Sometimes, my Favorite Sport Just Sucks

My first reaction to the news that broke on Tuesday night that four former Auburn players have stated on HBO's Real Sports that they were paid in violation of NCAA rules was "damn right." Even since the Cam Newton story broke and Auburn kept right on truckin' to and through Glendale, I've wanted the NCAA to tag the Tigers. My feelings of schadenfreude doubled when the news seeped out that Stanley McClover is also describing payments that he received on visits to Ohio State and Michigan State. Short of including Florida State and Tennessee in the mix, this is pretty much a perfect scandal for me in terms of my current rooting interests.

After thinking about the scandal for an hour or so, my opinion changed because I remembered that the NCAA's rules against paying players who generate millions of dollars for their schools are an affront. The rules represent a rare instance where liberals and conservatives should agree. Liberals should hate the rules because they force an income transfer from labor (especially labor that tends to be poor and Black) to management (the mostly wealthy, white individuals who run the business of college football). Conservatives should hate the rules because they counteract the way that a free market should work. The most basic precept of the free market is that individuals should be able to contract freely with one another and receive the benefit of their bargain without artificial rules corrupting the process. The NCAA prevents this from happening by stopping millions of dollars that want to end up in the pockets of college football players from doing so.

And where do those millions of dollars end up? How about two examples from yesterday's headlines. One place they end up is in the pocket of coaches, regardless of whether those coaches deserve the money. You end up with a coach who sports a career losing record being rewarded with a six-year deal averaging $3.25 million per season. Yes, a guy who said that he would walk from San Diego to Ann Arbor is being paid as if Michigan had no leverage with him whatsoever. The contract that Dave Brandon authorized for Brady Hoke is so ludicrously generous on its face that my first thought was that Brandon was acting like the sheikhs who run Manchester City and distort the transfer market by overpaying for players, often by a factor of two. (Seriously, how many athletic directors are seeing their best-layed budget plans flying out the window now that Michigan has set the bar for a coach with an average-at-best resume at $3.25 million? What do coaches with good resumes now get? If Hoke is worth $3.25 million, then what is Nick Saban worth? $15 million?) That said, at least the sheiks waste their money on the players on the field. Dave Brandon can't overspend on the players who bust their humps in winged helmets, so he has to do so on Bobby Bacala's twin.

Where else does the money end up? Let's ask the incorruptible souls who run the Fiesta Bowl. I'm stealing the summary from EDSDS:

• Junker had a fetish for gold investing, and charged $1,595 to Fractal Publishing for their subscription marketing service. According to its website, Fractal Publishing offers The Fractal Market Report and The Fractal Gold Report, providing "a detailed forecast for equity markets, as well as selected other markets like silver, bonds, and crude oil." Junker also blew over $22,000 for gold coins purchased with Bowl funds because, urr, DURR, durp.

• Junker in effect provided the startup capital for "Blue Steel," the security company run by a Maricopa County Sheriff's Deputy who later ensured that Junker's daughter received a police security escort to her prom.

• In order to "reach out to the Hispanic community," Junker sent Natalie Wisneski, the Fiesta's chief operating officer, to a Hispanic businesswoman's conference in Paris.

• The Bowl awarded construction contracts to standing board members in a no-bid process. #wellplayed

• Summed up by one quote: "As a general matter, it is unclear who is in charge of guiding the Bowl’s investment strategy for its available cash."

College football manages to combine massive exploitation and massive waste. In the words of Didier Drogba, it's a f***ing disgrace.

HR Lessons from Domino's

Here is David Brandon explaining how he ended up with Brady Hoke:

Hoke, who turned around San Diego State and Ball State after being a Michigan assistant for eight seasons, might not have been the fans' first choice because many of them wanted Jim Harbaugh or Les Miles to restore the program as a national power.

Athletic director Dave Brandon said he had discussions with both of them, but insisted Harbaugh and Miles weren't offered the job in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday night.

The next day, he seemed to try to knock the luster off the coach who left Stanford to lead the San Francisco 49ers and the one who stayed at LSU.

"All that glitters is not gold when it comes to some coaches,'' Brandon said. "A two- or three-hour meeting with a coach uncovers much more than you could learn scanning the Internet or sifting through statistics.

"Sometimes the hype or the PR doesn't match the real person.''

And here are Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein explaining in their review of Moneyball why Brandon's concept of being able to judge coaches on the basis of interviews is a terrible idea:

Lewis poses this question: "If professional baseball players could be over- or undervalued, who couldn't? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn't play baseball for a living." Right! On the basis of first principles, the market for baseball players should be one of the most efficient labor markets on earth. It is hard to think of any high-paid profession in which performance is measured so precisely--and is publicly available to every other potential employer. Compare the market for baseball players with the market for corporate executives. A company looking for a new director of human resource management would be hard-pressed to get any objective data on the past performance of job candidates. Instead, such a company would be forced to make choices based on interviews with the candidates--a process that is even less accurate than the one the old scouts use to size up a high school player. Interviews are notoriously bad predictors of future job performance. In most contexts their predictive value is essentially zero.

A decision to hire a college football coach is more like evaluating baseball players than HR managers. There is plenty of objective evidence that should help glean whether a coach is good or bad. The information is imperfect because the sample size of games is small (at least in comparison to at-bats) and a coach can win or lose for reasons that have little to do with his own merit (talent left over by a predecessor, key decisions made by subordinates, strength or weakness of key conference rivals, etc.), but there is plenty of publicly-available information about coaching candidates. If Brandon thinks that hiring Brady Hoke is just like hiring a VP at Domino's, then he has illustrated why Michigan has erred (yet again) by hiring an athletic director who comes from the business world without experience in athletic departments.

There are several possibilities here to explain Brandon's comments:

1. Brandon is making a post hoc rationalization to the fan base as to why he hired Brady Hoke instead of the two former Michigan players who had better resumes. "I didn't want to make out with Jessica Biel at the bar. She'd be more trouble than she's worth." This rationalization can be used to cover for: (a) Brandon trying to land Harbaugh and Miles and failing; (b) Brandon deciding that he didn't want to spend the money on Harbaugh or Miles; and/or (c) Brandon wanting Hoke all along because he wants a motivated coach for whom coaching at Michigan is the end-all, be-all of his existence.

2. Brandon actually believes that as a captain of industry, he can sit across a table from a guy and divine lessons about the guy's soul. In other words, Brandon is deluding himself in the same way that Dubya did with Vladamir Putin.

I've been using blackjack analogies a lot over the past few days to describe Michigan's coaching hires. Hiring Rodriguez was the equivalent of splitting two face cards when the dealer is showing a six and then being dealt a pair of fives. It was the right decision at the time, but it didn't work out. Hiring Hoke is the equivalent of hitting on 15 when the dealer is showing a six. It's not the right move, but there is still a chance that it could work because we're dealing with probability instead of certainty. If Dave Brandon believes his own rhetoric, then he's doing the latter and thinking that it's the right move because of his close study of the dealer's facial expressions.

C3PO, You’re Up

When I make small talk at cocktail parties about backgrounds, I almost invariably get the question “wait, so you grew up in Macon and went to the University of Michigan?  How did that happen?”  (This question usually comes about 45 seconds after making the joke that I didn’t live in Macon for my whole life and that’s why my knuckles don’t drag on the ground when I walk.)  My answer is that Michigan was an antidote to everything I hated about Macon.  In short, my adolescence was spent as a red-headed Jewish liberal debate star with less than “stylish” clothes (as if a polo shirt and khakis is the definition of style) at an non-diverse private school where open displays of prejudice were the norm and outsiders (read: people whose parents weren’t members at Idle Hour) were shunned.  I was attracted to Michigan by the end of middle school because it was everything that Macon wasn’t: big, progressive, diverse, intellectual, and welcoming of outsiders.  The last quality was especially important to me.  By design, I was going to a school where I wouldn’t know a soul, so a public university where one-third of the students were from out-of-state fit the bill perfectly.  If I’m not from here, then you won’t be either.

I bring up this back story not because my therapist told me to vent, but rather to express why I hate the Brady Hoke hire with the heat of a thousand suns.  Michigan hired Hoke because he coached at Michigan before.  Let’s ignore the fact that his eight-year coaching record has produced a losing record, or the fact that he wasn’t exactly in demand by other schools, or that he has expressed a disdain for the spread offense that is the one part of the team that worked in 2010.  Let’s hire Hoke because he has Michigan on his resume and only Michigan Men need apply.  There’s a word for that line of thinking: inbred.  I have this crazy preference for evidence-based decisions and there is no evidence to support hiring Brady Hoke at this stage in his career other than the fact that he’ll know how to place an order at Zingermann’s.

My verdict on the Hoke hire depends somewhat on my view of the Lloyd Carr era.  I liked Carr as a coach and as a representative of the University, but I wasn’t upset when he retired in large part because he had not done a good job of surrounding himself with top-notch coaches.  It’s in this respect that he is no Bo.  Bo Schembechler created modern Michigan football and one aspect of his greatness was that his coaching tree was excellent.  Carr, on the other hand, doesn’t have a coaching tree to speak of.  Thus, the two obvious candidates for Michigan’s head coaching position were Jim Harbaugh – a Bo quarterback whom Carr declined to hire when he was looking for a quarterback coach – and Les Miles – a Bo lineman/assistant whom Carr reputedly did not want as his replacement in 2007.  If Dave Brandon’s much-discussed Process was designed to bring back a Michigan Man from Bo’s lineage, then that would have been fine because hiring a Bo protege is can be done on merit.  The fact that the Process produced the one sickly branch from the Carr tree is the reason why Hoke’s hire has been greeted by articles with titles like "Advice for the Despondent."  I couldn’t agree more with this description by Brian Cook:

I'd rather have Rich Rodriguez entering year four with a new defensive staff than this, a total capitulation. Does anyone remember Tressel's record against Lloyd Carr? 5-1. Change was necessary. It didn't work, but that doesn't mean you go back to the stuff that required change.

Lloyd’s teams looked out of date by the end of his tenure, especially against spread opponents.  (Might I mention the Appalachian State game as Exhibit A?)  So that’s why I feel nauseous about the prospect of hiring a coach who expresses the following about the offensive style of the two teams that played in the national title game last night:

“Right, wrong or indifferent, when you’re zone blocking all the time -- when you’re playing basketball on grass -- you practice against that all spring, you practice against it all fall and then you’re going to play a two-back team that wants to knock you off the football,” Hoke said. “I don’t think you’re prepared.

“I think there’s a toughness level (required in college football). I still believe you win with defense. That’s been beaten into my head a long time, but I really believe that. The toughness of your team has to be the offensive front and your defensive front.”

So let’s summarize.  The University of Michigan is a great research institution based on the concept of open inquiry, but its football program just hired a coach who ignores all evidence regarding the dominant offense in modern football.  The University of Michigan is supposed to represent the values of tolerance and open-minded thinking, but its athletic director just concluded a coaching process where he did not interview a coach who was not a former Michigan player or coach.  The University of Michigan’s football program is the winningest in college football history and leads the nation in attendance on an annual basis, but with a massive pool of revenue from which to pay a coach, it just hired a guy with a 47-50 career record.  For the first and last time, I will quote Michael Rosenberg (excluding fisking purposes, which come up on a weekly basis): the University of Michigan is better than this.

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