Fisking Buzz Bissinger

I'm not going to lie; this was a lot of fun. 

It occurred to me while I was writing that Bissinger and John Feinstein occupy the same place in my head.  Both wrote indisputably great sports books in the late 80s.  Both are now grumpy old men, writing screeds against college football from the Acela Corridor.  In both instances, I read their writing and remember the day when my childhood ended: the day that I read the obituary of Roald Dahl (my favorite author as a boy) obituary and learned that he said the following:

There's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity ... I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason.

Bissinger also reminds me of Don Draper at the end of last week's Mad Men, left behind in a world where he didn't understand The Beatles in their "Hard Day's Night" stage, let alone their new "Tomorrow Never Knows" style, and having a drink while his actual wife is meditating and his office wife is smoking a joint while writing copy.  Buzz sees a world where college football has become a national sport, outpacing baseball in a number of ways.  The barbarians are at his gates.  For a guy already prone to angry outbursts, his WSJ column was entirely predictable. 

Chemistry is for Laboratories, Urban Meyer Edition

Here's my reaction to Matt Hayes' piece on Urban Meyer.  In short, I thought that the whole thing was overblown, mainly because Hayes was describing a time period in which Florida was remarkably successful.  In fact, the piece serves as an unintentional rejoinder to everything that Kirk Herbstreit says about the emotions and intangibles of college football:

To summarize the article, Florida's players engaged in various forms of bad behavior during the 2008 season. The highlights include Percy Harvin complaining about running stadium stairs and then choking his position coach, Janoris Jenkins getting into various scrapes with the law, Meyer applying laxer discipline to his best performers, and Florida players generally smoking a lot of marijuana.

And here's the punchline: it's an afterthought in the article, but Florida won the national championship in 2008. In fact, there's an argument to be made that 2008 Florida was the best team of the Aughts, as evidenced by the fact that their yards-per-play margin ranked up with those of 2001 Miami and 2005 Texas, despite the fact that the Gators played a tough schedule. The Hats Guys of the world (and there are plenty of analogs in the world of college football) want us to believe that teams win based on senior leadership, authoritative performances from quarterbacks in the huddle, and "everyone coming together as a team." According to this ideology, 2008 Florida should have been terrible, as their players should have been split apart by inconsistent discipline and a star player being permitted to commit a battery on a coach. Instead, they ended the season passing around a crystal football.

The piece then goes on to criticize both John Pennington for using the article as a platform to dump further praise onto Tim Tebow (Tebow being a great college quarterback just isn't enough anymore) and NFL personnel directors for letting the smoke surrounding Florida players cloud their judgment as to just how good those players are.  (Good lord, that was a terrible pun on my part.)

There are additional weaknesses to the piece that I'm sure have been noted by Ohio State fans.  For instance, the bit about Bryan Thomas falls flat for two reasons.  First, it makes it sound as if a football coach can make a unilateral decision to give a player a medical hardship letter without any involvement from a doctor.  Second, Florida wasn't a serial abuser of the hardship rule like their buddies in Tuscaloosa.  In fact, Florida has been one of the paragons in the SEC in refusing to engage in oversigning generally, a fact that refutes Hayes' argument entirely. 

In the end, the article just struck me as a kitchen sink approach.  Hayes took every single negative that he could find about Urban Meyer since Meyer moved from Utah to Florida and then threw them into a piece without providing context.  Some of the allegations are indeed pretty interesting, most notably the story about Percy Harvin choking Billy Gonzalez.  They reflect poorly on Meyer and well on Hayes' ability to obtain information.  However, Hayes then goes haywire when he moves from reporting the stories to claiming that Florida's weaker performances in the last two years are the result of a lack of discipline.  It's a fitting result that a guy named Hayes would write a column about the Ohio State football coach and then he would go nuts.

Is Hank Schrader Working at Butts-Mehre?

Though I generally view the focus on the off-field exploits of Georgia football players as a tired pursuit of sports radio hosts and Jeff Schultz, the suspensions for Bacarri Rambo and Alec Ogletree have caught my attention.  Georgia is now going to be missing at least four defensive starters for the SEC opener at Missouri, at least three because of apparent marijuana use.  The crusade by Georgia's football program against any drug use is going to have significant effects on the field.  The development has put me into rhetorical question mode:

Georgia's football program is in an interesting place right now. The Dawgs' head coach is a well-liked coach who is pretty clearly a B+ head man competing for titles against an A+ coach in the state to the west. The fan base is fiercely loyal and turns out for every game, but one has to wonder whether they will continue to make significant donations for the privilege to buy tickets to increasingly soft home schedules. How much do Georgia fans really want Mark Richt to play the role of Joe Friday when the conference is hyper-competitive? Do they really want to pay hundreds of dollars per ticket to see back-ups because the starters smoked pot on spring break?

The question that remained after I wrote that column was whether the current stance taken by the Georgia athletic department is the result of media attention paid to off-field issues.  Is Georgia overreacting to criticism from members of the media?  Or has this policy been in effect throughout the Richt era?  Is it just a function of the coach's personality and worldview?  I'm interested to hear from people who know more about the program than I do.

The Original Title Comparing Gary Danielson to a Famous Propagandist Violated Godwin’s Law and was Deleted

Braves & Birds Ballot - Week 15

Rank	Team	Delta
1	LSU Tigers	--
2	Oklahoma St. Cowboys	1
3	Alabama Crimson Tide	-1
4	USC Trojans	--
5	Oregon Ducks	--
6	Stanford Cardinal	1
7	Boise St. Broncos	4
8	Wisconsin Badgers	2
9	Arkansas Razorbacks	6
10	Michigan Wolverines	4
11	South Carolina Gamecocks	5
12	Clemson Tigers	11
13	Baylor Bears	7
14	TCU Horned Frogs	3
15	Oklahoma Sooners	-7
16	Michigan St. Spartans	-3
17	Kansas St. Wildcats	1
18	Georgia Bulldogs	-6
19	Virginia Tech Hokies	-13
20	Southern Miss. Golden Eagles	--
21	Nebraska Cornhuskers	-2
22	West Virginia Mountaineers	2
23	Houston Cougars	-14
24	Notre Dame Fighting Irish	-3
25	Florida St. Seminoles	--
Dropouts: Texas Longhorns

SB Nation BlogPoll College Football Top 25 Rankings »

OK, let’s talk about the latest illustration of the futile task that college football’s movers and shakers demand: picking two teams out of 120 to play for the national title.  I voted for Oklahoma State on resume grounds.  They have played a tougher slate than Alabama.  The Tide are getting by on the reputation of the SEC, despite the fact that it pretty clearly takes a back seat to the Big XII this year.  The SEC was a top-heavy league with five quality teams, two of which Bama missed.  Moreover, Oklahoma State looked good against their tough schedule, as only two of their wins were by single digits. 

In addition, I have philosophical issues with Alabama having a chance to win the national title against LSU.  One of the unique and positive aspects of college football is that it is the only American sport that doesn’t hit the reset button at the end of the regular season.  It is possible for a team other than the BCS Championship Game to be the national champion, at least as declared by the AP.  We had that result in 2003 when USC won a share of the national title despite the fact that they didn’t play in the title game.*  When declaring a national champion, we should be looking at the whole body of work, rather than arbitrarily anointing the winner of the last game as the champion.**  It’s with that framework in mind that I agree 100% with Clay Travis that LSU should win the AP poll as long as they aren't blown out by the Tide.  What does Alabama prove with close win at the Superdome, other than that they split a home game and a neutral site game with LSU and otherwise played a significantly easier schedule?  This isn’t just a matter of what I want to see as a viewer; it’s a matter that I don’t want an inconclusive national title game, which is exactly what the Bama-LSU rematch is going to be. 

* – Yes, the coaches have agreed to give the crystal ball to the winner of the national title game automatically.  I view that decision as an abdication of responsibility, a desire to tie everything in a neat little bow when life doesn’t work like that.

** – I will argue to the death that for all the complaints about the notion of a two-team playoff voted on by a mismatch of distracted coaches and minimally-qualified Harris Poll voters, I’ll take that over a system that can declare the 83-78 Cardinals World Champions or can decide that the 14-6 Giants are more deserving of eternal glory than the 18-1 Patriots who ended their regular season beating the Giants on the road.

All that said, I also agree with Matt Hinton that there is no way to be confident that Bama or Oklahoma State has a better resume than the other.  This is a great summary:

You like Alabama? Sorry. Oklahoma State has twice as many wins against teams ranked in the current BCS standings. It has seven wins against teams that finished with winning records; Alabama has three. OSU is second nationally in scoring, first in defensive takeaways and usually spent the fourth quarter throttling down in garbage time. Two of its three wins against top-20 opponents came by five touchdowns. Robert Griffin III, soon to be awarded as the best quarterback in the nation? Oklahoma State picked him off twice and led Baylor 49-3 after three quarters. Need I mention what happened Saturday night against the Sooners?

The Cowboys are outright conference champions against a round-robin conference schedule. The Crimson Tide missed two ranked teams in their conference and didn't even win their own division.

Oh, so you like Oklahoma State now, huh? Wrong again. Alabama bludgeoned its opponents by the widest margin of victory in the nation. Its seven SEC wins came by an average of 30 points apiece. Its closest win all season was 16 points, at Penn State, and it wasn't that close. 'Bama leads the nation in total defense, scoring defense, rushing defense, passing defense, pass efficiency defense and third down defense. At 8.8 points per game, the Tide are the least scored-upon team in Division I in more than a decade.

The only thing standing between Alabama and a perfect season is a three-point overtime loss to the undisputed No. 1 team that came down to field goals. Oklahoma State blew a 17-point lead to Iowa State. In late November.

You say Oklahoma State succeeded against a tougher schedule, I say Alabama has been more dominant on a more consistent basis. Let's call the whole thing off.

As someone who touts yards per play as a good baseline statistic with which to measure teams, the only argument that I would add is that the Tide are better on a per-play basis than Oklahoma State.  The Pokes are good, outgaining their opponents by 1.86 yards per play, but the Tide are off the charts with a 3.14 YPP margin.  That is a number reflecting the fact that Bama has been utterly dominant in its wins this year.  Too bad so few of those wins were over teams with winning records.

Hinton ends with this perfect description of the fundamental problem with college football’s postseason:

The only thing more ridiculous than using the BCS to determine a champion is pretending that it isn't ridiculous. After 14 years and a dozen legitimate, unresolved controversies, we are all fully aware that the emperor has no clothes. It never has. As the evolutionary link between the old, pell mell bowl system and a full-fledged playoff that actually determines a football champion by playing football, it's run its course. Stop the madness. Bring on a bracket. Or just point to LSU a mile ahead of the rest of the pack and declare the Tigers the champions right now. But stop splitting hairs.

I started and ended a post on the Florida-Michigan debate five years ago making the same points:

The first and most important is that it requires a serious splitting of hairs to pick between the teams. Both teams have one loss against fairly tough schedules. Florida has more quality wins, as they went 5-1 against Sagarin's top 30, whereas Michigan was 3-1, so it's fair to say that Florida played a slightly tougher schedule, although for a national title contender, there are tough games and then there's playing the #1 team on the road, which Michigan did and Florida didn't. On the other hand, Florida didn't blow anyone out all season. Compare the team's performances in their biggest games. Michigan beat Notre Dame by 26 on the road and Wisconsin by 17 at home before losing on the road to the wire-to-wire #1 by three points, the one result that can legitimately justify a rematch. Florida lost to an Auburn team that twice got blown out at home, benefitted from LSU's "shoot yourself in the foot, the Les Miles Way!" exhibition, and they eked past Tennessee, Georgia, Florida State, Vandy, and South Carolina. In fact, they were outgained by both South Carolina and Vandy. In contrast, Michigan beat Vandy by 20 and outgained them by 210 yards. It's Michigan's dominance in its wins that's the basis of Vegas having the Wolverines as a six-point favorite on a neutral field, per Chris Fowler. In any event, it's legitimate to say that Florida is #2 because of a better resume and it's equally legitimate to say that Michigan is #2 because they have looked like a better team this year…

Of course, all of this would be irrelevant if we had a plus-one system. The whole unseemly process of announcers and coaches blathering on like Carville and Novak would be less important if we didn't have a system that required impossible tasks such as differentiating between two one-loss teams with very similar credentials. With a plus-one system, we would have Ohio State vs. LSU, Michigan vs. Florida, and the debate would be a far less important one over who is #4, rather than who is #2. In the end, Florida is going to get the nod over Michigan because of the short memory of simple-minded voters, which seems a wee bit inferior to the two teams meeting in Pasadena or New Orleans to settle the matter like men.

I made these points as a Michigan socio who desperately wanted to see the Wolverines get a second shot at Ohio State in Glendale.  (As it turns out, Buckeye fans should have been hoping for the same so they would be spared Jim Tressel turning into Unfrozen Caveman Coach: “your spread formations and running plays frighten and confuse me.”) 

I mention this concept of trying to present rational arguments in a consistent way because the villains of the weekend - more than the BCS, Roy Kramer, Bill Hancock, Jim Delany, Nick Saban, or the person who convinced Herman Cain to expose himself to the scrutiny of a Presidential bid - is Gary Danielson and the people behind CBS’s production of the SEC Championship Game.  At this point, Craig James is credible when compared to Danielson.  Gary is quite good when he is discussing x’s and o’s, but when he steps away from the game that he is covering into bigger picture discussions, he embarrasses himself. 

In 2006, Danielson and the SEC on CBS team spent the fourth quarter of Florida’s win over Arkansas lobbying for the Gators to play for the national title over Michigan.  Their argument was based on the fact that Florida had played a tougher schedule, which they demonstrated with a graphic comparing the teams that the Gators and Wolverines had beaten.  Guess what metric CBS did not use yesterday?  You guessed it, the one that favored the SEC team in 2006, but cut against the SEC team in 2011.  Moreover, consider the fact that CBS was ready to go with graphics to begin with.  I have plenty of criticisms of the way that ESPN/ABC do games (I was bitching in this space last week about discussing Urban Meyer potentially taking the Ohio State job during the fourth quarter of a very close Michigan-Ohio State game), but I never get the sense that they are presenting a legal case for the teams that they cover over the teams that they don’t.  At times during the fourth quarter yesterday, I felt like I was at a mediation, watching one side make a PowerPoint presentation as to their strengths of their case and the weaknesses of mine. 

And leaving aside the fact that CBS apparently has the sports equivalent of Roger Ailes doing its SEC games and they think that no one remembers their convention speech in 2006, the remainder of the argument was shoddy in two more ways.  First, Danielson never bothered to acknowledge that he said before and during the LSU-Alabama game that he was against the idea of a rematch.  When it was in the network’s interest to bill the November game as an end-all, be-all, Danielson said that there shouldn’t be a second edition.  When it was in the network’s interest to go to bat for one of its teams in December, they did so without acknowledging the massive inconsistency.  Second, Danielson cited the fact that Oklahoma State is 106th in total defense and that disqualified them from consideration as a potential national champion.  One of the main reasons why the Pokes give up a lot of yards is that they have a no-huddle offense that scores quickly, so their defense is on the field for a lot of plays.  If you look at their defense on a per-play basis, they allow 5.31 yards per play, good for 52nd in the country.  In case you’re wondering, Auburn allowed 5.4 yards per play in 2010, good for 55th nationally.  Can someone refresh my recollection as to whether Danielson had an issue with the Tigers playing for the national title?   

I could be tilting at windmills here, but it is not good for the SEC that Danielson and CBS are filling the role of Baghdad Bob for the league.  There is already something of a backlash against the SEC, partially as a result of jealousy regarding the conference’s success, and partially for more legitimate reasons, such as oversigning (a topic that will surely get some attention in the lead-up to an Alabama-LSU title game).  The facts that the league is getting both spots in the BCS Championship Game and that its network broadcast partner is openly shilling for its teams will be another reason for people outside the South to look for chances to get even.  SEC football can succeed on its own merits.  It doesn’t need the unsubtle assistance of a former Purdue quarterback to prosper.

Jeff Schultz’s Solution for Georgia: Martin Seligman*

If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you know that I hate explanations grounded in pop psychology.  They are the refuge of the lazy.  They are a substitute for thinking and analyzing data.  Did Team A break a losing streak to Team B?  If yes, then it’s because they wanted it more and they spent all offseason thinking about it.  If no, then it’s because Team B is in their heads.

It’s Georgia-Florida week, so it’s time to trot out an array of unprovable assertions.  Step on down, Jeff Schultz:

The numbers are dizzying: three consecutive losses, 11 of 13, 18 of 21.

Vince Dooley went 17-7-1. His 25-game winning percentage: .700. Since then, Ray Goff (1-6), Donnan (1-4) and Richt (2-8) have gone 4-18. Their 22-game percentage: .182. 

How can players and coaches not think of that history, even if they weren’t here for most of it?Some players weren’t even born yet. Murray? He actually was born Nov. 10, 1990 — the day Steve Spurrier’s Gators tortured Goff’s Dogs, 38-7. That’s when this 21-game stretch started. So it’s all Murray’s fault.

When one signature program loses 18 of 21 games to another, it’s not just about talent. At some point, it’s between the ears.

Georgia’s starting quarterbacks in the past three meetings have thrown nine interceptions. Florida’s, one. The Dogs have committed 12 turnovers. Florida, one.

That not about athleticism. That’s one team being calm and the other having a meltdown.

Schultz presents a binary proposition: Georgia’s lack of success in Jacksonville can either be the result of talent or mental strength.  It can’t be a combination of the two.  More importantly, it can’t be primarily the result of a totally obvious, more likely explanation: for the most part, Florida have had better teams!  Maybe Georgia players, instead of getting PTSD the moment they cross the border into Florida, are up against superior opponets?  Whether that is the result of Florida having better players, better coaches, or a combination thereof, is a matter for debate.  Again, it’s probably a mix.

So, Jeff, let’s test my little hypothesis since I'm operating in the world of facts and you are in the ether.  Let’s look at CollegeFootballReference.com to see every year since 1990 in which Georgia has either finished with a better SEC record than Florida (excluding the Cocktail Party) or had a better SRS rating.  Here is the complete list:

1992
2002
2003
2004
2005

In contrast, Georgia had an inferior record and SRS rating in 1997 and had the same record (excluding the Cocktail Party) and an inferior SRS rating in 2007.  So really, Georgia fans can point to all of three games over a 21-year period where they had a better team and should have beaten Florida, but didn’t: 1992 (although in retrospect, Spurrier versus Goff was a huge equalizer), and the two Zook disasters in 2002 and 2003.  Georgia was better overall in 2005, but not without DJ Shockley.  Florida fans can point to 1997 and 2007 as years in which their teams were at least comparable, if not marginally better than Georgia and they lost both games.  (A simple question for Georgia fans: how much of your fond memories of the strengths of the ‘97 and ‘07 teams are bound up in the wins in Jacksonville?  After the Florida game, the ‘97 team was solidly beaten at home by Auburn and then required a last-second touchdown to beat Georgia Tech.  The ‘07 team came on like gangbusters at the end of the season, but was mediocre for the first six games.)  So Georgia should be, what, 5-16 against Florida since 1990?  6-15, maybe?  Would we all feel better about the game is that was the tally instead of 3-18?

Since 1990, Florida has finished first in the SEC nine times.  They have won the East ten times, or slightly more than 50% of all available titles.  They have played in 11 major bowl games.  They have three national titles.  In the same time period, Georgia has won two SEC titles, three divisional titles, and no national titles.  Georgia has played in three major bowl games.  Schultz’s mistake is starting from the premise that Florida and Georgia are both “signature programs,” implying some sort of equality.  Georgia has the potential to be equal to Florida, especially if Florida State and Miami pose credible recruiting threats to the Gators in-state, but that potential has not been realized over the past 21 years.  That, more than some imaginary mental block, is the reason why Georgia has struggled in Jacksonville.

The good news, then, is that Georgia is a better team than Florida in 2011 (Georgia is almost five points better in SRS and about 5.5 points better according to the Sagarin Predictor) and the margin isn’t close if Jeff Brantley is either out or limited.  If Georgia loses this year, then we may have to examine what’s going on upstairs with this team, as probability is pointing in the Dawgs' favor.**
 
* – Here’s the title reference for those of you who aren’t married to psychologists who interned at Penn.

** - Come to think of it, the most precise way to determine what Georgia's record should have been against Florida over the past 21 years would be to come up with retroactive point spreads using SRS (and Sagarin for the years for which it is available) and then assign percentages to the games. 

Time To Cower, BCS; Rick Reilly Is On Your Case!

I implore you to read Rick Reilly's complaint about the BCS.  If you are wondering how it is that Rick Neuheisel got a head coaching gig at UCLA after bombing out at Colorado and Washington (with NCAA sanctions, to boot) or Greg Robinson got the defensive coordinator job at Michigan after disastrous spells with the Kansas City Chiefs and Syracuse, just look at their magnificent coifs.  Imagine a middle-aged decision-maker who drives a Lexus, listens to Jimmy Buffett to unwind, spends way too much time futzing with his investments, and views golf as a sport.  That guy is just going to look at Neuheisel or Robinson and say "that guy looks like a coach," in the same way that the Oakland A's scouts said "that guy looks like a player" in Moneyball.  That guy is also going to click on the front page of ESPN.com and say to himself "awesome, a new column by Rick Reilly!  He just looks so friendly and unthreatening!  I'm in the mood for a bunch of dumb one-liners that would be beneath Jay Leno!  And I don't like data or cogent, orderly arguments in my sportswriting.  Explain the world of sports to me, Rick!"

How else can one explain ESPN giving prominent space to a column that contains the following gems:

• Reilly complains about the fact that there could be six unbeaten teams by the end of the college football season, as if all six were likely to run their respective tables.  As if to show how ludicrously short-sighted his argument was, Oklahoma and Wisconsin lost on Saturday night, cutting Reilly's nightmare scenario down before the column had been up for 48 hours.

• Reilly argues against an imaginary strawman, namely that an unbeaten Oklahoma or Oklahoma State would be jumped by the one-loss loser of the Alabama-LSU game.  Rick, now that you are writing on the Internet, you might be expected to learn about the concept of a hyperlink.  If you are going to argue against a proposition, then you might want to link to someone making that argument.  Or at least give us a name?  Is that too much to ask?  It seems relevant when you are arguing against an all-SEC BCS Championship Game, an event that has never occurred and in fact has never come close to occurring.

• How about this gem:

True, trying to win a national championship by beating Big Ten teams is like trying to get drunk drinking non-alcoholic beer, but what do you want them to do? They can only play their schedule and they've fricaseed every team they've played, 301-58. It's enough to make a Wisconsin fan hurl his lunch, which would be known as Bielemia.

What do we want Wisconsin to do?  Oh, I don't know, maybe play a non-conference road game against a team more threatening than UNLV, Fresno State, or Hawaii?  Rick, if you knew anything about college football other than the fact that it provides you with fodder for an annual complaint about the BCS, then you would know that programs get to pick their non-conference schedules.  A program like Wisconsin that has a large home stadium and supportive fan base has near-total latitude in making scheduling decisions.  Wisconsin doesn't just play their schedule; they make 33% of their schedule.  So yes, I want Wisconsin to start acting like the college football power that they pretend to be. 

• Reilly complains about the computers not showing any love to Stanford.  You want to know why the computer rankings are so bad, Rick?  Because the BCS kow-towed to bitchy columnists after Nebraska pipped Colorado and Oregon for the right to get slaughtered by Miami in the 2001 national title game on the basis of margin-of-victory.  You want to take a wild guess what position Reilly, a Colorado alum who hates Nebraska, would have taken at that time?  I am going out on a limb and say that Reilly wasn't motivated by a rigorous commitment to empiricism and math.  Also, Reilly complains about Stanford's low computer ranking and then cites their schedule going forward.  You know, the part of the schedule for which the computers are not yet accounting.

• I can't believe that Reilly gets paid to write sentences like this gem about Boise State: "And yet every time they play a big-conference school they tend to win, including Georgia this year and TCU coming up."  He's unintentionally paraphrasing Brian Fantana: 60% of the time, they win every time.  And that's before we get to the fact that TCU isn't yet a big conference school. 

• Reilly also got paid to write this: "If the [Clemson] Tigers go undefeated, they'll have beaten everybody but the Chinese army -- Auburn, Virginia Tech, Boston College, Florida State and South Carolina."  Boston College?  Are you too f***ing busy to click on the ACC standings and notice that Boston College is 1-6?  Would you prefer to cite the Packers' accomplishment in going unbeaten against a schedule that has included the winless Rams?  Or, since you seem to like shallow geopolitical analogies, maybe you should tout our armed forces' triumph over Grenada? 

Rick, if you feel like college football is crucifying you, then might I suggest you find another religion?  The CIMB Asia Pacific Classic is ready when you are.

Brady Hoke and Gene Stallings

As I have tried to come to grips with Brady Hoke as Michigan’s head coach after some initial misgivings, the most comforting analogy has been between Hoke and Les Miles.  No one would accuse Miles of being an x’s and o’s savant, but he does three things very well: (1) he recruits; (2) he hires good coordinators and position coaches; and (3) he makes ballsy end-of-game decisions (although the ‘09 Ole Miss and ‘10 Tennessee games damaged that last reputation severely).  The early returns are positive in the first two categories and Saturday night, he checked the third box emphatically.*  So yeah, Hoke’s upside is Miles.  His recruiting base isn’t as good, but he can make up for that with Michigan’s national profile and an “I love the s*** out of this school” pitch that worked for Charlie Weis at Notre Dame.  His predecessor didn’t leave the program in as healthy a condition as Nick Saban did, but Rodriguez did leave Hoke with Denard Robinson. 

* – For those of you who (quite rationally) gave up on the game with Notre Dame leading 24-7 in the fourth quarter, Michigan had the ball on the Irish 16 with eight seconds left, plenty of time to take a shot at the end zone.  Kirk Herbstreit, who is usually on the right end of the bell curve for intelligence for color guys, immediately advocated for Michigan to center the ball, kick the field goal, and go to overtime.  Is this some sort of rule for analysts that they need to take the Rick Perryiest position when it comes to risk?  Let’s review the facts.  Michigan has not kicked a field goal all year.  They were 4/13 on field goals last year and have the same starting kicker this year as they did at this time last year.  They had momentum.  They had rallied in the game with a series of jump balls.  As Miles intuited four years ago, a fly pattern to the end zone is a very safe play with eight seconds remaining.  

But what if the better analogy isn’t to Miles, but instead to another SEC coach who ultimately won a national title: Gene Stallings.  Here are the parallels:

• Stallings had a losing record as a head coach when Alabama hired him.  If Michigan fans think that Hoke’s 47-50 record is bad, then imagine how Tide fans felt when Stallings was hired with a 27-45-1 record at Texas A&M and a 23-34-1 record with the St. Louis/Arizona Cardinals?
• Stallings was replacing an outsider who was fired after three years because of a lack of success against the in-state rival.  We’ll see what details emerge from John Bacon’s soon-to-be-released book, but there is a good argument to be made that Rich Rodriguez was never accepted by large segments of the Michigan fan base and the local media because he did not have any ties to the Schembechler-Moeller-Carr lineage.  Does that sound like Alabama fans rejecting Curry because he was the coach of Georgia Tech (a major rival for the Tide in previous years; look at the lyrics of their fight song if you need proof) and had no ties to the Bear?  Stallings didn’t have a great resume in terms of wins and losses, but he did bring the possibility of unifying a fractured, somewhat disgruntled fan base.
• Stallings was a defensive coach who didn’t wear a headset (although that was more common in the 90s than it is today) and relied heavily on his assistants. 

So obviously, Michigan is going to have an epic defense in 2013 and win the national title with Blake Countess stealing the ball out of the hands of an opposing receiver en route to the end zone. 

ESPN, the SEC, and the False Specter of Lawsuits Aplenty

Prior to Charles Robinson dropping a hydrogen bomb on Coral Gables, the big topic in college football as we while away the time before actual games has been Texas A&M potentially moving to the SEC. A&M is annoyed by the prospect of Texas using the Longhorn Network to increase its in-state recruiting advantage, so they are eying a move to a conference that isn’t dominated by their arch-rival. This sort of result was always likely as Texas increased its control over the Big XII. First, Nebraska and Colorado bolted, thus making Tom Osborne into a seer as he had worried about the southern members (especially the one in Austin) dominating the Big XII when the Huskers joined in the mid 90s. Now, A&M is seeing the same factors that pushed the Huskers and Buffaloes to new destinations.

Because of the legal issues involved in a major school decamping from one conference to another, this story has spawned all manner of commentary regarding the possibility of various parties ending up in court. Much of the commentary has been poorly reasoned. Exhibit A is the blogosphere’s Lionel Hutz, Clay Travis. Much of Travis’s writing on SEC expansion has been worthwhile. He claims to have sources that have told him that the SEC will not expand into any states in which it already has a member, which is an interesting and useful contribution to the discussion. That said, Travis’s claim that ESPN has a legal conflict of interest in its dealing with the Big XII and the SEC is simply wrong for a host of reasons. Here is the keystone of Travis’s theory:

OKTC hasn't read the entirety of the Big 12's agreements with ESPN, but every contract has a boilerplate "good faith" provision that obligates a party to act in the best interests of its partners. Would it be in good faith for ESPN to be negotiating with the SEC about increased payouts to a current Big 12 member that would lead to a breach of the Big 12 contract when that member leaps? Of course not.

Like Travis, I have a law degree from a good school in the South that starts with the letter “V.” Unlike Travis, I have a lot of experience litigating contractual disputes. That said, it does not take a law degree and experience to figure out why he’s wrong here. OK, maybe a legal background is necessary to figure out that a contractual agreement between two commercial parties does not create a fiduciary relationship as Travis claims. ESPN and the Big XII would be seen more as independent contractors and that sort of relationship does not create any fiduciary duties unless the contract creates such duties.

A legal background is not necessary to conclude that, unless its lawyers were committing malpractice, ESPN would never agree to the sort of provision that Travis describes. Think about ESPN”s position. They cover college football and have agreements with all six BCS conferences. Every week during football season, they make decisions that favor some teams and leagues over others. Which teams get plum timeslots? Which players and coaches are going to get puff pieces on College Gameday? Which highlights are they going to feature on SportsCenter? Moreover, ESPN has a dedicated news wing that is (at least in theory) separate and free from the commercial side of the business. In Travis’s world, ESPN's news apparatus would be forbidden from presenting a critical story on any Big XII team.

Assume for the moment that ESPN found evidence that an Oklahoma booster has been paying Sooner players for years and hosting orgies in the shadow of abandoned oil rigs. The implication of Travis's inference is that ESPN agreed to a contractual provision with the Big XII that would prevent it from running with the story because doing so would be antithetical to the Big XII’s interests as it would have negative consequences for one of the conference’s marquee members. ESPN has been accused of many things over the years, but being commercially naive is not one of them. So when Clay wrote the following embarrassingly self-congratulatory remark about how he’s the only one reporting this critical issue:

This is a massive story that OKTC is reporting, one that goes to the very essence of college sports in a televised era. The conflict brought on by Texas A&M to the SEC is just the tip of the contractual iceberg for the worldwide leader in sports. Texas A&M's situation isn't unique, it's just the first one to expose the internal hypocrisies and conflict of ESPN's college sports coverage.

This is a massive story that will be integral to all reporting on conference realignment for the foreseeable future.

…there’s a reason why Travis is the only one writing about the “massive story:” he’s almost certainly wrong. He’s right that ESPN has an inherent conflict of interest in that it is a business partner with a number of conferences that are in competition with one another, but this is a business conflict, not a legal conflict. Travis is right that ESPN will want to appear passive in A&M’s potential move by simply answering questions posed by the interested parties as to what it would pay in various scenarios, but this is almost certainly not because of contractual language.

The second legal issue that has been analyzed incorrectly is the claim that the SEC would face a tortious interference claim if it induced Texas A&M to join the Big XII. Again, we are going to have to make inferences as to the content of agreements that are not publicly available, but there are three problems with a tortious interference claim.

First, it is likely that the agreement between A&M and the Big XII sets out a procedure for A&M to leave the conference. That's fairly standard in conference-school agreements. If the agreement between A&M and the Big XII establishes that A&M can leave the conference based on certain notice and/or paying a certain amount as a penalty, then the SEC cannot be tortiously interfering with the contract because there is no breach in the first place.

Second, even if one assumes that the contractual provision says that A&M has to provide two years notice (or something to that effect) or else they have to pay a penalty, then that penalty should be the extent of the Big XII’s damages. In order to enforce a liquidated damages provision, the Big XII would have to establish that it would have a hard time calculating damages resulting from A&M breaching the agreement and therefore, the liquidated damages provision is a good faith estimate as to what its damages would be if A&M left the conference without complying with the notice requirement. Thus, the Big XII is committed to the position that its damages for early withdrawal are a certain number. If that number is the right number for A&M, then how could the SEC cause different, greater damages? The Big XII would be left arguing that a provision of its own contract is unenforceable. If the Big XII were at risk of losing $1B in the event that A&M left, then its agreement with A&M should have reflected that reality.

Third, the Big XII would have a duty to mitigate its damages caused by the actions of A&M and the SEC. If the issue is as simple as the ESPN/Big XII contract being voided by the league dropping below ten teams, then there is an incredibly basic way for the Big XII to keep its deal in place: add a new team. I wonder what the withdrawal penalty/procedure is for TCU with the Big East? Even if TCU is not an option, there would be a host of schools that would line up for the privilege of being in a BCS conference. I can immediately think of a school in Idaho whose recent football success far outstrips that of Texas A&M that would love the chance to move to an Automatic Qualifying Conference. In order to recover for the full length of its TV deal (which is how Burnt Orange Nation comes up with the $1B figure), the Big XII would need to establish that it could not find another school to bring its numbers back up to ten. Good luck with that.

One final caveat: the fact that I am pooh-poohing the legal claims that the Big XII would have against ESPN and the SEC does not mean that the former will not threaten or even bring claims. Parties posture in negotiations. Additionally, a plaintiff does not need a fully meritorious claim in order to initiate a lawsuit. There are some fairly complicated issues involved in a dispute that would ultimately be addressed by a judge or jury, which is a prospect that would scare any defendant, let alone two out-of-state defendants in a Texas court. ESPN and the SEC would like to avoid that fate and they are almost certainly governing their actions accordingly. That said, the claims that Outkick the Coverage and Burnt Orange Nation are describing are overblown.

My New Game

It's very simple. I listen to sports radio on the way to work in the morning (most of my podcasts are either taking the summer off or are operating a little below normal levels) and wait for a discussion of an event that actually took place on a field or a court. I'll admit that starting this game the week before the All-Star Break was a little unfair, but I had a solid, one-week streak going. During that week, I was enlightened on the following topics:

• Steak Shapiro going to New Orleans for the wedding of Tulane's play-by-play guy;


• How excited the 680 morning crew were to see Zookeeper;


• Floyd Mayweather being a "punk" by burning hundred-dollar bills at a club;


• Nick Cellini deciding not to go to a friend's 40th birthday party in Vegas because the group going was going to waste hundreds of dollars on table service (no s***, they discussed this without a hint of irony one day after venting about Mayweather wasting money); and


• Wall-to-wall James Harrison discussion (nothing lights the fire of sports radio hosts like negative comments about teammates).

Truly, this is sports radio in name only.

So this morning, Sandra Golden finally snapped the streak by discussing her experience watching the Women's World Cup Final, so I only made it a little more than a week without hearing a discussion about an actual sporting event. The discussion on 790 was on the changes at 680, which Shapiro naturally credited to 790 winning in the afternoon slot.

In reality, the change in the lineup could be a good harbinger for sports radio in this town. I've never been a big fan of Buck & Kincaid, mainly because Buck isn't especially interesting to me and Kincaid fills out the caricature of a sports radio host to a "T": opinionated Northeasterner who spends as much time trying to rile up his audience as he does thinking of something intelligent to say. In other words, emotion over intellect.* I much prefer Matt Chernoff and Chuck Oliver because they seem less emotionally manipulative. In fact, I reached the decision that the sports radio medium had left me** when I realized that the two local shows that I like the most - Chernoff & Oliver on 680 and Tony Barnhart & Wes Durham on 790 - are both in the wasteland of late morning and that it's probably not an accident that the shows with the best sports content are in the worst slots, while the "how can I titillate or annoy the most people?" shows get drive time. Putting a likeable, sports-heavy show in PM drive time is a good step.***

* - Shapiro made the point that the comments to Rodney Ho's AJC articles on sports talk radio reflect the strength of the medium because of the passion displayed by the commenters. By the same reasoning, I suppose that the race wars that break out in the comments sections of news articles show the strength of American democracy. If your sole goal is to rile people up to the point that they express how much you annoy them, then yes, you are a success. If your goal is that people get out of their cars when they get to their homes or offices and say to themselves "that was a quality product and a good use of my time; I'm happy with how I just spent my commute," then hundreds of negative comments on an AJC article are not an indicator of success. It's like the difference between reading intelligent sports commentary on the Internet (and Alex Massie is right; the college football blogosphere is rife with smart analysis) and "look, boobs!" posts on Deadspin. The latter gets a ton of clicks, but at the expense of credibility. As some guy from Hibbing once sang, all the money you made will never buy back your soul.

** - No lineup change is going to address the fundamental issue that sports talk radio has, which is that it's inferior to a good podcast. If my choice is to listen to a 30-minute interview with Tim Vickery or a seven-minute interview with Darren Rovell, followed by a lengthy commercial break and then recitation of scores that I can get on my phone at a moment's notice, I am going to choose the former every time. Even when the local stations get good guests and assuming for the sake of argument that the hosts asked good questions, the chopped up format of sports talk radio prevents the guests from ever getting into detail with their answers. The format has not evolved with technology, specifically the facts that: (1) listeners now have commercial-free options; and (2) there is no point in wasting time on scores that listeners can get with ease if they are so inclined.

*** - Though Cellini has scratched his schtick itch a bit too much in the morning slot, my favorite drive time show on either channel was the Cellini-Dimino afternoon program. Oliver & Chernoff seem like a good replacement for that.

Drew Sharp: The Most Ironically Named Man Outside of Rush Limbaugh

Newspaper columnists tend to be respectful to one another.  Whereas bloggers are prone to pissing matches of all shapes and sizes, our mainstream media counterparts will rarely call one another onto the carpet.  They represent the civility of a bygone age … or they just don’t get the fun of calling another writer a mouth-breathing troglodyte.  Either way, a columnist has to have written something really dumb in order to get another columnist to spend an entire piece railing on a bad argument.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Drew Sharp.  I read Sharp for my four years in Ann Arbor and his sole value was to raise my blood pressure.  Sharp is a Michigan graduate who quickly figured out that his place in the world is to make bomb-throwing statements to anger the local fan bases, most prominently that of his alma mater.  In his mind, Sharp probably thinks of himself as a noble scribe telling truth to power, regardless of the reaction.  In reality, the next well-constructed argument he makes will be the first.  Remarkably, both approaches can lead to a negative reaction, only Sharp (and apparently his bosses at the Detroit Free Press, who have employed Sharp for years) doesn’t understand the difference between the two.

I haven’t clicked on the Free Press’s web site since that newspaper committed journalistic malpractice by giving Mike Rosenberg license to publish a wildly slanted and misleading piece about the practice habits of Michigan football players.*  Mark Bradley does not operate under the same constraints, so he found Sharp’s piece about how Jair Jurrjens would be a .500 pitcher in the mighty American League and tore it to pieces.  Again, when you have caused a veteran columnist to go Fire Joe Morgan on you, then you have really screwed the pooch.

* – Here’s a thought experiment: if Michigan took Ohio State’s approach to NCAA violations, what would it’s response to the NCAA’s notice of inquiry have been?  Maybe a letter suggesting that Michigan get more practice time than the rules permit for the trouble of having to respond to such trivial allegations?  Seriously, look at the disparity between one school referring to “a day of great shame” when it concluded that it had misclassified stretching time and another school stating that it would be “shocked and disappointed and on the offensive” if the NCAA went beyond the ludicrously light sanctions suggested by the school in response to its head coach burying evidence of violations and thereby riding five ineligible players to a Big Ten title.  With that hyper-partisan aside behind me, we can get back to mocking Drew Sharp.

Because he is polite and I am not, I was expecting to have to pick up where Bradley left off, but Mark hit all of the high notes: the minor statistical difference between the AL and NL (Sharp has apparently missed the fact that offense is down in both leagues this year), the fact that Jurrjens has done well against the AL in 2011 (in two starts, Jurrjens has allowed one earned run in 14.1 innings, striking out 12 and walking three), and the fact that velocity isn’t the be-all, end-all for pitching (a point to which Braves fans are especially keen after years of watching Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux mow through opposing lineups without cracking 90 on the radar gun). 

The one point that I would add to Bradley’s fine work is that Jurrjens has gotten better this year despite dropping his average fastball velocity from 91 to 89.  Dave Allen at Fan Graphs noted this change at the start of June, positing that Jurrjens controls his slower fastball better, thus leading to fewer walks and more bad contact as Jurrjens gets opposing hitters to swing at pitches just outside of the strike zone.  Christina Kahrl has noticed that Jurrjens has dropped both his walk rate and his opponents' ISO rates.  We are dealing with a sample size of 110 innings, so there is a good chance that there is noise in the numbers.  It’s eminently reasonable to assume that Jurrjens will not be able to keep his ERA at Maddux levels for an entire season.  However, there’s no way to deny that Jurrjens has been outstanding in 2011, possibly because of a reduction in velocity that has yielded better control.  In that sense, Drew Sharp is backwards when he criticizes Jurrjens for noth throwing hard enough.  After a sample size of thousands of columns, we can safely say that Sharp’s performance is representative of his true quality.

America F*** No

Five Thoughts on the auto-da-fé in Foxboro:

1. I have mixed feelings regarding Bob Bradley. On the one hand, he doesn't have a lot to work with, especially at the back. If we loom at the resumes of his defensive candidates, then it's hard to escape the conclusion that he is being asked to make chicken salad out of you-know-what. Even farther forward, he is supposed to rely on a teenager who just broke into MLS and a striker who has been a total failure in Europe. The best central midfielder on the team spent the season on the bench at Aston Villa. Outside of Clint Dempsey, Tim Howard, and possibly Maurice Edu, it's hard to find a lot of current success stories for Yanks abroad. (Stuart Holden would be an additional success story if not for his injuries.) If Bradley wins the Gold Cup and beats a Mexico side full of players with better resumes, then we ought to laud a significant accomplishment.

On the other hand, what the hell is Bradley doing when he picks his team? Spain win matches by dominating the central midfield area. They play a 4-2-3-1, which means that they have three players in that zone. In this match, those three players were Sergio Busquets, Xabi Alonso, and Santi Cazorla. The US is always going to have issues with players of that quality because we don't have anyone close, but Bradley made a bad situation worse by playing a 4-4-2 that had only two central midfielders. Thus, not only are Edu and Jermaine Jones inferior to the players in their zone, but they were also outnumbered. What is the point of playing two strikers if they are never going to see the ball? Jones and Edu were shockingly listless in the game, but part of their malaise has to be attributed to being given mission impossible by their manager. At best, Bradley was deploying the formation that he is going to use against easier marks in the Gold Cup, but if that's the case, then why even play this game if you are going to serve your players up to the lions?

1a. Two execution metaphors so far. That ought to tell you how well the match went.

2. Was it me or did it seem as if either the ball was underinflated or the grass was too long at Gillette Stadium? The ball kept dying in the grass. Maybe this was by design to prevent Spain from playing their normal passing game. If so, then gee, imagine what the result would have been with balls that actually rolled properly?

3. Santi Cazorla's two goals raise an interesting point for Spain: is he a better fit in the central attacking midfield role than Xavi? The middle man in the band of three in a 4-2-3-1 should generally be able to provide the killer final ball and also crash the box to score. Xavi can obviously do the former, but he's not noted for the latter. Last summer, Vicente del Bosque often started matches with Xavi in the forward role and then he pulled him back into the defensive band of two with a player like Cesc Fabregas moving into Xavi's old spot. This usually worked better for Spain. It's hard to argue with a World Cup-winning manager, but shouldn't he just start matches with Xavi farther back and a goal-scoring threat like Cesc or Cazorla farther forward.

4. Kudos to ESPN for showing the national anthems before the match. ESPN's commitment to proper coverage of Pepidemiology, International Edition stands in stark contrast to both Fox Soccer Channel and Univision. Univision is usually good in this department, but they skipped the anthems before Mexico-El Salvador last night, causing tears of rage on the part of my anthem-obsessed four-year old son. (Thank goodness for YouTube.) Maybe Univision can be excused because the Mexico match was the second half of a double-header and they needed to squeeze in ads between the games. Fox Soccer Channel has no such excuse for skipping the anthems before England-Switzerland. In keeping with their inability to show anything interesting before and after matches, Fox Soccer had a narrator providing useless commentary before the match, but did not show the anthems. If you are going to be blind Anglophiles, then the least you could do is show "G-d Save the Queen," which is typically the high point for an England match.

4a. Has there been a bigger upgrade in a media position than ESPN going from Mark Shapiro to John Skipper? ESPN Hollywood to Ian Darke? It's the broadcasting version of Greg Robinson to Greg Mattison.

5. It's true that Spain was missing a number of first-choice players, but in a way, it's more dangerous to play the second-team guys because Spain are very deep and those second-teamers are going to be highly motivated to prove themselves. Don't you think that Raul Albiol, Santi Cazorla, and Alvaro Negredo were trying to leave an impression with del Bosque? It might have been better to go up against Xavi and Iniesta, neither of whom could have been super-motivated.

The History Books Tell it / They Tell it So Well

This is not Mark Bradley’s strongest effort. Bradley is, by nature, an optimist and wants to think that a major move by the Falcons is going to pan out. Thus, in his column yesterday, he started grasping at straws, like this one:

Before we leave the NFL draft, we need ask a simple question: Were you the Falcons, would you rather have had the second-best-at-worst receiver in this class or the eighth-best defensive end? Because the rationale for trading up to take Julio Jones lies therein.

Gee, if only it were so simple. The Falcons were not choosing simply between taking Julio Jones or one of the defensive ends who would have been available with the #27 pick. No, they were choosing between those two options, only with four additional picks, including a first-rounder and a second-rounder behind door number two. One can just as easily make a simplistic argument in the other direction by saying that the Falcons made the wrong decision in a choice between one player or five. Bradley also assumes without evidence that the Falcons are going to have a late first-round pick in next year’s Draft. He is overrating a team that was outgained on a per-play basis and then lost by 863 points in its first playoff game.

And then this argument by Bradley ignores all recent evidence:

Julio Jones will start as a rookie. That’s a given. It’s all but a given he won’t be a bust. He’s too gifted and too focused. Jones was a high school star and played college football at the highest level, so he’s accustomed to the pursuit of excellence.

I told myself that I wasn’t going to be condescending to a columnist whose work I’ve enjoyed since I was in middle school, but I can’t help myself. Mark, in case you haven’t been watching the NFL for the past decade, wide receivers have a disturbingly high bust rate. Here is the list of wide receivers who have gone in the top ten spots in the Draft since 2000:

Darius Heyward-Bey
Michael Crabtree
Calvin Johnson
Ted Ginn
Braylon Edwards
Troy Williamson
Mike Williams
Larry Fitzgerald
Roy Williams
Reggie Williams
Charles Rogers
Andre Johnson
David Terrell
Koren Robinson
Peter Warrick
Plaxico Burress
Travis Taylor

By my informal count, the number of busts (Ginn, Williamson, Mike Williams, Reggie Williams, Charles Rogers, David Terrell, Koren Robinson, Peter Warrick, and Travis Taylor) outnumber the stars (Calvin Johnson, Fitzgerald, and Andre Johnson) who have been taken in similar positions. (Neither Crabtree, nor Heyward-Bey are off to starts in their careers that indicate that they will be anything other than busts, but for the sake of argument, I’ll give them grades of incomplete.) If the recent past is a guide, then it is three times more likely that Jones will be a bust than it is that he will be the player that Bradley describes.

If Bradley is thinking clearly, then he will counter with some variation of the following: “Michael, none of the busts on your list had a quarterback throwing to them with anything close to Matt Ryan’s ability. Most of your busts are the victim of circumstance.” That may be true, but there are two problems with this argument. First of all, if their lack of success was a function of teammates, then one would expect one or more of those receivers to have flourished when they moved to different teams. The only guy who could possibly be described in that manner is Mike Williams. Second, if wide receivers are simply a function of their quarterbacks, then it makes no sense to invest five good picks into one receiver. Rather, you would simply bide your time and wait for the chance to take your version of Desean Jackson, Mike Wallace, or Wes Welker later in the Draft. You know, like the good teams do.

The Morning S***list

Comcast - I can't comment on the first 55 minutes of the Copa del Rey Final. Why? Because I ordered a new DVR receiver from Comcast before going out of town last Friday and they neglected to inform me that when they send a new receiver, they disable the old one remotely. So, when I got home yesterday, the cable box wasn't working and I did not have a recording for the Final. By the time I was able to talk to a "customer service" representative to sort the issue out, I was only able to pick-up the replay midway through. But hey, they took $5 off my bill, so it's all worthwhile!

ESPN3 - My first impulse when I realized the impact of Comcast's perfidy was to try to watch a replay of the game online, but neither of the links on ESPN3 were working. Helpfully, ESPN3 had a picture of the trophy with white ribbons on one of their broken replay pages, so I had a good idea as to the eventual victor before I started watching.

Me - I was a pouty bitch about not getting to watch the match in proper circumstances. Domestic hilarity ensued.

Cristiano Ronaldo - It's not enough that Barca had to lose a cup final to their arch rivals, but they did so to a Ronaldo goal. Playing Javier Mascherano at center back is probably the right move for Pep Guardiola because Busquets and Pique are too slow a pairing to function, especially against a fast counter-attacking side. The downside is that Mascherano is not a big guy. Thus, losing to a headed goal was not that surprising.

My Intellectual Honesty - I have evolved into a college football/European footie fan for a variety of reasons. One of the major reasons is that these are the two major sports that don't have the absurd American structure of ignoring a large sample size and putting outsized importance on a short playoff at the end of a long season. That said, Barca's season of over 60 matches is going to rise or fall on two games: the Champions League semifinal legs against Real Madrid. Win those and the season is a success (even if Barca are upset in the Champions League Final, although I suppose the manner of the match will matter). A domestic title, two cup finals, and taking two of three from Mourinho's Real would be a great season. Lose the tie and the season, while not a total failure, will come with a bitter aftertaste. The season (or at least the second half of the season) all built towards these four matches against Real. It cannot be an unqualified success if it ends in failure against the arch enemy. I hate this line of thinking because it throws away so much good work, but that's how I feel right now and I doubt that I'm alone.

The Braves’ Lineup and Sports Media in General

When I saw the Braves’ batting lineup on Opening Day, it didn’t take 140 characters to convey disappointment:

My first ever Fredi complaint: McLouth hitting second?

After Joe Sheehan wrote in Sports Illustrated that Gonzalez was making a mistake by putting his best hitter so low and his worst hitter (or one of his worst hitters) so low, Rob Neyer has also made this point, although he downplays the significance of the batting order:

Of course, you know as well as David Schoenfield that it really makes little difference where McLouth and Heyward bat. Granted, McLouth's will cost the Braves a few runs over the course of the season if he stays in the No. 2 slot all season. Which he won't. And Heyward might account for two or three more runs if he were batting third or fourth rather than sixth. But the odds against the Braves missing a playoff spot because of Fredi Gonzalez's batting orders -- as opposed to the players he actually uses -- are exceptionally long.

Really, this is about aesthetics more than anything. It just looks wrong for McLouth to be listed four slots ahead of Heyward. And yes, I wish Gonzalez would stop it. If only because we don't get to see Heyward hit quite as often. And because we have to watch McLouth bat more.

An interesting discussion ensued in the comments section.  As I read the article, I thought to myself that this is a good indication that sports media is far, far ahead of where it was when I was becoming a baseball fan in the 80s, let alone what the media must have been like during baseball’s glory days.  (You know, the era when the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers played in the World Series every year, because the true test for a sports league is whether the teams in Gotham are doing well.)  Not only do we understand baseball much better now as a result of the proliferation of sabermetric analysis, but that analysis has infiltrated a number of different platforms.  Thus, if I’m dissatisfied that AJC columnists still talk in terms of batting averages, I have a plethora of options, both team-specific and national-oriented.  You have a relatively minor issue like Jason Heyward’s spot in the batting order and a number of smart takes on it.

The Heyward issue reminds me of a terrific piece by James Fallows in last month’s Atlantic about the changes to political media.  Fallows is generally excellent at exploding hysteria-producing myths (his writing about China is excellent and it led to a terrific piece about America's strengths and weaknesses) and his piece on the media was no different.  He does a nice job of attacking the notion that we are somehow less informed now because of the media:

[Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard] added that since the 1940s, political scientists had tried to measure how well American citizens understood the basic facts and concepts of the nation and world they live in. “It actually is a constant,” she said. “There is a somewhat intractable low level of basic political knowledge.” When I asked Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at UC San Diego, whether changes in the media had made public discussion less rational than before, he sent back a long list of irrationalities of yesteryear. One I remembered from my youth: the taken-for-granted certainty among some far-right and far-left groups in the 1960s (including in my very conservative hometown) that Lyndon Johnson had ordered the killing of John Kennedy. One I had forgotten: Representative John Anderson of Illinois, who received nearly 6 million votes as an Independent presidential candidate against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980, three times introduced legislation to amend the Constitution so as to recognize the “law and authority” of Jesus Christ over the United States.

Fallows then identifies four potential problems with the direction of media before proceeding to cite potential evolved responses that can address them:

If we accept that the media will probably become more and more market-minded, and that an imposed conscience in the form of legal requirements or traditional publishing norms will probably have less and less effect, what are the results we most fear? I think there are four:

• that this will become an age of lies, idiocy, and a complete Babel of “truthiness,” in which no trusted arbiter can establish reality or facts;

• that the media will fail to cover too much of what really matters, as they are drawn toward the sparkle of entertainment and away from the depressing realities of the statehouse, the African capital, the urban school system, the corporate office when corners are being cut;

• that the forces already pulverizing American society into component granules will grow all the stronger, as people withdraw into their own separate information spheres;

• and that our very ability to think, concentrate, and decide will deteriorate, as a media system optimized for attracting quick hits turns into a continual-distraction machine for society as a whole, making every individual and collective problem harder to assess and respond to.

It’s an interesting exercise to apply these elements to sports media, if for no other reason than to illustrate that sports fans seem to have fewer of the qualms about the direction of media than political junkies.

1. Truthiness – there is a certain validity to this criticism.  With every team having its own media apparatus, we have evolved into a post-modern world where all the truth adds up to one big lie.  Yahoo! publishes a heavily-researched series of pieces illustrating that USC was looking the other way as Reggie Bush got improper benefits, so the rest of the college football world nods its collective head at the Trojans’ ultimate punishment while the USC fan media refuses to go along and thereby provides its readers with the content to reject what everyone else accepts.  This pattern plays out with every college football team that finds itself under the NCAA microscope.  That said, this just doesn’t seem to be a big issue because fans can differentiate between USC’s Rivals site and credible media outlets.  At the end of the day, USC fans can think that they were railroaded, while everyone else dismisses that position as self-interested claptrap.  Is that any different than how things would have been before the media avalanche?

2. Too much fluff – yes, there is plenty of sports fluff (watch College Gameday if you disagree), but there has always been sports fluff.  The difference now is that there are more outlets competing for eyeballs, so there is far more material with substance.  AS a Michigan fan, I’m privileged to get to read MGoBlog’s UFRs after every game.  For those of us who want analysis that goes deeper than “Michigan State was the tougher team,” there are a wealth of options.  And moving away from x’s and o’s to macro issues, there is far more investigative work done now by outlets like Yahoo! than there ever was before.  The various scandals that have broken in college football over the past several months have led to several writers questioning whether the sport is destroying itself, but what we’re really seeing is the net result of an increase in scrutiny because there are more media outlets covering the sport.  A little more attention and transparency are not bad things.

3. Balkanization – Let’s see, we have ESPN, which covers just about every major sport in depth and employs a small army of writers.  We have Sports Illustrated, which has gone from a weekly magazine to a weekly magazine plus a detailed web site that has a number of talented sport-specific writers.  We have Yahoo!, CBS Sports, SB Nation, and Deadspin.  These are all national sites.  The avalanche of media includes a bevy of team-specific entities, but it has also increased the volume of national coverage.  There are plenty of outlets to suck fans into the vortex of national issues.  Fans are now like the yeoman farmers of the first half of the 19th century who feared that the national economy would pull them out of their traditional existence; for better or worse, we are pulled into a world where we all have opinions on Brett Favre.

4. The Continual Distraction Machine – Mrs. B&B is surely nodding her head right now.  On the one hand, this is a valid criticism.  As opposed to going to games and paying attention to the actual contest, we are now distracted by our smart phones, Kiss Cam, the cheerleaders, and t-shirt cannons, among other niceties.  We’re less likely to come out of a game thinking “man, we should have run more screen-and-rolls with Hinrich and Horford.”  On the other hand, if the criticism is that media is trending towards shorter, fluffier articles, then I’m not inclined to buy that criticism in a world of SmartFootball.com and ZonalMarking.net.

In sum, despite the fact that I devote a good chunk of this blog to media criticism, I see the progression of sports media has being very positive.  We have more choices and content from which to choose.  Moreover, with fewer barriers to entry, the current sports media universe is more likely to produce and reward superior writers because consumers can choose winners with clicks as opposed to editors choosing winners based on who interviews the best.  The question that now arises is whether these same positive developments apply to coverage of weightier issues, or if political media is inherently different than sports media.