Phil Jackson & Bela Guttmann

Jonathan Wilson’s latest article, which asks whether Barcelona will be a victim of Bela Guttmann’s famous three-year rule, is worth a look.  Here is the gist:

"The third year," the great Hungarian coach Bela Guttmann always said, "is fatal." If a manager stays at a club more than that, he said, his players tend to become bored and/or complacent and opponents start to work out counter-strategies. There are occasional exceptions, especially in weaker leagues, but at the highest level it seems to hold true that great teams last a maximum of three years – which is why Barcelona's draw against Espanyol on Saturday may be more significant than just two dropped points. This, after all, is Pep Guardiola's fourth season as a manager at the Camp Nou.

Now right off the bat, there is a problem with Wilson’s analogy.  Guttmann said that the third year is fatal, but in year three under Guardiola, Barca won the two biggest prizes available to it: the Spanish Primera and the Champions League.  It’s only if you modify Guttmann’s concept to “every year after the first three is fatal” that is has applicability here.  Additionally, Guardiola is a disciple of Johan Cruyff and Cruyff’s version of the theory is that a great team has a four-year shelf life.  This makes sense from Cruyff’s personal experience because his Barca Dream Team won four straight La Liga titles in the early 90s, as well as the club’s first European Cup, and then declined.*  Guttmann could make a side function at a top level for two years, so he thinks that that is the statute of limitations.  Cruyff’s team lasted for four, so he thinks that that is the limit.  There is a danger here of assuming that one’s personal experience is universal.

* – Cruyff suggested that Barca should have broken its 2006 Champions League-winning side apart because it was coming to the end of its cycle, although that team had really only been together for three years.  The bottom really fell out in year five when the Blaugrana finished third in La Liga and suffered the ultimate humiliation of forming a Pasillo for Real Madrid after Los Merengues clinched the league.  Samuel Eto’o and Deco both got cards intentionally in the preceding match so they would not have to participate, which is a major reason that both were ultimately drummed out of the club.

Wilson’s article got me thinking about American sports and whether a three- or four-year rule applies there.  One could make a good argument that it applies in the NBA.  Because basketball requires more natural teamwork than baseball or football,* it would seem to be a proper candidate.  Look at recent NBA history.  The Bulls won three titles, then Michael Jordan went away.  They won three more, then Jerry Krause broke the team apart.  The Lakers won three in a row, then Shaq and Kobe could no longer co-exist.  Once a team gets to the top, it seems that it has a three-year statute of limitations before the combination of egos and pressure create an untenable situation.  Phil Jackson, did you ever know that your intellectual forefather was a Hungarian nomad?

* – Football obviously involves players working together, but to do so, they are often following instructions in the form of a play.  Basketball, because it is less controlled by the coaches, requires organic cooperation from its players.

In addressing whether Barca can be an exception to the three-year rule, Wilson points out a distinction that would not apply to NBA teams:

Yet in many ways, Barcelona are a side set up to endure. Like Ferguson, who reflected last week on how those who have been brought up at a club have more instinctive loyalty, Guardiola has a stock of homegrown talent. The impression is that most players play for Barcelona because they want to rather than because it's a convenient way of paying for the cars and clothes and rounds of Jaegerbombs.

The Lakers and Bulls didn't build their teams by signing players when they were twelve and then teaching those players over the course of years how to play in a certain style.  With the exception of Dani Alves, Barca's current core comes from the La Masia cocoon.  These players grew up together, were taught how to play together, matured together, and have now won a room full of trophies together.  That experience is simply different than what the NBA's dynastic teams experience.

I'm currently reading Soccer Men, which is Simon Kuper's attempt to explain what modern soccer* stars are really like.  One of the themes of the book is that players don't feel the same way that we do about teams and matches because for them, it's a job.  For instance, Bernd Holzenbein, one of the starters on the team that won the 1974 World Cup in a famous final against the Netherlands, recalls West Germany's win in 1954 with greater fondness.  As he describes his feelings, he was a fan in 1954 and a professional in 1974.  The chapter on Fernando Torres is also interesting, as it explains that Torres was an Atletico Madrid fan almost from birth, but had no problem moving to Liverpool because it was a better opportunity for him.  We want to think that the players we love feel the same way about the clubs that we love, but that usually isn't true.  On one end of the spectrum, we expect that LeBron, Wade, and Bosh don't feel any strong connection to the Miami Heat as an institution.  On the other end, it will be interesting to learn how strong the connection is between Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi and Futbol Club Barcelona.   

* - Kuper explains in the book that soccer is actually a British term and the sport was referred to by that title instead of football until the 70s.  I am going to be more comfortable using the term and not worrying that I come off as too American.

A Lion in Winter

I am almost done with Winston's War by Max Hastings* and one of the dominant themes of the book is how irrelevant Great Britain became as the War reached its final stages.  The British deserve great credit when they were the last bulwark against the Germans after the fall of France in 1940.  However, by 1944, they were spent.  They didn’t have the population to take casualties, the industrial base to put thousands of tanks and planes in the field, or the money to pay for expansive military action.  Churchill wanted to occupy the Aegean islands to get Turkey into the war, but the US would not go along, so the British had to send an under-strength force and the campaign turned into a fiasco.  Churchill wanted to commit more forces to Italy and then push on to Vienna, but the Americans wanted to focus on landing in and then pushing through Normandy, so Italy became a sidenote.**  By 1944, the Americans did pretty much whatever they wanted and Churchill’s strategic impulses were rendered irrelevant.  He went from leader of the Western World to bystander.
  
* – For the record, Hastings and Antony Beevor are my two favorite WWII historians.  I will buy just about anything that they write.  If you are interested in getting into WWII as a subject, then their books are a great starting point.

** – In both instances, Marshall and Eisenhower were correct and Churchill was wrong, so it’s just as well that Great Britain did not have any pull.  That’s the funny thing about the image of Churchill as the great opponent of Stalin.  If Winston would have had his way, then D-Day would have been delayed, the push for the breakout from Normandy would have had less oomph, and the Soviets would have had more time to occupy more of Western Europe.  And that’s before we get to Hastings’ discussion of Yalta, where Churchill didn’t exactly stand up to Uncle Joe as is sometimes portrayed in the popular imagination.

Saturday, around 5:30, the image of a once-great and inspirational leader being shunted off to the side, ignored by those who once listened to everything he said, suddenly popped into my head in a completely different context…

Ross Barnett and Sepp Blatter

I started reading Curtis Wilkie’s Dixie on Friday morning at the gym. I bought the book years ago for $5 at a discount bookstore and then I had it sitting on the shelf until I started into it because I needed a paperback to read on the Elliptical machine. I’m now halfway into the book and I’m wondering why it took me this long to open it. Wilkie has a terrific writing style. I often find myself saying “man, I wish I could structure a sentence like that.” In terms of content, Wilkie does a terrific job of blending the personal and the political, weaving his life story in with the story of the South trying to destroy itself in resistance to the end of Jim Crow.

I always liked Howell Raines’s line about the joys of being an Alabama fan when the Bear was the coach:

And believe me, to have been in the city of Tuscaloosa in October when you were young and full of Early Times and had a shining Alabama girl by your side--to have had all that and then to have seen those red shirts pour onto the field, and, then, coming behind them, with that inexorable big cat walk of his, the man himself, The Bear--that was very good indeed.

Wilkie has a similar paragraph, one that I was immediately repeating to my wife with a look that said “see, I’m not all that crazy”:

Several passions are important to Southern men. The love of a good woman ranks slightly ahead of the exhilaration that comes from a sip of sour-mash whiskey. Other pleasures include greeting the chill dawn in a deer stand, debating the merits of barbecue from North Carolina, Tennessee, or Texas, expanding on stories that improve with age, and enjoying the bonhomie of friends. Then there is football.

Replace “sour-mash whiskey” with “bourbon” and “in a deer stand” with “on a run, trying to think of something interesting to say about the SEC” and I could put that paragraph on the back of a personalized t-shirt. Wilkie follows that paragraph by describing the highs and lows of SEC football: the famous 1959 Ole Miss-LSU game, a.k.a. the Billy Cannon punt return, and the infamous 1962 Kentucky-Ole Miss game that Ross Barnett turned into a massive rally against integration and that preceded by one day the riot/insurrection in Oxford.

Coming on the heels of Ole Miss replacing Colonel Reb, Wilkie’s book is a great reminder of William Faulkner’s line that the past is never dead, it's not even past. Part of what makes SEC football so compelling are the ghosts that are occasionally nipping at the heels of events. I was reminded of this truism not just by plowing through Dixie, but also by Tim Vickery’s recent article explaining why much of the developing world retains some otherwise inexplicable loyalty to Sepp Blatter. Here is Vickery on the 1966 World Cup:

A few months ago in Rio I saw Uruguay coach Oscar Washington Tabarez give a lecture to Brazilian coaches. The theme was on his team's recent rise and their progress to the semifinals of last year's World Cup. Tabarez, though, in addition to being a man of soccer is an academic, a teacher by trade (nicknamed "El Maestro" for this very reason), and he could not resist some historical context.

He stopped off briefly at the 1966 World Cup, held in England while FIFA was presided by an Englishman, Stanley Rous. That tournament, he said, had been a conspiracy against the South American teams.

The great Pele was brutally kicked out of the tournament by European teams while European referees did nothing. Strikingly, all but seven of the 32 matches had European referees, and the Portugal-North Korea quarterfinal was the only knockout game with an official from outside the continent. Famously, the Germany-Uruguay quarterfinal had an English referee, while the England-Argentina match had a German -- both were controversial, and South American involvement in the competition ended before the semifinals.

Tabarez is certainly no demagogue, no flaming-eyed nationalist. But he believes that the tournament was set up to exclude the South Americans.

He may well have extended his complaint, and noted that the competition was a conspiracy against the world outside Europe. There was just one place reserved for Asia and Africa combined. The bulk of the African nations pulled out in protest, their complaints given extra fuel by the support Rous offered to apartheid South Africa. The wind of change was blowing in Africa, but it could not dislodge the cobwebs in the mind of Rous, who was floundering badly in post-colonial politics he seemed unable to understand.

Vickery then explains that when Joao Havelange replaced Sir Stanley Rous as the head of FIFA, he created opportunities for countries outside of Europe by expanding the World Cup, creating youth tournaments that members of the Developing World could host, and commercializing the game to pay for the process of bringing the game to previously ignored places. Thus, the current criticism of Blatter (Havelange’s hand-picked replacement) has to be understood in context:

There was no pre-Havelange and Blatter garden of Eden -- just a different FIFA with different defects. With its lack of historical context it is unclear whether the current hysteria in the English press is motivated by a genuine desire to carry the game forward on a global basis -- or by nostalgia for when English rule was unchallenged.

The lack of accountability of the current FIFA is surely unsustainable, the quasi-feudal personal fiefdoms that develop inside the organization are disturbing and the fat-cat lifestyle of some of those at the top makes the stomach turn. But for all its flaws and problems, it is not hard to understand why much of the developing world prefers the post-Havelange FIFA to what came before.

It never occurred to me until reading the Vickery article and the first half of Dixie on the same weekend, but there is a real parallel to be made between SEC football teams and European national footie sides. Both are the representations of states/countries with significant identities. Those states/countries have a history of subjugating racial minorities that comes up from time to time in the present,* especially as their teams deploy players from groups whom they previously tried to oppress. You can't understand the politics surrounding FIFA and Sepp Blatter without knowledge of the post-colonial struggle to democratize international football; you can't understand Ole Miss's place in the SEC without knowledge of Ross Barnett and James Meredith.

* - If you want to go one step further, both colonialism and Jim Crow were ended by World War II. Colonialism ended because the European colonial powers were devastated in one way or another and replaced by two countries - the US and USSR - that had anti-colonial ideologies and therefore had to exercise power in subtler ways. (The USSR's subjugation of Eastern Europe is the obvious exception.) Jim Crow ended for a variety of reasons, but one major one was the Great Migration that kicked into high gear as a result of war mobilization. African-Americans were much harder to oppress as rural sharecroppers; not so much when they could organize politically in great urban centers in the North. Also, the experience of fighting against the Germans and Japanese illustrated where racist ideologies could take a country.

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.

The Post in Which I Compare Texas to France

I am about two-thirds of the way through Paris 1919, so naturally, it's time for more tortured historical analogies.

With the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Versailles firmly in the front part of my brain, I read Dr. Saturday's post last week on conference expansion and immediately thought of France pushing its hand too hard after WWI. Margaret MacMillan doesn't mean to do so, but she certainly makes the French out to be incredibly shortsighted. In many instance, the U.S. and Great Britain were arguing with France and trying to restrain the latter from following through on unreasonable positions. One can understand the French wanting to impose a punitive peace on Germany and Austria-Hungary after losing hundreds of thousands of casualties and seeing its countryside and coal mines ripped to shreds. Still, with the benefit of hindsight, specifically the knowledge of how Germany would react to Versailles and how they would take their vengeance against the French, Clemenceau and Foch made major mistakes. They pushed for serious reparations against Germany. They neutered the German military to such a degree that paramilitary groups (like, say, the Nazis) became important for maintaining order in Germany in the economic chaos that followed the war. They lopped off German-speaking populations in the east and west, thus leading to another source of resentment. In sum, the French took a hardline position that seemed to be in their interests at the time, but ended up being a colossal mistake that led to blowback from their historical rivals to the east.

I mention this because Texas may have made a similar mistake in the formation of the Big XII. Most articles that discuss the motivations for Colorado, Nebraska, and Missouri potentially leaving the conference discuss the unequal sharing of revenue. Because the Big XII doles out revenue based on TV appearances, the marquee programs in the conference - most notably Texas - do far better in terms of income. When one adds the revenue and recruiting advantages that Texas already has with an unequal distribution of TV money, you have a situation where the northern members of the conference are going to feel a good deal of resentment. Going from memory, Tom Osborne expressed these concerns when Nebraska decided to join the Big XII. He was worried about the Huskers being left behind in a Texas-dominated conference. Thus, it was not at all surprising to read Osborne express interest in Nebraska joining the Big Ten, a league that has a more redistributionist revenue scheme. Thus the conclusion that Texas may have made the same mistake that France did: pushing for an arrangement that benefits it, but in doing so, planting the seeds for future problems.

The problem with this analogy is that Texas may not suffer the same blowback that France did because it is in a better position. France imposed a punitive resolution on Germany because Germany was bigger and more economically powerful after unification. In short, France was scared of Germany, so it acted to weaken the Germans. Texas, on the other hand, is much stronger than Colorado, Nebraska, and Missouri. Let's say that Colorado went to the Pac Ten and Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas joined the Big Ten. At first glance, that would leave Texas in an eviscerated Big XII. However, the Horns would still have options. One suspects that the SEC would jump at the chance to add Texas along with Texas A&M or Oklahoma, as would the Pac Ten. Thus, as fun as it is to insult Texans with an analogy to cheese-eating surrender monkeys, we don't have a perfect fit.