime, hoping to control fan behavior.

Somewhat predictably, the plan backfired a bit, as resourceful Packer fans did what resourceful Packer fans do—they got loaded before they even entered the stadium, and many of them double-fisted drinks once they got there. A total of 21 fans ended up getting arrested on the premises, and I'd guess that a few more got arrested for drinking and driving on their way home.

While it's hard to know exactly how things would have gone without the attempted alcohol ban, the principle of the matter is still clear—if you ban something for which people have an intense desire, they will find a way to get around the ban, legally or not. In the case of gun control, gun sales have soared to record levels around the country in anticipation of new legislation. Even if the government does pass new laws, will it really be able to put that cat back in the bag and confiscate the weapons that were purchased ahead of time? Is there any reason to believe that a ban on any type of gun would be any more successful or productive than the long-standing ban on marijuana?

I continue to raise this issue because I refuse to believe that simply banning guns or certain types of guns will eradicate the mass murders that we've seen at schools and elsewhere in recent years. To actually tackle serious and complex issues, we need to attack the roots of the problem, not merely to take away the tools or "symbols" of those issues. We can get rid of all the guns we want, but there will still be people in this country (and the world) who are disillusioned, angry, or mentally unstable, and who want to do great harm to other people.

Until we try to figure out why these people exist—and what we can do as a society to temper their anger or mental illness—our gun control laws will be a sideshow at best, just like the alcohol bans at Harvard, Yale, and Lambeau Field. If you want to get rid of a behavior, you don't do it by getting rid of the tools. You do it by getting rid of the underlying mentality, and that's a much harder (and much more essential) task. And in the greatest country in the world, I'm sure we won't shy away from those difficult tasks, right?

Clip of the Week (Gil Santos edition)

I'm going to go in a totally different direction with this week's Clip of the Week, using it as an opportunity to honor one of my favorite Boston sports figures of the past 20 years (no, not Tim Wakefield, we already took care of that one).

For those of you who don't share my Boston roots (or rooting interests), you'll probably move right along and ignore this post, and that's fine. I don't blame you. But for anyone who grew up watching the Patriots transform themselves from a laughing stock into a model franchise—something I still can't believe happened, but for which I give Drew Bledsoe and Bill Parcells a ton of credit, not to mention Bob Kraft—the unavoidable soundtrack of a million Sundays was the tandem of Gil Santos and Gino Cappelletti, one of the greatest radio play-by-play pairings I've ever heard. Those two made growing up as the son of a Boston sportswriter (and thereby inheriting my Patriots fandom) significantly more enjoyable, and I can't overstate the joy I received from listening to them.

Gino retired at the beginning of this season, and Gil will retire at the conclusion of this year's playoffs. This past Sunday, during the Patriots' last regular season game, the two were re-united for one final quarter together, and the CBS national broadcast even joined the pair for a live cut-in. It was a fitting send-off for a duo that teamed up to call more than 500 games over 28 seasons, and I wanted to take a minute to pay tribute to the men who I so often listened to while watching the game on TV with the audio on mute (something I know was commonplace among Patriots fans in the good old days).

Gil was always a fair and balanced announcer, something that I think is in short supply these days. When the Patriots deserved his scorn, he was quick to deliver it—of course, those instances became increasingly less frequent as the years wore on. But at the end of the day, Gil was a Patriots fan like the rest of us in the Boston area, and he let it show for one day at least, at Super Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans.

For those who don't remember, the Patriots pulled off a resounding upset that day, taking down the heavily-favored St. Louis Rams (led by Marshall Faulk and Kurt Warner) on a last-second field goal by Adam Vinatieri. It was the first title in franchise history, and Gil's call of the final kick can still be heard today on various highlight packages and retrospectives.

To the greatest play-by-play announcer I'd ever hope to hear, this is my official "thank you" for decades of listening pleasure. Things won't be the same without you, and I'll honor you with this week's Clip of the Week—a compilation of clips from the radio call of that famous day in the Superdome eleven years ago. Here's hoping we can send you off in proper fashion a few weeks from now in the very same venue. Thanks for everything, Gil.

The NCAA and unintended consequences

Earlier today, my attention was drawn to a tweet from John Infante, a former NCAA compliance officer who writes the Bylaw Blog for Athnet. I've written a fair amount about the NCAA and its relationship with "student-athletes" before, so I thought this latest tidbit was worth sharing. In an article teased in his own tweet, Infante writes:

In the wake of last summer’s highly publicized transfer battles (Ed. Note: like these), the news that the NCAA was looking at changing the transfer rules was refreshing. What appeared to be an inconsistent standard for waivers along with student-athletes needed permission to contact other schools lead to a popular backlash against the NCAA’s transfer regulations, a sentiment that was echoed by NCAA President Mark Emmert... 

There is no formal proposal yet, but the Leadership Council published a set of principles for updated transfer rules that make it easy to see what those specific rules might be.

One of those principles is the topic of this post (and of Infante's tweet), the principle regarding a GPA contingency:

AM RT: NCAA considering transfer model that would allow all athletes with a 2.6 GPA to play immediately: athleticscholarships.net/2013/01/03/new…
— John Infante (@John_Infante) January 4, 2013

In general, I think this principle is a clear step in the right direction, as it restores some rights to student-athletes who, through no fault of their own, are left in a situation that is dramatically different from the one they entered (like a coach leaving for the NFL, or dying, or a program being put on probation for violations that occurred before the player arrived, etc.). It also hypothetically provides these student-athletes with an incentive to actually go to class, which is definitely a positive for everyone involved.

However, as usual, it wouldn't be a policy if there weren't some unintended consequences to consider. In this case, I see a great problem with setting a GPA threshold that doesn't (and can't) vary based on the quality of the institution. Are we to pretend that a 2.6 GPA is as easily attainable at Stanford or Notre Dame as it is at San Jose State or Arizona? Since we know that it isn't, doesn't this proposal effectively penalize those students who choose to go to schools with rigorous academics? And by extension, isn't it also penalizing those schools for not watering down their academic programs to benefit the student-athletes? If so, is that really what we want our NCAA policies to be doing?

As I wrote in a Twitter response to this news, encouraging schools to downgrade the rigor of their academic programs is a poor long-term strategy. Unfortunately, that's arguably what this policy would do, simply because of the incentives that it creates for student-athletes when they are considering schools. If an athlete with a 2.6 GPA has more rights than an athlete without one, then every kid should do everything in his power to make sure that he can attain a 2.6 GPA.

In an ideal world, that would mean that the athletes in question would all buckle down and work harder in school, and we'd end up with a world full of student-athletes with sparkling collegiate transcripts. But over here in the real world, all it does is encourage the kids to go to schools where they can get a 2.6 just by showing up, thereby immediately receiving more rights as an athlete.

Is that really what we want? Do we actually want to steer athletes away from the top academic schools, simply because they're likely to have more rights at the lower-tier ones? I don't think so, and I hardly think that's the idea at the core of this proposal. But unintended consequences are consequences nonetheless, and they require careful consideration by policy-makers at all levels of governance.

This winter, we have seen several top-rated schools play in meaningful football games—from Northwestern gaining its first bowl win since 1949 to Stanford winning the Rose Bowl for the first time in 40 years to Notre Dame playing for the national title for the first time in what seems like forever. Hell, even Vanderbilt won itself a bowl game, in a bowl season where most SEC teams can't seem to get out of their own way.

Against all odds, teams are finding a way to excel both in athletics and in academics, and yet the NCAA wants to pass a rule that would take us in the opposite direction, even if unintentionally. That would be a terrible shame, and I encourage the NCAA to reconsider this proposal, which has good intentions but potentially dire consequences.

[Athnet]

The problem with "most likely" outcomes (an NFL playoffs discussion)

On the final Sunday of the NFL regular season (yesterday, for those who weren't paying attention), there's always a number of moving parts as we try to figure out who is going to make the playoffs and who isn't (and also, who is going to be seeded where). Figuring it out is often a challenge, which is why it's nice to have a handy guide at your disposal to help you through the morass.

Luckily, our friends over at Deadspin were nice enough to provide just that, which was an immeasurable help to me as I sat around and rooted for the Patriots and made myself fatter (thanks to Sam Adams and some homemade lasagna). A Patriots win and a Texans loss meant that my Patriots earned themselves the #2 seed and a first-round bye, which was interestingly contrary to what Deadspin had told me to expect. To wit:

The most likely scenario [in the AFC] is that every team which has something at stake wins—they're almost invariably playing teams that don't—and thus the playoff order is exactly what you see above [Texans, Broncos, Patriots].

That line, when I first read it at 2pm or so, stuck with me as I watched the afternoon's games. What does "most likely scenario" really mean? It turns out that the way that we define our terms has an important impact on the way that we understand and respond to the world before us. That's what I'm about to explain.

Yes, it's true, in each individual game, it's "most likely" that the favorite will win—that's what being a favorite means. Therefore, when you start stringing together potential scenarios, the "most likely combination of outcomes" is, indeed, the combination in which all of the favorites win their games. But that doesn't necessarily make it the "most likely scenario"—there's a subtle but very important difference. Bear with me for a second here, because I'm about to get nerdy.

Let's start from the top here, considering a three-game sample. Let's say that each of the three top seeds coming into yesterday (Texans, Broncos, Patriots) had a 60% chance of winning their game (in the grand scheme of things in the NFL, that's a pretty high probability). To determine the likelihood of ALL THREE of them winning their games, which Deadspin said was the "most likely scenario", we just need to multiply the probabilities. In this case, 60% x 60% x 60% = 21.6% , so the likelihood of all the favorites winning was a little less than 1 in 4 odds.

There are 8 possible groupings of winners in this scenario (Texans/Broncos/Patriots would be one, Colts/Broncos/Patriots would be another, Texans/Chiefs/Dolphins a third, etc, etc, etc), and of those 8 possible groupings, the one where the favorites all win is indeed, as we said, the "most likely combination of outcomes". Here's a super-nerdy chart that shows that point, using the 60% probabilities that I used above.

When you look at it this way, you start to see that the "most likely scenario" isn't that all three teams will win, but that one of the other seven scenarios will occur (in fact, the "at least one upset" scenario is more than three times as likely here, with probability 78.4%).

Sure, any one of those individual outcomes is less likely than the individual outcome of "no upsets", but the reality of the matter is quite different. When we start to group the possible outcomes, we see things with a little bit more clarity. I think that a more realistic way of presenting the available data is the following:

Probability of exactly one upset:                       43.2% 

Probability of exactly two upsets:                     28.8%  

Probability of zero upsets:                            21.6% 

Probability of three upsets:                                6.4%

When you group the scenarios this way, you can see that all three teams doing what they're "supposed" to do is, in fact, far from the "most likely scenario" (NOTE: in order for it to become the "most likely scenario" the way I define it, the probability of each favorite winning would have to be more than 75%, as opposed to the 60% that I am using; I find 75% to be way too high for any NFL game). The statistics say that we should probably expect at least one upset, and that "exactly one upset" is the most likely scenario—which, unsurprisingly, is exactly what we ended up with.

Of course, in advance, we can't possibly know which game was likely to produce the upset, but it's almost beside the point. What we can know is that the more times we flip a coin, no matter how lopsided toward "heads" the coin may be, the more likely it becomes that it will eventually come up "tails".

Ultimately, the more independent variables (games) you start linking together, the more likely it is that your "most likely outcome" involves an upset (or a couple of upsets) somewhere along the way. In a sense, this is a similar statistical problem to the birthday problem, which I discussed here once before.

So, why does all of this matter? I'll make this part quick. Let's say you're the Broncos. You're sitting at home this week as the #1 seed, on your bye, trying to decide which team to prepare for (remember, the NFL re-seeds after the first round) while the Wild Card Weekend games are being played. With two games being played—Texans hosting Bengals, Ravens hosting Colts—there are four possible scenarios: (1) Texans and Ravens win, (2) Texans and Colts win, (3) Bengals and Ravens win, (4) Bengals and Colts win.

Assuming once again that the favorite has a 60% chance of winning, we get the following probabilities:

Texans/Ravens (Broncos play Ravens):                 36% 

Texans/Colts (Broncos play Colts):                       24% 

Bengals/Ravens (Broncos play Bengals):               24% 

Bengals/Colts (Broncos play Bengals):                  16%

So, using the same logic we used before, the most likely individual scenario is that both favorites (the Texans and Ravens) win their games, and so the Broncos should be preparing to play the Ravens next week... right?

But no, look again. Even though the "Bengals/Ravens" and "Bengals/Colts" scenarios are individually less likely than the "no upsets" scenario, they combine to be more likely. Because we've given the Bengals a 40% chance of winning their game, and because the Broncos will play the Bengals no matter what if they do indeed win, the Bengals are in fact the Broncos' most likely opponent. Sure, it's only by a small amount, but it's still relevant from a preparation standpoint—Denver should spend at least as much time watching Bengals film as Ravens film, if not more.

Any time we use statistics, we need to be careful with what we're really saying when we communicate our findings or beliefs. In the case of the Deadspin piece, the analysis in question wasn't wrong, it was simply imprecise (and possibly incomplete). When we as readers read that something is the "most likely" scenario, we're almost certainly hoping for something better than a 21.6% probability. Personally, I greatly prefer the much higher 43.2% probability that I ascribed to the "exactly one upset" scenario—I especially prefer it as a Patriots fan, whose team benefited greatly from the way things turned out on the field yesterday.

Good statistics (and good math, and good science, and good writing) requires that we be precise with our methods and our communication of our methods. If we're imprecise, we end up saying things that we don't really mean or that just aren't true.

[Deadspin]

More stadium financing follies

I've written about the lunacy of publicly-funded sports arenas and stadia here before, and I think the issue deserves to be revisited given recent developments. On the one front, there is the city of Miami, which was taken to the cleaners by the disgrace that is the Miami Marlins franchise. Unfortunately for that city, their woes may just be beginning, as the Dolphins are also reportedly looking for public funding to fix their dilapidated home.

It would be easy to write this all off as Miami's loss, and theirs alone, except that it's not the case. When municipalities like these go into debt to fund stadium boondoggles, the whole country pays, as a recent Bloomberg article points out.

New York Giants fans will cheer on their team against the Dallas Cowboys at tonight’s National Football League opener in New Jersey. At tax time, they’ll help pay for the opponents’ $1.2 billion home field in Texas. 

That’s because the 80,000-seat Cowboys Stadium was built partly using tax-free borrowing by the City of Arlington. The resulting subsidy comes out of the pockets of every American taxpayer, including Giants fans. The money doesn’t go directly to the Cowboys’ billionaire owner Jerry Jones. Rather, it lowers the cost of financing, giving his team the highest revenue in the NFL and making it the league’s most-valuable franchise. 

“It’s part of the corruption of the federal tax system,” said James Runzheimer, 67, an Arlington lawyer who led opponents of public borrowing for the structure known locally as “Jerry’s World.” “It’s use of government funds to subsidize activity that the private sector can finance on its own.”...

Tax exemptions on interest paid by muni bonds that were issued for sports structures cost the U.S. Treasury $146 million a year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg on 2,700 securities. Over the life of the $17 billion of exempt debt issued to build stadiums since 1986, the last of which matures in 2047, taxpayer subsidies to bondholders will total $4 billion, the data show. 

Those estimates are based on what the Treasury could have collected on interest from the same amount of taxable bonds sold at the same time to investors in the 25 percent income-tax bracket, the rate many government agencies assume. In fact, more than half the owners of tax-exempt bonds pay top rates of at least 30 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So they save even more on their income taxes, a system that U.S. lawmakers of both parties and President Barack Obama have described as inefficient and unfair.

Yes, that's right, when tax-exempt municipal bonds are used to pay for these stadiums, that means that the FEDERAL government is effectively subsidizing these projects. So when the Cowboys build a stadium with "public" funds, that "public" isn't limited to the Dallas area—it includes the entire nation. This amounts to taxation without representation for those of us who don't get to enjoy the Cowboys' new monstrosity, and that used to be something that mattered in this country (but of course, doesn't any more).

Sure, we could try to argue that some of this comes out in the wash, because it's just a transfer from taxpayers to bondholders, and there is significant overlap between those two populations—it's just taxpayers stealing from themselves. But unless every taxpayer is also a municipal bondholder (and I'm at least one taxpayer who owns no munis), then this becomes a very serious constitutional issue, and yet one that is perpetually ignored by nearly everyone in the nation. I, for one, have no interest in paying more in taxes so that Jerry Jones can build a playground for the super-rich in Texas, but I was never afforded a say in the matter.

Ultimately, this trend of public financing of private enterprise must end in all its forms. There's no reason for taxpayers to be funding private business, in Miami, Dallas, or anywhere else. This is a long-running scam that has been run on Americans who love their sports (and teams) too much to say no to this extortion. We all must stand up and say that we are unwilling to pay for stadiums that we then must pay to enter—if it's a public facility, then we should have the right to do with it what we please. Otherwise, the Jerry Joneses of the world can figure out their own ways to build the things. I'm getting out of the stadium-building business... who's coming with me?

[Bloomberg]

Maryland, Under Armour, and the Big 10

This is turning into a sports-heavy week, which is ironic given that in my first post yesterday I said that we probably ascribe way too much importance to sports, since they're just a form of entertainment. But given some of the things I've written about in the past, I felt that it was necessary to chime in on yesterday's decision by Maryland to leave the ACC for the Big Ten Conference (which will soon have 14 teams, because of course it will—the Big 12 has 10 teams... awesome).

The University of Maryland's Board of Regents voted Monday to accept an invitation to join the Big Ten and begin competition in the conference in the 2014-15 academic year. 

"Today is a watershed moment for the University of Maryland," said university president Wallace D. Loh in a release. "Membership in the Big Ten Conference is in the strategic interest of the University of Maryland." 

Loh added it would "ensure the financial vitality of Maryland Athletics for decades to come," and offer opportunities to boost the "education, research, and innovation" of the university... 

Sources at Maryland believe the Terps will be able to negotiate the current $50 million exit fee from the ACC to a lower amount. The additions of Maryland and Rutgers would spur the Big Ten, then, toward negotiations on a new media-rights deal when its first-tier rights expire in 2017.

There are any number of angles I could attack on this topic, and most of those angles have already been explored in my previous missives about collegiate athletics. But what I find most troubling (and unique) about this particular move is the rumored role that Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank has had in these negotiations.

Welcome to the new landscape of college sports, where billionaire boosters and eight-figure payouts cause universities to abandon rivalries decades in the making. 

On Monday, the University of Maryland Board of Regents unanimously approved leaving the ACC and joining the Big Ten conference, a decision that may trigger the next wave of college sports realignment. The move is potentially quite profitable for Maryland, which could double the TV revenue it gets by hitching its wagon to the Big Ten Network. 

However, despite the foreseeable long-term gains, breaking with the ACC comes with a high upfront cost: $50 million, an exit fee that was recently raised from only $10 million. That kind of fine could cripple the University, especially at a time of cutbacks and budget shortfalls. 

Luckily for Maryland, it has a billionaire backer who may be willing to foot the bill: Under Armour founder and Maryland alumnus Kevin Plank. At the release of the Forbes 400 in September, Plank was the 345th richest person in America, with an estimated $1.35 billion net worth. A $50 million donation would barely dent his bank account... 

According to an ESPN report, an anonymous university regent said Plank is “100 percent” behind the move to the Big Ten and added that the billionaire is “heavily involved behind the scenes with board members.” 

The final piece of the puzzle may have fallen into place last week, when Under Armour announced in a SEC filing that Plank would be selling 1.3 million shares of the company “for asset diversification, tax and estate planning and charitable giving purposes.” What would 1.3 million shares of Under Armour net Plank on the open market? Try a cool $56 million after taxes—just the amount Maryland needs to pay if it leaves the ACC for greener pastures. 

Is it a smoking gun? No. And Plank did not immediately return requests for comment. But such generosity wouldn’t be unique.

Right. "Generosity". That's what we're calling it now. The simple fact is, if Plank does indeed foot the bill for Maryland's move to the Big Ten, then the expenditure amounts to little more than a marketing expense on the part of Under Armour. The company spends a few million bucks, they put their ugly-ass Maryland uniforms on a few more cable TV screens, and they immediately get increased exposure to a whole new midwest market.

We may think we're watching student-athletes play ball out there, but what we're really watching is cleverly designed product placement, brought to you in (large) part by unpaid student labor. The setup is eerily familiar to those of us who have studied 19th century plantation economics, especially when you consider that a not-insignificant portion of the players on these teams are blacks from low-income backgrounds. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'...

Increasingly these days, when we talk about collegiate athletics, what we're really talking about are Nike, Under Armour, and ESPN, because those are the companies that really call the shots around here. The conferences and the schools have become little more than pawns, transformed into the marketing departments for these huge multinational corporations. Maybe that's a cynical way of looking at things, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to view NCAA sports through anything but a cynical light, especially given how cynical the decision-makers at these schools have seemingly become.

The NCAA needs to step in immediately and put a stop to this ridiculous conference-raiding free-for-all, before the whole thing loses all credibility. If we want to master plan this thing and create four or five huge jumbo-conferences, then fine. Let's get everyone together under one big NCAA umbrella and do this thing. But doing it piecemeal, with every conference raiding every other and then forcing the schools to pay exorbitant exit fees on the way out of town is just insanity, and worse yet, it's monstrously inefficient.

The conferences (and the apparel and TV companies) have become significantly more powerful and profitable than the NCAA itself, and that's clearly becoming a problem. As for me, the more days that go by, the more I think I should just quit on football altogether and start watching the sports that don't make any money, because at least there's something real left there.

As a remaining fan of the ACC (until further notice), all I can say to Maryland is "good riddance". A school that would sell out so brutally to one corporation and its CEO is not a school that I want anything to do with. God speed, Terps. Enjoy being the new Indiana.

[ESPN]
[Forbes]

Quote of (Last) Week

It's time to do a little catch-up around here, as it seems to be a lot recently. We'll start with last week's Quote of the Week, which never got posted because I'm a delinquent. It comes from NBC Sports' Mike Florio, whose "Pro Football Talk" is a staple of NFL news reporting. It's also batshit nuts. I'll give you the full context, so that you can appreciate the (lack of) development of Florio's argument.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"More than a few NFL players have made known this year their intention to miss a game in lieu of missing the birth of a child.

If push comes to shove, however, should they choose to be present for the pushing and not the shoving?

It’s a thorny issue.  My position was and is that the players have made a lifestyle choice that entails being available 16 days per year, no matter what.  If they choose not to plan their nine-month family expansion activities to coincide with the eight months per year when their work activities don’t entail playing games that count, why should their teams suffer the consequences?"
                                                        - Mike Florio, NBC Sports

Wow. "Family expansion activities," first of all, is an epic turn of phrase that deserves to be commemorated for all time in the Mike Florio Hall of Fame. The rest of the Florio piece basically speaks for itself, in a tone-deaf "football isn't everything, it's the only thing" sort of way.

Insinuating that a football player can and should have full control over when his wife gets pregnant is only a couple of small steps removed from declaring that pregnancy cannot result from a "legitimate rape". Remember that what Florio is really trying to suggest here is to say that players should only have sex with their wives during the season, so that they can reasonably be expected to go into labor in the offseason (when we include the playoffs and training camp, the offseason is a whole lot closer to 4 or 5 months than the 8 months that he suggests).

That's right, during the season, when the players are constantly on the road, or recuperating from injuries, or spending late nights at the stadium watching film because WINNING IS EVERYTHING. And if you can't get the job done this season, too bad, my friend, you better wait till next season to try again. Hopefully your wife's biological clock is kind enough to stop ticking for our benefit.

Now... to Florio's credit, he backed off of his initial statements and actually subsequently penned a much more reasonable and well-articulated piece on the topic. This incident, therefore, seems to have been a case of publishing-before-editing, which is increasingly common in the internet/blogging era of journalism.

Nevertheless, the mentality that Florio initially articulated persists among fans and journalists throughout the country, and it's an ugly and dangerous mentality. Whatever your job may be, nobody should ever suggest that performing it at the highest level should take precedence over family and good parenting. That's particularly true in an entertainment industry like professional sports, which many people take way too seriously at the end of the day.

Missing one or two games over the course of a career in order to attend to major family events should never be something that fans take issue with, especially when fans (and TV networks) already expect teams full of players to miss holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years simply to add incrementally to our enjoyment of those same holidays. These players sacrifice large portions of their lives (and their personal health) for our entertainment, and some people would request that they sacrifice even more. That's a terrible attitude to have, no matter how much these guys get paid (some of them, a ton, others, not so much). I'd rather we just said "thank you," and went on our way.

[Pro Football Talk]

Clip of the Week

Nothing much to share this week (except devastation from Sandy, which is depressing), so yay, football! Here's a punt return by Oregon's De'Anthony Thomas. This kid did basically everything wrong here, and yet it worked out for him. Go figure.


Have a good weekend, folks.

Clip of the Week

Time for the weekend, and another quick flurry of posts before we head out the door (or stay in to watch the Ryder Cup). First up is the Clip of the Week, where we've got a few decent contenders.

As election season wears on, and my phone rings a million times a day because I'm in a swing state, I got a kick out of this Simpsons clip (nice satirical summary of the Presidential choices) and this Stephen Colbert clip on Romney's struggling poll numbers.

As far as animal videos go, this was the only thing I saw this week worth sharing, but it's a doozy. And then Jimmy Fallon did another one of those things he loves doing, which is honestly about the only thing he's good at.

Then there's sports, where we had this absolutely ridiculous catch by the Pirates' Travis Snider, which probably should've won your Clip of the Week. But we'll hold off on the baseball until October, and for now we'll give this week's honor to the (now defunct) replacement refs, via this fantastic montage of some of their best work.

Nice knowing you guys. Enjoy life back on the high school football fields. And now the rest of us can get back to doing what we normally do—complaining about the usual refs and pretending that we care about concussions.

On intellectual inconsistency

In yesterday's Quote of the Week, I presented a line from actor Craig T. Nelson that displayed a stunning lack of self-awareness, a trend that's seemingly everywhere in our country these days. I had previously discussed this dynamic in a post on "blind spots", which hold the potential to swing elections (and the political and economic future of our nation).

In that post—which focused on a graphic that revealed that a significant percentage of recipients of government welfare programs did not consider themselves to be government beneficiaries—I wrote:

To fully appreciate the importance of these blind spots, I think it's useful to attempt to put these numbers into context. Using just the final line item, "Food Stamps"—which I think is a fairly clear and unambiguous example of a "government social program"—we see that 25.4% of food stamp (pardon me, SNAP) recipients do not consider themselves to have benefited from a government program. This is certain to impact the way they view national issues in federal (especially Presidential) elections, especially when debt and deficits are as large a story as they have currently become. 

Recall next that in several states, food stamp usage covers close to (or more than) 20% of the total population (nationwide, food stamp usage rates are at 14%). If a full 25% of people in these states do not think that they benefit from our "big government", that leaves us with 5% of that state's population—easily a big enough group to decide just about any Presidential election—believing something that is patently false.

Simply put, how can we expect voters to make intelligent and informed decisions about their political leaders when they have such blatant and vicious blind spots obscuring their view of the world (and their role in it)?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this issue has been coming up quite a bit lately, most recently in Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker found himself in a bit of a weird spot with respect to the NFL's disastrous replacement referees.

Nothing brings political enemies together in Wisconsin like the Green Bay Packers. 

Following a controversial game-ending call by replacement referees that cost Green Bay a win over the Seattle Seahawks on Monday Night Football, Wisconsin officials from across the political divide united behind the Packers. 

Even Gov. Scott Walker and a Democratic state senator who were bitter opponents in the 2011 battle over Wisconsin public workers' collective bargaining rights found themselves on the same side Tuesday. 

Walker, whose union-busting efforts have made him the darling of fiscal conservatives, posted a message on Twitter calling for the return of the NFL's locked-out unionized officials. 

"After catching a few hours of sleep, the #Packers game is still just as painful. #Returntherealrefs," Walker tweeted early Tuesday... 

Walker's spokesman, Cullen Werwie, tried to spin the governor's post on Tuesday, saying it wasn't meant as a pro-union political statement. Walker's tweet was being widely mocked on Twitter in light of his push last year that effectively ended collective bargaining for teachers, nurses and most other public workers. His proposal didn't affect private sector unions. 

"I don't think this anything to do with unions, but has everything to do with refs making bad calls," Werwie said.

To be fair to Walker, there's an important difference between the role and operation of public-sector unions as opposed to private-sector unions, a difference that even FDR recognized and appreciated. Nevertheless, the more we dig into this issue, the more inconsistent Walker's analysis seems to be.

According to Sports Illustrated's Peter King, there are some fairly significant parallels between this case and the Wisconsin (or Chicago, take your pick) teachers' case:

One of the emerging and major reasons why a deal has been so elusive... is that the NFL is insisting on getting some control of the officials back that it has ceded in past negotiations with the NFLRA. This includes the league's desire to have three seven-man officiating crews in reserve with the ability to replace—either for a game or longer—underperforming current officials. 

Another source with knowledge of the locked-out officials' position said Tuesday that the NFL would not guarantee that they would work at least 15 games in a regular season. Currently, other than due to injury, an official that starts a season works the full season. The officials source said that this is the main crux of what the NFL is trying to do in these negotiations: wrest back control of the officials' performance week to week in an NFL season. I've been told that the NFL is insisting on being able to make in-season changes to crews based solely on performance of individual officials... 

There's also still the matter of the league trying to roll back the officials' pension. Over the last five years, the league has contributed, on average, about $5.3 million per year to the officials' pension plan. The league, in keeping with the current cost-cutting practice of corporations across America, no longer wants to guarantee how much each official would get in retirement, but rather tie the contributions to a 401(k)-type pension.

The ability to fire underperforming workers? Questions over the funding (and fundability) of workers' pensions? You know, this situation is starting to sound pretty familiar, which of course makes Gov. Walker's support of the referees in this situation that much more ironic.

But then, intellectual inconsistency and self-justifying behavior has become the norm in this country, especially since the financial crisis of 2008-09. As I wrote in this blog post last summer,

In the housing crisis, there were some who blamed the borrowers (i.e. homeowners) for irresponsibly using debt to live beyond their means, but the vast majority felt that the real story of the crisis was one of overly greedy and predatory bankers taking advantage of borrowers, originating loans that were destined to fail. This "blame the lenders" dynamic ultimately became the "winning" narrative in the aftermath of the crisis, hence the incredible vitriol directed at banks today. 

In today's [global sovereign debt] crisis, though, that's far from the case. Instead, we direct our ire primarily at the irresponsible borrowers, blaming the nations in question (rather than the enabling lenders) for their predicament. Instead of blaming China for consistently purchasing our national debt time and time again over the past few decades, we blame our own government for its irresponsibility (which is probably fair, just noticeably different from how we viewed the housing crisis). 

After watching the strange theater of the forced "austerity measures" in Greece this week, I tried to imagine the proper analogy in the housing crisis. What if, instead of foreclosing on a home, banks and mortgage companies came to an individual's house and demanded that they cancel their phone service, cut down on their food intake, and sell their cars in the name of "austerity" and improving the chance that they repaid their mortgage? That sounds completely ridiculous, right? And yet, that's exactly what we're seeing here. 

Ultimately, I think that the differing responses to otherwise similar stories derives from our pre-existing notions of who is the more sympathetic party, rather than the facts of the matter. In the housing crisis, it was far easier (and incredibly satisfying) to blame the big, evil banking institutions than it would have been to accept the blame ourselves, as homeowners. 

In the sovereign debt case, it is far easier to blame one or two basket-case governments (especially when it is so fashionable right now to blame governments—in this case, THEY are the big, evil corporation relative to the smaller banks) than it would be to place the blame on the lenders, who span everyone from the European Central Bank to nearly every American who places money in a money market fund. 

It's hard to trust ourselves when we try to analyze complex situations like these, simply because our reactions are so utterly inconsistent with regard to the actual facts of the case. We all approach situations in life with inherent, trained biases, and it's exceptionally difficult to get past these and assess problems at face value.

We all like to view the world as a universe full of simple narratives, with clear villains and heroes and obvious lines of culpability when things go wrong. But the truth is always somewhere in between—both heroes and villains share some of the blame, and sometimes the heroes in one situation are in fact the villains in another. Because this doesn't fit well with the way that we like to view the world, we instead end up with bizarre and contradictory approaches to what are in fact similar situations, based simply on the role in which we place ourselves.

As a nation, if we are ever going to be able to engage in an open and honest conversation about the issues that plague our country's political and economic systems, we must first start by appreciating our own biases and blind spots, and approach these complex situations from a more detached (and less emotional) standpoint. If we can't do this, then we'll be forever destined to make poor and inconsistent decisions, and we'll all end up in an awkward spot, just like Gov. Walker.

But hey, breaking news, looks like the NFL's "real" referees are on their way back to work, after all. That's great news.... isn't it?

[Sports Illustrated 1]
[Sports Illustrated 2]

Clip of [Last] Week

Alright, we're back at it here after a couple-day unplanned hiatus from the blog (I had family in town, so I ranted and raved to them in person instead of on the blog... so be it). I've got at least 3 blog posts coming your way this afternoon, starting with last week's Clip of the Week, which never got posted.

As you all know by now, I harbor some pretty negative feelings toward Apple and their iPhone—I think they've transitioned from being an ingenious and admirable company to being an evil genius company, and there's an important difference between the two. Given that backdrop, I got a huge kick out of these two iPhone-related clips, the first from Jimmy Kimmel (awesome) and the second courtesy of Barry Ritholtz (also awesome, in a different way).

It was also another week in which sports were played, so we got this and this from the college football ranks and this goal from a one-legged soccer player.

If you're familiar with the work of the rapper DMX... just... watch this, I guess. And if you want to see a fun visualization of what contagion looks like (and how stable systems can quickly become very unstable), watch this little experiment.

But this week's spot is reserved for the recognition of Steve Sabol, the President of NFL Films, who died last week after a long illness. NFL Films was a huge part of my childhood, back when VHS tapes were a thing and YouTube (and the internet) hadn't yet been invented. I had tons of NFL Films videos at home, and I would watch the same ones over and over again. They were that good. Frankly, Steve Sabol's work is a big reason that the NFL is so popular today, and of course the league is now throwing up all over itself in the wake of Steve's death. Solid work, Commissioner.

At any rate, I love sports, I love NFL Films, and I love profanity, so this clip here is the perfect way to honor Steve Sabol's memory. R.I.P.

Song of the Week(end)

It's Labor Day weekend, the 'Hoos are kicking things off tomorrow against Richmond, and I'm ready for football season. Sorta. I'm still wondering what happened to my summer. Who knows... let's do this.

So with a nod to the College Gameday boys, here's Big & Rich with "Comin' to your City". Happy long weekend, people. Maybe next week I'll get cracking on some of those 30-something blog post drafts I've got in my queue...

Quote of the Week (NFL Edition)

Shortly after former NFL linebacker Junior Seau's tragic suicide in May, I published a post here regarding concussions and the NFL. In that post, I argued that most NFL players are well aware of the risks of football (not just concussions, but of injuries of all types), but that they choose to play anyway because the rewards are so large.

My argument was lent serious credence over the weekend by former running back (and one-time Patriot) Curtis Martin, who may have said more than he realized during his Hall of Fame induction speech in Canton (which, incidentally, was incredible in its candor and is definitely worth watching in its entirety). In discussing his mentor, Bill Parcells, Martin cited this line from the legendary coach:

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I've always believed one thing... You should never come out of the huddle, because you never know who's going in the huddle."
                                      - Hall of Fame football coach Bill Parcells, via Curtis Martin

Martin went on to describe his takeaway from Parcells' message—in the NFL, you're always replaceable. There's always some rookie somewhere who's right on your heels, itching for the opportunity to take your job (Drew Bledsoe, meet Tom Brady). Martin later admitted that nearly every year in training camp there was someone on the Jets roster who had more ability than him, but that he kept his job simply by "out-working everyone".

With all due respect to Martin's legendary work ethic, it's probably not the only reason he kept his job—a consistent willingness to shake off injuries and even concussions couldn't have hurt his case. Indeed, Martin would follow up his Parcells story by recounting a tale of having been knocked silly during one game, leaving him so dazed that he ended up inadvertently wandering into the Oakland Raiders' defensive huddle.

I wouldn't be surprised if Martin was back on the field later in that same game against the Raiders, not to mention the next week and the week after that. In fact, given his incredible durability in his career (he missed only 8 regular season games in his 11-year career, 4 of which were in his final season), I'd be almost certain that was the case.

The uncomfortable truth is that if he hadn't found a way to get back on the field, somebody else would have, and the fear of being replaced is never far from a professional athlete's mind. It's never easy to make the decision to step aside and take a few plays off, especially when in the heat of the battle. And yet, despite all of this, and knowing all of the risks inherent in football, Martin still says that he would let his own children play football, because he believes that the risks are worth the potential rewards (be they tangible or intangible).

Honestly, I find Martin's honesty in this regard to be refreshing. We all engage in behavior in our lives that is "risky", but we do it because we happen to assess the situation as "worth it", whatever the potential rewards from the situation may be. So we smoke, we drink, we eat red meat, we play the lottery, we invest in the stock market, we buy houses in Las Vegas in 2005 with interest-only mortgages, whatever. The point is, we're all adults here, and as such we're entitled to make our own decisions about which risks are and are not acceptable in our lives.

I'm fine with all of this, right up until the time that those same people try to blame others when the risks inherent in their actions blow up in their faces. Sure, the bank ripped you off, but it's your fault for not reading and understanding your mortgage documents. Yes, you have a serious brain injury, but it's your fault for rushing back onto the field when you couldn't actually see straight.

I sympathize with those players who played back before there was a full appreciation of the seriousness of brain injuries (concussions), and I certainly don't mean to be callous with respect to players like Seau and Dave Duerson, whose deaths were tragic by any definition. But we're seeing more and more athletes admitting that they know (and knew) the risks of playing through injuries, and decided that the risk of not playing was in fact greater than the risk of continuing to play. That's life in the NFL, and we fans know it just as well as the players do. As long as there's another rookie willing to step out on that field, we'll keep seeing veterans who are willing to sacrifice their health in order to keep their jobs. That's just football.

[Deadspin]

Adios, BCS

Given my past rants about college football and how broken things are, I have to at least mention yesterday's major development that promises to reshape the NCAA landscape. Beginning in 2014, Division 1 football (the "FBS", whatever) will have a four-team playoff system, scrapping the badly flawed BCS system.

Let's hand over the analysis to ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, who is probably working off a champagne-fueled hangover today.

This is a momentous day in the history of college football. And thanks to Tuesday's final ratifying vote by the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee, a manageable, logical and lonnnnnnnng overdue playoff system makes the traveling squad in 2014. 

As recently as the 2011 BCS National Championship Game, a BCS spokesperson gravely predicted: "Don't be fooled -- a playoff would be the end of the bowls as we know them." When the spokesperson wasn't bashing the idea of a playoff, he was constantly reminding us that the BCS "got it right again." 

And just six months ago, that same spokesperson insisted, "the BCS works well and very well," for all players and fans. 

Yes, it worked so well that 11 conference commissioners and Notre Dame's athletic director gutted the BCS and replaced it with a playoff system, a playoff selection committee, a national championship game that can be bid out to a non-traditional playing site and, eventually, a new brand name. And Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the oversight committee approved it all. 

"It's a best-of-both-worlds result," said Charles W. Steger, Virginia Tech president and chair of the committee. "It captures the excitement of a playoff while protecting the best regular season in sports and also the tradition of the bowls. A four-team playoff doesn't go too far. It goes just the right amount." 

The BCS Championship is about to be euthanized -- may it soon rest in peace. Gone are the ridiculous polls, the computer standings and the automatic qualifier status extended to favored conferences. 

The bowl system? Despite the BCS propaganda of 2011, a playoff isn't going to be "the end of the bowls as we know it." That's the beauty of the new agreement. It works within the bowl system, not outside of it.

Of course, there will still be controversy under the new system, and that's fine. Controversy is a big part of sports--there's frankly little entertainment without it. But there's good controversy and there's bad controversy, and it had become abundantly clear that the BCS was engendering the wrong kind of publicity.

Questions about fairness, favoritism, and opaque selection criteria had become more important than the games themselves, and that's a huge problem. With four teams instead of two, it now becomes that much more unlikely that we'll have anyone who gets outright screwed (like Auburn in 2004). More importantly, the new system should avoid the bizarre situations that we saw in 2000, 2001, 2009, and last year, when several teams had a claim at a spot in the title game, and there was no viable way of choosing which team (or teams) should be chosen.

In the four-team playoff, these dilemmas would almost always be avoidable, and all qualified teams would get the chance to play it out on the field. Yes, there could still be exceptions--2004 and 2009 were bizarre years by any measure--but it won't be an inevitable annual result of a deeply flawed system.

The NCAA still has a lot of problems to address, but at least now the competition on the field won't be one of them. That's a good thing.

[ESPN]

Quote of the Week

After a couple days of no writing, I'm planning on coming back with a vengeance in the second half of this week. Yeah, I know... good intentions. Whatever.

Either way, it's Quote of the Week time, and this one here is a doozy. I actually considered giving this week's honor to this article, which found that Germans may actually be physically incapable of enjoying life. Now that's a hell of a study right there.

But instead, I'm giving the nod to Vanderbilt football coach James Franklin, who issued one of the facepalmiest quotes of the year so far.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I've been saying it for a long time, I will not hire an assistant coach until I see his wife... That's part of the deal. There's a very strong correlation between having the confidence, and going up and talking to a woman, and being quick on your feet and having some personality and confidence and being fun and articulate, than it is walking into a high school and recruiting a kid and selling him."
                                   - Vanderbilt football coach James Franklin

Wow. What's funny about Franklin's line is that there's actually probably some truth to it. It takes a certain personality type to be a successful recruiter, and it doesn't hurt to look at an assistant's life for indications of the guy's personality and salesmanship abilities. But to paraphrase Mallrats... JESUS man, there's some things you just don't talk about in public. I mean seriously, is this idiot trying to get fired?

I'm sure Franklin's wife and two daughters are proud of him right about now--he's not getting any icy stares at the dinner table at all this week. What a clown.

On Junior Seau and smoking

I'm still shocked by the news of Junior Seau's suicide on Wednesday. Seau was well-liked at every step of his career (this anecdote gives you a pretty good idea of why), and his premature death is an unspeakable tragedy, especially to those in his hometown of San Diego. It's even more troubling to learn that Seau followed in the lead of Dave Duerson by shooting himself in the chest, so that his brain could be studied to better learn the impact of head trauma (concussions) on long-term mental health.

Naturally, incidents like the Seau suicide tend to spur many of us into action, in hopes that we can learn some kind of lesson that will help prevent future tragedies. That reaction was evident in the following Twitter post from Hall of Fame running back Emmitt Smith, re-tweeted by Sports Illustrated columnist Peter King:

Smith makes a fair point, but as I replied to him (and King), the information is, for the most part, there--it's just that many players choose to ignore it, because their careers often depend on such ignorance.

Concussion awareness organizations like the Sports Legacy Institute (founded by Chris Nowinski, a former pro wrestler whom I knew in college) have existed since the mid-2000s, inspired by a growing body of evidence surrounding head trauma. Their findings have clearly had an impact on the NFL, and the league has tried its best to respond to their recommendations.

To be fair to players like Seau and Smith (not to mention Duerson), their careers began and essentially ended before they could have benefited from the most recent research. But there's no excuse for current players to be engaging in this kind of behavior, given the NFL's new emphasis on preventing serious head injuries:

A four-month look at how the NFL handles concussions in a more tightly controlled environment shows that following the new rules remains extremely arbitrary. Many times, players ignore them. Sometimes, teams do. In other instances, there is a pact between the two to skirt them. 

While NFL teams have enacted smart and thorough mechanisms to help players deal with the dangers of concussions, some have found a way around them by simply waving off doctors on the hits that aren't clearly visible or where the player doesn't lose consciousness. Some are hiding concussion symptoms from doctors, players said in dozens of interviews. 

"In some cases, if you avoid the doctors, you can avoid the concussion exams," one AFC North player said, "and the doctors know you're avoiding them, but let you." 

Said one player, who is also a player representative: "The concussion rules are the best they can be. The league and the union have done a good job protecting players, but the truth remains, players are still hiding concussions, because they want to protect their careers. In some cases, teams know a player is concussed and let it go. Yes, that still happens." 

The NFL and players union might soon respond to holes in the policy by placing independent doctors on the sidelines during games, taking the decision out of the hands of the interested parties: the teams and players. But until then, some players will continue to put themselves at risk by doing whatever they can to stay on the field.

In this regard, I see significant parallels between concussions in the NFL and the smoking of cigarettes.

In this day and age, everyone knows the dangers of smoking, and everyone (at least, everyone in the NFL) knows the dangers of football and concussions. But for various reasons, people continue to light up, just like they continue to buckle up their chinstraps and take the field. Simply put, some people just don't care about the risks--they want the rewards. That's why people continue to take steroids, and it's also why people continue to invest in the stock market (though that's probably a topic best left for another day).

The only way this dynamic will change is if people stop watching football because of incidents like the Seau suicide, whether as a means of protest or simply out of disgust. Until that day comes, the rewards of an NFL career will continue to be so great (particularly for uneducated or under-educated kids from lower class families) that many players will simply overlook the risks, hoping that maybe they'll be one of the lucky ones.

Simply knowing about the risks isn't enough to prevent future tragedies like the Junior Seau story--knowing is indeed half the battle, but that still leaves the other half. We as a society need to actually respond to those risks in a way that affects future behavior. Otherwise, we'll be doomed to learn nothing from the Seau tragedy, just as many of us learned nothing from millions of smoking-related deaths around the world over the past few decades.

In a sense, maybe that's okay. NFL players are consenting adults, and if they choose to put themselves in harm's way despite knowing the risks, then that's certainly their choice. But we shouldn't pretend that they don't know better, because by now, they absolutely do. If nothing else, Junior Seau's death has at least assured us of that much. Hopefully, it will do even more.

[Twitter]
[CBS Sports]