I have plenty more I could say about Tarquin’s recent attempts to off Roy and their impact on Elan’s character development, but I never took advantage of any opportunities to do so.

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized familial farewells.)

After nearly three hundred strips – after no previous book had lasted more than 188 in-comic strips, adding up to nearly a third of all OOTS comics – and nearly four and a half years – nearly half of OOTS’ entire existence – the fifth book of The Order of the Stick is finally winding its way to a close.

Over three years ago, when the book was only just over a year old, we were introduced to another in a long line of Rich’s fascinating, multi-layered, complex supporting characters. His name is Ian Starshine.

We knew who Ian was (and we certainly knew his daughter) for some time prior to his appearance in the cast. We knew it was him that got Haley in the thieving business, we knew his capture was what was motivating Haley and led to her joining the Order of the Stick, and we certainly ladled on the speculation that his captor was in fact his daughter’s potential future father-in-law. But everything we knew about him came in snippets and flashbacks from Haley. Now, we’ve seen him in the flesh, so to speak, and we’ve gotten his story.

Ian was in the midst of trying to overthrow Tarquin’s tyranny when he got the idea to get himself locked up to recruit other dissidents, only to find that those that could understand Tarquin’s modus operandi got killed pretty quickly, and that once locked up, he couldn’t escape for good. More interesting than Ian’s story, however, is his personality. Haley has been a mess of secrets from the start of the comic because Ian taught her never to trust anyone with anything, and while Haley has been slowly but surely opening up, at least to Elan, in Ian we have the picture of someone who went through absolutely none of Haley’s character development. And once Haley gets a glimpse of that picture, she realizes that for all that she wanted to be with him again, her father’s teachings nearly completely ruined her life.

When Ian’s brother-in-law Geoff finds Elan lurking about, everything Haley says to reassure her father only serves to make him more convinced that Tarquin planted him to serve as their downfall, to the extent that he actually refuses to leave with her, convinced she and Elan would just lead him into a trap. Even though Ian’s theory makes no sense given the family history of Elan and Tarquin, it serves to illuminate just how much character development Haley has gone through, because it’s exactly the sort of thing she might have once been worried about before finally getting together with him (and even then only under the most extreme duress).

But even as it illuminates Haley’s character development, it even more so illuminates Ian’s lack of same. It may not have been terribly surprising that Ian would be suspicious of the son of his captor, but what stands out in this sequence is how much it shows his general paranoia. When Haley tells Ian of how much she’s learned to open up to people, all he sees is weakness in his daughter, weakness that allowed the son of a despot to get into her heart. Both of them reflect on the death of his wife and her mother, who urged them in her dying words to “be better than this town. Than all of this.” But they came to completely different conclusions on what she meant: Ian feels the work he’s been doing against Tarquin has been a higher cause than “looting rich folk”, but Haley sees in her mother’s words something grander, a call to get away entirely from the world of trickery and deceit she was born into, and help do something far grander than Ian could even imagine.

But if it were strictly about paranoia for Ian, I don’t think he would have been quick to insult Tarquin out of the blue when they met face-to-face. I think an even more overriding principle for Ian lies in something he tells Haley during their conversation: “You can always trust in family, for good or for ill.” Thus, the flip side of Ian’s certainty that Elan must be a spy simply because Tarquin is his father is that he is so confident in the abilities and trustworthiness of his own family that he’s equally certain that Haley is the true leader of the Order of the Stick and Roy and Belkar were there to help rescue him all along.

But ultimately, that confidence may not only be misplaced, but may be his ultimate tragic downfall. Ian was originally recruited to the Western Continent to oppose Tarquin by his sister and her husband, and Geoff has been sitting in prison with him the whole time. It’s very possible that Geoff has in fact been working against Ian the whole time, tricking him into getting locked up and making sure he never escapes for good – especially when you consider the first hint we got regarding the circumstances of Ian’s capture, when Bozzok, the former boss of both Haley and Ian that both burned bridges with, let slip in passing that he arranged for Ian’s departure when he gave word to some “friends” on the Western Continent. The only thing sadder than it turning out that the one person he most needed to be paranoid of was the one person he never suspected would be if, instead of showing him that blood isn’t the sole determinant of one’s character, it only served to make him more paranoid, even of his own daughter, if he survived it.

These last two strips, though, have raised the possibility that, in some way, Ian has become more trusting while we weren’t looking – or at least that his real blind spot is simply his fanatical opposition to and desperate desire to overthrow Tarquin. Most obviously, when Ian asks his new boss, a former opponent of one of Tarquin’s secret allies who was betrayed after asking him for help, whether or not he can trust her, she replies, “You don’t, and you shouldn’t,” and Ian responds, “Just the way I like it. I’m in.” But what may be more telling is something in this strip Rich may not have even intended. Elan hands Ian his own plan for overthrowing Tarquin, and Ian is pleasantly surprised at its plausibility, affording himself the possibility that Elan might in fact be on the up and up after all – despite very little having changed regarding what Ian knows about Elan. The Ian of earlier in the book might well have decided that the plan’s very plausibility was a way to attempt to lure him into a trap. The only thing sadder than his betrayal by his own brother-in-law leaving Ian untrusting of literally anyone and everyone would be Ian misdiagnosing his betrayal by his own brother-in-law as his betrayal by his potential future son-in-law, reinforcing his misguided blind faith in family above all else rather than exposing it.

It may well be that in this, Ian is a rather fitting mirror image of Tarquin – knowing what we know of Elan and Tarquin, for Ian to find Elan’s plan plausible would probably imply at least some familiarity with the tropes of story Elan and Tarquin are (or, in Elan’s case, were) so devoted to. Tarquin is so desperate to be a villain going out in a blaze of glory at the hands of his own son he spends several strips trying to kill Roy in hopes of making Elan into the hero he so desperately wants him to be; Ian is so desperate to be a hero he’s willing to sacrifice his own principles to go along with anyone who claims to be out for the same goal he is, even if his ultimate goal may well be to usurp power away from them and take control of the resistance, even if in a rather Tarquin-like behind-the-scenes way. (In this, perhaps this isn’t so inconsistent with his prior portrayal; Geoff did, after all, marry into the “family” much like Elan might eventually do.) Either could prove to be their undoing; one would hope that, if Ian is ultimately responsible for Tarquin’s downfall, Tarquin could at least appreciate Ian’s credentials for the job.

The Studio Show Scorecard for Week of December 9-15

PT Rnk

TD Rnk

Nov Distr.
(000)
PT Vwr
(000)
LW/LY TD Vwr
(000)
TD HH TD Vwr
LW/LY

1

=

1

=

97370

3463

+1%

1189

0.8

+1%

=

=

84%

3463

+15%

1189

+3%

+5%

2

=

2

+1

72066

1303

+82%

344

0.2

+53%

=

=

62%

1761

+43%

464

+40%

+25%

3

=

3

-1

97407

386

-29%

244

0.2

-15%

=

=

84%

386

-10%

244

-12%

-2%

5

+1

4

+1

78139

169

+13%

83

0.0

+4%

+2

+4

67%

211

+84%

103

+3%

+83%

4

=

5

+1

59078

209

-5%

72

0.0

-3%

+1

+1

51%

344

+67%

119

-17%

+36%

6

-1

6

+1

88556

155

-17%

70

0.0

+0%

=

-1

76%

170

+49%

77

-0%

+9%

7

+1

7

+1

74882

134

+47%

63

0.0

-8%

-3

-3

65%

174

-1%

83

-20%

-2%

9

-3

8

-4

81751

89

-40%

62

0.0

-24%

-1

+1

71%

106

+10%

73

-44%

+66%

8

+1

9

=

74685

118

+49%

58

0.0

-5%

+1

-2

64%

154

+69%

76

-18%

+12%

10

=

10

=

70036

72

+22%

52

0.0

+44%

+1

=

60%

100

+100%

73

 

+128%

I’m serious, I’m actually falling further behind on these scorecards, which means I’m also falling behind on the weekly ratings reports. I had said I wasn’t going to do another two-month catch-up post; the next one is going to be three months and is going to include data from October. I want to avoid either having a mass of network roundup tables or contriving a reason to put up tables from interim weeks, and it seems ESPN2 has moved Numbers Never Lie to noon ET full-time which could give me a reason to introduce a new chart, so I’m going to still do a few more weeks of these, but if I don’t see any evidence that they’re attracting any audience – and why would they when they’re so late? – I’m going to be stopping at that point.

So earlier this month Awful Announcing had a piece on how Jay and Dan’s schedules on Fox Sports Live were going to be adjusted from a Sunday-Thursday to a Tuesday-Saturday schedule, and they noted that Friday and Saturday editions of FSL tended to be the highest-rated editions, and they suggested that this was because of the quality of the lead-ins those editions had and that Fox wanted to expose Jay and Dan to those larger lead-in audiences. I was surprised by this because I hadn’t thought the Friday lead-ins were that remarkable and AA’s data was from December, after college football season ended, so I wondered if AA’s data really showed that Jay and Dan’s antics were actively a turn-off.

Lo and behold, I get to this week and the Monday and Tuesday editions of FSL actually improve on their lead-ins, which is something that should be very encouraging to FS1 in and of itself. Now, FSL’s numbers are very volatile, so this doesn’t necessarily represent FSL’s “floor” in any way; Tuesday’s episode doubled Monday’s and Thursday’s episode that actually had a relatively strong lead-in did worse than them both (though it did keep nearly three-quarters of that lead-in), but there does seem to be some evidence in favor of AA’s hypothesis; boxing has been populating Fridays the last two weeks and done well, and UFC and college basketball have been carrying the flag on Saturdays, while Sundays basically have nothing going for them. We’ll see if this move helps give the Jay and Dan-helmed editions of FSL all the more momentum.

All numbers are in thousands of viewers and are from Son of the Bronx.

Read moreThe Studio Show Scorecard for Week of December 9-15

An Open Letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler

To: Federal Communications Commission Chair Tom Wheeler
CC: Other FCC commissioners, the United States Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, the House Energy Subcommittee on Communications and Technology (and any other interested members of the House of Representatives), the National Association of Broadcasters, and all concerned citizens reading on MorganWick.com

Read moreAn Open Letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler

Predictions for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2014

The Pro Football Hall of Fame’s selections are performed by a panel of 44 leading NFL media members including representatives of all 32 NFL teams, a representative of the Pro Football Writers of America, and 11 at-large writers.

The panel has selected a list of 15 finalists from the modern era, defined as playing all or part of their careers within the last 25 years. A player must have spent 5 years out of the league before they can be considered for induction into the Hall of Fame. Players that last played in the 2008 season will be eligible for induction in 2014.

During Super Bowl Weekend, the panel will meet and narrow down the list of modern-era finalists down to five. Those five will be considered alongside two senior candidates, selected by a nine-member subpanel of the larger panel last August, for a total of seven. From this list, at least four and no more than seven people will be selected for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

My prediction for the Pro Football Hall of Fame Class of 2014 is:

Andre Reed
Michael Strahan
Derrick Brooks
Jerome Bettis
Will Shields
Ray Guy

Hall of Fame Game: Steelers v. Giants

How to Fix the Hall of Fame (And How Not to Fix It)

Maybe it was the fact that Keith Olbermann now has a sports-oriented platform with which to rail against the “banana republic” that is the Baseball Hall of Fame. Maybe it was Deadspin’s stunt where they turned over what turned out to be Dan Le Batard’s Hall of Fame ballot to the public for them to vote on. Maybe it was the continued hand-wringing over the steroids issue, or the fact not a single modern-era player was inducted the previous year, or the ballots and accompanying grandstanding and sanctimonious moralizing that made Le Batard’s stunt seem reasonable. Or maybe it was some combination of the above. Whatever the reason, despite the induction of three very worthy first-ballot candidates, this year’s Hall of Fame election became as much about how broken the election process supposedly is than about the election itself.

It strikes me, though, that many of the reforms that many writers and other commenters propose to fix the Hall miss the reasons for the rules they want to change. Doubtless the voting could be expanded beyond merely sportswriters, and writers who throw away their ballots in ways more outrageous than Le Batard did should lose them. But for example, Deadspin elected the top 10 candidates that received a simple majority of the people’s vote, rather than the 75% the Hall requires, explaining that the high threshold helps allow the process to be “hijacked by cranks, attention-seeking trolls, and the merely perplexed—people who exercise power out of proportion to their numbers due to the perverse structure of the voting.” But it should be difficult to get into the Hall; someone should only get in if there’s some sort of consensus that they’re deserving.

Nor do I buy the argument that because there are already cheaters and general assholes in the Hall of Fame, that justifies inducting the steroids users as well. Yes, the general public is ambivalent at best about the steroids issue, but the sport’s history is more important to baseball than any other sport; the steroids users have irrevocably tainted that history, and it seems odd to play up that history in one breath while backing the induction of the steroids users with the other. The single-season and career home run records, once the most hallowed in sports, will forever be untrustworthy and have an asterisk mentally if not physically attached to them, and many other records besides. Of all the players blackballed from the Hall, only Shoeless Joe Jackson might have done more damage to the game. (There’s an argument to be made that players that had Hall-worthy credentials without steroids should be inducted, which would put Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and possibly Mark McGwire in, but not Sammy Sosa, who no one had heard of before he came from out of nowhere in the summer of ’98, or Rafael Palmeiro, who actually received few enough votes to be dropped from the ballot this year. That a player like Sosa could effectively juice his way into a Hall of Fame career underscores why the steroids issue can’t be simply swept under the rug. I would bet Gaylord Perry would be in the Hall of Fame regardless of whether or not he spit.)

Many commentators, including Olbermann, faulted the 10-person limit for forcing voters to make very difficult choices on a loaded ballot, resulting in part in Craig Biggio missing induction by two votes. What would be the harm, they say, in allowing as many people as the voters find worthy to get in? Theoretically, if someone isn’t one of the ten best candidates on the ballot maybe they aren’t that strong a candidate after all (again, it’s supposed to be difficult to get in); but even beyond that, it’s not so much having a ton of people getting in at once than losing those people in future years. Craig Biggio will be inducted into the Hall of Fame, possibly as soon as next year. But if not next year, it’s very possible he (or someone like Mike Piazza or Jeff Bagwell) may end up saving the Hall from a repeat of 2013, when no one was inducted. It’s worth noting that even with a supposedly loaded ballot, only three people were actually inducted, and only seven even received more than half the vote. Clearly there isn’t that much consensus over which candidates are more deserving to get in over which other candidates.

Perhaps the baseball Hall could take a cue from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, which repeatedly cuts down all the numerous candidates for induction down to a list of 15 finalists, then brings the voters together Super Bowl Weekend to debate the merits of those fifteen candidates and further whittle them down to five. Result: the Pro Football Hall of Fame always inducts the maximum five modern-era players despite actually having a higher threshold for induction at 80%, and so actually tries to clear its backlogs. Obviously, given the fact that the BBWAA has hundreds of people voting, it’s impractical to get them all together to discuss the candidates, but what would be wrong with a two-stage voting system, where the first ballot cuts the list down to 10-15 finalists, who are then subject to a straight up/down vote?

Underlying the last complaint, however, seems to be the notion that someone either “is a Hall of Famer or he is not“, that it’s ridiculous for someone who wasn’t considered a Hall of Famer X number of years in the past to suddenly be a Hall of Famer now. Presumably many of these people would prefer to hold a single up/down vote on a candidate five years after their retirement, induct anyone who crosses the threshold of induction, and keep out everyone else. It’s an attractive prospect, but it seems cruel to subject a player’s destiny to a single vote at an arbitrary point in time, especially if the rules may be different at a different point in time; should Edgar Martinez’s chances be based on the luck of how the voters feel about the DH issue in one particular semi-random year? The Hall of Fame voting window allows candidates to be looked at fairly and with some degree of historical perspective; five years after retirement allows voters to vote somewhat dispassionately without being too close to the player’s career, but leaving their fate in the hands of the Veterans’ Committee after fifteen years ensures that a player’s fate lies in the hands of those who actually saw him play. That’s why I’m leery of giving Bill James a Hall of Fame vote. Bill James is awesome; he may well go in to the Hall of Fame for the way he revolutionized the way we look at the game. But Bill James perfectly encapsulates why there’s a statute of limitations on how long a player can wait before it gets much tougher for them to get into the Hall of Fame. We don’t need him engaging in historical revisionism to justify why some random player from the 30s no one at the time would have ever dreamed of getting into the Hall should get in using statistics no one at the time could have ever conceived of. It’s disingenuous for someone to complain about, say, Bert Blyleven getting in without any change in his resume in one breath and argue for Bill James to get a Hall of Fame vote with the other. It’s called the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Great.

When figuring out how to fix the Hall of Fame (in any sport), there are a few things to keep in mind:

  • The fate of players should be in the hands of a group of electors who experienced their career as it happened, that is, not making a post facto judgment. They should also, however, have a good grasp of the standards by which someone should be considered a Hall of Famer and the historical perspective to assess players by those standards in a relatively unbiased fashion, at least as a whole. The selection process should facilitate striking a balance between these competing concerns.
  • Reasonable people will always disagree over someone’s Hall credentials. They also disagree over how stringent the standards should be for induction, with some “small Hall” people arguing that only the very best of the very best should be honored.
  • Once a player is inducted into the Hall, they become a benchmark for any other player to get in; i.e., “if player X is in the Hall, player Y should be too.”
  • Once a player is inducted into the Hall, they are never un-inducted. The body of electors should be very sure of themselves if they wish to induct somebody.

With these challenges in mind, we can begin to sketch out a proposal for organizing a Hall of Fame that reflects some level of consensus over who does and does not belong. There will, of course, continue to be debate over who does and does not belong, but hopefully even those who disagree with the Hall’s selections can agree that it reflects the consensus of those who lived through the era on the matter of the best and most important players and other figures.

One place to start would be to adopt Bill Simmons’ pyramid idea, that is, assigning all Hall of Famers to one of five tiers, with the top tier (“the Pantheon”) reserved for the very best of the best and each subsequent tier containing progressively less esteemed players until the players with the shakiest cases show up on the bottom level. I know a lot of people don’t like the idea of “ranking” the best players, feeling it makes things too much of a competition and that it becomes a case of splitting hairs between specific players as you get further down the list; shouldn’t it be enough that a player is considered a Hall of Famer? Why belittle the guys perceived to have shakier cases by placing them on a lower level or considering them not “real” Hall of Famers? However, I think this would be a good compromise between the “small Hall” guys and the more liberal guys. The “small Hall” guys would have only the guys they would allow in on the top one or two levels, while still having all the other players on the lower levels. It would serve as a way to refocus and rekindle the debate and provide some necessary clarity to the Hall, reorganizing it by players’ importance to the game and thus better allowing people to appreciate its history. Depending on what kind of Hall of Fame we’re talking about, we could use different terminology to distinguish the levels, even naming each level (for example, Bronze/Silver/Gold) if circumstances warrant.

I have a couple of issues with Simmons’ specific implementation. First, Simmons’ pyramid distributes Hall of Famers across five physical floors of the pyramid. Actual Hall of Fames, however, tend to throw all their Hall of Famers into a single literal hall; they are museums first and Hall of Fames second. The Hall may be the room everyone gravitates to and even the most prominent room, but it’s still a single room. Even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a place that already vaguely looks like Simmons’ pyramid (and, incidentally, by all accounts a place that makes Cooperstown look like the model of integrity) throws all its Hall of Famers onto a single level of a six-level building; the closest thing to what Simmons might be talking about might be the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There are some points in this model’s favor, even from the perspective of the Halls themselves, as it provides a single place for you to be overwhelmed by the prestige and the eminent personalities all around you, to take it all in all at once, besides the fact it allows the Hall not to overwhelm the building’s place as a museum. But this consideration doesn’t completely invalidate the model; physical differences in the honoring of each Hall of Famer, such as a plaque made of different materials or placement on the floor, could distinguish players of different tiers, which could be indicated by the personality used. For example, each plaque could have one to five stars on it and we could refer to Hall of Fame members as one-star to five-star Hall of Famers. Or we could arrange the Hall as a spiral going around a larger building, connecting with the exhibits on each floor with each full turn or half-turn, each tier arranged in chronological order or in rough order of importance within each tier, up to the Pantheon taking up the entire top floor, with statues instead of mere plaques for each Pantheon member, and if the sport has a Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, or Wayne Gretzky, one single undisputed best player of all time, they get their statue in the center. This could be considered taking a cue from the Guggenheim Museum, which arranges its artifacts in a spiral one browses starting from the top and working their way down.

A simpler but perhaps more challenging problem has to do with the process of assigning a level to each member, which Simmons would do by taking the average score each member gets from an assignment committee, “rounded up”. The problem should be obvious: if the assignment committee consists of 50 people, 49 of them votes a member to level 1, and the 50th votes them to level 2, their average is 1.02, which gets rounded up to 2. That one single voter got them bumped up to level 2! It would seem that very few people would be selected to level 1 unless their election to the Hall at all was so tentative as to make it unlikely they would be elected in the first place. Considering part of the appeal of the pyramid for Simmons is to throw all the borderline candidates to level 1, this seems counterproductive. Even if we made a post facto argument that past decades were undeniably mistaken in putting someone in, and everyone votes them to level 1 because even those who would have voted for them agree it’s ridiculous to put them any higher, it’s hard to see how the bottom level would grow. Simmons seems to be counting on the assignment committee to disagree with the selection committee, and specifically to agree with his own judgments. (Rounding up has another, similar problem: it’s very easy for someone to get into the Pantheon just by racking up enough level 4 votes and a couple of level 5 votes to get their average just over four. “Small Hall” people would much rather round down, making it more difficult to get into higher levels; while that gives the Pantheon the opposite problem, requiring induction to be unanimous, a case could be made that if your average can’t top 2 you don’t deserve to be in level 2 or above anyway.)

Instead, I prefer to see each level and the ones above it as its own sub-Hall of Fame within the Hall of Fame. If you wish, you can consider only those in tier 2 and above “real” Hall of Famers, and “small Hall” people would prefer to restrict it to the top one or two tiers. As such, the procedure would go as follows:

  • The Selection Committee consists of a mixture of sportswriters (including bloggers), fans, players (possibly including existing Hall of Famers), coaches, historians of the sport, and other people involved with the sport and the media. The vote is weighted towards the writers, fans, and other people who have a good grasp of what it takes to get to each level and are familiar with each candidate’s case.
  • On the ballot, each voter must give each candidate a number from 1 to 5, signifying what level they would induct each candidate to, or leave it blank or mark it with a 0 to indicate that they would not elect that candidate at all.
  • A player must be given a number on 70% of the votes to be inducted, at which point they are inducted to the level at the 70th percentile of their vote. For example, to be inducted to the Pantheon at least 70% of the votes must vote you to the Pantheon. To be elected to level 3 at least 70% of the votes must put you on level 3 or above, and so on. This keeps it difficult to get inducted to the Hall and to each level; I originally considered making the threshold 60%, but I don’t want someone to get into the Pantheon when only 60% of voters agree he deserves it.
  • There may or may not be a limit on the number of players to be inducted (I would support limiting Pantheon inductions to one a year), but there is no limit on how many people may be voted in or voted to a particular level. A player that has received the necessary votes to be inducted to a particular level but is excluded due to yearly limits may have their induction postponed to the following year, but generally cannot fall below the lowest or highest level they were ever voted to.
  • If there is a difference between the median level a player is voted to and the 70th percentile, the player remains on the ballot in subsequent years; as with players pushed out due to yearly limits, they cannot fall below the lowest or highest level they were ever voted to. A player not inducted to the Hall must be chosen for induction on at least half of all ballots just to remain on the ballot the following year; a player with the votes to make the first tier must have at least half the votes naming him to the second tier in order to remain on the ballot for the chance to move up to the second tier, or else their future fate is remanded to the Historical Committee where it gets much tougher for a reassessment to find that a player was wrongfully kept out or elected to too low a level. A player may appear on fifteen ballots; once they have appeared on fifteen ballots, they are either inducted to whatever level they are voted to their final year, or the highest level they were ever voted to. (Alternatively, once a player has the votes for induction and aren’t kept out by numerical limits they are inducted to that level, but may be “re-inducted” to a higher level later.)

This is a similar system to the up/down approval voting system Deadspin and others would favor, but the addition of the pyramid and tier system turns it into a range voting variant, which for various reasons is probably the best voting system for achieving the best outcome without perverse incentives. The notion that “the first ballot is sacred” (which only succeeds in producing “second-ballot” Hall of Famers like Roberto Alomar) would become less relevant if the Pantheon (and possibly the tier or two below it) serves the role of separating the “elite” from the rank and file, and broadening the electorate beyond sportswriters helps keep people with agendas from hijacking the process. Ideally, we’d have a single vote to determine the legacy of each candidate, without candidates completely crowding each other off the ballot, without necessarily risking some induction ceremonies being too big (though more time can be devoted to players going in to higher tiers) or nonexistent, and without completely precluding reconsideration later, but only if a substantial enough number of people believe from the start that someone’s case merits reconsideration (that is, 5% of the electorate can’t keep someone who clearly doesn’t have a shot taking up space on the ballot for fifteen years).

So we have two different solutions to what seems to be the most obvious and agreed-upon problem with this year’s baseball Hall of Fame induction: an overabundance of qualified players crowding each other out because of the 10-player limit. A system similar to that of the Pro Football Hall of Fame would limit the number of candidates and make it easier to give each of the resulting finalists a straight-up up/down vote, but instituting a pyramid system would help fix some of the deeper, more systemic flaws and restore at least some prestige to America’s Halls of Fame among those who might feel it irredeemably lost.

The Studio Show Scorecard for Week of December 2-8

PT Rnk

TD Rnk

Nov Distr.
(000)
PT Vwr
(000)
LW/LY TD Vwr
(000)
TD HH TD Vwr
LW/LY

1

=

1

=

97370

3426

-2%

1177

0.8

-6%

=

=

84%

3426

+2%

1177

-4%

+1%

3

-1

2

=

97407

541

-27%

288

0.2

-21%

=

+1

84%

541

+27%

287

-15%

+6%

2

+8

3

+1

72066

717

+2290%

224

0.2

+109%

=

-1

62%

969

-34%

303

+80%

-26%

6

+2

4

+5

81751

149

+119%

81

0.1

+74%

+2

+4

71%

177

+113%

96

+219%

+93%

6

=

5

=

78139

149

+7%

79

0.0

-9%

+3

+4

67%

186

+122%

99

-8%

+94%

4

=

6

+1

59078

220

+29%

75

0.0

+7%

=

-1

51%

363

+22%

123

+8%

+13%

5

-2

7

-4

88556

186

-64%

70

0.0

-64%

+1

-1

76%

205

+74%

77

-67%

+14%

8

-3

8

-2

74882

91

-43%

69

0.0

-21%

-3

-4

65%

118

-37%

89

-16%

-0%

9

-2

9

-1

74685

79

-41%

62

0.0

-6%

-2

-2

64%

103

-20%

80

+10%

+4%

10

-1

10

=

70036

59

+59%

36

0.0

+25%

=

=

60%

82

+18%

51

 

+21%

I decided to do a straight comparison of FS1 studio shows between the week before the Oklahoma-Baylor game and this week, tracking the cumulative effect after two hugely popular games. The general pattern does seem to be one of gaining viewers, though not always in a statistically significant fashion. There’s a lot of noise involved in the numbers of both Crowd Goes Wild and Fox Football Daily, for example; it’s hard to tell how much of CGW’s drop-off is due to the NASCAR season ending leading to an exodus of viewers from NASCAR Race Hub.

A couple of other things stand out to me. First, we have another sign that Fox shouldn’t be too disappointed with Fox College Saturday, as it’s beating all the weekday afternoon shows and all of FSL’s lead-in-independent averages. Second, in both of these weeks Fox NFL Kickoff didn’t have NASCAR RaceDay as a lead-in and still did over 100,000 viewers, blowing away any other non-NASCAR studio show and being a huge standout for FS1. Considering the numbers ESPN and NFL Network get for NFL Insiders, NFL Live, Around the League, and NFL Total Access compared to NFL Matchup, Fantasy Football Now, and NFL Gameday First, Fox Football Daily should be doing a lot better than it is. If I don’t see some marked improvement in its numbers by the end of 2013 I’ll be left with the conclusion that Fox should consider tinkering with its timeslot. Putting it at 5 ET, against ATH and PTI, or 4 ET, against NFL Live, are probably bad ideas. Is the midnight ET airing, where it does much better than the first-run airings earlier in the day (and where it did nearly as well as Fox NFL Kickoff Wednesday), a test run for moving it there permanently?

  Oct 28 Dec 2
Crowd Goes Wild (least-viewed 4 airings) 35 31
Fox College Saturday (compared to 11/30) 54 67
Fox Football Daily (average of all 5 airings) 32 35
Fox NFL Kickoff 101 106
Fox Soccer Daily (least-viewed 3 airings) 15 16
Fox Sports Live 11p (least-viewed 2 weekdays) 42 34
Fox Sports Live midnight (least-viewed 2 weekdays) 42 33
Fox Sports Live 1a (least-viewed 4 weekdays) 20 46
Fox Sports Live 2a (least-viewed 3 Mon-Sat) 15 25
NASCAR Race Hub (4 live airings) 161 103
UEFA Champions League Magazine 40 15
UFC Tonight 60 88
UFC Ultimate Insider 78 23

All numbers are in thousands of viewers and are from Son of the Bronx.

Read moreThe Studio Show Scorecard for Week of December 2-8

The Studio Show Scorecard for Week of November 25-December 1

PT Rnk

TD Rnk

Nov Distr.
(000)
PT Vwr
(000)
LW/LY TD Vwr
(000)
TD HH TD Vwr
LW/LY

1

=

1

=

97370

3513

+11%

1254

0.9

+5%

=

=

84%

3513

+30%

1254

+3%

+15%

2

+1

2

=

97407

745

+6%

363

0.3

+8%

+1

+1

84%

745

+38%

363

+6%

+34%

3

+4

3

+3

88556

513

+277%

192

0.1

+153%

+2

+2

76%

564

+274%

211

+147%

+159%

10

-8

4

-1

72066

30

-97%

107

0.1

-63%

-8

-2

62%

41

-97%

145

-53%

-63%

6

-1

5

=

78139

139

-22%

87

0.0

+6%

+3

+4

67%

173

+96%

108

-5%

+123%

5

-1

6

-2

74882

160

-30%

87

0.1

-21%

+1

=

65%

208

+27%

113

-14%

+34%

4

+2

7

+1

59078

171

+16%

70

0.0

+21%

=

-3

51%

282

-22%

115

+40%

-9%

7

+1

8

-1

74685

134

+46%

65

0.0

+2%

+1

-1

64%

175

+79%

85

+0%

+5%

8

+1

9

=

81751

68

-24%

47

0.0

-20%

-1

-1

71%

81

-20%

55

-50%

-21%

9

+1

10

=

70036

37

-29%

29

0.0

-2%

+1

=

60%

51

-8%

40

-96%

+32%

We’re waiting another week before chiming in with analysis of the effects of Oklahoma-Baylor and Oregon-Oregon State on FS1 studio show ratings, but there is one thing that FS1 should be very, very concerned about. The Civil War was not only the most-watched show in FS1 history, it also produced the most-watched edition of Fox Sports Live. But said edition of FSL only beat the one from launch night – a record the post-Oklahoma-Baylor edition failed to break – by about 50,000 viewers. On launch night, FSL’s retention was 26.7%. Its Oklahoma/Baylor retention? Only 16.2%. FSL’s post-Civil War retention rebounded to 24%, and earlier in the week on Monday FSL kept almost all of its college basketball lead-in, but the folks at FS1 should still keep a close eye on how FSL does going forward, and don’t be afraid to conclude that some of it may not be working.

(Obviously, don’t read too much into FS1 ranking ahead of NFL Network in a week in which NFLN didn’t have a Thursday Night game.)

All numbers are in thousands of viewers and are from Son of the Bronx.

Read moreThe Studio Show Scorecard for Week of November 25-December 1