Tail. Wagging. Dog.

Presented without comment, except to refer you to my previous columns on the topic here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

(h/t Tyler Cowen)

Daily Show on the NCAA

I've got a few posts here and there that I'm working on, but this is absolutely beautiful and needs to be shared. We'll go ahead and call this your Clip of the Week, from Aasif Mandvi at the Daily Show.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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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 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]

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]

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.

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...

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.

Song of the Week(end)

There was really no question on this one. In case you missed it, Harvard Baseball blew up the internet this week, with this YouTube video that's already up over 3 million views. I think you could add up all the fans at all of the Harvard baseball games since long before I was there, and you'd still have trouble getting to 3 million views. Moneyball and 14 NCAA tournament appearances aside, this is quite possibly Harvard Baseball's finest hour. I'm so proud.

So here's to my old team, and to Carly Rae Jepsen, whose song has been in my head all week. Go Crimson.

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]

Welcome March Madness (from The Simpsons)

It's March (already?), and that of course means that March Madness officially kicks off this week with Championship Week--plenty of teams have already clinched their NCAA berths, the Big East tournament has been underway for about a week now, and the ACC just started theirs today. I couldn't be more excited.

In honor of the ACC tournament and my Cavaliers (who earned a first round bye and start tourney play tomorrow), I thought I'd share my personal take on the ACC, as viewed through the all-knowing lens of The Simpsons. Enjoy. (Click on the pic to blow it up full size, for the full effect).

Another Yale update (and a mea culpa)

Sigh... it serves me right for praising a Yalie, really. I should've known I'd come away from this situation with egg on my face.

Back in November, I discussed the Patrick Witt/Rhodes Scholarship story on two separate occasions (here and here), praising Witt for prioritizing his commitment to his team and school over his personal ambitions for the Rhodes Scholarship. I also had some harsh words for the Rhodes committee, whom I depicted as rigid and detached from the original mission of their foundation's benefactor.

Yesterday, the New York Times revealed that it was Witt who was more deserving of scorn, for being (at best) duplicitous in his dealings with the media. As a result, I (and many others in the assorted national media) have come away scrambling for cover this morning.

On Nov. 13, Patrick J. Witt, Yale University’s star quarterback, announced that he had withdrawn his Rhodes scholarship application and would instead play against Harvard six days later, at the very time of the required Rhodes interview. His apparent choice of team fealty over individual honor capped weeks of admiring national attention on this accomplished student and his quandary. 

But Witt was no longer a contender for the Rhodes, a rare honor reserved for those who excel in academics, activities and character. Several days earlier, according to people involved on both sides of the process, the Rhodes Trust had learned through unofficial channels that a fellow student had accused Witt of sexual assault. The Rhodes Trust informed Yale and Witt that his candidacy was suspended unless the university decided to re-endorse it.

Witt’s accuser has not gone to the police, nor filed what Yale considers a formal complaint. The New York Times has not spoken with her and does not know her name.

Witt, who is 22, is no longer enrolled at Yale. He completed his class work last semester, is working on his senior essay and has been training in California in preparation for a possible N.F.L. career, according to the Yale athletics Web site. Witt did not respond to messages left over several days on his cellphone, his Yale e-mail and his Facebook page.

To be clear, I don't mean to imply that Witt is guilty of the sexual assault charge, or that his Rhodes application deserved to be suspended (I've learned my lesson in this case as far as jumping to conclusions is concerned). But suspended it was, and Witt deserves a wag of the finger for allowing the media to praise him for a choice that was ultimately not a choice, after all.

This revelation is just the latest Rhodes-related disaster to come out of New Haven in recent months, following the resignation of Yale's head coach Tom Williams for his own Rhodes Scholarship misrepresentations. I don't know what's going on down at Yale, but it's at the very least a bit odd. What Yale knew and didn't know (and what the Rhodes committee did and didn't know) is difficult to discern at this point, because both institutions are swearing confidentiality on the matters at hand.

But both Witt and Yale could have saved themselves quite a bit of negative attention here if they had just been candid about things from the beginning. Instead, both player and institution are deservedly being portrayed as incompetent and duplicitous, a situation that easily could have been avoided.

As for me, I think I'll just stick with my gut going forward, and criticize Yale and all Yalies by default. It's way more fun that way, anyway. And now I can be happy about Harvard's blowout victory over Witt and the Yalies without reservation--not that I really had any reservations to begin with.

[New York Times]

Clip of the Week

This week's Clip was simply a no-brainer. The last couple of weeks, I've teased some great plays by wide receivers, but I haven't yet given Clip of the Week honors to any of them. That's clearly because I was waiting for this catch, from Marshall's Aaron Dobson. In a word (or two), holy crap.



The more you watch it (especially the slo-mo replays), the more impressive it gets. Until this play, I thought Randy Moss would forever hold the title of best one-handed catch ever. Nope. How appropriate that Moss would be displaced by a kid from his own alma mater. Let's hope for Aaron Dobson's sake that he can go on to have half the career that Randy Moss had. Even if he doesn't, that's one hell of a catch.

Honorable mention: science tricks, random cat video, NBA lockout humor. All of them a distant second.

A quick rant about college football

It's a slow news day out here as we all finish digesting our Thanksgiving leftovers and watch the market inexplicably march higher, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to do a little ranting about this uniquely peculiar college football season.

I was a little busy watching my Wahoos get destroyed by their rival on Saturday, but when I woke up on Sunday morning I was bombarded with stories telling me that an Alabama-LSU rematch for the national title was essentially locked up. Good to know. I could've sworn we already saw that game, fell asleep for 5 hours and woke up to see that LSU had won, 9-6, at Alabama's stadium. Yawn. Why not try again and see if we can get it right?

Nevermind the fact that--as Stewart Mandel points out--Oklahoma State has a stronger resume in just about every regard, or that the very concept of a rematch lays waste to the BCS' claim that "Every Game Counts". And please ignore the fact that it's completely ludicrous that a team that couldn't even play for, let alone win its conference title is now a virtual lock for the title game, whereas an LSU loss in that very same SEC title game that Alabama couldn't qualify for... could knock them out of the national title picture. Huh? Yeah, I'm confused too.

And yet, championship game hijinks aren't the only screwy thing going on in college football right now, or that requires my ranting. You see, out west in the Pac-12 (formerly the Pac-10), things are getting even weirder.

To bowl or not to bowl? That is the question UCLA, the Pac-12 Conference and the NCAA will have to answer should the Bruins lose to Oregon on Friday in the Pac-12 title game. 

The Bruins (6-6) finished the regular season bowl eligible but would need to ask the conference to petition the NCAA for a waiver to play in a bowl game should they drop below .500. 

Yes, in a bizarre twist of fate, the team that slipped into the conference title game through the back door is now a 30-point underdog in that game and is very likely to lose bowl eligibility simply because it qualified for the Pac-12 title game. 

"It’s a unique situation," quarterback Kevin Prince said.

So if you're keeping track, that's two teams--LSU and UCLA--that could conceivably get penalized because they qualified for their conference title game (LSU better hope it doesn't lose to Georgia in the SEC title game, or else things are gonna get REALLY messed up over in BCS Land...), and one team (Alabama) that seemingly gets the benefit of the doubt no matter what.

Conferences love these title games because of the extra revenue they generate, but they're increasingly becoming a nightmare for the teams involved. In a system that's as screwed up as the BCS, playing games against tough opponents can only hurt you (unless you're Boise State, but let's leave that alone for now), and you therefore want to minimize them at all costs. And yet, winning a conference title now requires adding one more difficult game to the schedule, one more game that can easily cost you a chance at the ultimate goal of a national title.

What we essentially have here now, with the major conferences all moving toward conference title games, is a de facto playoff round--lose your conference title game, and you can kiss your national title hopes goodbye. However, in this case, a team like Alabama can counterintuitively "earn" a playoff bye simply by losing its regular-season home game to LSU.

Ironically enough, losing to LSU may have been the single best thing that Alabama could have done in order to ensure a berth in the national title game--and that, for lack of a better phrase, is seriously fucked up. If we're going to keep this current BCS system that refuses to include a playoff and insists on cherry-picking the top two teams, we have to remove the conference title games from the equation. Oh, we can keep playing the games, that's fine. But they need to be glorified exhibitions--we can't let them have any bearing whatsoever on who gets to play in the playo--excuse me, in the BCS title game.

And another thing... by the time Alabama does finally play in a game it didn't deserve to be in, it won't have played a game for OVER SIX WEEKS. No other sport in the world does that, and it's a big part of the reason that teams so often come out rusty and flat in the BCS title game. What if we played the World Series on Thanksgiving? Would anybody even watch? Why am I still talking?

Whatever. I hate the BCS. Give me a playoff. And let me enjoy watching meaningful college playoff games for the next 5 weeks, instead of garbage like the Idaho Potato Bowl and the GoDaddy.com Bowl. And please hurry--I'm getting tired of Nick Saban's smugness already.

[ESPN]

Tough choices

As you are all certainly aware by now, given the close attention that is paid to Ivy League football these days, my alma mater clinched the league title on Saturday with a convincing victory over Penn. Yeah, I know, old news, right?

But as any fan of Ivy League sports knows (you know you're out there), a league title means nothing to Harvard if they lose to Yale, and vice versa--if you play for the Crimson or the Bulldogs, "The Game" is the only one that really matters. As evidence of that fact, look no further than Yale quarterback Patrick Witt.

Two weeks after becoming a Rhodes Scholarship Finalist, Yale quarterback Patrick Witt ’12 made the decision to play against Harvard in The Game on Saturday rather than attend his finalist interview for the Rhodes Scholarship.

Witt officially announced on Sunday that he had withdrawn his application for the Rhodes Scholarship, giving him one last chance at beating Yale’s archrival. If he had chosen to stay in the running for the Rhodes, Witt would have had to travel to Emory University in Atlanta for the interview, which was to begin at 8 a.m., just four hours before the Bulldogs’ kickoff against the Crimson at noon in New Haven.

“I will be playing in the Yale-Harvard game this Saturday,” Witt said in an official press release. “My focus this week is solely on preparing for The Game alongside my teammates and coaches.”...

The senior signal caller received the official notification regarding his finalist status on Oct. 31, two days after leading the Elis to a 16–13 victory over Columbia.

Since then, Witt’s dilemma has gained the attention of national media outlets including ESPN and Bloomberg. A week ago, Witt was featured on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and said on national television that it wouldn’t feel right to leave his teammates to fend for themselves.

This isn't the first time that a college football player has faced this sort of dilemma--Florida State safety Myron Rolle interviewed for and won a Rhodes scholarship three years ago, but was able to make it back to College Park, MD for the second half of his team's night game against Maryland. Witt didn't have that choice given the noon kickoff, and his role on the Yale team is of course much more central than Rolle's on those Seminoles.

Torn between loyalty to his teammates and his own personal ambitions, Witt ultimately chose the former. It probably doesn't hurt matters that Witt will be eligible to apply for a Rhodes scholarship again next year (and the year after), whereas this will be his last opportunity to play in "The Game". Either way, for those who doubt the importance that Ivy League athletes place on their sports, Witt's difficult choice should give some perspective. Despite the lack of "official" stakes--Yale has no chance of winning the league title, Harvard has no chance of losing it--pride plays a central role in this decades-old rivalry (side note: Yale has lost the last four Games, has won only one Game since 2000, and has won only one home Game since 1993... so yeah, they want this one badly).

I'll of course be rooting against Yale this Saturday, but I have to respect Witt's dedication to his team, and I hope the Rhodes committee takes that dedication into consideration if and when Witt re-applies in the future. Of course, given that the committee was apparently unwilling to reschedule his interview to accommodate his conflict, that consideration is far from a given.

[Yale Daily News]

A step in the right direction

Given my past rants about the flaws in collegiate athletics, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the developments from yesterday in the NCAA.

The scandal-plagued NCAA is moving swiftly to clean up its image.

On Thursday, the Division I Board of Directors approved a package of sweeping reforms that gives conferences the option of adding more money to scholarship offers, schools the opportunity to award scholarships for multiple years, imposes tougher academic standards on recruits and changes the summer basketball recruiting model.

"It was one of the most aggressive and fullest agendas the board has ever faced," NCAA President Mark Emmert said. "They moved with dispatch on it, and I think they're taking positive steps for schools and student-athletes."

For decades, outsiders have debated whether college scholarships should include more than just the cost of tuition, room and board, books and fees. Now they can.

The board approved a measure allowing conferences to vote on providing up to $2,000 in spending money, or what the NCAA calls the full cost-of-attendance. Emmert insists it is not pay-for-play, merely the reintroduction of a stipend that existed for college athletes until 1972. He also compared it to the stipends received by other students who receive non-athletic scholarships.

Some thought the total amount should have been higher. At the Big Ten's basketball media day in Chicago, commissioner Jim Delany said studies have shown the average athlete pays roughly $3,000 to $4,000 out of his or her own pocket in college costs.

But many believe the measure is long overdue.

I'll leave a more complete analysis until later, when more details about these reforms become available, but for now this seems to be a significant step in the right direction. It certainly isn't sufficient to address the widespread inequities that still exist, but to be fair, addressing them completely would probably mean a wholesale destruction of collegiate athletics as we know them.

For now, it seems that the NCAA knew that the widespread conference realignment/money grab/three-ring circus would likely create a significant public relations backlash, and it therefore scrambled to save face or at least divert attention. Whatever the reasons, though, it's undeniably the right move. Is it enough? We'll see.

[ESPN]

More great NCAA-related journalism

There must be something in the water in NCAA Journalism Land, because suddenly there's a whole raft of well-reasoned and well-written treatises coming out as the 2011 season gets underway. It started with Spencer Hall from the EDSBS blog, with a great piece that I excerpted here, and now Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch has chimed in with a long-form journalism piece for The Atlantic that is exceptionally well-crafted and incredibly damning, even if it sheds little new light on the topic.

Yes, Branch's piece is essentially an example of the very journalism that Hall railed against in his EDSBS piece ("We know this. This is not news. Please stop acting like it is. That's very ingenious that in the bombed-out church of football, you have figured out that there is no God, and someone is running out the door with the coffers."), but that doesn't make it any less a brilliant piece of writing. Read the Branch piece, then go back and read the Hall piece, and consider yourself fully versed on the world of collegiate athletics. What you choose to do from there is, of course, up to you--I just think it's valuable to be well-informed.

Yes, the Branch piece is long (if you don't like Grantland, you won't like this piece), but I insist that it's worth a read. At the very least, you can read the Deadspin Cliff Notes of it, if you're feeling lazy. But know that if you skip the real thing, you're missing out on gems like this (which, incidentally, is the article's lead):

“I'm not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”

Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers—among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.

“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

William Friday, a former president of North Carolina’s university system, still winces at the memory. “Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” he recalled recently. “I never will forget it.”

Yikes. That's one of the greatest takedowns in history, and it takes huge balls to look a group of powerful people in the eye and call them out like that. But then, it's easy to talk tough when you know you're right.

[The Atlantic]
(h/t Deadspin)

Excellent journalism

Since I'm always harping on bad journalism, I try my best to also salute good journalism when I see it. Enter Spencer Hall from the Every Day Should Be Saturday blog, with one of the most level-headed views on collegiate football that I've ever read.

I, like many others, spend a lot of time harping on what's wrong with college sports, which frankly isn't hard to notice. It's not exactly a well-kept secret that the NCAA is largely built on a lie of "amateurism", and Hall asks so what? Does it make watching college football any less enjoyable, or does it add anything valuable to the experience to recognize that it's at least in part a fraud? If anything, it cheapens it. But I'll step away here and leave the rest to Spencer. I'll excerpt it in part, but I highly suggest you take the time to read the whole thing. I found it to be somewhat uplifting in a strange, counter-intuitive way.

People like to say this is a fraud. They like to say it a lot. It's easy, because there is a fine, solid skein of truth to it. The world is filled with misdirected companies, banana stands that took a wrong turn, countries demarcated with borders drawn by tipsy colonials thousands of miles away. The entire state of Florida is a real estate scam no one ever bothered to stop. Georgia was and possibly still is a debtor's colony. The United States' largest and most populous state sits between wildfires and a fault line capable of cracking the state's inhabitable land into its own island in a matter of hours. Large tracts of the Western United States came from Mexico's attic. We hope they don't want it back any time soon.

There are people--con artists, visionaries, frauds, hucksters, geniuses, the mad, the clueless and monied--who leave in their wake elaborate, ambitious fakes. You call the aftermath "home," or your town, or your nation. A large chunk of your experience as a person involves elements created with the worst of intentions: fraud, the peculiar delusions of power, or desperate tax evasion writ large on the landscape in the form of homes, shops, and a long flight from the responsibilities of abandoned lives.

Sometimes they leave you with a state. Sometimes they leave you with a sport.

He continues:

There is no one in charge in college football. There likely never will be. One lie leading to another forms the bridge the present takes to the future, and your steps don't lie: it feels as solid as truth, and holds up for far longer in some cases.

The editing matters so much here. You can say the sport is rife with filth, and you would be right. The negligent policemen of the sport strike intermittently at thieves. One side makes up the law as they go while the other politiely ignores it. Bowl games grease the palms of venal public officials. Television networks buy off longtime allies and reconstruct the map as they fit, as drunken in their excesses as the mustachioed cartographers of any careless empire. Players steal what they can when they can. Coaches do the same, but to much greater effect.

We know this. This is not news. Please stop acting like it is. That's very ingenious that in the bombed-out church of football, you have figured out that there is no God, and someone is running out the door with the coffers. The only intrigue is in the variation, not in the repeated exaggerated reminders that this is a sport of charlatans, sweathouse labor conditions, and a thousand dodges behind the shield of amateurism.

It's somewhat strange to be (indirectly) called out in this manner, and yet by the end of Hall's article I'm left feeling oddly liberated. That's the true genius of Hall's piece--that it finds hope in desolation, and entertainment amid corruption.

Yes, college sports are largely built on fraud, and we all ultimately know this. We similarly all knew that Mark McGwire was on performance-enhancing drugs as he chased Roger Maris' record, but we really didn't care. It wasn't the point. In a world full of bad news, sports can always be an escape--we need them to be an escape. We don't want or celebrate anyone pulling back the curtain to show us that it, too, is a fraud. Most of us would rather go along enjoying the lie, and as a result we can either join the lie or just look elsewhere for our entertainment and escapes.

Excellent writing, Spencer. Go 'Hoos.

[Every Day Should Be Saturday]  
(h/t Deadspin)

Clip of the Week

Well, The Red Cowboy may or may not have stolen my Clip of the Week this morning... he'll never know for sure what I intended to do here today, so I'll just let this public shaming make him feel bad about himself and proceed.

Luckily, I've always got a few tricks up my sleeve for this most cherished of weekly posting traditions, so I've got some options at my disposal. The cubed halfpipe is fantastic, but so is this awesome living music video from the people of Grand Rapids, MI--a big "eff you" response to the Newsweek writers who referred to Grand Rapids as a "dying city". Amazing coordination and a cool concept. I also considered posting this video about... good lord, what is that thing?... but, no.

Ultimately, I'm a big homer when it comes to sports (not as big as John Sterling, but pretty big), and it's not every day that the home team brings home a title. So while I may not be the biggest lacrosse fan in the world, and I'd trade 5 lacrosse championships for one College World Series title (the pursuit starts tomorrow), I have to give some recognition to the Virginia Lacrosse team for this most unexpected of national championships.



To say that the UVA lacrosse team has had a strange last 12 months would be an extreme understatement. After last May's murder of women's lacrosse player Yeardley Love--apparently at the hand of men's lacrosse player George Huguely--both programs were thrown into disarray.

The men's team put in place some fairly strict team rules--with the goal of rehabilitating its image and making sure nothing similar ever happened again--and then stood by those rules when two of the team's best players violated them, kicking them off the team. In doing so, the team immediately went from favorite to underdog, but did so knowing that it was placing team unity and solidarity above all else.

Apparently, their gamble paid off, and the team deserves a significant amount of credit for their actions. Many (or most) of the players on the team deserve no blame whatsoever for what happened last year between Huguely and Love, but they nevertheless recognized the need to step up and lay down the law.

It's fairly amazing to see the last 12 months of turmoil end in triumph, and I applaud the players who saw the value in doing things the right way, regardless of the likely outcomes. Congrats to them.