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?

 

The Best Team Wins the Championship? What Kind of Communist Notion is That?

It’s too bad that this article resides behind ESPN’s paywall and is full of untrustworthy notions like “computer rankings,” because Brian Fremeau makes a very good, basic point about college football’s structure: it is more likely to crown the most deserving team.  Fremeau notes that according to the Massey Rating composite, the BCS has consistently crowned the team that the computer consensus has placed as the best team in the country (or at least the team with the best resume, if those two concepts are distinct).  In fact, the Massey composite goes back to 1996 and reflects that the BCS (and the Bowl Alliance before it) is a perfect 15 for 15 in awarding the national title to the most deserving team.  The BCS is not as good at matching the best team against the second-best, but as Fremeau notes, playoff systems don’t really achieve that aim, either:

According to the Football Outsiders' DVOA ratings, the Green Bay Packers were only the third-best team in the NFL last year and didn't face the best team, the New England Patriots, in the playoffs. (Note: They did lose head-to-head to the Patriots in the regular season). In college basketball, the Connecticut Huskies played the best in the month of March and claimed the championship, but they finished only 10th in Ken Pomeroy's opponent-adjusted ratings. The Huskies didn't face any of the tournament's No. 1 seeds and faced only two teams in March Madness ranked in Pomeroy's end-of-year top 10.

Fremeau then notes the drawback of a playoff system: as the playoff increases in size, the odds that the best team will win goes down:

What is accommodated in a playoff system is the opportunity for weaker teams to have a shot at winning the championship. Opening up the field certainly has its rewards, potentially assuring every possible championship-caliber team a chance. But it changes the nature of what the championship means, as well. The Packers and Huskies were terrific teams down the stretch in those seasons, but advanced metrics and many fans would agree that the tournament title didn't suddenly mean they were the best team over the course of the whole year. A smaller playoff field, even as small as two teams, allows the best overall season to be rewarded with a championship.

Our college football FEI ratings project the Tigers with a 68 percent chance of beating the Crimson Tide in the BCS title game rematch. Certainly not a guarantee, but it presents a better than 50 percent likelihood that the clear No. 1 team in the nation will claim the crown. If we had a four-team playoff and LSU was required to beat both Stanford and Alabama on a neutral field, that likelihood drops below 50 percent. With an eight-team playoff built from the final BCS standings, LSU's likelihood of defeating Kansas State, Stanford and Alabama drops to 41 percent.

This is a great way of framing the playoff discussion and it helps me tighten my own beliefs.  There is a happy medium between the playoff structures of American professional sports,* which strike me as too big and not slanted enough in favor of the most deserving teams, and college football’s current structure, which is too small to accommodate teams like 2004 Auburn.  Brian Cook does a nice job of finding that medium with his annual description of a six-team playoff system that incorporates byes and homefield advantage to reward the best teams and is also small enough that any team that wins the tournament will end up with the best resume.  That said, Fremeau’s point about the advantage of the current two-team playoff cuts against Cook’s (and my) complaints about the BCS.  We all love to complain about the impossible task of picking the right #2, but the advantage of the BCS is that it is more likely to pick the right #1.

* – The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament is just a complete abomination to me.  If you need additional evidence that the Big Dance has killed college basketball, look at Saturday’s sports coverage.  Were you aware that North Carolina and Kentucky played?  Two top five teams, loaded with NBA prospects wearing the jerseys of the two winningest programs in college basketball history, played a one-point game that was decided in the final seconds and the game was a total afterthought on the day of the college football conference championship games.  That’s what happens when a sport becomes a four-month lead-in for a three-week tournament.

A Simple Question

How exactly does one sell the four-month college basketball regular season when the Final Four is comprised of: (1) the second-place team in the SEC East that went 2-6 on the road in KenPom’s sixth-placed conference; (2) the ninth-place team in the Big East that lost seven of its last 11 games (so much for that theory that you can watch games in February and figure out which teams are peaking); (3) a team that was at one point 6-5 in the Horizon League; and (4) the fourth-place team in the Colonial Athletic Association that finished on a four-game losing streak in that mighty conference?

Dan Wetzel, if this is what you want college football to become, then I think I speak on behalf of most enthusiasts of the sport when I say “no thanks.”

The Same Old Playoff Argument, Michigan and Udinese Edition

For those of you who don’t look forward to looking at the standings of Serie A every Sunday night, Udinese is the hottest team in the major European leagues right now.  Paolo Bandini explains:

A four-horse race? That depends who you ask. "Please, you know [the scudetto] is an impossible goal," said the Udinese manager Francesco Guidolin after his team's 2-0 win over Catania, but the director Gino Pozzo – son of team owner Giampaolo – took a different view. "Dreaming doesn't cost a thing," he mused.

No one could blame the Friuliani for doing that after their recent run. The only unbeaten side left in Serie A this calendar year, Udinese have collected 33 points from the past 13 games and gone seven games without even conceding a goal. Furthermore, they already hold the head-to-head tie-breaker over Inter, and have the chance to get the same over both their other rivals, having already beaten Napoli 3-1 at home and drawn 4-4 at Milan. Their return fixture against the Rossoneri comes on the last day of the season.

Guidolin may be saying that the scudetto (the Italian word for the Serie A championship) is out of reach just to tamp down expectations, but he is also being realistic.  With eight games to play, Udinese are not just six points off the top of the table; they are also looking up at three teams: AC Milan, Inter, and Napoli.  Even if they manage to win out without even a draw, they will still have to rely on three other sides slipping up.  This is interesting to me because if Serie A followed the American model, Udinese would be the favorite in the post-season playoff.

Now, contrast Udinese’s current place to that of my alma mater’s basketball program.  While not quite as hot as the Friulani, Michigan ended the season on a fairly torrid run.  After starting 1-6 in the Big Ten, Michigan’s only losses were a pair of setbacks away from Ann Arbor against #1 Ohio State, a two-point loss at Illinois in which Michigan missed a pair of potentially winning three-point attempts, and a one-point loss to Wisconsin after a Wisconsin player banked in a three at the buzzer.  The Wolverines were a classic young team that takes most of the season to figure out how to play together before gelling for a run through the second half of the schedule.  (Not that Michigan has any experience with that.)  As a reward for this stretch and then a 30-point trouncing of Tennessee, Michigan got a shot at top-seed Duke.  That shot ended with Darius Morris missing an open runner in the lane to force overtime.

As excited as I was about Michigan basketball returning to relevance, the whole spectacle on Sunday struck me as odd.  Michigan was not good for the first half of the Big Ten schedule, as evidenced by a 19-point loss at Indiana and a 14-point loss at Northwestern.  Duke was excellent for the entire season, despite the loss of their best pro prospect.  Duke’s reward for being much better was that they got to play Michigan on a neutral court with one day to prepare for John Beilein’s system.  OK, Duke got to play in Charlotte, but as it turned out, Michigan had a number of UNC fans cheering for them (or at least hectoring the refs for calls that went against Michigan).  How exactly does the NCAA reward teams for being demonstrably superior for a four-month, 30-something game regular season?  In Italy, Udinese doesn’t get to forget an average first half of the season.  In college basketball, Michigan’s past sins were washed away.   

Conference Expansion: Don't Speak Too Soon for the Wheel Still it Spins

I have gotten a few comments, e-mails, and confused calls from friends, all along the same lines: why haven't you written anything about the sea changes going on in your favorite sport? There are two reasons. First, when the World Cup is around the corner, everything else takes a back seat for me. El Mundial is my favorite sporting event. It represents one of my earliest sporting memories, sitting in the basement of our house in Pittsburgh in 1982 with my Dad and our neighbor Leonardo watching PBS's coverage of the World Cup. It's one of those rare, we can all get along events that appeals to my natural optimism. It's a proving ground for new stars and a platform for the swan songs of legends. Put it this way: I like basketball and I was only vaguely familiar that Game Six of the Finals was on last night.

The second reason is that the conference expansion was a constantly shifting landscape of rumor. In retrospect, what would the point have been of writing about the Pac 16? It looked like the Pac Ten was going to engulf the Big XII South, but then that didn't happen. It looked like Notre Dame was finally going to join the Big Ten, but then that didn't happen. It looked like Texas A&M was going to make a brave move to independence, but then that didn't happen. Frankly, there was enough bandwidth wasted on scenarios that didn't play out and I didn't feel like I had much to add to the dreaming. Now that we've reached a stopping point, I have a few thoughts. Naturally, I'll start with a claim of victory:

1. College basketball has been killed by the Tournament. In all of the discussions about who was going to end up where, did you notice that Kansas was completely on the sidelines? The Big Ten wasn't interested and the Pac Ten wasn't interested, which left the Jayhawks as bystanders, hoping that other decision-makers would reach conclusions that would be incidentally beneficial. The fact that Kansas - one of the top five college basketball programs, both historically and at current - is an irrelevant property should tell you all you need to know about college hoops. The same was true during ACC expansion. The ACC - the nation's best basketball conference - expanded to add football powers (plus BC, for faulty reasons) and to have a championship game. The objections of the basketball programs in the conference were brushed aside. (In retrospect, those concerns were valid, as the ACC has diluted its identity as a top basketball property, but it hasn't progressed on the gridiron.)

From a revenue perspective, college football is a more valuable property for three reasons: (1) Americans love football; (2) college football has a meaningful regular season because it doesn't kill its product with an expansive playoff; and (3) the programs that generate TV money get to keep that money. The third point is critical here. Generally speaking, the TV money from the Big Dance goes to the NCAA, which then spends the money to maintain its bureaucracy and for other, feel-good goals. The TV money that college football generates goes back to the schools and conferences that are responsible for the eyeballs watching games. If you want to know why college football's stakeholders don't want a big playoff administered by the NCAA, this is the reason. And they're not wrong. Just ask Kansas.

2. Identity Still Matters. Unlike the ACC's attempt to repackage itself as a football power, the Big Ten seems to have a good understanding of its brand: a Midwestern conference that favors tough, physical teams. Adding Nebraska makes perfect sense. Jon Chait made a good point ($) about expansion:

You can put together a conference that looks powerful on paper. But it's a bit like trying to meet women through a computer dating service. A match that looks good on paper might fail in real life for reasons that can't be quantified.

If the lessons of the conference conglomeration fad teach us anything, it's that tradition and history matter. You can't just bring schools together on the basis of creating the most lucrative cable television package and expect them to cohere into a natural fit.

...

In the short run, the television dollars will be staggering. But in the long run, the television value will follow the actual value. And the actual value of the conference grows out of its cultural cohesion, its history, its collective identity. Every college football fan can tell you what Big Ten Football is, or what SEC football is, or Pac Ten football. Those things have an identity on the field and in their surrounding communities. Trying to build a conference tailored to maximize the value of a television footprint is a short-sighted way to maximize the real value of a conference.

Jim Delany entered the expansion process talking about the Big Ten's demographic issues, namely the fact that people are leaving the Big Ten states in droves. He ended up adding Nebraska. At some point in the process, he recognized that adding a school that fits the Big Ten, both in terms of geography and culture, made more sense than taking a run at the New York City television market. In other words, he avoided the mistake that John Swofford made when he added Boston College.

[Yes, the Big Ten would have been willing to add Texas. They would be fools not to add an athletic and academic behemoth like the one in Austin. However, the Big Ten wasn't willing to make all manner of concessions to Texas such as unequal revenue splits or dragging along its weak, but politically important cousins to make the deal happen.]


From an identity perspective, the Pac 16 was an interesting idea because it would have created two mini-conferences: the old Pac Eight and most of the old SWC with Arizona and Arizona State thrown in as Southwestern friends. Those two divisions would have made sense; the question would have been whether there would have been fighting between the divisions as there was in the Big XII between the former Big Eight teams in the North and the former SWC teams in the South.


3. It's World War I all over again! I started this process thinking that the Big XII was Germany plus the Austro-Hungarian Empire: a collection of ill-fittting allies about to break apart in a number of different directions. I am ending the process thinking that Texas is functioning as France at Versailles, imposing as harsh terms as possible on their neighbors. Texas has gone from a conference in which they were the big fish to the conference in which they are an orca swimming with baby seals. In an era in which quality non-conference games are a dying breed (and Texas certainly isn't a paragon for ballsy scheduling), this is a problem.

I'm Going to Start Swearing

I don't like Michael Rosenberg. Although we attended the University of Michigan at the same time, I can't say that I've ever met him, so this isn't based on any personal interaction. I can't say that he smells bad, he has a weak handshake, or he kicks homeless people when they're sleeping. What I can say is that I don't like his written product at all. For evidence, I give you this piece on John Calipari.

Before reading the piece, keep in mind that Rosenberg authored a ludicrously unfair attack on Rich Rodriguez's Michigan program in August, a piece that willfully obscured the distinction between countable and non-countable hours. A piece that preyed on unsuspecting freshmen in a manner that would make Urban Meyer purple. A piece that a proper Michigan grad/journalist referred to as "journalistic malpractice."

If Rosenberg wants to cast himself as a defender of purity in college athletics, then that's one thing. He can rant and rave about cheating coaches until the cows come home. I can disagree with him and chastise him for writing unfair articles, but at least Rosenberg would have a consistent worldview for his readers to accept or reject. However, it's quite another thing to write pieces as if Rodriguez is the devil and then write the following about John Calipari:

REFUSE TO LOSE. It sounds like such a simple, inspirational phrase for a team -- and it can be. But it also describes the man. He's a scrapper, and will weigh all of his options besides losing.

Calipari has done the most remarkable coaching job of this season, and nobody is close. Think about it: He convinced John Wall, Xavier Henry and DeMarcus Cousins to come to Memphis, inserted clauses into their letters of intent so they could go somewhere else if Calipari left, convinced Memphis to keep its Notice of Allegations from the NCAA quiet for three months, took the Kentucky job before anybody knew about that notice, then convinced Wall and Cousins to join him in Lexington. That is refusing to lose.

(Rosenberg is factually wrong in a number of respects in this paragraph, starting with the fact that Wall never verballed to Memphis, let alone signed a letter of intent, but what else did we expect from Rosenberg? To paraphrase Francisco Scaramanga, facts never were his strong suit.)

Or this:

Calipari just keeps rolling. Since he first arrived on the national stage, Calipari has changed offenses, stars and schools. He has gone from the hot new coach that everybody loved too much to the crafty veteran that people hate too much.

When people attack him, he fights back. Refuse to lose. But he'll open his home to fans and his program to anybody who can help him win.

There are plenty of people in college basketball who think it will all come crashing down around Calipari -- that we will witness the professional death of a salesman. I don't know. We won't know for years. All I know is that I filled out my bracket the other day. I'm picking Kentucky.

Sorry, Mom, but I'm about to swear. Are you fucking kidding me? Rich Rodriguez is a dirty bastard because your investigation uncovered the fact that Michigan was practicing five hours on certain days instead of four and quality control assistants were watching some summer skeleton drills. John Calipari is an inspiring fighter even though he has left both UMass and Memphis on probation and came within a whisker of winning a national title with multiple players who apparently cheated on their SATs. If you're going to be a moralist, then be a moralist. Don't pick on one guy for running a stop sign and laud an arsonist because the arsonist is a smooth salesman and and the bad driver isn't. Your credibility as a writer sorta depends on whether readers think that your opinions are based on something other than completely subjective judgments about people.

An unrelated note: Rosenberg unintentionally does a great job of illustrating why the NCAA Tournament has killed college basketball with this paragraph in his paean to the Big Dance:

The NCAA tournament is never overhyped because from November to March, most of the country doesn't pay attention to college basketball. You might watch your team. You might watch your conference. But the college basketball season starts during the baseball playoffs, stays underwater for the NFL playoffs and finally comes up for air at the end of the regular season. I mean, Baylor, West Virginia and Kansas State are all top-three seeds in this tournament, and I have yet to hear anybody say they have been inundated with Baylor, Kansas State and West Virginia basketball talk for four months and they're sick of it.

Yes, the Tournament is great because we no longer know anything about the teams playing! We have destroyed the village to save it!

In a B&B First...

I am going to express a modicum of sympathy for the Duke University basketball program. Duke just won the ACC regular season and tournament titles. They are 29-5 and, according to Ken Pomeroy's ratings, the best team in the country. They drew a #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. So what is their reward for a season of excellence? A bracket in which they could end up playing Texas A&M and then Baylor in Houston.

Pitt faces a similar issue. The Panthers are 24-8 and, according to the NCAA, one of the 12 best teams in the country. What is their reward? A potential Sweet Sixteen matchup with BYU in Salt Lake City. (One caveat: since I mentioned KenPom's ratings earlier, I should mention that Pomeroy has BYU as the seventh-best team in the country, so this is not an injustice according to my preferred methodology. That said, the NCAA doesn't use KenPom's ratings, so by their standards, they screwed Pitt.)

The NBA, NHL, and MLB all have interminably long regular seasons followed by short, overvalued playoffs, but at least those three leagues have the decency to give incentives to teams in the form of homefield/court/ice advantage. If the Lakers have a great season, then they are rewarded by getting to play extra home games in the playoffs. College basketball doesn't even have that reward. Teams play all year for a chance at being slightly closer to home for the couple games that will decide whether their seasons are successes or failures, but even if a team does everything right and gets a #1 seed, there is still a reasonable chance that it will end up in someone else's backyard.

Moreover, the same commercial pressure that is pushing the NCAA to further expand an already gaudy tournament also causes the NCAA to put teams like Duke and Pitt is difficult situations. It cannot be a coincidence that Baylor and Texas A&M are both in the South bracket when the NCAA needs to sell thousands of tickets for a regional at Reliant Stadium. Duke ends up being penalized by the NCAA's need to maximize revenue. Couldn't the NCAA have adopted a more neutral way to draw Texans to the regional, like say burning Thomas Jefferson in effigy?

I will now return to my normal Vicious Little Ferret jokes.

Unintentional Irony, Mike Lupica-style

So I was watching the Sports Reporters on the elliptical this morning and the opening segment was about the plans to expand the NCAA Tournament to 96 teams. Bob Ryan and Mike Lupica lit into the idea, complaining that it would ruin the "perfect sporting event" and that it would devalue the regular season. Ironically, these are the same two people who cannot discuss college football at any point in the season without moaning about the fact that there is no playoff. I found a few things about their wildly inconsistent worldviews to be amusing:

1. They complained that expansion of the Big Dance is driven by coaches (because of the pressure to get bids) and the combination of the NCAA and the networks (which want more product to sell). Unwittingly, they illustrated the best case against a college football playoff. (For the record, I'm in favor of a 4-8 team playoff, but I'd like a constitutional amendment capping the field at eight. I'd rather have the current system than a 16-team playoff.)

2. Which arguments that Ryan and Lupica made against expanding the tournament from 65 to 96 could not be made to contract the tournament to 32? Or to 16? (I would be a much bigger college basketball fan if the tournament were 16 teams.)

3. It was not an accident that the panel spent the whole first segment discussing the potential expansion of the Tournament, but there was no discussion of actual college basketball teams and games in 2010. That wouldn't be because the "perfect sporting event" has killed the regular season, would it? Lupica's contribution was to mispronounce "Louisville" (the "s" is silent, Mike) and to refer to a non-existent school named "Missouri Valley State" as the typical Cinderella. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the NCAA Tournament is loved by people like Lupica and Ryan who spend the most of their time catering to the pro-sports obsessions of their readers because it allows them to distill an entire season down to three weeks. It's a sports writer's path of least resistance.

This Is Why You Fail

Imagine an SEC football coach saying the equivalent of the following from John Calipari:

John Calipari is one win away from clinching a Southeastern Conference championship in his first season at Kentucky -- just what he was brought in to do.

That's why his answer was swift and decisive when Calipari was asked Friday what winning the school's 44th conference title would mean: "Nothing."

The No. 2 Wildcats (27-1, 12-1), college basketball's winningest program, would assure themselves of at least a share of the championship by beating Tennessee on Saturday. They would get the championship outright if Vanderbilt also loses at Arkansas.

"I've always taken the approach that it's about the seed in the NCAA tournament," Calipari said. "If you want me to be honest about how I think and what we're doing to prepare, that's what it is. The SEC tournament is about our seed in the NCAA tournament."

Calipari is an unethical twit. He's made Kentucky hateable again, which is a public service, in a way. That said, he just did a wonderful job of distilling why college basketball has killed itself: it has rendered a three-and-a-half month regular season completely meaningless by making everything about a three-week tournament in March. It has produced a legion of casual fans who tune into the sport in March so they can stumble their way through the banal exercise of picking a bracket, but it has killed any incentive for people without a rooting interest in one of the contenders from being anything other than extremely casual about the sport. So thanks, John. You make me feel better about no longer caring for a sport that excited me as a kid.