Hitler, John Junker, DeLoss Dodds, Mike Brown ... Arthur Blank

This one is from last week, but it was a theme that I had been considering for quite a while.  Here is the conclusion:

I mention all of this as a cautionary tale for the Falcons. The local professional football franchise is seeking to replace the Georgia Dome - a facility that is only twenty years old and is a perfectly good place to watch a football game - with a retractable roof facility. The price tag for the new stadium is estimated at $948 million, although that seems to be a conservative estimate. Additionally, the only funding source listed so far has been a hotel/motel tax. The remaining funding is undetermined, but could very well come in the form of either additional tax revenue or in the form of charging fans more for the privilege of supporting the local team through PSLs and higher ticket prices.

I feel leery about any analogy that has Mike Brown and Arthur Blank in a sequence. Mr. Blank is widely popular in Atlanta for a variety of reasons, two of which are his various philanthropic endeavors and his generally good stewardship of the Falcons. That said, the Falcons risk the same sort of backlash that the bowls, Texas, and Bengals have all seen for pushing their position too hard. A new Falcons stadium promises little or nothing for an average fan, save for fewer seats, higher ticket prices, and the opportunity cost involved with $300 million in tax revenue going for a private business as opposed to schools, police, and other public services. The Falcons rely on the local community for much of their revenue. They ought to consider that fact when pushing for an unnecessary new stadium.

Arthur Blank faces an interesting quandary.  Mike Brown has no reputation to protect, either in Cincinnati or elsewhere.  The fact that the Cincinnati Bengals remain in the NFL despite decades of miserly mismanagement is a testament to the cartel nature of the league, one free from the competitive pressures that the possibility of relegation creates in the rest of the world.  Brown does not care about his reputation locally, so he has no issue driving a hard bargain with his city and county and then turning a deaf ear when the effects of that bargain affect the services that the local government can provide. 

Blank, on the other hand, has a sterling reputation in Atlanta.  His commercial creation - Home Depot - is generally popular, as are his philanthropic endeavors.  He has done a good job as the owner of the Falcons.  Moreover, he simply has a pleasant demeanor because he smiles and speaks well.  If I were casting a movie and wanted to fill the role of doting grandfather, I would pick someone who looks and acts like Blank.  Because of that reputation, Blank cannot credibly make the threat that would get him a new stadium: "give me this or I'll move the team."  He has too much to lose if he becomes the person known as the guy who killed professional football in Atlanta, a city that loves the sport.  This positive reputation works against him.

That last paragraph, by the way, can operate as a criticism of Liberty Media and Atlanta Spirit.  Whereas Blank has roots in the community and therefore wants the Falcons to do well to enhance his local reputation, Liberty Media, as an out-of-state media company, has no such interest.  Nor does Atlanta Spirit, which (at least in terms of ownership share) is predominantly composed of individuals from out-of-state.

Confronting my Feelings on the Hawks

Here's my latest at SB Nation, trying to explain why I can't get as excited as I should about the Hawks' surprisingly solid season.  As usual, I start babbling about sample sizes:

This is an instance where my sports ideology conflicts with my self-interest as a fan. My favorite sports are college football and European club soccer. One of the reasons for these preferences is the fact that these sports have meaningful regular seasons. College football's two-team playoff puts a premium on winning regular season games. In Europe, domestic championships are decided in the fairest way possible: each team plays each other team home and away and the team with the best record at the end is the winner.

The NBA doesn't have this structure. It has the conventional American pro sports model that annoys me: a long regular season, followed by a reset button and then a short tournament during which the long regular season is a total afterthought. However, because: (1) home court advantage matters so much; and (2) the better team tends to win in basketball because the large number of possessions reduces variance, the NBA doesn't lend itself to upsets. If my problem with the NFL and MLB is that undeserving teams like the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Giants can win multiple championships after merely decent regular seasons, then I should like the NBA. Even on the rare occasions where the NBA produces a surprise champion like Dallas last year, that team is usually a perennial contender that finally broke through from a slightly lower seed.

The NBA is pretty good at crowning a deserving champion, so where does that leave the Hawks? With the Braves and Falcons, we can be excited when they go into the playoffs because the MLB and NFL playoffs have turned into lotteries. The Hawks aren't buying a lottery ticket so much as they are facing a firing squad. As someone who tries to value the big sample over the small one, I should be enjoying the Hawks' solid regular season, but in a league where regular season success is dismissed, I find it hard to step outside of this mindset. Reduced to focusing on the postseason, I try to imagine a Black Swan world of highly improbable events, but with the Hawks, it is hard to make myself believe.

One factor that I didn't mention because it's somewhat trite is that I'm at the stage of life where I don't have as much leisure time as I used to.  For example, I got home yesterday at seven, had dinner with the wife and kids, helped give the boys their bath, read books to the younger, more rambunctious version of B&B Jr., and then had about an hour of free time before going to sleep.  I decided to watch Benfica-Chelsea instead of the Hawks game.  In my younger days, I would have had time for both.  In this instance, I chose to watch a game that had more riding on it.

Catching Up

Sorry for the lack of content in recent weeks, but between work and my posts at SB Nation's Atlanta site, time has been tight.  For those of you who don't visit the Atlanta page on a daily basis, hang your heads in shame ... and then click on the tab that I added to the right that goes directly to my profile there.  That has a fill list of what I have been posting, both in shorter and longer form.  Some highlights from the last few weeks:

My predictable gloating over the Saints' little bounty issue:

The last parallel between the Ohio State and New Orleans scandals is that both relate to the most pressing issues facing their respective sports. College football has been plagued in recent months with significant scandals involving major programs and improper benefits, leading many to question the continued viability of a sport that is built on a fiction. For instance, the 2010 national title game was contested between a team whose star quarterback's father was trying to sell his son to the highest bidder and an opponent currently under investigation for paying a runner in Texas to direct players to Eugene.

The biggest issue facing the NFL is the long-term health impact of the sport, a dilemma that leads to a plausible scenario in which the NFL no longer exists. Through a combination of: (1) the school firing its head coach and suspending several of its best players; and (2) the NCAA tacking on a one-year bowl ban, Ohio State has essentially had to give up two football seasons. That's the message that the NCAA and its members have to send to deter money finding its way to the players who generate it.

I don't pretend to know what is in Roger Goodell's holster in terms of potential punishments, but it is clear that he is going to have to bring the hammer down because the participation of Saints' coaches in the team's bounty system and the acquiescence of the head coach and general manager in that system touches on the biggest problem facing the league. Goodell has to ensure that current and future authority figures in the league see what happened to the Saints and take the lesson that they have to stamp out incentives to injure opposing players.

This is one of those instances where I am quite happy that Roger Goodell has given himself untrammeled power to punish league figures who "damage the shield," to quote that preposterous phrase that was bandied about by authority worshipers when Goodell was disciplining Ben Roethlisberger for tawdry conduct that did not lead to criminal charges.  Let's see him use that power when the wrongdoers are management instead of labor.  That, after all, is the big issue with the Saints scandal.  It's not that the Saints had a bounty system, as that appears to be something that happens every now and again in the NFL.  It's that this appears to be the first instance in which a defensive coordinator, a head coach, and a general manager all either participated or at least knew about the scheme and did nothing.

My predictable counter to Forbes labeling Atlanta as the most miserable sports city in America:

Forbes would never permit this terrible reasoning when evaluating companies. Financial reporting is (at least theoretically) based on reviewing the entirety of a company's record to make the best evaluations possible. That same rigor apparently does not apply to sports analysis, where we define disappointment based on a "small sample size important; big sample size unimportant" framework.

The point of sports is to provide us with entertainment. We all want an escape from the ennui of the working world and games provide us with exactly that. A team like the Braves during their heyday provided great entertainment, as they consistently won more than they lost. Day after day, we could rely on the Braves to make us happy by beating down the rest of the NL East. Losing a playoff series was a sad experience, but was it enough to overwhelm six months of happiness? No.

Personally, this has been a pretty good period to be an Atlanta sports fan.  How many other times in city history can we say that two of our teams - the Hawks and Falcons - are playoff regulars and the third - the Braves - are at least on the cusp and have a roster full of promising young players.  Maybe my expectations were beaten down by two of the city's three teams being so bad in the 80s when I was growing up, but this seems fine to me.  It's unfortunate that the Hawks have reached their ceiling at the second round of the playoffs and the Falcons can't win a playoff game, but as between playoff disappointment and finishing in last place every year, I'll take the former.

I also finished a post that I've been meaning to write for weeks on the decline of the ACC as a basketball conference.  I offered four potential explanations: conference expansion, bad coaches, the Big Dance killing the regular season, and the possibility that we are just seeing a statistical blip.  The decline of the ACC stands out for me because of the juxtaposition with SEC football.  The latter is as strong as ever, as population trends have dovetailed with the ability of athletic departments to monetize fan passion - and thereby build facilities and hire coaches that create a recruiting advantage - to put the SEC on top of college football.  Those same shifts in population should be helping the ACC in basketball, but they aren't.  That leads to a chicken-egg question: is fan intensity down in the ACC because the product is weaker or is the product weaker because fan intensity is down?

 

Shorties from Last Week

Two shorter offerings from the past two weeks…

One was an analogy between Atlanta and Paris as sports cities, based on the fact that both are full of transplants:

Like Paris, Atlanta can be described as a city where a good portion of the populace comes from elsewhere, seeking better social and economic opportunities. Also like Paris, Atlanta sports fans are more attracted to the spectacle that the local teams can sometimes provide than we are creatures of habit, going to games because that's what they have always done. When the Braves came out of nowhere to contend in 1991, Fulton County Stadium was home to the spectacle, especially with the Tomahawk Chop being new and exciting. When Mike Vick hit the scene, the Georgia Dome was home to the spectacle, as Vick was the most exciting player that most of us had ever seen. To a lesser extent, the Hawks had the same attraction when Dominique was in his prime. For a hot minute, the Thrashers provided a spectacle when Heatley and Kovalchuk were electric. In short, we need a reason to go.

Naturally, it ended with a shot at Bill Simmons for making excuses on behalf of Pats fans that he would never make for Atlanta or other sports markets in the Sunbelt.  Speaking of Simmons, I strongly recommend the piece from the Classical about PSG.  It cites Simmons’ podcast with the CEO of Ticketmaster regarding the steps that American sports teams are taking to attract casual fans by making the gameday experience as personal as possible.  Of course, it also attacks Simmons for taking a very 1% view of the sports experience, but in this respect, I think that the author underestimates the ubiquity of flat-screen TVs.  Generally speaking, if you can get past the Nader-ite tangents (I especially love the fact that the whole piece is built around a defense of fan culture at PSG, when one of the two galaxies of fan associations – the Virage Boulogne – is a right-wing, all-white, sometimes ractis entity), it’s a fascinating look at the changes at PSG, ostensibly to deal with fan disputes.  There are some very interesting political parallels along the lines of “what do we sacrifice when we place security uber alles?”  I almost linked the piece again when I was writing about SEC scheduling, as there is a parallel to be made in terms of the management of sports teams viewing consumers as nothing more than walking wallets who will always support their teams, regardless of how poorly the fans are treated.

The second piece was a complaint about sports talk radio that will sound very familiar to those of you who have been reading this blog for a while.  The gripe, as usual, was reducing sports discussion to etiquette:

The discussion on 680 was mostly about the Super Bowl, but there was some attempt to discuss recruiting, namely the fact that the same teams are on top of the recruiting rankings every year. The discussion wasn't especially interesting, but at least the effort was there. The discussion on 790 was whether it is appropriate for high school stars to announce their college decisions in press conferences.

This is exactly what drives me crazy about sports talk radio in general and Mayhem in the AM specifically: the devolution of sports discussion to simplistic moral judgments. This discussion yesterday was about athletes being jerks when they (or their entourages) don't tip appropriately. The discussion this morning was another foray into the world of deciding what behavior is acceptable for athletes. My commute is generally about 20 minutes; I don't need to spend it listening to three middle-aged guys doing a bad imitation of Judith Martin. Any idiot can judge someone else's behavior. Before my commute was half done, I had started listening to The Solid Verbal podcast after muttering to myself "what the hell took me so long?" Oddly enough, the discussion was about actual topics relating to recruiting.

My tolerance for sports talk radio waxes and wanes.  During football season, I listen because there is some coverage of the games that interest me.  Later in the season, it was enjoyable listening to Steak Shapiro overrate the Falcons yet again.  (Listening to him discuss the Falcons is like surveying the emotions of a small boy during movie previews.)  With football done, I am less likely to listen because the local shows are going to put even more emphasis of schtick.

Guys, The Roadblocks on 316 Are Not Necessary

I took a quick run this morning at the rumor that the Falcons are interested in Todd Grantham.  I guess if you are replacing one former Georgia defensive coordinator, you might as well do so by making another one, right?  Aside from the facts that Grantham's scheme is a bad fit for the Falcons' personnel and the team has neither the draft picks nor the cap space to re-tool in the offseason, I opined that there is no way in hell that Arthur Blank is going to piss off the significant portion of his fan base that spends their Saturdays barking:

A significant portion of the Falcons' fan base is comprised of Georgia fans. How exactly do we think that Georgia fans would react to losing their now-beloved defensive coordinator to the local pro football collective right before a season in which Georgia will be preseason top ten and expected to win the East and challenge for the SEC title? Arthur Blank didn't get to where he is by angering his customers. It would make a lot more sense for him to back the Brinks truck up to Steve Spagnuolo's house so the Falcons can sell their fans on the fact that they hired a Super Bowl-winning defensive coordinator.

So no, I don't think that this is happening.  In fact, I seriously doubt that the Falcons even considered it beyond "yeah, that would be a terrible idea."

If the Falcons wanted to do a change of scheme, how about the Air Raid?  It's almost certainly too radical for a winning team, but if some teams are going to move towards the spread 'n' shred, then why wouldn't someone try the other offense that is ripping up college football?  It's not like the run 'n' shoot was a resounding failure in the NFL.

Customary Invective About New York

You didn't really think that I would let a week like this go by without a paragraph on my love for New York sports culture, did you? 

Adrift on a sea of potential ennui, there is one subject that in my experience unites Atlanta sports fans: we hate New York teams. I've yet to encounter a non-Big Apple transplant Atlantan who views the teams from New York with anything but contempt. When their teams come to our venues, we get overrun with loutish, gold chain-festooned former New Yorkers who have John Franco mustaches with no shred of irony and who cheer lustily for teams from a city that they fled because they didn't want to pay $3,000 per month for 500 square feet. When we turn on the TV, we get inundated with news about their teams as if they are our teams. Their shills in the media have completely appropriated baseball history as being the story about New York teams and their games against one another or the Red Sox. Nothing will quite bring out passion quite like being dismissed as a bystander.

Unfortunately, the post then deals with reality, which is that Atlanta teams have a terrible history against New York teams in the postseason.  I missed an opportunity to make a joke about Rutgers football not being in a position to play the Dawgs in a bowl game.  Sorry about that.

Once Every Eight Years...

Michigan beats Ohio State and I agree with a "trade for this superstar" column from Jeff Schultz.  In this case, he wants the Hawks to acquire Dwight Howard.  His reasoning is that Howard is not going to re-sign with the Magic, so the Hawks should offer that the Magic pick any two players for Howard.  Schultz suggests scenarios that would involve Joe Johnson, which made me laugh out loud.  Otis Smith may not be the GM in the NBA, but having signed one of the worst deals in the league to acquire Rashard Lewis and then having to trade that stinker of a deal for the disaster that is the Gilbert Arenas contract, I seriously doubt that he is going to give a second thought to acquiring a similarly terrible deal.  The Joe Johnson contract was a terrible idea when it was signed and only looked worse last year as Johnson's scoring regressed (although John Hollinger points out that Johnson's reduced numbers were the result of fewer minutes and a slump shooting threes that does not seem repeatable($)).

Thorpe would be committing GM malpractice if he touched Johnson's deal, so the trade would almost have to be Howard for Al Horford and Josh Smith.  Rick Sund could only make the deal if he had the assurance that Howard is going to sign a long-term contract, but if Howard expresses interest in coming home and staying, then the trade makes sense.  It solves the eternal issue for the Hawks, which is that their two best front-court players are both natural power forwards.  (Hopefully, Thorpe won't notice that he's trading for that problem, or at a minimum, Smith and Horford - overlapping skills and all - are the best he can do in terms of a return for Howard.  Wouldn't he prefer that deal to one centered around Andrew Bynum and his various ailments?)  It also reboots the team, which is a major need right now.  Atlanta Spirit is in desperate need of something to change the narrative.  They are selling a team that has reached its absolute apex: the second round of the playoffs.  They are also the group that killed hockey in Atlanta.  Faced with the prospect of trotting out the same product to lukewarm response, they would love an energizing, marketable star.  There's one in Orlando.

The big question is whether Howard wants to come and stay.  To make his case, Schultz cites a New York Times piece on Atlanta's increasing prominence as a center of Black culture as a reason why Howard might come here as opposed to New York or Los Angeles.  I hope that Schultz is right about this, but Atlanta has had the Black Hollywood nickname for a long time without becoming a preferred destination for NBA players.  We have neither a winning tradition, nor a respected ownership group.  Additionally, Howard has played against the Hawks in the playoffs in front of less-than-full houses.  If fan intensity matters to him, then he isn't coming.

Additionally, Howard has to be thinking that the biggest obstacle to gaining a higher Q-rating is that he hasn't won a championship and has only made the Finals once.  He needs to go somewhere where he will win.  His issue in Orlando is the supporting cast.  Will it make sense for him to come here to play with Jeff Teague (a player whose promise is based on a six-game series against the Bulls last year), Joe Johnson (holder of one of the worst contracts in the NBA), Marvin Williams (average small forward who escapes being non-descript only because of his Draft position and the careers of the players taken after him), and a power forward to be named later?  And then you add in the fact that Atlanta Spirit has expressed an aversion to paying the luxury tax and in light of the team's revenues, they can't really be blamed, can they?  The end game could well be that Thorpe wants to send Howard to Atlanta, but can't make the trade happen because Howard refuses to agree to a potential extension with the Hawks.

In sum, I agree with Schultz's position, but the more I think about it, the more unrealistic it looks.

Is Georgia Tech Even Grant Field’s Team?

Both Georgia and Georgia Tech fans will read Sippin’ on Purple’s post on how Michigan fans took over Ryan Field on Saturday night and find it immediately familiar.  A college football program – one from a small-ish (by BCS conference standards), highly selective school whose graduates tend to migrate all over the country after graduation - has trouble selling tickets and thus sees visiting hordes of fans swarm like locusts when their team visits.  Nope, we aren’t familiar with any scenarios like that.  And the post also mentions Boston College, which has similar attendance issues.  Factor in the issues that Miami, Tulane, UCLA, and Pitt have and you have a consistent pattern in college football: urban programs struggle to draw.

In light of that context, Georgia Tech deserves some credit for taking the right approach to putting butts in the seats.  The most important issue for an urban college football program is to win.  As Sippin’ on Purple points out, Northwestern drew in the mid-90s when Gary Barnett’s teams were winning back-to-back Big Ten titles and Boston College drew when Doug Flutie won the Heisman and led BC to the Cotton Bowl in 1984.  USC certainly illustrates this point, as well.  When they win, they sell out.  When they don’t win, you get to see what the Coliseum looks like half-empty.  TCU’s success under Gary Patterson has allowed them to draw well enough to merit an invitation from the Big XII.  Georgia Tech has won under Paul Johnson, which has put them in position to sell tickets.

The second-most important issue for an urban college football program is to play with style.  Georgia doesn’t need to worry about playing exciting football because Dawg fans are going to pack Sanford Stadium and various road venues regardless.  Thus, wins like the vanilla asphyxiations of Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and Tennessee are perfectly acceptable.  Those type of wins would be more problematic for Georgia Tech.  Like Buzz Lightyear, the Jackets need to fall with style.*  The fact that the Jackets are leading the nation in yards per play is relevant.  It’s not just a means to the end of winning football games; it is an end by itself.  Even when Georgia Tech won under Chan Gailey, their teams were hard to watch.  Paul Johnson makes sense for them because his teams can score points.  That is a necessity for the Jackets to have an actual homefield advantage.

* – This is what happens when you have two small boys.  Just wait for the extended analogy between the flex option and the turntable at Tidmouth Sheds.

Nerd Alert

If you haven't figured it out yet, I like numbers. I get annoyed when mainstream sports analysis either dismisses statistical analysis as the province of nerds who never put on pads or uses the wrong numbers to try to make a point. Part of what is great about sports is that results can be quantified and compared, so we have have a more rational discussion about the best college football team in a given year as compared to the best movie or TV show. That said, there are limitations to statistical analysis. As SABR afficianados will tell you themselves, the appropriate use of stats is to complement scouting, not to replace it. Ideally, the numbers tell us what our eyes are already communicating. If a number seems totally out of whack with reality, then it is time to question the number.

That is exactly what is going on with Nate Silver's attempt to quantify the size of college football fan bases. I love Silver's writing on politics and baseball, but you can tell from his post that he is not a college football fan. If he were, then he would know that he needs to go back to the drawing board when his methodology produces a conclusion that Georgia Tech has 1,664,088 fans, while Georgia has only 1,098,957 fans. Anyone who follows college football in this market (and according to Silver's number, Atlanta has more college football fans than any other city in the country, save New York, which is a very confusing argument for the "Atlanta is the worst sports town in America" crowd) immediately knows that this number is wrong. Georgia sells out every game in a 90,000 seat venue, regardless of opponent. Georgia Tech struggles to fill a 50,000 seat stadium unless the opponent brings fans. Georgia has a fan base that will make massive donations in order to have the right to buy tickets; Georgia Tech has to offer ticket packages to get casual fans in the door. Georgia's student body is twice as big and the Dawgs also command lots more support from residents of the state who never went to college.

So how does Silver make his mistake? Look at his inputs. First, he is looking at the top 210 TV markets. In Georgia, that covers Atlanta, Savannah, Augusta, Macon, Columbus, and Albany. That leaves a lot of the state unmeasured. The list of TV markets linked by Silver puts the population of those six cities at about 3.6M in a state of over 9M people. If I were to start surveying people in Cordele, Dublin, or Luthersville, I'd guess that I'd find a lot more Dawg fans than I would Tech fans. College football is a very popular sport in rural areas, so Silver is missing out on a big piece of the sample by looking at TV markets.

Working from only a portion of the pie, Silver then relies on Google search traffic and an online survey of college football fans to divide up the 210 TV markets. It's here that Georgia fans' stereotype of Tech fans as computer geeks really kicks in. As my friend Bob shouted at some Tech fans during our unsuccessful attempts to scalp tickets to the 1999 Tech-Georgia game, why don't you download yourselves a beer! Silver is doing the best he can to use publicly-available data so as to replicate the sort of market analyses that the major conferences are doing in making realignment decisions, but there are holes here. Any online measure of fan support is going to skew urban and white collar. Maybe that's how you end up concluding that Miami has a bigger fan base than Florida State. Silver does try to limit the damage by including revenue information, but again, this will tend to favor a fan base like Georgia Tech's that is small and wealthy. It's a compliment to Tech as an institution that it produces successful graduates, but it is a limiting factor when we are trying to look at the number of eyeballs watching the Jackets play North Carolina and the Dawgs play Tennessee.  Likewise, Silver's methodology will tend to overrate the size of Auburn's fan base and underrate the size of Alabama's because there are a bevy of Harvey Updykes out there who don't live in urban areas and don't respond to online surveys, but instead express their love of the Tide by amateur efforts at horticulture and then by calling the Finebaum Show to brag.

The last point to be made here is that Silver is looking at the size of fan bases as being the dominant factor in realignment.  There's no doubt that demographics matter, but there are other considerations.  Take branding as an example.  The SEC is the best college football TV product for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the games are played in stadia packed with fans screaming their heads off for three hours.  That intensity comes across on the tube.  I wrote about this issue during the winter in making an analogy between what the English Premier League has achieved worldwide and what the NHL could learn from the EPL:

Tim Vickery made a great point on the World Football Phone-in a few weeks ago regarding coverage of futbol in Brazil and the point applies to the NHL. He was talking about the discussions in England regarding whether the new tenant of the London Olympic Stadium, either Spurs or West Ham, will tear out the track when one of the clubs moves in after the Olympics. In the process of making the point that having a running track kills the atmosphere for a match, he said that Brazilian TV companies can't get enough of the English Premier League in large part because the atmosphere is so good. The fans are screaming and singing the whole time and significantly, they are close to the action, so the cameras can pick up the facial reactions of the fans when goals go in.


Vickery's point has applicability to the NHL, specifically as an illustration of yet another way in which Gary Bettman has got things all wrong. He expanded hockey throughout the Sunbelt because of the size of the markets here. In the process of doing so, he reduced the value of the NHL as a TV property. Hockey already struggles on TV because it's hard to follow the puck. The sport needs to make up for this shortcoming in other ways. One such way is passion from the fans. Hockey fans tend to be screamers, especially in places where the game has deep roots. Leaving aside the fact that I live in Atlanta and want our city to have an NHL team, what is going to be more appealing to an average viewer: a playoff game in a beautiful, but somewhat sterile arena in Atlanta or Nashville or the same game played in front of crazy fans who live and breathe the game in Quebec City or Winnipeg? The NHL already has something of a spectacle problem by virtue of iconic franchises leaving their great old arenas for new, less interesting venues. (Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, and Boston all come to mind; Hockey Night in Canada just isn't the same without Maple Leaf Gardens. Now, if you'll excuse me, there are some kids on my lawn who require shooing.) The league adds to the problem by moving its product outside of its sweet spot.

Apply this reasoning to the SEC potentially adding West Virginia as team 14.  West Virginia is a small, rural, poor state.  In terms of eyeballs, it is not worth adding.  However, if you imagine the scenes when Alabama and Florida go there for games, you can see the SEC adding to its EPL-style brand.  Hell, just watch what happens when LSU arrives this weekend.  Now, the question that Mike Slive & Company have to be asking themselves is whether their brand really needs cementing.  Isn't the SEC going to be the same, outstanding TV product without West Virginia?  Maybe, but there has to be a way to figure out the value of further salting away the perception of the SEC as the best TV product for fansanity. 
 

Steak Shapiro Knows How You Should Feel

One of the virtues of writing for a major newspaper as opposed to an eclectic (read: marginal) blog in the hinterlands of the Internet is that a writer can gauge how a fan base is feeling at a given time.  Because of his position, Mark Bradley gets to interact with tens of thousands of Atlanta sports fans by e-mail, Twitter, and the comments sections of his articles.  So, when Bradley writes that his sense is that Falcons fans aren't especially excited for the upcoming season, he is making an interesting observation.  I can watch the same games that Bradley does and come to my own conclusions as to what I just saw.  I can’t, however, claim to have my finger on the pulse of how Atlanta fans are feeling about a given issue. Bradley can, so when he says that Falcons fans don’t seem as excited about the upcoming season as one would expect for a team that just went 13-3, he is performing a useful function.

Based on the emotionally incontinent* reaction of Steak Shapiro, we should feel differently.  It was hard to tell from his rant whether Shapiro is mad with Bradley for reaching an incorrect conclusion (although, this being sports talk radio, Shapiro didn’t offer any evidence for his assertion) or whether he is mad at Falcons fans for feeling this way.  The claim appeared to be something along the lines of “the franchise is in much better shape than it was before, so how can you people not be fired up!?!  Have I mentioned that we are the new home of the Falcons?”  (I’m not pretending to be quoting him directly.)  Well, yeah, but saying that the franchise is exceeding its historical norm is damning with faint praise. 

* – I stole that term from Graham Hunter, who used it to describe Jose Mourinho.

I found the rant to be remarkably lacking in self-awareness for a couple reasons.  First, Shapiro was mockingly citing the names of the fans that Bradley cited in the article.  Hello, you’re a sports talk radio host!  Your whole format is based on giving a voice to average fans.**  The implication of your criticism that Bradley put quotes from Average Joes on the front cover of the paper is that a newspaper is a more legitimate format than sports talk radio and should not reduce itself to quoting the ticket-buying proletariat.  Second, your whole view of the sports world is buzz-based.*  Is buzz only legitimate when you agree with it?  When the buzz isn’t against your commercial interests?

* – Man, it’s odd to read what I wrote six years ago and say to myself that I was once an unapologetic fan of the format.  I guess that was the age before podcasts.  

** – And for f***’s sake, please stop referring to commenters on AJC articles as “bloggers.”  The people who call your station are not hosts or analysts, so why would you make the equivalent mistake about people using the Internet?

Personally, I’m not overly excited about the Falcons season for two main reasons.  First, my two loves are college football and European soccer and both are starting their seasons at the same time as the Falcons.  With a finite amount of intellectual and emotional energy, thinking about the Falcons’ pass rush comes in behind Al Borges designing an offense for Denard Robinson, the prospect of Isaiah Crowell tearing through holes, and Cesc and Alexis Sanchez fitting into the best XI in the world.  I’m unusual in liking soccer so much, but I am hardly unusual in this market in thinking that the NFL is dessert after the main course is served on Saturday.  That’s how this market operates.  Second, my view is that the Falcons were a mirage last year, a nine- or ten-win team masquerading as a 13-win team.  I doubt that there is wide-spread belief that the Falcons were not a great team last year because of their yards-per-play margin, but I do suspect that there is a general sense that the team wasn’t as good as its record.  Fans in this market watch enough NFL to know that there are often teams that have great records in a given year and then regress to the mean.  I would guess that the Falcons fan base is taking a wait-and-see approach because they remember that at this time last year, the Vikings and Cowboys were coming off of seasons where they were the second- and third-best teams in the NFC.  Those teams both finished 6-10 in 2010.  But why should historical memory get in the way of a good buzz?

And one last, related point: it’s hilarious to me to listen to a sports talk radio host try to use the “don’t overrate the importance of a small sample size playoff over the large sample size regular season” argument when it suits his purposes.  Shapiro constantly rants about the fact that there is no playoff in college football.  He killed the Braves for their postseason failures in the first part of the Aughts.  Now, his personal affection for the Falcons and the people who run the franchise has caused him to see the light that putting all importance on playoff results might not be the most rational way to evaluate a team or a season. 

An Ode to Jonny Venters

Three thoughts triggered by this article in the Baseball Prospectus about Jonny Venters($):

1. The Braves should hold a parade down Peachtree Street for whoever made the decision to convert Venters into a reliever and convinced him to drop everything but his sinker and slider:

While it might be interesting to look forward two years and speculate about what kind of money Venters could make in arbitration, it is also instructive to turn the clock back two years. In 2009, Venters was promoted to Triple-A Gwinnett after making 12 starts for Double-A Mississippi to begin the season. He posted a 5.62 ERA in 17 starts and 91 1/3 inning,s as International League hitters averaged 10.1 hits per nine innings. Venters also walked 4.1 per nine while striking out just 5.7, and it appeared that the Braves' 30th-round draft pick in 2003 had hit the wall.

However, the Braves decided to switch Venters to relief last year, telling him to junk his changeup and curveball and stick to a sinker/slider combination. It proved to be a wise decision, as Venters has been dominant since moving to the bullpen, averaging 94.5 mph on his sinker and 84.9 mph on his sinker (hat tip to Fangraphs), rare velocity for a left-hander. Many scouts believe that Venters has the best sinker in the game because of both its velocity and its movement.

"When I was a starter, I'd get tired and just run out of gas," Venters said. "I never really learned how to pace myself. I'd go all out on every pitch, then be dead by the fourth inning. Now, I can put everything I have into every pitch, and it's more fun for me to pitch that way."

Now, can the Braves replicate this decision three more times so we no longer have to trust games to Linebrink and Sherrill?

2. I doubt that Fredi has thought this through, but the Braves are saving themselves a lot of money by keeping Venters in the set-up role because relievers get paid for saves and Venters isn't getting a chance to save games.

3. It's fun to root for a team full of players from the region:

Venters and Kimbrel, a couple of Southerners, have become best friends. Venters hails from Altamonte Springs, Fla., and Kimbrel has his roots in Huntsville, Ala. Because of that friendship, Venters says he is not concerned about who generates more publicity.

"Craig and I have just a great relationship," Venters said. "We don't really care who has what role. It's just awesome for us two to be pitching together late in the game. Craig is a great kid, and we have a lot of fun. We laugh a lot down in the bullpen and have a good time until it's time to get serious and go to work."

With Venters, Kimbrel, Heyward, Chipper, Hudson, Minor, McCann, and Uggla, this team has a connection to the region that supports them, unlike some other teams in markets that allegedly love baseball a lot more than this one.

Atlanta is the Worst Sports Town Ever, Heat-Mavs Edition

In an article that is becoming an annual occurrence, Tim Tucker notes that Atlanta had the 11th highest TV ratings for the NBA Finals out of 56 metered markets.  The ten markets that finished ahead of Atlanta, you ask?

Miami-Fort Lauderdale (33.7), Dallas-Fort Worth (30.7), West Palm Beach (17.7), San Antonio (15.9), Cleveland (15.8), New Orleans (15.1), Memphis (14.5), Houston (14.5), Oklahoma City (14.4) and Chicago (13.7).

You have the markets that had finalists, followed by the home of the West’s #1 seed, the market rooting for LeBron to humiliate himself (and who says that Cleveland never wins anything?), the beaten conference finalists, a beaten conference semifinalist, and then Houston and New Orleans.  Interestingly enough, Boston, the greatest sports city in the universe (is the sarcasm coming across here?), and Los Angeles are not on the list, but the other beaten conference semifinalists – Atlanta and Memphis – are. 

This raises a point that is often missed in the discussion about “best sports towns,” which is that the discussions almost always focuses on support for specific teams instead of sports or leagues in general.  Atlanta is not super-supportive of the Hawks.  Maybe we have a right to be lukewarm on the local professional basketball collective because the team has delivered so little over the years, but the team was certainly good enough that they should not have finished 22nd in attendance this year.  That said, this is a very strong NBA market, as Atlanta consistently out-performs other NBA markets when it comes to ratings for the later rounds of the playoffs.  In short, we’re not great at supporting our own team, but we are interested in other teams.  Boston, for example, is the opposite.  Personally, I’d attribute this difference to the fact that Boston is a provincial city and Atlanta is not, but I’m a little biased in saying that.

Atlanta as a college football market is somewhat similar.  The one major program in the city limits – Georgia Tech – gets good, but not overwhelming fan support.  However, there is tremendous interest here for teams all over the Southeast, as well as a number of Big Ten programs with a large number of transplants.  (Cough.)  Thus, this is a great college football market (the TV ratings consistently back this conclusion up) without being hogwild over the Jackets.  If people outside of the market could differentiate between support for home teams and support for sports in general, then this city would have a better reputation as a sports town.

The Silver Lining

I look forward to John Hollinger articles about the Hawks because Hollinger has a statistically-oriented approach and he’s that rarest of national writers who shows more than a passing interest in the local professional basketball collective.  Hollinger is typically pessimistic realistic about the Hawks and he has written some of the best criticism of Atlanta Spirit, so it was something of a surprise to see this title to his article the morning after the Hawks took their umpteenth whuppin’ of the season, thus ending an unexpectedly interesting playoff run. 

The main focus of Hollinger’s optimism is the fact that Jeff Teague emerged in the series against the Bulls.  The prospect of playing Derrick Rose brought the best out of Teague.  Whether Teague genuinely improved this spring or this ability has always been present and the Hawks haven’t mined that talent, we’ll never know.  Hollinger describes the possibilities that Teague now provides:

In doing so, this also opens up new options for the Hawks that we hardly saw all season. Atlanta can play Teague at the point, Kirk Hinrich at shooting guard and Joe Johnson at small forward -- a look that puts a top-notch scorer, a defensive ace and a penetrating, ball-pushing point guard on the court at once. Or the Hawks can roll with a Teague-Jamal Crawford-Johnson triumvirate (if Crawford returns) on the perimeter that even the defensive-minded Bulls struggled to match up against at times.

Every since Billy Knight first assembled this team, the vision was for a young, athletic team that could get up and down the floor and score in transition.  In part, the Hawks have never been good enough defensively to make that happen, but they have also lacked the right point guard to run.  Is Teague finally that guy?

Hollinger also points out that the possible move of the Thrashers to Winnipeg could have benefits for the Hawks in two respects:

Heck, even the hockey news might be good news for the Hawks. Sure, it’s not exactly positive for a city’s sports reputation when its history entails losing franchises to both Alberta and Manitoba, but the financial constraints that have limited some of the Hawks’ dealings in recent years could perhaps ease a bit if they can (A) unload the money pit called the Thrashers and (B) eliminate some of the competition for Hawks seats. (For the record, an owner I spoke with had nothing to add beyond “we’re looking for solutions” when asked about the rumored move of the NHL’s Thrashers to Winnipeg.)

I had always thought about the potential loss of the Thrashers as a negative for Atlanta Spirit because it lowers the value of their operating rights of Philips Arena to have one major tenant instead of two, but I can see the counter.  First, Atlanta Spirit will get an infusion of cash from the sale, which gives them the ability to spend on the Hawks this off-season.*  Second, they can focus all of their energies on one team.  (Whether that’s a good thing is another matter entirely.)  Third, Philips Arena is a cashcow for concerts, so maybe having more available dates will be a net positive.  Fourth, the owners will stop bleeding money on the hockey team.  They’re bleeding money because of their own mismanagement of the Thrashers, but to paraphrase William Munny, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.  This market is big and diverse enough to support both an NBA and NHL team, but if it has to choose between the two, I’ll take the NBA.  The city has an established African-American elite and middle class rivaled only by New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and DC.  It ought to have an NBA franchise for which making it to the sixth game of the conference semifinals isn’t a massive accomplishment.

* – The difference between the Hawks and Bulls wasn’t so much in the starting fives.  Chicago had the best player on the court, but the Hawks have a more balanced lineup.  The differences came in all of the accoutrements that a spendthrift owner will buy, namely a coveted head coach and quality pieces on the bench.  If the Hawks would have signed Tom Thibodeau last summer and the Bulls would have gone for the cheap, internal option, how would this series have played out?  As a practical matter, Thibodeau wouldn’t have been a stylistic change from Mike Woodson (although he’s obviously better at coaching defense) and therefore would have been an unlikely option (not to mention the fact that the Hawks wouldn’t have had the “come coach Derrick Rose” selling point), but the point remains that the Hawks went cheap on the coach.

That was Great, Part One

I got a kick out of going for a run and listening to Bill Simmons' playoff preview podcast yesterday. Much of the discussion was about how great the Heat-Celtics and Bulls-Magic series would be in the East. Simmons was incredulous when John Hollinger gave the Hawks a chance against the Magic, even when Hollinger explained that Jason Collins gave the Hawks a chance because of his ability to get under Dwight Howard's skin. I'll admit that incredulity is the right response whenever Jason Collins is mentioned as the key to anything, but lo and behold, the regular season was not a fluke. The Hawks went 3-1 against the Magic in the season and are now up 3-1 in the playoffs.

Despite the regular season series, this playoff series is still jarring to me. The last Hawks game I attended was game three against the Magic last year. That game (combined with the resulting decisions to keep the roster intact by mortgaging the future for Joe Johnson and to promote Larry Drew to head coach) killed my affection for the team. Judging by attendance this year, I'm certainly not alone in that feeling. It's quite a turn of events to go from being swept by 101 points to being 3-1 and having been in charge for most or all of all four games. Again, I'm not the only one who has this feeling, as the crowds for games three and four have been outstanding. Hawks fans aren't consistent in our support, but if the team gives us a reason (like, say, winning game one in Orlando), we're perfectly capable of making Philips a hostile venue for a visitor.

(Related point: Joe Johnson had some nerve to criticize the fans after his woeful performance against the Magic last year. He evidently didn't learn his lesson because Ric Bucher relayed in a sideline report on Friday that Johnson told him that Johnson was hoping that there would be more Hawks fans than Magic fans at the game. I can say from first-hand experience that there were not a lot of Magic fans at the series last spring. The Magic fans might have seemed louder because it's hard to cheer when you're down 52-33 at the half.)

To me, the 180 degree reversal is down to three factors. First, as mentioned before, the Jason Collins effect is significant. Atlanta Spirit gets rightly criticized for not rounding out the roster with useful bench pieces, but Collins has proven himself to be useful against Orlando, so that's something. Second, Larry Drew's decision not to double-team Howard has been a good one. Mike Woodson had Collins available and never used him in this role, instead employing the double-teaming strategy that never worked against the Magic. Third, going from Mike Bibby to Kirk Hinrich has been a major improvement defensively. The Magic got open threes against the Hawks in part because of doubling Dwight and in part because Jameer Nelson could get into the lane at will. The latter avenue is now gone. Nelson's assist numbers in this year's series are almost the same as his numbers from last year, but his shooting percentage has dropped from .565 to .355. That seems relevant in a series in which most of the games have been tight.

Random Thoughts:

Just when I thought that I couldn't love Zaza any more, he goes and does this:



The leaning quasi-headbutt is a classic Euro soccer move. Jason Richardson never received the memo that the correct response would have been to throw himself to the floor as if hit by a cross-bow and then wait for the stretcher/blanket combo. I suspect that Zaza delivered three headbutts because he was so shocked at the lack of victim theatrics from Richardson after the first delivery. In the end, the Magic were denied their second-leading scorer for game four. The best part is that the whole fracas started because of a punk move by Howard, so the Hawks get to claim a piece of the moral high ground.

If Joe Johnson put on the worst contract-drive performance in last year's Orlando series, then Jamal Crawford is putting on one of the best. If the Hawks can re-up with Crawford for a reasonable price, then they should do so, but I suspect that the price is going too high with this performance. I suppose the decision will come down to how the Hawks finish out this series and then perform against the Bulls in round two. If the Hawks give a good account of themselves against the Bulls, then keeping the team together might make some sense. If not, then it will be clear that the Hawks simply had a hex on the Magic this year and a re-tool might be in the cards.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the Hawks either take the Bulls to the limit or actually upset them and make the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time. This ought to be a great selling point for Atlanta Spirit to get the market re-engaged with the team. On the other hand, the Hawks will have performed at a high level in the playoffs after an uninspired regular season. So how do you sell tickets for next season when the lesson from this season is that nothing matters until the team turns on the jets in April?

How to Lose a Fan Base in Three Easy Steps

1. Build your team to contend in the East, then get swept in consecutive years in the second round of the playoffs, the latter sweep by record margins.

2. After having received definitive proof that your team is not in the top tier in the conference, sign a good player to superstar money, thus ensuring that you will keep trotting out the same team that was just humiliated in the playoffs.  For good measure, fire your coach and appoint his nice guy lieutenant, on whom the team will quit within a matter of months.

3. To ensure that your fans have the message that ownership has fully committed to a fatally flawed core, lose 15 of your first 36 home games in the following season.  Make sure to include blowout losses in all of the marquee games to guarantee that your fans get the message.  You know, losses like 114-81 to the Bulls, 106-85 to the Heat, and 101-87 to the Lakers.  Throw in a 100-59 loss to the Hornets just to remind your fans that you had the chance to draft Chris Paul and didn’t take it.

I started this blog in no small part because I was going to a fair number of Hawks games and I wanted to write about them.  In other words, I’m part of the Hawks’ target audience, so if they are losing me, they have major issues.  I’ve been wondering whether I’m unique in my place in life (busy at the office, wife and two small kids, strange attachment to a European soccer team that provides great emotional fulfillment), so I’ve been asking various friends who like basketball if they have the same feelings about the team.  To a man, everyone has echoed the same conclusion: the combination of the repudiating loss to the Magic, the re-signing of Joe Johnson, the hiring of Larry Drew, and the tepid performance this year (especially at home) has killed our interest in the team.  I’d like to be writing more about the Hawks to be a little truer to the title of this blog, which sits on top of the page taunting me as I write thousands of words about Barca, Michigan, and other sports topics that are not strictly Atlanta-themed.  I just can’t work up the interest.

I was reminded of the Hawks when I read Christopher Clark’s great piece at SB Nation defending Lakers fans against the taunt that they are bandwagon jumpers of the worst variety:

The Lakers have the most fair weather fans in all of sports.  Why?  Because Los Angeles is one of the entertainment capitals of the world.  If the Lakers suck, fans have a myriad of other fine options to more suitably distract themselves with.  As such, when the Lakers struggle, support for the team dwindles dramatically.  That couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the team has missed the playoffs only five times in the 62 year history of the franchise, could it?

The Lakers have reached the NBA finals a staggering 31 times, averaging a Finals trip every two years.  They've won roughly 25 percent of the league's championships.  There are a whole bunch of reasons why, and a fair number of inherent advantages that allow it to be so, but a Laker fanbase which has made it clear that winning is important has to be part of the equation.  Jerry Buss is keenly aware of the price he will pay if the Lakers ever have a prolonged period of poor play, and it drives him to ensure the team reloads quickly.

So, the next time you accuse someone of being a fair weather fan, take a second to think about exactly what that means.  The Los Angeles Lakers might be the most fair weather fanbase on the planet, and I for one am proud to be one of them.  I don't suffer bad food, bad dish soap, or bad movies, so why in the hell would I suffer bad basketball?

Atlanta isn’t on LA’s level in terms of entertainment options, but like LA, it a major city with good weather and a host of options for one’s entertainment dollar.  Just like LA, fans in this city will not pay for a bad product.  Sadly, this incentive for ownership to put a quality product on the court has not led the Hawks to anything close to the Lakers’ history of success.  Still, Clark’s central point applies to the Hawks just as much as it applies to the Lakers.  Fans shouldn’t reward a team that has had a 12-month period like this Hawks franchise has had.

It’s the Losing, not the Lying

In a development that is entirely unsurprising, Atlanta Spirit is suing King & Spalding for malpractice, alleging that K&S made massive mistakes in drafting the agreement by which the entity would buy out Steve Belkin’s shares and then compounded the error in its representation of Atlanta Spirit in the litigation in Maryland against Belkin.  The suit is unsurprising because the source of the litigation was an ambiguously drafted provision in the sale agreement that allowed Belkin to try to control both of the appraisals for the value of his interest.  Atlanta Spirit ultimately prevailed on appeal in Maryland by convincing the Court of Appeals there that the appraisal provision was unenforceable.  The moment that happened, a malpractice claim was likely.  (Note: K&S will have plenty of defenses to the claim, one of which will be that, as the Maryland opinion notes, they had 30 hours to prepare a complex commercial document.  Another caveat: I’ve only followed this dispute through the media, so take my thoughts with a pound of salt.)

Atlanta Spirit’s Complaint makes for fascinating reading as a history of the legal wrangling regarding the ownership of the Hawks, Thrashers, and Philips Arena (albeit from the perspective of ownership).  One of the big issues that Atlanta Spirit faces is establishing damages.  OK, so K&S drafted a document with an imperfect provision regarding the determination of fair market value for the teams; what did that mean for you in terms of actual dollars and cents?  Atlanta Spirit’s claim is that they wanted to sell the Thrashers after the resolution of the 2004-05 lockout, at which point the competitive landscape would be better for a team like the Thrashers and the franchise’s value will be greater, but they were unable to do so because of the uncertainty as to who actually owned the teams: Belkin or the rest of Atlanta Spirit.  This is a somewhat embarrassing argument for the owners of a major pro franchise to make, but this is what happens when you air your grievances in the public litigation process.  Atlanta Spirit faced the same issue when it was litigating against Belkin in Maryland and had to put forward evidence regarding the vast sums that the teams were allegedly losing.  (Unrelated issue: this dispute illustrates the value of an arbitration clause in certain commercials contracts.  Atlanta Spirit would have been much better off if it could have fought with Belkin behind a wall of confidentiality.)

Naturally, Jeff Schultz has latched onto this argument to complain that we’ve been swindled by Atlanta Spirit.  Here’s his opening flourish:

They told you they cared. They lied.

They told you their biggest concern was putting out the best product for you, the fans. They lied.

They told you not to pay attention to any of those rumors of the Thrashers being for sale, although they eventually admitted begrudgingly that, yes, they were looking for “investors.” They lied.

The Atlanta Spirit is not looking for investors. They’re looking to sell the Thrashers. They’ve been looking to sell them for — ready for this? –six years.

Six . . . years.

Those are the caretakers of your franchise. Those are the ones who’ve pleaded with you since 2005 to support a mostly inferior product — and now they can’t figure out how they’ve burned so many bridges in this town why fans still feel too angry or worn down to show up for a pretty decent team. Reality never has been their strong suit.

This is hopelessly naive.  A decision to buy or sell a franchise is one of those topics about which we can fully expect owners to lie and with good reason.  If a team’s owners admit that they are looking to sell, then they immediately start to look desperate and their price goes down.  This is negotiation 101.  If I’m going to scalp tickets outside of a game, I want to create the impression that I’m not committed to getting into the stadium.  If I show up in team gear reeking of desperation, then a scalper is going to fleece me.  The apparent decision by Atlanta Spirit to lie about its intentions to sell the team is no different than a college coach denying that he’s considering leaving his program, a presidential candidate denying that he’s considering ending his campaign, or a president lying about surveillance flights over the Soviet Union.  If Schultz wants to be mad, then he ought to be mad at himself for assigning weight to the self-interested answers of Atlanta Spirit to questions that they could not answer honestly for perfectly legitimate reasons.

Schultz is absolutely correct in the conclusion of his column: “If Atlanta loses its second NHL franchise, it won’t be because the sport failed here. It will be because ownership and management failed.”  The reason why he’s correct has nothing to do with Atlanta Spirit claiming that it was trying to sell the team when it was, in fact, trying to do exactly that.  Rather, if hockey fails again in Atlanta, it will be because the team didn’t win nearly enough games to generate interest.  Atlanta fans will respond to a winner.  We turned out for the Hawks in the 80s, we turned out in droves for the Braves in the 90s, and now we’re selling out the Georgia Dome for every Falcons game.  Atlanta fans, unlike some fans elsewhere, will not pay for a bad product.  (This does not extend to our affection for our college football teams, whom we’ll pay to see even when they are 0-11.)  The Thrashers have made the playoffs once in eleven seasons and were promptly swept.  Let’s go out on a limb and say that that qualifies as a bad product.  Indeed, one of the first defenses that K&S will make regarding Atlanta Spirit’s damages is that its alleged malpractice didn’t cause a diminution in the value of the franchise; Don Waddell’s fumbling of the on-ice product is the proximate cause of the loss.  (K&S would also point to larger systemic factors, like the economic downturn and the NHL’s descent into irrelevance.  That said, they’ll try to resolve the case on legal grounds if at all possible.  They won’t want 12 jurors trying to make these complex analyses of market value.)  At this point, we would all be happy if Atlanta Spirit sold the team, but it’s not because they had the temerity to claim that they had no interest in doing so.    

Quick Thoughts on Cliff Lee’s No Accounting for Taste Decision

C3PO said it best. It’s always possible that the Phillies will be beset by injuries, especially with a number of players on the wrong side of 30, but man, it’s hard to imagine competing with a starting rotation that includes Roy Halladay, Cole Hamels, Roy Oswalt, and now Lee. Egads, they’re getting close to the rotations that the Braves trotted out in the 90s. Also, the uncomfortable thing about this acquisition is that it’s reminiscent of Greg Maddux’s decision to join the Braves in that Lee took less money because playing for the Phillies was so attractive to him. It was most satisfying when Maddux turned his back on the Yankees’ filthy lucre because pitching in Atlanta for Bobby Cox, Leo Mazzone, and this fan base was so appealing. The fact that the Yankees’ naked economic might wasn’t enough to sign a player is about the only aspect of Lee’s decision that is good for Braves fans. Otherwise, we’re just left with a reminder that the Braves used to be the preferred destination for free agents, but now, the destination is somewhere else in the division.

The other thought that’s kicking around in my brain right now is that Lee’s decision is our fault. On the radio this morning, the local hosts were making the usual complaints about Liberty Media not being “invested” in the team’s success, but the sort of investment that is being requested is really just red ink. If we use attendance as a proxy for revenue (and I know that it isn’t that simple), the Braves were ninth in the NL in butts in seats last year. How is it fair for Braves fans to demand that the team’s payroll go above its revenue? In other words, are we forgetting that professional sports teams are businesses? In what segment of the economy is it an expectation that ownership should lose money? The Phillies were first in attendance in the NL last year, so Cliff Lee is a reward for fans who turn out. Again, the Braves were once the team drawing better than their rivals, so we deserved Maddux. Phillies fans aren’t intrinsically better than Braves fans; they’re just in a place where Braves fans were in the 90s when their team was winning big and consistently for the first time in eons.

And now for a CYA paragraph. It occurred to me after writing this post that referring dismissively to the Yankees' "filthy lucre" in the first paragraph and then singing the praises of the Phillies' right to the luxury item that is Cliff Lee in the second paragraph can be seen as inconsistent. I hate the Yankees for a number of reasons, but one of the primary motives is that the Yankees and their fans are the quintessential brats who were born on third base and think that they hit a triple. The Yanks are the major team in the largest, richest market in the country. Their market is old and established (as opposed to Los Angeles), so their roots are deep. Their two local rivals both moved out of New York, which gives the Yanks a leg up on their current local rival. Thus, the Yankees win because of money and they have money for a number of factors, most of which have nothing to do with good management, but are instead the result of circumstance. (A little like Stalin taking credit for beating the Germans in World War II.) The Phillies can't be described in the same way. Philadephia is a big market, but it's not New York. The current management of the team doesn't benefit from the decisions of its predecessors because the team's history is mostly lousy. The Phillies' current success deserves respect, so I don't begrudge them a great free agent signing. And I say this as a person who has a per se rule against rooting for teams from Philly.

The Hawks are 5-0. Do I Care?

When I started this blog, I wrote about the Hawks as much as any of Atlanta’s teams.  This made little sense when the team was 13-69 and seemingly headed to drafting Chris Paul.  It made more sense as the team gradually improved.  This fall, I’ve found it hard to get back into the Hawks, despite the fact that they are coming off of a 53-win season.  There are a couple reasons for this.  First, I was dispirited last year by the fact that this market didn’t respond to finally having a winner in the NBA.  The Hawks finished 18th in attendance despite putting a quality product on the floor.  After years of defending basketball fans in this city by saying that they would support a winner and fans who support a loser send the wrong message to ownership, it hurt to see plenty of empty seats when the Hawks finally produced a winner.  (And yes, I see the contradiction in a post in which I complain about not feeling connected to the Hawks because other people don’t feel connected to the Hawks.)  The lesson I took from last year is that this is a good basketball market and a good NBA market (the ratings for the NBA playoffs are consistently strong here), but it isn’t a good Hawks market.  We’re like a town in Spain where all of the locals support Real Madrid or Barca instead of the local team.

The second source of my ennui is the Hawks’ performance in the playoffs last year.  The performance against the Bucks was ugly.  I can’t get the fourth quarter of game five out of my head, when the Hawks got clobbered by a short-handed Bucks team and seemingly pissed away the season.  The team did fight back to win games six and seven, but the overriding question was why the Hawks were even in the position to have to fight against a Bucks team without Andrew Bogut.  Then, the performance against the Magic was embarrassing.  The Hawks had built for five years towards that series: a second-round tilt against one of the three favorites in the East.  The team barely showed up.  I went to game three and left at the end of the third quarter with a rancid taste in my mouth.  That taste lasted for the entire offseason.

The third reason why I’m having a hard time getting back into the local pro basketball collective is that it doesn’t seem to have a future.  The response of management to the embarrassing playoff exit was to re-sign Joe Johnson to a massive contract, thus cementing in place a nucleus that had just failed on the big stage.  Maybe Atlanta Spirit and Rick Sund made the best of a collection of bad options, but it is hard to get excited knowing that we are going to see the same collection of players for the next several years after that collection reached a nadir against the Magic.  Maybe the team will keep growing together, but there is an overriding feeling that we are set of for repeated disappointment with the team’s bete noire – the Magic – in the same division to deliver more punishment four times per year.  The fact that the Heat assembled their mega-squad in the Southeast division is also a problem.  It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Hawks are condemned for eternity to third-place finishes (and that assumes that the John Wall-led Wizards don’t rise up).

The Michael from 2005 would have punched 2010 Michael in the face for being less than enthusiastic about a Hawks teams that has made the second round of the playoffs twice and had the #3 seed last spring.  2005 Michael was excited when Section 317 got free burritos because the team on the court was rarely competitive.  Put another way, I feel a little guilty about my sense of ho-hum about these Hawks.  Still, the pervading sense that the Hawks have no chance against the Magic and Heat is dispiriting.  When the Hawks were good in the second half of the 80s, the town was excited by the team not only because Nique & company were fun to watch, but also because they had a chance of competing with the Celtics and Pistons.  The ‘94 Hawks were less pleasing to watch, but they had a chance of winning the NBA title.  The late 90s Hawks were never going to beat the Bulls, but there was always the hope that they would be in position to win the East after Jordan retired.  (Hence the disappointment after the sweep at the hands of the Knicks in ‘99 and the resulting decision to blow the team up.  That rebuilding process lasted until this current group of Hawks matured.  Come to think of it, Atlanta Spirit’s decision to keep this team together makes sense if you use the last decade as a guide.)  This team is as good as those three iterations of the Hawks, but the combination of the struggles against the Magic and the Heat putting a top team together is dispiriting because it removes the hope (illusion?) that this Hawks team can play into June.

So, here we are.  The Hawks are 5-0.  Their victims are collectively 5-12 in their games against the Hawks and it’s not as if the Hawks have been beating their opponents like drums.  The next two games – at Minnesota and home against Phoenix – are both winnable.  That would make the Hawks 7-0 for their first trip to Orlando.  That game will be very important, at least for my level of interest in the team.  I want to see this core show something that they haven’t shown before.  A good performance against the Magic would qualify. 

This is a Great Sports Town, the Spencer Hall Edition

If I had a nickel for every debate I've gotten into with a Yankee about Atlanta's merits as a sports town, I'd be Midas. Inevitably, the debate progresses along the same lines: "you don't sell out your Braves playoff games." "Georgia football versus Boston College, what what?" "But, but, baseball!" I've made the same arguments over and over again, but I never quite phrased them this well:

Telling someone the exact charms of Atlanta is difficult, particularly if you're talking to a transplanted Northeasterner repeating what everyone outside of Atlanta says: "This is a terrible sports town." They would be right in a certain sense. If I went to New Orleans I could say "This is a terrible restaurant town," since all the typical easy signs of modern food civilization are gone from the landscape of the Quarter. There is no Applebee's sign, no easy Olive Garden beckoning the eater in, only a series of stand-alone cafes, diners, and restaurants where you will not eat quickly, and where you may be denied entry for not wearing the right thing.

This assumes correctly that the outsider has a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation, and bad taste. This is true, since sports fandom in Atlanta is almost wholly dependent on college football, the one thing suturing together the disparate group of people who come here for work, love, or because several months into a lengthy layover at Hartsfield, they decided to just stay and make the best of things ...
Go to Taco Mac in Decatur on a fall Saturday, and you will step into a football United Nations. There is a guy who brings his own Brutus Buckeye doll, plops it on the table, and then attempts to singlehandedly drain the place of its Bud Light. A contingent of Michigan fans usually occupies a table along the wall, including a doctor who treated me for a health scare a few years ago and, in the middle of an EKG, asked me about Michigan's prospects for the year with all seriousness. I have a running, years-long tauntfest going with a Florida State crew who sits by the streetside windows. On the whole, they've behaved a lot better than I have. Then again, my team's been doing all the winning, so it should be that way. Occasionally, on special nights, you will see actual Pac-10 fans there. They're real. I touched one just to see.

It's funny that Spencer mentioned the Taco Mac in Decatur, because I cite that same restaurant as an example of what's great about Atlanta as a sports town. (In fact, Mr. Hall, I think that the UN line is mine. This will represent the first and only time in which you will take one of my bon mots, as opposed to the reverse.) Watching a game there is a little like spending time on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange: there is shouting coming from ten different directions and you always have to figure out which fan base is shouting to know what's going on. Someone has lost his fortune; someone else can retire.

The downside to watching games at the UN/NYSE is that the potential for humiliation is maximal. When a bunch of Bostonians get together in a bar to watch the Sox in October ("not anymore" says Dr. Lecter with a smile), they are all happy or sad together. Everyone is pulling in the same direction. When one goes to a bar in Atlanta to watch the ol' alma mater play, there is the potential to be miserable around others who do not share that misery. When one's alma mater comes into the season ranked #3 and loses at home to a I-AA team, there is the potential to be unexpectedly and completely miserable and humiliated while everyone else is joyous as a result of the event that just made one miserable. There's no shared misery or sympathy, only the rest of the crowd pointing and laughing like Nelson Muntz while one's cell phone is blowing up with texts from "friends." One might choose to respond by hurriedly putting all of the money in one's wallet on the table to cover the bill because one has to get out of there as fast as possible (leaving what must have been a 300% tip) and then walking two miles home, jersey in one hand (after all, one cannot be identified by cars passing by as that would only increase the humiliation) and cell phone in the other, shouting at one's college friends "Lloyd is a military history buff, he should know that the general resigns as a matter of principle after a defeat of this magnitude! Right now, he's not even McClellan; he's Gamelin!"

(Funny thing about that season: I started the season watching Michigan-Appalachian State with Spencer at Taco Mac, wondering why I ever became a sports fan. I ended it by getting misty-eyed as the Wolverines carried Lloyd off on their shoulders in Orlando and calling Mssr. Hall to say "you know, you were right about Wondy Pierre-Louis." That reversal of fortune is what keeps me warm when I think about Michigan being 3-13 over the past two years in the Big Ten and entering this season with a secondary that has Brian Cook asking "what's the point of anything?" and most Michigan fans hoping for seven wins.)

If you are a college football fan, this is the greatest place in the world. It refutes the notion that college football is a regional sport. Sure, it's fun to spend a fall in Tuscaloosa or Lincoln or Blacksburg to experience the euphoria of a season seized by the local team, but is that really so much better than a summer in New York City when the Yankees and Mets are good or a fall in Green Bay when the Packers are in contention? No, what makes this market unique and great is that it's a melting pot. Everyone is from somewhere else. The downside of that is that the Braves have empty seats in October. The upside is Taco Mac tomorrow at noon. It's just hard to see that upside when Shawn Crable blocks the outside rusher and lets the inside rusher go free.

One final anecdote that I couldn't work into this post, so I'll just stick it here as a useless appendix: the Platonic ideal for an Atlanta sports moment comes from when I was 12. My Dad took me to a Hawks game at the Omni. We sat about midway in the upper deck to see the Hawks play the Jazz. This was when the Hawks were the one good team in Atlanta, so the crowd was fairly lively. The Hawks overcame an outburst from Darrell Griffith (I still remember my Dad telling me after Griffith got blocked on a fast break "they never would have caught him when he was at Louisville"), got a dramatic three from John Battle in the left corner at the buzzer, and won in overtime. At one random point in the third quarter, a guy stood up about eight rows in front of us, apropos of absolutely nothing, and shouted in every direction at once "War Eagle, all you Georgia fans! War Eagle!" That's Atlanta, the place where no one cares about sports.

A Thought on Why Georgia Stars Come from Wrightsville and Tennille

I recommend this piece in Wired about how small towns produce a disproportionate share of top athletes. Here is the basic conclusion:

The lesson of Tiger Woods is that the best way to become a superstar is to start young and get in those 10,000 hours as quickly as possible. That’s why Earl put a club in the hands of a toddler, and why Mozart was composing music before most of us can do arithmetic.

However, a series of recent studies by psychologists at Queen’s University adds an important wrinkle to the Tiger Woods parable. The scientists began by analyzing the birthplace of more than 2,000 athletes in a variety of professional sports, such as the NHL, NBA, and the PGA. This is when they discovered something peculiar: the percent of professional athletes who came from cities of fewer than a half million people was far higher than expected. While approximately 52 percent of the United States population resides in metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 people, such cities only produce 13% of the players in the NHL, 29% of the players in the NBA, 15%of the players in MLB, and 13% of players in the PGA.

This conclusion is consistent with what I've noticed watching Georgia games over the years. Roughly half of the state's population lives in Metro Atlanta. Moreover, the metro area is significantly richer than the rest of the state. Nevertheless, Georgia always seems to have a majority of players from the rural parts of the state. By my half-assed count, 14 of Georgia's 22 projected starters come from outside of major metro areas (defined in the article as a city of 500,000 or more).

Here are the explanations proffered by Jonah Lehrer:

I can think of several different explanations for this effect, none of which are mutually exclusive. Perhaps kids in small towns are less likely to get distracted by gangs, drugs, etc. Perhaps athletes outside of big cities go to better schools, and thus receive more attention from their high school coaches. Perhaps they have more access to playing fields. Perhaps they have a better peer group. The scientists summarize this line of reasoning in a recent paper: “These small communities may offer more psychosocially supportive environments that are more intimate. In particular, sport programs in smaller communities may offer more opportunities for relationship development with coaches, parents, and peers, a greater sense of belonging, and a better integration of the program within the community.”

But there’s another possible explanation for this effect, which was nicely summarized by Sian Beilock, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and author of the forthcoming Choke. She proposes that an important advantage of small towns is that they’re actually less competitive, thus allowing kids to sample and explore many different sports.

Based on my anecdotal experience, I don't buy the notion that small towns produce more players because there is less pressure. To the contrary, I suspect that small towns produce lots of top athletes because players in those towns grow up in an environment that mimics the pressure they'll face in college and then in the pros. Growing up in Macon, there were no pro sports teams, so high school sports dominated the local news. High school football was a very big deal. In Atlanta, high school sports are pushed to the back burner because we have four professional teams and the city also functions as a major college football market. A star high school player in Macon (or moreso in a real small town) is more likely to face pressure in the form of the entire town cheering or booing his performance. A football player in Atlanta is likely to experience pressure from family and friends, but not from the local media and the random guy on the street. Or have I been watching too many episodes of Friday Night Lights?