Sports

My Evolving Take on the Debate on a College Football Playoff Part I: The Effect of a Playoff on the Importance of the Regular Season

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As I said last Monday, I bring a different perspective on the world of sports because I like to think about my sports (I’m that rarest of rarities, a nerd with a sports interest), and there’s no sport that invites more thinking than college football. This is an update and expansion of The Case for a Playoff, probably one of the posts I’ve looked the most at on the old version of Da Blog.

No sport has a more contentious championship structure, in all the world, than American college football. We give control over the championship to a complicated structure called the “BCS” which combines the result of two subjective polls with a bunch of complicated computer ratings which no one knows how they work and wouldn’t be able to understand them anyway. This system eventually spits out two teams who are supposed to be “the best” and play each other, and we call the winner the champion.

It’s a lot better than the old system, where we just took a poll to determine the champion. USC-Texas in 2005-06 would never have happened under that system; USC would have played in the Rose Bowl and Texas in the Cotton or Fiesta bowl. Unfortunately, years like that are the exception and not the rule. When there are exactly two undefeated teams, the BCS’ job is easy. When there isn’t, controversy is basically unavoidable. Everyone thinks we should have a real playoff, but no one can get it done.

Part of the problem is the hidden genius in the old system. There wasn’t a national championship. Oh sure, the polls announced a national championship at the end of the season, but who really cared what they had to say? College football was a regional sport that just so happened to be popular in all the regions. Each region crowned its own champion, and some of these regional champions faced other regional champions in bowl games at the end of the season for regional bragging rights. (College football is probably the only sport in the world that ends its season with exhibition games.) The “national championship”, such as it was, wasn’t much different than the Heisman – it was awarded by a panel to the team they felt was most deserving of it. College football isn’t about championships; it’s about history, tradition, and GO WOLVERINES BEAT THE BUCKEYES! Each team didn’t care what most of the other teams in their own conference did, let alone the other teams in the entire country.

The fixation on championships is mostly a result of the ESPN and Internet era, coupled with the rise of money in sports, in particular the proliferation of college football TV contracts in the aftermath of the NCAA’s monopoly power over college football on TV being busted. For a long time, the three most popular sports in America were baseball, horse racing, and boxing. Only baseball had a championship structure similar to that which proliferates in the major sports today – and it only started in 1903 despite prior attempts to compete with the National League and despite the NL itself starting in 1876. Even baseball only selected one-eighth of its teams to the postseason (one team from each eight-team league until 1961, and one from each ten-team league until divisions were finally introduced in 1969), meaning for the majority of teams the postseason was irrelevant (and until the addition of the LCS – and certainly before the 1920 formation of the unified Major League Baseball – the World Series was almost an exhibition). Even baseball today, which has sought to keep its postseason miniscule compared to the select-half-the-teams postseasons of the NBA and NHL (and to a lesser extent, the NFL), still selects eight out of 30 teams – a little over a quarter of all the teams in baseball. (Because of unbalanced league sizes the NL selects exactly a quarter.)

Horse racing and boxing were downright different. Horse racing had no championship whatsoever, or even any unified sanctioning bodies; going to the racetrack was mostly a pastime (and a chance to gamble). That’s why the Triple Crown is more important than it really should be, because they were, for a long time, the biggest races in the sport by default. (The horses that run the Triple Crown are really teenagers, and the races were originally a showcase for the hottest young talent in the sport. That horses are now being bred solely to run in three races in their teens and then retire to stud is just one of the many MANY things horribly wrong about horse racing today.) The closest any of the sports come to this system (or non-system) outside college football are NASCAR and golf – both of which have established pseudo-“playoff” systems in the hope of evoking their team-sport counterparts.

Boxing used and still uses the system of (as wrestler Ric Flair famously put it) “to be the man, you gotta beat the man”, and the corruption of this system with more “championships” than you can shake a stick at (and no one caring about any of them, only caring about individual fighters) is probably irrelevant to most of the other factors. MMA suggests the system can still work wonders when there is a single sanctioning body (even though there have been and continue to be several attempts to compete with the UFC), and the idea of college football using this system has been
floated
before, but the regional nature of the sport makes it difficult, especially since college football does not have a real central sanctioning body. (Not to mention it pretty much necessitates abandoning the idea of only holding the sport for three months; in fact, the need for some sort of “training camp” in team sports is probably the main reason the championship-belt idea has never gotten any play in a team sport.)

Certainly it didn’t have a real sanctioning body before the 90s. The NCAA only handled the TV (and eventually, not even that); college football was really controlled by the individual conferences (and even then by the top schools within each conference), the top independents (of which there were more, including Penn State and the better, more tradition-filled ACC and Big East teams, than today), and the bowls (which were really controlled by the conferences and top schools). When the NCAA handled the TV it showed one game each week; after losing its monopoly power TV contracts began being handled by the conferences. That, coupled with ESPN beginning to showcase games from all around the country, started to dissolve the regional nature of the sport. College football now had a national audience, and it was possible for someone to see games from Ohio State, Alabama, and USC in one weekend.

This started to focus more attention on college football’s nonexistent national championship, and the conferences and bowls, seeing how popular a “national championship game” between the best two teams in the country could be, decided to get together and create one, agreeing to send the top two teams to the same bowl. The Bowl Coalition and Bowl Alliance both suffered from not including the Big Ten, Pac-10, or Rose Bowl, and the split poll-determined titles of the past remained common. Finally, after a series of concessions to those groups, the Bowl Championship Series, involving four bowls and six conferences plus Notre Dame, was instituted in time for the 1998 college football season. But far from ending the era of split titles and instituting a true college football national championship, the BCS created controversy almost every year, with farcical results and teams outside the previously-nonexistent “Big Six” having no shot at a national championship. The BCS and its faults have had an odd effect, however: it’s touched off a national debate about what sort of system to replace it with, if any (the minority that supports the BCS is very vocal), and that has resulted in an examination, carried out by a surprisingly large number of people, of the very premise and meaning of a playoff in all of sports.

The problem – and, if not the main reason, a big part of the reason we don’t have a playoff already – is the tension between our desire for a playoff and college football clarity, and the history and various traditions of college football that made it so popular in its own right for decades but which were borne out of not having a playoff and thus can’t easily accommodate one. For all its faults, the BCS was designed mostly so as not to overly disrupt these traditions, namely, the fact that you play 11 (later 12) games during the regular season, and if you have a winning season you get to have a vacation in a bowl after school lets out for Christmas, a showcase for college football attended by people visiting the city for the holidays, and a chance to close out your season on a fantastic note by winning your own “championship”, and if you’re really, really good, you just might play in one of the marquee bowls on New Year’s Day. The only thing the BCS changed about this calculus directly was playing after New Year’s. To extend the BCS into a playoff would cause some sort of problem, and it’s an open question whether it’s worth it. It would devalue the regular season by providing spots for 4, 8, or 16 teams rather than two, thus robbing college football of what makes it special; it would force teams to play during finals week, or otherwise hinder academics; it would be the end of the bowls; it would make college football a two-semester sport (never mind that today’s January 8th BCS Championship Game is already being played after school starts). The debate over the merits of a playoff is a debate over striking the right balance between clarity and maintaining these traditions.

What’s my opinion of this debate? It’s too late to preserve the traditions. They were borne of a sport that barely even cared about the games, let alone who was “national champion”, instead preferring to care about the pageantry surrounding it, with the exception of the major rivalry games. The gatekeepers of college football opened Pandora’s Box when they decided they were going to start caring about who was national champion by creating the BCS. You want to preserve the traditions, go back to the old system, but if you want a national champion, you’ve already sacrificed the traditions. You’ve attracted a new clientele to college football, but they won’t miss the traditions if it means they get a playoff. Want proof? Just look at the farce the bowls have become, with more bowls than one-quarter the teams in the Bowl Subdivision, meaning it’s a minor miracle there have been enough 6-6 teams to fill all the spots – and all but five of them are completely meaningless, and even four of those five no longer have even a shot of influencing who gets at least one of the national championships. College football is now a sport that has a “national championship” (of sorts) and it needs to stop acting like it isn’t, and it needs to stop being a hybrid of a sport that cares and a sport that doesn’t, and ends up doing a bad job of either.

Earlier this year I discovered the college football blog of Ed Gunther, and his incredibly well thought-out and comprehensive analysis of the debate surrounding a playoff. As Gunther sees it, the debate surrounding a playoff is rooted in different conceptions of what a champion is. Proponents of a playoff want a champion to be objective, with no ambiguity, settled “on the field”, regardless of whether that team was really the best team there was that season (as opposed to just getting lucky at the right time); opponents want a champion to at least have a claim to being the best in the sport, even if that means picking it subjectively with multiple possible answers, plucked out of a hat by a poll. Opponents of a playoff, in other words, would say the 2007 New England Patriots should have been crowned champions because the Giants weren’t actually any better, they just got lucky at the right time; the Patriots could literally beat them two out of three times. In my opinion, although Gunther accurately captures the root beliefs of the pro-playoff side, he’s off the mark with the anti-playoff side, and this is more of an individual side argument than the actual core of the debate, namely the “upsets mean you won’t really get any real clarity as to who the best team is” argument. As I just mentioned, opponents of a playoff are more concerned about holding on to the image of college football they have from their youth, and in the case of university presidents, whether their student-athletes are doing well in class. The debate surrounding a playoff is more about differences in priorities than differences in philosophies.

(But if Gunther wants me to approach the debate as a difference in philosophies, then let me say to playoff opponents: What’s your response to the fact that a team outside a BCS conference has virtually no shot of claiming to be the “best”? Isn’t it possible that there could be a season with only one team with a legit claim to be the “best” but that loses in an upset in the BCS championship game – in other words, isn’t even a two-team playoff bad enough? Before you call that far-fetched, let me point you to 2006 Ohio State and Florida. Actually, I’m not sure if even Gunther really believes in this dichotomy as more than a device to help focus the debate. You can judge for yourself by reading his expanded explanation.)

I’m going to follow along with Gunther’s analysis of the issues, responding to both the various arguments against the playoff as well as Gunther’s analysis of both sides. This process should serve to demonstrate my personal playoff biases and what I feel is the best form of playoff for FBS, why other systems (including the current one) don’t work, and why mine does, taking a fairly comprehensive tour of the arguments along the way. It’s probably not the Holy Grail and the great panacea that solves every question, and it certainly has no shortage of its own issues, but over the course of this debate I hope to show why it manages to keep many of the things that make college football great, against the grain of what you might think. By his own admission, Gunther’s analysis skips around a bit because the debate kinda goes around in circles in some ways, with many different potential paths through the various arguments, and I’m going to follow Gunther’s path as a framework for presenting my own thoughts.

We already have a playoff – the regular season!
The regular season, which is part of what makes college football special, will become meaningless. Big upsets will mean less if the losers are going to get into a playoff anyway.
Late in the season, if a team has no or 1 loss, and has already locked up their conference or at least a spot in the playoff, they will rest starters and begin to coast, like in the NFL.
A playoff won’t give us the best team at the end of the season, only the hottest or the one best able to avoid – or pull off – upsets.

These arguments are tightly related, especially in Gunther’s analysis. They all have to do with the role of the regular season, the role of a playoff, and their relationship to each other, as well as the definitions of a champion held by the two sides in Gunther’s view. For this post and the next two, I’m going to jump around addressing different parts of each argument and different parts of Gunther’s “fair competition” sections.

College football is like a playoff because if you lose one game, you might be out, but if you win every game, you should win the championship; it’s not like a playoff because you can lose one game and still be in the running, and go undefeated and still not be in the running. (And not just in non-BCS conferences either. Remember Auburn 2004?) In fact, in 2007, you could lose two games and still be in the running, while there was an undefeated Hawaii team out there that couldn’t muscle its way into the title game. (I’m convinced that if the 2007 Mountain West Conference had played out like the 2008 MWC did, Utah would have been in the title game. You can exclude 2007 Hawaii for having an atrocious schedule, and you can exclude 2008 Utah on the grounds that despite having a conference and schedule on par with a BCS conference and team, it wasn’t quite good enough top-to-bottom to justify leapfrogging a one-loss BCS conference team, but you cannot say a team with a near-BCS quality schedule that goes undefeated should be kept out of the championship game in favor of a two-loss team whose schedule might not be that much better.) If it sounds a little confusing, it’s because both sides are true in different years and to different teams. One loss might eliminate you from championship contention, just like in a playoff, or it might not.

Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: every regular season in all of sports has meaning. It is idiotic to claim that a playoff would render the regular season completely meaningless. Regular season games in other sports influence who gets into the playoffs and how the playoffs are seeded. That’s even the case in college basketball’s famously undervalued regular season. Under a playoff, college football would be no different, which is part of the problem: playoff opponents don’t want to see college football lose its special quality. But they don’t really believe the regular season would be rendered completely meaningless, just that it would have less meaning than now, when it has “the most meaningful regular season in all of sports”, a regular season so meaningful “the whole regular season is a playoff”. A playoff would automatically devalue that, and the regular season wouldn’t “be a playoff” anymore.

So people who want college football to adopt a playoff want the regular season to have a different meaning than it does now: rather than serving as a “regular season playoff” to select two teams to play for the championship, the regular season is meaningful for selecting however many teams the playoff will have, 4, 8, or 16, and the meaning of the playoff is to determine the champion. When you only need to get into the top 4, 8, or 16, instead of the top two, it takes less effort to move on to the next stage of the season, you don’t need to win as many games, losses are less costly, and it’s easier to brush off regular season games. College football’s regular season would not be as meaningful.

So the harder it is to get into the postseason, the more meaningful the regular season becomes. When there are more teams competing for fewer spots, the regular season becomes more meaningful. So to establish a rough index of how meaningful the regular season is, we can take the proportion of each league that gets selected to the postseason – the ratio of number of teams in the league to number of teams in the postseason. The larger the number, the more meaningful the regular season is. Then to establish an index of the meaning of each game, we take the number we get, and divide it by the number of games each team plays. Do a little algebra, and the Regular Season Meaning Index is T / (P x G), where T is the number of teams in the league, P is the number of teams in the postseason, and G is the number of games each team plays. (Note that this index is not adjusted for auto bids and seeding – it is purely the meaning of the regular season for getting into the postseason all else being equal.) Here are the numbers for various leagues:

 

Teams in
Postseason

Total
teams

% of teams
in Postseason

# of Games
Per Team

Meaning of
Each Game

College Football

2

120

1.67%

12

5

CFB (All BCS Bowls)

10

120

8.33%

12

1

College Basketball

65

347

18.73%

31

.1722

NFL

12

32

37.5%

16

.1667

CFB (All Bowls)

68

120

56.67%

12

.1471

Baseball

8

30

26.67%

162

.0231

NBA/NHL

16

30

53.33%

82

.0228

There it is, plain for all to see: college football by far has the most meaningful regular season in sports. But there are some odd things about this chart. What is college basketball doing with the most meaningful regular season, per game, than any sport except college football? I thought opponents of a playoff wanted to avoid a situation like college basketball where the regular season doesn’t matter and only March Madness is even worth paying attention to? If college basketball’s regular season is so meaningful, why do I always hear about how meaningless it is? (Even if we included all three minor tournaments – the NIT, CBI, and CIT – college basketball’s meaning index would be .0868, more than baseball, the NBA, and the NHL, and it would be selecting a smaller percentage of its teams to the postseason than the NFL at 37.18%. Note that the number of games per team is a guesstimate and the total number of teams may be out of date.) Well, part of it is that college basketball selects the largest raw number of teams to the postseason, so the perception is that teams at the top get locked in quicker. There’s also the fact that most of college basketball’s at-larges go to BCS conference schools; for those schools, the meaning of each game is significantly less than .1722, for the other schools, it’s significantly more. (We’ll see how much less for BCS schools later.) But in my opinion, another factor in college basketball not getting credit for its meaningful regular season is the fact there isn’t a straightforward standings you can check. Though “bracketology” has become a well-practiced science in recent years it’s still guesswork, and people often have trouble grasping what’s at stake in each game. The selection committee’s picks can seem like voodoo, and so people think the regular season has little to do with it.

There are some other interesting things about this chart. For one, the meaningfulness of each game in baseball is pathetic, but at least in its case it’s justifiable because of how pitching affects things – but the NBA and NHL chased the money in expanding their postseasons to include more than half their respective leagues’ teams and each game is only about as meaningful, maybe a little less, than baseball. The NFL, on the other hand, kept their postseason at a streamlined 12 teams, and with their 16-game regular season, that results in a regular season almost as meaningful as college basketball, and more meaningful than college football if the goal is to get into any bowl. I suspect the relatively large meaning the NFL imbues each game with is a key factor in the NFL being the most popular and powerful sports league. There’s drama and impact in each game you don’t get with the other three traditional major professional sports, not even in baseball which selects fewer teams and a smaller percentage of them.

But back to college football. As we said, college football has by far a more meaningful regular season than any other sport – but I bet you didn’t know how meaningful. Even college basketball and the NFL give each game a meaningfulness index number less than .2 (that’s point two). College football’s meaningfulness index number is 5 (that’s the integer 5). College football’s regular season is so much more meaningful than the others it’s hard to grasp just how meaningful it is. There are so few teams competing for the championship at the end of the season, and so few games, that it produces a meaningfulness index number over 1 (well over), which should beg the question: is college football’s regular season too meaningful? (The BCS bowls, taken as a whole as the goal, give the regular season a more reasonable level of meaningfulness at exactly 1.)

Here’s how imposing a playoff on college football would affect the meaning of each game:

Teams in
Playoff

% of teams
in Playoff

Meaning of
Each Game

4

3.33%

2.5

8

6.67%

1.25

16

13.33%

.625

An 8-team playoff would still have a meaningfulness index number over 1, and a 16-team playoff would have an index number still over three times bigger than any other sport, and would select a smaller percentage of teams than any other sport. The regular season would be significantly more meaningful than other sports even for the spotlight BCS teams with an easier path. This chart assumes every at-large is awarded to a BCS team:

 

Expected BCS Teams
in Postseason

Total BCS
teams

% of BCS in
Postseason

# of Games
Per Team

Meaning of Each
Game for BCS Teams

CFB (16-Team Playoff)

11

65

16.92%

12

.4924

College Basketball

40

73

54.79%

31

.0588

With a 16-team playoff, the regular season is not that much less meaningful for BCS teams than it is for college football as a whole, and still way more meaningful than in any other sport. (And even for BCS teams in college basketball, the regular season is twice as meaningful as in baseball, the NBA, and the NFL, before factoring in that every year, at least a few at-larges go to mid-majors.)

See, college football’s meaningful regular season has a dirty little secret: a pitifully small sample size. In fact, the sample size in college football is so pitifully small, especially compared to the number of teams, that no playoff is really any good at selecting the teams. When multiple teams can go undefeated in the regular season on a regular basis, you know you have a small sample size and a horribly skewed schedule – too skewed, in fact, to even come close to coming up with a half-decent playoff system. The NFL uses a system where every team in the division plays each other home-and-away, plus a balance of teams in the rest of the conference, plus all the teams in one in-conference division and one other-conference division. Each team plays six games that do a reasonably good job on a round-robin basis of establishing a pecking order within the division, plus a robust “out-of-conference schedule”, within a theoretically competitively-balanced league, establishing comparisons between divisions and between teams in different divisions. As long as the NFL includes every division champion it has a robust playoff system that includes every team with a claim to being “the best”. College basketball teams play 30 games within what amounts to a league with over 300 teams – about the same ratio as college football. But there are enough non-conference games, and enough of them against quality opponents, to establish connections between teams in different conferences.

College football teams only play three (four, now) non-conference games, and they are often against cupcakes. Comparing teams in different conferences is, almost literally, pure guesswork. Consider the following hypothetical scenario: Two teams go 11-1. One team lost to the team but their best win is against the #50 team. The other team lost to the #30 team but their best win is against the team – but their respective second-best wins are both against teams in the 60s. I could easily argue that a team that takes two losses to top-ten teams is better than an undefeated team that didn’t beat a single team in the top 50, but college football doesn’t really work that way (unless the former team is in a BCS conference and the latter team isn’t); it has to rank teams by record by default because the sample size is so small. It’s nearly impossible to separate the teams and seed them. College basketball teams suffer more losses (thus creating more of a pecking order) and create more separation of records between teams.

In Part II, I’ll explore how the way we compare teams with similar (not even necessarily identical) records in college football exposes the truth of this point, and I’ll start to explore my preferred playoff and why I prefer it.

College Football Schedule – Week 1

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This is a feature I started on my old blog last year – the complete FBS college football schedule for the coming week, complete with TV info from MattSarzSports.com. I originally intended to post this after at least the first part of my kickoff to the college football season, but that’s taking a while to write. College football is the second-most highly watched level of every-year sport in America, and quite possibly the majority of games, at least involving BCS teams, are available to a reasonably national audience, if not on TV then online. I maintain my own college football rankings, which (this year) I’ll start putting out after Week 3. That means that starting Week 4, the rankings will start being ordered by the top teams in those rankings for teams in the Top 25 (and those slightly below), followed by the games available in HD, followed by non-HD games listed by conference. Until then I’ll list games by day and HD games for Saturday.

At the top of the list will be games for holders of the college football lineal titles. This is a fairly simple concept (and one not just proposed by me, either): each game the titleholder plays, the title goes to the winner. The Princeton-Yale title, which traces its history to the first football game between Rutgers and Princeton, is in the hands of Florida after what happened last season. A split title is created whenever a team goes undefeated (or wins the BCS title game) without holding any lineal title – but only one such title has not been merged with Princeton-Yale, the 2007 Boise State title, in the hands of last year’s mid-major darlings, Utah. This section will list the Princeton-Yale holder first, followed by the 2007 Boise State holder. Titleholders will be marked by asterisks.

Also, I was going to list DirecTV channel numbers for all games this year, until I learned that ESPN GamePlan doesn’t release channel numbers for games until just 1 to 2 days before game time, which defeats most of the purpose I originally had for it. Instead I’ll list announcing teams from Awful Announcing.

All times Eastern.

LINEAL TITLES 

Charleston Southern

@

*Florida

7 PM SA

FSS/SW/SUN

Bob Rathbun, Dave Archer, Jenn Hildreth

Utah State

@

*Utah

9 PM TH

mtn.

James Bates, Todd Christensen, Sammy Linebaugh

THURSDAY 

Troy

@

Bowling Green

7 PM

CSD.com

Greg Franke, Tom Cole (BGSU)

South Carolina

@

NC State

7 PM

ESPN

Sean McDonough, Jesse Palmer,

Craig James, Erin Andrews

Villanova

@

Temple

7 PM

CSD.com

  

Coastal Carolina

@

Kent State

7 PM

CSD.com

  

North Texas 

@ 

Ball State 

7:30 

ESPNU

Charlie Neal, Jay Walker

North Dakota State

@ 

Iowa State 

8 PM 

CSD.com

  

Eastern Kentucky 

@ 

Indiana 

8 PM 

BTN

Ari Wolfe, Charles Davis, Larra Overton

Oregon 

@ 

Boise State 

7 PT 

ESPN

Mark Jones, Bob Davie

FRIDAY 

Tulsa 

@ 

Tulane 

8 PM 

ESPN

Joe Tessitore, Rod Gilmore

SATURDAY’S HD GAMES 

Central Arkansas

@

Hawaii

1 AM

PPV

Jim Leahey, Russell Yamahoa

Navy

@ 

Ohio State

Noon

ESPN

Dave Pasch, Bob Griese, Chris Spielman

Minnesota 

@ 

Syracuse 

Noon 

ESPN2

Pam Ward, Ray Bentley

Kentucky

v.

Miami (OH)

Noon

ESPNU

Clay Matvick, David Diaz-Infante

Akron

@

Penn State

Noon

BTN

Matt Devlin, Glen Mason, Kenny Jackson

Toledo

@

Purdue

Noon

BTN

Craig Coshun, Rod Woodson, Larra Overton

Montana State

@

Michigan State

Noon

BTN

Dan Gutowsky, Ron Johnson, Lisa Byington

Towson

@

Northwestern

Noon

BTN

Matt Rosen, Mark Campbell, Tony McGee

Northern Iowa 

@ 

Iowa 

Noon 

BTN

Tom Werme, Anthony Herron, Elizabeth Moreau

Western Kentucky 

@ 

Tennessee 

Noon 

SEC Network

Dave Neal, Andre Ware, Cara Capuano

Georgia 

@ 

Oklahoma State 

3:30 

ABC/ESPN2

Sean McDonough, Matt Millen, Holly Rowe

Western Michigan 

@ 

Michigan 

3:30 

ABC/ESPN2

Mike Patrick, Craig James, Quint Kessenich

Baylor 

@ 

Wake Forest 

3:30 

ABC

Dave Lamont, Shaun King

Nevada 

@ 

Notre Dame 

3:30 

NBC

Tom Hammond, Pat Haden, Alex Flanagan

San Jose State 

@ 

USC 

3:30 

FSN

Barry Tompkins, Petros Papadakis, Michael Eaves

Jackson State 

@ 

Mississippi State 

3:30 

ESPNU

Todd Harris, Charles Arbuckle

Missouri 

v. 

Illinois 

3:30 

ESPN

Ron Franklin, Ed Cunningham

Stanford 

@ 

Washington State 

6 PM

FSN NW/FCS

  

BYU 

v. 

Oklahoma 

7 PM 

ESPN

Brad Nessler, Todd Blackledge, Heather Cox

Louisiana Tech 

@ 

Auburn 

7 PM 

ESPNU

Eric Collins, Brock Huard

Northern Illinois 

@ 

Wisconsin 

7 PM 

BTN

Wayne Larrivee, Chris Martin, Charissa Thompson

San Diego State 

@ 

UCLA 

7:30 

FS W/FCS

Bill MacDonald, James Washington, Brooke Olzendam

Alabama 

v. 

Virginia Tech 

8 PM 

ABC

Brent Musburger, Kirk Herbstreit, Lisa Salters

Buffalo 

@ 

UTEP 

9 PM 

CBS CS

Dave Ryan, Akbar Gbaja-Biamila

Maryland 

@ 

California 

7 PT 

ESPN2

Terry Gannon, David Norrie

Idaho State 

@ 

Arizona State 

7 PT 

FS AZ/FCS

Tom Leander, Juan Roque

LSU 

@ 

Washington 

10:30 

ESPN

Mark Jones, Bob Davie

SATURDAY’S OTHER GAMES

Appalachian State 

@ 

East Carolina 

Noon 

MASN/WITN

Patrick Kinas, Billy Weaver, Brian Meador (MASN)

Liberty 

@ 

West Virginia 

Noon 

B.E. Network

John Sanders, Rene Nadeau

Jacksonville State 

@ 

Georgia Tech 

1 PM 

ESPN360

  

Youngstown State 

@ 

Pittsburgh 

1 PM 

    

Northeastern State

@ 

Boston College 

2 PM 

ESPN360

  

Nicholls State 

@ 

Air Force 

2 PM 

    

Portland State 

@ 

Oregon State 

2:30 

FSN NW/FCS

Rich Burk, Steve Preece, Jen Mueller

Weber State 

@ 

Wyoming 

3 PM 

    

Rice 

@ 

UAB 

4 PM 

CSS

Matt Stewart, Chuck Oliver, Melissa Lee

Southern Illinois

@ 

Marshall

4:30 

    

Middle Tenn. St.

@ 

Clemson

6 PM

ESPN360

  

The Citadel

@ 

North Carolina

6 PM

ESPN360

  

William and Mary

@ 

Virginia

6 PM

ESPN360

  

Northwestern State

@ 

Houston

7 PM

CBSCS XXL

  

Florida Atlantic

@ 

Nebraska

7 PM

PPV

Ron Thulin, Kelly Stouffer, Kent Pavelka

Louisiana-Monroe

@ 

Texas

7 PM

PPV

Bill Land, Gary Reasons, Emily Jones

Connecticut

@ 

Ohio

7 PM

ESPN360

  

New Mexico

@ 

Texas A&M

7 PM

    

Army

@ 

Eastern Michigan

7 PM

CSD.com

  

Northern Colorado

@ 

Kansas

7 PM

FCS

Dan McLaughlin, Yogi Roth, Samantha Steele

Wofford 

@ 

South Florida 

7 PM 

Gameplan

  

Southern 

@ 

Louisiana-Lafayette 

7 PM 

CSD.com

  

Missouri State 

@ 

Arkansas

7 PM 

Gameplan

Scott Inman, Jimmy Dykes, Clint Stoerner

Richmond 

@ 

Duke 

7 PM 

theACC.com

  

Alcorn State 

@ 

Southern Miss 

7 PM 

    

North Dakota 

@ 

Texas Tech 

7 PM 

    

Mississippi Valley St. 

@ 

Arkansas State 

7 PM 

    

Massachusetts 

@ 

Kansas State 

7 PM 

    

Indiana State

@ 

Louisville 

7:30 

Gameplan

Drew Deener, Doug James

Samford 

@ 

UCF 

7:30 

    

Western Carolina 

@ 

Vanderbilt 

7:30 

CSN/CSS

Doug Bell, Chris Doering

Idaho 

@ 

New Mexico State 

8 PM 

Gameplan

  

Stephen F. Austin 

@ 

SMU 

8 PM 

    

Central Michigan

@ 

Arizona

7 PT

  

Dave Sitton, John Fina, Glenn Howell (Wildcats SN)

UC Davis

@ 

Fresno State

7 PT

CBSCS XXL

  

Sacramento State

@ 

UNLV

7 PT

    

SUNDAY

Mississippi

@ 

Memphis

3:30

ESPN

Joe Tessitore, Rod Gilmore

Colorado State

@ 

Colorado

7 PT

FSN

Joel Meyers, Dave Lapham, Jim Knox

LABOR DAY

Cincinnati

@ 

Rutgers

4 PM

ESPN

Bob Wischusen, Bob Griese

Miami (FL)

@ 

Florida State

8 PM

ESPN

Brad Nessler, Todd Blackledge

College Football Kickoff Prelude: My thoughts on Rodriguez-gate

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If Ohio State is defending Michigan, as Jim Tressel did with regards to the allegations that Rich Rodriguez was violating NCAA limits on practice time, you know something’s gone bananas. That’s like cats and dogs deciding to work in harmony.

Tressel’s point seems to be that the NCAA limits are too low, and the players themselves want to get in more workout time because they need more workout time and they want to be the best they can be. Strictly from the perspective of the teams, at least the big-name teams like Ohio State and Michigan, a lifting of the limits would seem to be a no-brainer.

From the NCAA’s perspective, the limits, like all their regulations, serve two purposes. First, they protect academics. Time spent on the practice field or in the weight room is time not spent on schoolwork. If players want more time on the practice field than they’re allowed, their priorities are mixed up, because they’re supposed to be a student first and an athlete second, not a pro athlete in all but name and salary. Of course, we don’t need to get into how college football and basketball barely even pays lip service to that whole “student-athlete” thing anymore, and even from that perspective you could still make a case for lifting limits on practice time. Maybe they’ve already done all their schoolwork, or even if they haven’t it’s quaint and old-fashioned to insist they do. (The argument that these are “just kids” reaches this  same conclusion.)

The second purpose of practice time limits is to protect, and level the playing field for, the small schools that do care about academics and maybe can’t/don’t want to work out as long and hard as the big football schools. But this is tied in with the need to defend academics and results in a similar defense: “don’t punish us because those other schools don’t care about football”.

I don’t know whether the NCAA should or shouldn’t raise its practice time limits, but now you know where the NCAA is coming from, to at least a limited extent.

Probably the last word on Roethlisberger-gate, as in, I’m chiming in so late I doubt anyone else will chime in after me. Or even listen.

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If ESPN wanted to cover up the Roethlisberger scandal, their initial decision not to report on it may have inadvertently helped that goal more than they intended, by moving the focus of the story off the suit itself and onto ESPN… (I swear I won’t spend every one of my posts talking about stories everyone has already left behind!)

Ultimately, the outrage directed at ESPN seems to have two sources. First, ESPN wouldn’t report on it, at all, not even on its web site, when other organizations – including the same company in the ABC News division – did. In his interview with ombudsman Don Ohlmeyer, Vince Loria declares that “[i]t was never our intent to be out front on this story.” Newsflash, Vince: ESPN is expected to be out front on every story. At the very least, ESPN is expected to acknowledge the existence of every story, since so many people turn to it for their sports news. As more people turn to the Internet for their sports news, that may start to change, but ESPN is still the definer of the news cycle, and for the moment the Internet only increases ESPN’s responsibilities, by not restricting it to filling only an hour and thus not giving it any excuse for ignoring a story. (Ohlmeyer seemingly acknowledges as much towards the end, though he also seems to recommend that ESPN itself should make the story about its refusal to report, and no one goes to ESPN for that sort of meta-discussion… this was an issue with Ohlmeyer’s predecessors as well…)

Second is the question of whether ESPN’s decision was fair, balanced, or consistent, given the fact that ESPN has not shied away from reporting on unconfirmed civil suits in the past… then other times it has. ESPN’s inconsistent stance on this issue has seemed wildly inconsistent and left people in the dark as to what criteria ESPN is using to determine whether to report and when. (And how; some have accused ESPN of slanting the story when they did report it.) With people left to come to their own conclusions, some have determined it has less to do with ESPN’s claimed criteria and more with irrelevant aspects of the athletes themselves, such as popularity, race, and relationship to the network. Ohlmeyer arguably did a disservice by asking Loria only about Marvin Harrison. ESPN has a lot more than that to answer for. Ohlmeyer also did a disservice by asking only about ESPN’s perceived protection of the NFL, and not Roethlisberger or the Steelers (especially given some writers’ dredging up ESPN’s Spygate coverage for evidence that the Patriots are/were not one of ESPN’s “protected” teams and the Steelers are).

(In fact, Doria himself notes that “prior history” goes into coverage decisions – a commendable position on its face, but Mike Tyson getting in trouble with the ladies is kind of old news, and a pillar of the community doing so is big news.)

I think most of us would prefer that the media not get so wrapped up in accusations against athletes that damage reputations and then not restore those reputations if the accusations turned out to be false – a natural result of the fact that once the case is settled, there’s no reason to report on it anymore, so the “no accusation” doesn’t get as much coverage as the “accusation”. But that’s not the way the media (or this country) works, and ESPN shouldn’t pretend it is.

On another note, I’m debating whether to include Ohlmeyer’s line – “I think the Internet is the most transformative technological advancement since the printing press” – in my book on the impact of the Internet… then again, Ohlmeyer’s hardly the first to say it.

Sports journalism in an age of transition for all journalism

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This is my first blog post to be republished on Bleacher Report. Hi! I’m going to bring some quirks to my writing, which I hope to (re-)introduce you to over the next few days and weeks. I just relaunched my Web site, MorganWick.com, where I talk about a wide variety of topics, including some you might never have heard about, and even the topics that are familiar I often talk about from a unique perspective, because I’m constantly thinking about them. On my site, the motto is “Ideas every day”, and to celebrate the launch of the new site, this is Ideas Every Day week month at MorganWick.com. Because I got the idea for Ideas Every Day week over a month ago, I’m going to start it with some ideas for posts that are not as topical now as they were then.

We are in a period of painful transition in journalism. We are in a period where the Internet is big enough to take a bite out of newspapers but too small to effectively replace them and too young to know what, exactly, will replace them, or how it’ll be paid for. It’s outside the realm of a single blog post for me to proclaim to have all the answers for how to save newspapers or maintain the standards they set in the Internet Age. It covers too much ground, touches on too many aspects of our everyday life. One day I hope to write a book on all the changes the Internet is bringing to society, and maybe I’ll try to find the answers there. Nonetheless this post is on just one symptom, one aspect, of this larger problem, and it unavoidably means talking about the larger problem and thinking about how to fix it.

The second sentence of the preceding paragraph is an important way to describe and look at the situation. For all the trouble that newspapers are in, they still reach many more people than most websites and even most TV news shows. The slow disappearance of newspapers isn’t just about the in-depth journalism that will be lost, which itself is less about the disappearance of newspapers and more about our increasing demands for immediacy. There are still a lot of people, people without any access to the Internet, that are reliant on newspapers (and, admittedly, TV) to know what’s going on in the world. At least in the short term, losing access to newspapers could mean complete disconnection.

The flip side of that is the reality that whatever it is that replaces newspapers, it will exist in a greater number, diversity, and precision than what exists now. The diversity of voices on the Internet has a lot of advantages. But it also has a number of problems.

For many, including me, it’s easy to assume that the future of the Internet and journalism in general will follow the mold set by television, a future largely supported by ads. There are a few problems with this supposition, but one of them is that very, very, very few web sites will have the mass penetration of a leading daily newspaper or TV station. The value of advertising lies primarily in the number of eyeballs you can have seeing your ad; the fewer eyeballs, the less value. While it’s theoretically possible for people to follow more websites than they subscribe to newspapers or watch TV shows, the fact is that there are going to be more voices fighting for a piece of the pie, and there’s a limit as to how big the pie can grow, especially when a lot of the eyeballs are going to be the same people over and over again.

Not all journalistic functions that are going to be changed, and possibly not for the better, by the Internet are time consuming. Some are just expensive, underwritten by less expensive sections of the paper. Something that requires a lot of traveling may attract a significant number of readers and eyeballs, but it’s still going to be harder to pay the bills that go along with it – which in turn, means fewer people are going to be willing to take the plunge. It’s doubly hard when we’re talking about something that requires a lot of traveling yet is still local.

Which brings me to July’s series in the Sports Business Journal on the declining sizes and budgets of newspaper sports sections. Sports sections have reduced staff and page counts, cut travel expenses on beats (especially by not sending writers on the road), and even when they haven’t reduced beat coverage, cut coverage of big events as well.

A one-two punch of the Web and ESPN has put a crimp on local sports sections, and given its frivolity compared to the rest of the paper, I wonder if sports sections will be first to be cut entirely. Hardcore sports fans who once were reliant on the local sports section, or the sports minute on the local newscast, for sports news from anywhere in the country have found ESPN a godsend. A self-reinforcing pattern of people flocking to ESPN for sports coverage in the wake of shrinking coverage in the local paper has started to emerge. There’s now a significant group of people like me who consider themselves general sports fans, rather than necessarily fans of any particular team. The team I have the closest attachment to is the Mariners, and that’s because I’ve been going to a couple of games every year since I was a little kid and feel a sentimental attachment to keep going. I probably couldn’t tell you half the names on the team.

ESPN will tell you when Brett Favre is coming back – they’ll cover the big stars and the big-name teams. That’s why its detractors like to call it the “Eastern Seaboard Programming Network”, despite its willingness to cover LA teams even before opening a studio there. They’ll cover leagues at the macro level, at least to an extent, but as Don Ohlmeyer noted in his first ombudsman column for the boys in Bristol, “programming and commentating for a national audience made up mostly of local interests is a treacherous balancing act.” ESPN itself has suffered from becoming “America’s sports section” in a nation more patriotic about local teams than any other. To get the same level of coverage of individual teams requires a local-level operation whose patrons only expect them to cover two or three teams. There’s less money in those local level operations, so travel expenses have been cut and coverage has suffered.

For teams that aren’t already being doted on by ESPN, that means they’re threatened with a slip to irrelevance. When ESPN puts and keeps an event in the news, people pay attention. If the amount of coverage a team gets in a local paper is a short wire story on the game on page 36 and the amount of coverage on the local news is less than ten seconds, meaning they’re probably getting more coverage from ESPN than the local media (assuming it’s a Big Three team), the team effectively gets shut out. Unless a blogger can become really popular, they’re not going to be much of an improvement, because they either watch the team on TV, cover only the home games live (just like the beat writers who see travel expenses cut), or fork over a considerable amount of money for travel expenses.

That’s why I think it’s smarter for papers to skimp on coverage of big events. Unless their team is in it, people already get more coverage of the Super Bowl or World Series from ESPN alone than they’d ever need, and there are, by my count, nine national sports websites before you go into single-sport websites like the sports’ official sites, fan-powered websites like Bleacher Report, and blogs like Deadspin – ESPN, CBS, Fox, Yahoo, SI, NBC, USA Today, Sporting News, and depending on whether or not you consider it a blog, Fanhouse. What people want, and need, is maintained coverage of the local teams. And if their team is in the championship, no coverage the major sports organizations can provide can match the coverage provided by someone who has grown intimately familiar with the team over the course of the season. But not all papers have realized this, and for papers with large, somewhat national readerships, like the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, it poses some tough questions as to which audience to appeal to.

At least in the short term, most of the easy answers are unsavory, involving the dicey concept of teams subsidizing their own coverage, which always raises the specter of conflict of interest. The LA Kings, who saw the Times‘ beat writer stop travelling with them on the road, hired their own freelance writers to write coverage for their own web site.

Now that he’s seen what they can do with editorial content, [Vice President of Broadcasting and Communications Mike] Altieri said he is warming to the idea of hiring a newspaper pro to cover the team both at home and on the road.

They looked into doing it three years ago, but decided against it, mostly because of the expense. The salary of a seasoned professional likely would approach $100,000 in Los Angeles, a difficult expense when he can’t demonstrate that it will lead to more revenue, particularly at a time when the team’s on-ice performance has been shoddy.

If traditional coverage continues to wane and the team improves, it may be worth the money, Altieri said. The debate then will be whether the front office is prepared to occasionally find criticism on its own site. Without it, fans probably won’t view it as credible, and they won’t come back.

The Kings wouldn’t be first: the Dallas Mavericks hired the Fort Worth Star-Telegram‘s NBA writer as that paper left Mavs coverage to the Dallas Morning News (merging of beats between competing papers has also become common practice where once that level of collusion would have been unthinkable), and at least six NFL teams have done similarly, led by the Bengals’ Geoff Hobson, who has written for the team site for a decade. In Major League Baseball, where the Advanced Media division runs MLB.com and all 30 club Web sites, 12 online writers have Baseball Hall of Fame votes. The Chicago Bulls, concerned about the loss of legendary Chicago Tribune NBA writer Sam Smith weakening the NBA’s profile in a football- and baseball-crazed market, hired him to continue his work for their site. In their case, they saw the departure (without their intervention) of one writer having a severe impact on their profile. The resulting uptick in traffic suggests other teams may follow the Bulls’ lead in that sense, ignoring the concerns about editorial control and conflict of interest given the larger issues at stake. Major League Baseball seems to have leapt into the future head-on: with no editorial interference from MLB or the clubs, the Advanced Media-run sites are fairly impartial.

Still, given the issues involved, I would suggest a better, less nauseating option, especially in markets without competing papers to share resources, would be to help pay for some of (in the Kings’ case) the Times‘ beat writer’s travel and other expenses – maybe, depending on the comfort level of all parties involved and necessary logistics, even letting him ride on the team plane. That would not only be cheaper than subsidizing all a reporter’s expenses, it would not only lessen (though not eliminate) the appearance of a conflict of interest, it would also restore that broad exposure of coverage. The only people who will find coverage of the Kings on the team’s own site are people who are looking for Kings coverage in the first place – not casual fans, unless they read aggregators, but content providers are very protective of content these days and some of them want to kill aggregators for “stealing” content.

Flamboyant Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has in fact taken this idea one better: he’s proposed that the major sports leagues form a “beat writer’s cooperative,” “hiring reporters who would provide daily content to local newspapers in exchange for guaranteed space in the print edition.” He’s gone on record stating he doesn’t believe a team Web site is the place for objective, unbiased opinions and reporting, but for selling the team. (He does think it’s the place to break news despite the risk that runs of antagonizing papers the team needs more than ever.)

If local teams are concerned about the loss of local beat writers, at least those writers spend half their time at home, and the emphasis on their presence adds up to less concern for the leagues. Take all the pressure faced by each of 30 teams, ratchet it up considerably, and concentrate it in one place and you have the problems facing individual sports – NASCAR and golf most prominently – that are all travel no matter where in the country you are.

It’s easy to separate the national and local levels in team sports – ESPN and the national outfits cover the biggest games like the playoffs, local outfits focus on the local teams. But that dynamic goes completely out of whack in the NASCAR and PGA tours, where for years local beat writers often spent all their time on the road. Considering the additional expense that entails, it’s no surprise those beats have often been axed entirely. Even national chains (who could conceivably get by with one beat between them) and content-sharing local papers have severely cut back coverage as writers have left for the Web. But that just puts more pressure on the national outfits to put as much resources into covering every event on the tour as local outfits do into covering every game for their local teams. It’s easy to cover the big races like the Daytona 500 and the majors – but the Local Dodge Dealers 400 and the side tournament Tiger’s skipping on some random golf course in Texas somewhere? Other than golf-specific magazines, only the AP, New York Times, and three of the aforementioned sports sites (ESPN, CBS, and USA Today, the latter more as a paper than a Web site) have a regular presence on the PGA tour.

PGA Tour Executive Vice President of Communications and International Affairs Ty Votaw insists that, mostly because of ESPN’s and CBS’s online presences, there’s still more being written about golf than ever… but here we run into that little “transition” problem, and a potential harbinger of problems to come. As with local teams, newspaper beat writers are a more visible place for coverage than a team web site, and unless they take the form of a blog, national sports sites aren’t really much better than the latter. Although Web sites have more space than newspapers, the amount the average fan will see is less. General sports fans can easily look through every page of the sports section, but they can only look at the front page of the Web site before anything they aren’t already interested in falls off the radar in favor of what they already came to look at. (The value of RSS for improving this situation is… iffy.) The result is a far more Darwinian competition for space than that which ever existed in the sports section.

For NASCAR, it seems like the universe has it in for them. NASCAR devoted so many resources to encouraging newspapers to covering their circuit in the late 90s as they made a push to be accepted as one of the modern four major sports… only to see their efforts wasted in the face of the juggernaut destroying the business they courted, and in a position to be first to go. Many papers haven’t ended NASCAR coverage entirely but switched to running abridged AP copy. NASCAR has attempted to adjust by removing the travel from its coverage – running weekly streaming press conferences with e-mailed questions from around the country – and, like local teams, has begun credentialing bloggers and other Web-based operations.

There is a silver lining in this for teams and leagues: as newspapers die, sports coverage may slither to the Web easier than you may think. Smith’s example suggests that sportswriters with large – even if strictly local – followings may be in the best shape of anyone threatened by the decline of newspapers; they have a ready-made audience to follow them to the Web in the form of a blog or just a series of columns for another web site. Unlike most journalism, sportswriting lends itself well to a conversion to blog format. Several sportswriters – especially those let go by ailing newspapers – have found new homes at a league or team web site, one of the national sports sites (ESPN seems especially popular), or even starting their own blog or web site.

Which approach is best for the sport or team varies. The best approach to reach a general audience is probably the national sports sites for the sports in general, especially the big individual ones. For local teams, the future for reaching a general audience may be dicier, at least until more local Web-based sites spring up and become popular. For their part, ESPN is trying to broaden and focus their mandate; earlier this year they launched ESPNChicago.com, a site dedicated to coverage of Chicago-area teams. The site quickly attracted more eyeballs than the Chicago Tribune‘s online sports section, and ESPN will soon launch similar sites for New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas. All four cities are places where ESPN owns a radio station (Pittsburgh being the only other), but few doubt that they’ll eventually expand beyond that zone into markets like Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington DC.

If what’s wanted is coverage, regardless of whether that coverage only reaches the people that are looking for it, a blog may be the best approach to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, at least for the writer looking for creative freedom, and for the sport or team that’s looking for a diversity of voices. But that sends the writer plunging headlong into the issue plaguing so much else of the Internet: the question of money. (SBJ’s profile of Racin’ Today, started by four laid-off motorsports writers, encapsulates many of the issues involved.)

Over the seven or so years that it’s run, ESPN’s Around the Horn has almost been emblematic of the changes coming over journalism. It started as a show for banter between four newspaper sportswriters. From west to east, the current lineup of writers includes: Bill Plaschke (Los Angeles Times); J.A. Adande (formerly L.A. Times, now ESPN.com); Woody Paige (Denver Post, excepting about a year working double duty as co-host of Cold Pizza-turned-First Take‘s 1st and 10 segment); Tim Cowlishaw (Dallas Morning News); Jay Mariotti (formerly Chicago Sun-Times, now Fanhouse, though probably moving to the Chicago Tribune); Kevin Blackistone (formerly Dallas Morning News, now Fanhouse after a lengthy unemployment); Bob Ryan; and Jackie MacMullan (both Boston Globe). Only five out of eight regular panelists still work for newspapers, and because Mariotti shows up almost every day, it’s a rare sight to see nothing but newspaper writers on one show. Occasional panelist Gene Wojcehowski moved from the Sun-Times to ESPN.com; Michael Smith became an occasional panelist (after being a regular for a while) after moving from the Globe to ESPN.com. On ATH‘s “big brother” show, Pardon the Interruption, Tony Kornheiser no longer works for the Washington Post.

There’s one other noteworthy thing about ATH: almost always, the youngest person on the show is host Tony Reali. Perhaps more disturbing, the youngest of the panelists still at a newspaper is Cowlishaw, who seems to be in his 40s if not 50s, and the only regular panelist I’d even suspect not to be in his 40s or above is Adande. It takes a long time for a sportswriter to build a reputation and following, but there haven’t been a lot of writers to get their start this decade. Newspaper sports sections are being further crunched by the fact most people who once might have been aspiring sportswriters are getting a head start on the future and starting out on the web and firing up their own blogs, free of editorial control and deadlines. Bill Simmons once aspired to be the next Ryan, but instead found enough of a following with his “Boston Sports Guy” web site he was picked up by ESPN.com and is now one of the site’s major attractions. Until recently he even had a regular column in ESPN the Magazine – akin to being a regular writer for Sports Illustrated.

Ultimately, the content of sports journalism will come out intact and possibly even expanded. It’s just an open question how much it’ll change in the process.

Did I just fall into the Twilight Zone?

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One minute I’m thinking Jay Glazer’s report/opinion piece predicting a Favre comeback merely reflected disgruntled Vikings who didn’t like their quarterback situation and maybe didn’t quite understand the circumstances and reasons why Favre wasn’t already there, didn’t quite understand that Favre wasn’t any ordinary free agent. I wondered if ESPN’s obsessing over the story was related to its willingness to give Glazer credit for it instead of saying “ESPN’s Michael Smith reports…” and whether ESPN was setting up Glazer to get maximum egg on his face when the report proved spurious.

The next, Favre not only signs a contract with the Vikings, he shows up at training camp and is going to start the next preseason game like he was always there?

I mean, within 24 hours, we went from Favre being retired and in Hattiesburg, to being at training camp and the No. 1 QB on the depth chart without even throwing a practice pass.

Did history somehow retroactively change on everybody?

How LeBron salvaged Kobe’s reputation

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I was originally saving this post for the big relaunch of the site, when I would have a week of exciting, interesting posts. Various factors have been continually pushing that back much further than I ever intended. But the relaunch should go through next weekend, sometime between the 15th and 17th, as I’m very close to taking care of both those factors and the last few tweaks needed before relaunching the site.

In the interim, in our 24/7, hypermedia world, we’ve already forgotten and moved on from the LeBron dunk story. The word came out that Nike suppressed the tape of LeBron being dunked on by a college journeyman, we all laid shame on Nike and LeBron, crappy, Zapruder-like tape came out and we all ridiculed Nike and LeBron some more, saying we would have seen the footage and forgotten about it if LeBron had just let the tape go… and then we forgot about it.

But I think that, in the big picture, LeBron James, in the space of a few months, has done more to salvage the reputation of Kobe Bryant than anything Bryant himself could have ever done.

LeBron was supposed to be the good guy. He was supposed to be the guy who helped his teammates, didn’t get into legal trouble, came from Akron and helped the local small-market team to an NBA title. He was supposed to be everything big-market, me-me-me Kobe wasn’t. Kobe was a petulant individualist who was accused of sexual assault in Colorado and was poison to team chemistry, ultimately driving out Shaq and demanding to have the Lakers to himself, to carry a team on his own shoulders. The hopes of NBA purists rested on LeBron to give Kobe what for.

But three things have happened to completely reverse the roles. In reverse order: One, the LeBron dunk controversy. Two, Kobe DID carry a championship team by himself. And three, LeBron’s reaction to losing the Eastern Conference Finals, refusing to shake hands or address the media.

Bracketing Kobe’s title win were two events that create a new narrative of LeBron James. The dunk controversy in particular makes LeBron come off as a carefully crafted persona, too perfect, a fake, a creation of Nike. (After a shorter career with fewer titles, LeBron is more visible in Nike ad campaigns than Kobe.) Getting dunked on may have seemed harmless, but it didn’t fit the Nike storyline of perfection, so Nike tried to erase it from the narrative and in the process exposed the true LeBron. Kobe Bryant, by contrast, is human, and (unlike LeBron) lets his human foibles come through. Kobe is one of us, what we would be like if we had Kobe’s talent. According to this narrative, LeBron couldn’t handle losing the Eastern Conference Finals because it didn’t fit into The Plan as laid out by Nike, which says that LeBron must always find success.

We may end up seeing Kobe’s career from 2004 to 2008 very differently than we did at the time. We may see it as the struggles of a tortured man to find his individuality and find fulfillment, struggling to balance the demands of NBA stardom with his own needs and desires. Finally he managed to find the magical combination that could lead him to the title he could claim as his own. As for LeBron, probably the only way he can even hope to kill the narrative, the only way he can go back to being Michael Jordan instead of Tim Tebow, is to stay in Cleveland, or at least move to another mid-sized market. If he moves to New York, the Clippers, or even Portland (capital of the Nike empire), all moves that would be driven by Nike’s marketability needs more than anything else, I’m going to start calling him LeNike or LeSwoosh.

Baseball’s image problem

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Maury Brown is one of the most trusted online sports journalists – it seems demeaning to call him a “blogger” – for his Business of Sports Network, especially The Biz of Baseball. I felt moved to comment on a recent post examining 10 problems baseball faces in marketing its stars, mostly ones out of its control. I wouldn’t ordinarily put it here, but I apparently ran up against a mysterious, unadvertised character limit, so here it is. This reads significantly different from a normal blog post because it originated as a comment, but nonetheless touches on residual racism, Doonesbury, ESPN (and the problems thereof), Jackie Robinson, Ball Four, Black Power, the Simpson trial, Barack Obama (race comes up a lot here doesn’t it?), and just about everything surrounding the game of baseball today, big and small. I mostly wanted to get up my responses to Brown’s second, third, and eighth concerns.

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t –. One of baseball’s biggest problems isn’t about efforts by the league or the MLBPA to market its players, but rather how the players move on and off camera. Consider: with the exception of pitchers, players are shown during their at bats (3-6 times a game), on the base paths, or when a ball is hit to them on defense. There is no sustained face time. Whereas in the NBA, a player may be on the court for most, if not all of an entire game, baseball’s stars are only seen in a limited fashion. Baseball’s dynamic makes showing star players on camera continually nearly impossible.

The whole “athlete face time” argument makes less sense in a post-ESPN era. Also, this is a problem that has always affected baseball and always will affect baseball, and it didn’t seem to negatively affect the players of the past.

Lack of College Baseball Coverage – One of the biggest reasons the NFL and NBA does well in marketing their players has to do with young talent being covered on television while being part of NCAA Football or Basketball. For example, ESPN alone will show 300 college football games across their various platforms during the 2009 football season. Given that the transition from college to the pros for NFL and NBA players is a far shorter trek than most college baseball players that often times find themselves in development systems before ever making it to the majors, fans have been following many college football and basketball players for years before they enter the NFL or NBA. When you throw in that college baseball has only the College World Series as its national television platform, it’s difficult for MLB to market its young stars on the level that the NFL and NBA do

This has been a problem since cable TV and ESPN caught on, providing more college football and basketball coverage than ever before (that by far the biggest basketball stars to that point in the 80s were the two star players in the famous 1979 game that started the rise of March Madness is probably no accident), and didn’t seem to hurt the 90s stars too much, but it may be changing. The ratings for the College World Series Finals were comparable to the Women’s Final Four, suggesting ESPN should give it coverage comparable to women’s basketball. Sure enough, the SEC conference championships will be shown on an ESPN network as part of the new SEC-ESPN agreement. Still, a lot of people jump straight from high school to the pros, and unlike in basketball, always have and in very large numbers, so more college baseball alone isn’t enough.

But you point to what may be the real answer, which is that the minor leagues (especially AAA) really need (or at least deserve) a LOT more coverage. Basically, the extent of minor league coverage right now is the World-vs.-US game, the AAA all-star game, and the IL-vs.-PCL championship (not, to my knowledge, the individual league championships), all on ESPN2. Minor league teams tend to be in smaller markets but the smallest AAA market (Colorado Springs) is still top 100; the bigger problem is that players jump to MLB the instant they get good enough. College football and basketball have the fandom aspect as well as the “before they were pros” aspect, which the two problems I just mentioned make difficult; the best approach may be for major league teams’ fans to also become fans of their AAA teams, which is made easier by the close proximity many of those teams have to their parent teams.

I think MLB Network is really dropping the ball on this one; the metaphor with the former NFL Europe and NBDL isn’t really appropriate because of the different role each plays, but even NFL Network and NBATV respectively either had or have shown regular games from each, which MLBN isn’t doing to my knowledge, and minor league baseball has a lot more tradition and a lot more central role!

Wall St. Ad Execs Yet to Tap Minority Stars – Baseball can rightfully say that it has the most player diversity starting in games than any other US pro sports league. Some of MLB’s biggest stars are Latinos or from the Far East. The problem is television ad execs have yet to see the full potential of such players. A good example is Albert Pujols, someone that should translate well to the camera, but has not been used as a pitchman. Others include Ichiro Suzuki and David Ortiz. In terms of Far East athletes, maybe ad execs figure Yao Ming is enough. As for the Latin players, it seems a vast demographic isn’t being fully tapped.

THIS IS COMPLETELY INDEFENSIBLE. Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods (I don’t count Ali because he probably became too controversial after changing his name and especially dodging the draft) have shown black athletes can have crossover appeal to whites; I see no reason Latinos and Asians should be any different. Asians are especially mystifying to me since they’re the richest non-white racial group.

What it’ll probably take to change that is the Latino or Asian Jordan or Woods; on the Asian front, both Ichiro and Yao have suffered by being on mediocre teams instead of even contending for championships (Ichiro in 2001 aside, but even he didn’t make the World Series). Pujols SHOULD be the Latino Jordan or Woods; he’s dominant enough (and I think if he wins the Triple Crown and businesses don’t leap all over him I’m just going to throw up my hands and give up) and has the rings (well, ring… well, he’s won the NL, I forget how far he’s really gotten). It’s even less defensible because Oscar De La Hoya might actually be close to, if not a Latino Jordan or Woods, at least a Latino Shaq or Brady. Brown’s fourth point is that baseball hasn’t had a transcendent player like Jordan or Woods in this decade, with only Derek Jeter coming close and Barry Bonds derailed by steroids allegations. I’d hate to think the only reason Pujols isn’t that player is latent racism. Fortunately, it probably isn’t. See below.

“Tradition” vs “Flash” – From a younger demo perspective, baseball has lost its luster, in large part due to the ascension of Michael Jordan. Baseball is touted as having a “long and prestigious tradition” which doesn’t exactly compete well with the high-energy tempo of the NBA, NFL, and NHL. As one scribe wrote, baseball is a game of calm, punctuated by extreme action. That sounds great… if you’re older. In an era where kids are looking for ultra-stimulus, baseball’s pace is lost in translation. When 18-34s have the lion’s share of discretionary income, baseball isn’t the first stop for some corporations with a young demo appeal when looking to advertise.

Complaints about the game’s pace are as old as the game itself; in fact there’s an old Doonesbury from the 70s that makes that joke. This always ends up coming around in circles (“Well, football has short bursts of action too!”). I personally don’t find balls and strikes boring, in part because you never know when it’s going to result in action (and until I wrote this comment I hadn’t thought to look here for the source of baseball’s-too-slow complaints and found them completely mystifying). There is the new aspect here that today’s youth has lower attention spans than ever before. (By the way, I’m only 21.)

Waiting For Barkley – In terms of studio shows surrounding games, baseball lags woefully behind most of its Big-4 counterparts. There is no “Howie” or “Terry”, or “Barkley”. FOX has dropped their pre-game show, which leaves TBS. And while Cal Ripken and Dennis Eckersley have made a go of it, they haven’t been able to exude the personality that other pre and post-game shows have had to offer. The solution, or at least an attempt at it? TBS has brought in David Wells.

This is the problem with ESPN in a nutshell. Sunday Night Baseball should feel really special each week and it really doesn’t. ESPN should really think about getting a special crew for Baseball Tonight on Sunday nights and try and get some splash and dash there. (John Kruk? Please.) If it’s needed to increase their motivation, maybe they should give up either the Monday/Wednesday games, or the Sunday night games, to another network like TBS. If the Sunday night games are the only games its network has, like with TNT and the NBA, they’ll feel more special and there will be more motivation to put on an “Inside the NBA” type show.

TBS’ Sunday Afternoon games are a joke and INCREDIBLY buried against NASCAR and golf, not to mention their own inconsistency of start time (really bad on the West Coast), picking behind ESPN, and TBS’ lack of punctuality in announcing the games during the season. (I’ve gotten the impression TBS doesn’t announce the game for flex weeks until the FRIDAY BEFORE IT’S PLAYED!) Don’t look to that package to be a savior. As far as most baseball fans are concerned, it’s Fox and ESPN all season and TBS comes out of nowhere during the postseason. When the contract comes up for renewal, either TBS will steal a package from ESPN or ESPN will take the postseason back from TBS.

Just Let Me Know When It Begins and Ends – Baseball finally got with the picture and realized that by putting World Series games on late Eastern Time, they were potentially losing a generation of baseball fans as kids hit the sack long before games would end. But, baseball’s a game that ends when it ends, as opposed to being controlled by the clock, that makes it difficult for fringe fans to get into when there are competing interests in hundreds of channels to switch to, and video games to play. Another issue that baseball faces – and only NASCAR seems to butt up against – has to due with delay of game due to weather. When a game starts, nothing kills your captive fan base off like a rain delay. Worse are games that are scheduled and postponed due to rain or snow. With families becoming intensely schedule driven, they want to know when the game is on, and when it ends.

How many games that don’t go extra innings or are rain delayed last more than four hours? Again, this is a problem that always has and always will afflict baseball. While there are more demands on people’s time than ever before, and extra-inning baseball games go longer than OT games in any sport save hockey, in order for this to be a marketability issue it would have to show up in the ratings.

MLB’s Image Problem – There’s the obvious (PED culture) and, the not so obvious (chewing tobacco) when it comes to baseball’s image. Would Manny Ramirez be more marketable if he hadn’t been suspended for PEDs? There’s a case to be made there. And, while it’s legal, few, if any, find a close up of a player with a mouthful of chaw spitting a stream of black tobacco drool appealing. Think Gillette would keep a player like Jeter in their ad campaigns if he chewed?

This is probably the big one. No one thinks Pujols is using steroids… but then, we said the same thing about Alex Rodriguez. MLB’s only hope here is for other leagues (especially the NFL) to be similarly chastized for PEDs, but it’s a bigger issue in purity-obsessed baseball than in musclebound, depraved, violence-driven football. The alternative? Well, the younger generation of fans (such as they are) don’t seem as concerned about the whole thing… I doubt most people even notice baseball players chewing, and it’s dumb enough that if baseball players basically refuse to stop chewing it points to deeper baseball-cultural issues that Brown doesn’t go into here dating back to Ball Four.

Brown’s ninth point is the idea that baseball is for old fogies, and I didn’t have much to say about it. His last point ties back into the point of the white eyes in the halls of big business. Remember when I said that it’s now proven that blacks can appeal to whites? This is why baseball isn’t benefiting from that.

The Declining Interest By African-Americans in Baseball – Whether it has been the rise in the NBA’s popularity due to the Jordan factor; the continued diversity growth in international players; the fact that on average, players can jump to the professional ranks faster in the NBA and NFL, or other factors, there has been a steady decline in the number of African-Americans playing baseball. MLB, late in proactively dealing with this issue, has been pushing the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program, and working to highlight players such as Curtis Granderson in the latest This is Beyond Baseball ad campaign. But, the damage has been done, and now baseball is digging out from the hole.

Jackie Robinson was a big deal because baseball essentially ruled the sports landscape. But then the 60s and 70s happened, and by the 90s I don’t know if black interest in basketball was caused by Jordan or created him – the biggest white superstar after Larry Bird and Bill Laimbeer, who won all their titles before Jordan’s first, was John Stockton. (Certainly I don’t see many blacks jumping to golf because of Tiger Woods. The stench of whiteness and richness still follows it.) Basketball has really colonized urban playgrounds, especially since it takes up less space than a baseball field.

And then you see what’s happening in the South where great young black athletes in more rural areas are seeing college football as a better test of their skills than baseball, probably thanks in part to the tradition of the SEC compared to a lack of real stars (of any kind) created by the Braves during their TBS/AL East-winning heyday. Most black stars, like Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds, or Ryan Howard, tend to go to northern, big markets (it’s too bad Griffey was injury-plagued in Cincinatti; Seattle and Pittsburgh may not be that big, or exactly surrounded by urbanity, but they’re far from the South where the rural blacks are). Even one of the Big Three markets with their large black populations wouldn’t drag rural blacks away from football. (Another reason blacks aren’t being drawn to golf after Tiger Woods: golf courses are best suited to rural areas, and the skill set of southern, rural blacks tends to involve speed and athleticism, while the only physical skill golf uses is strength.)

I suspect – though I doubt it’s really been studied or floated that much by others – that during the Black Power movement baseball became associated with The Man, especially as the other major human sport of the time, boxing, saw a black icon (and a Black Power icon to boot) emerge in Muhammad Ali that insulated it from being overly associated with whites. (Football was similarly insulated by stars like Jim Brown and OJ Simpson. Basketball wasn’t yet a major sport but it was already being colonized by blacks like Bill Russell, which I suspect led to it being claimed by, for lack of a better word, blackkind as their own. Baseball still had some black stars, but most of them were old fogies with Negro League experience, which probably netted them the Uncle Tom label; Frank Robinson is the only black star of the 70s that comes to mind. Spillover popularity from Ali gave rise to such dominant black fighters as Tyson and Holyfield during the 80s and 90s but boxing retreated to PPV, split into gazillions of different organizations, saw the dominant Tyson go batshit insane, and started dying a slow, painful death.)

Another problem might be that blacks don’t just blindly support their own the way whites got to thinking during the Simpson trial, and decided to distance themselves from the way Bonds handled the steroid allegations. (I’m sure some, perhaps many if not most, supported him, but was it really inspiring new people to enter that quagmire?) Which really brings us back to the whole steroids issue.

In my view, baseball’s problems have less to do with the structural issues that haven’t really gone away, and MUCH more to do with the steroids scandal. It may be a problem mostly with the old fogies, but it’s the old fogies in charge on Madison Avenue. If they won’t get with the program, and the image problem caused by PEDs is as hard to shake with them as it appears, baseball’s only hope for becoming “hip” again may lie in Barack Obama’s White Sox fandom… pray for a White Sox-Cardinals World Series?

My (belated) thoughts on the Erin Andrews Peep Show

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I hate the sports blogosphere’s obsession with Erin Andrews. I think it’s cheap and trashy and shows an objectification of women and that Andrews doesn’t even look that great.

But guys, stand firm on your principles.

I’ve heard that several sports bloggers have called out the rest of the blogosphere for hypocrisy for criticizing the “EAPS” while making much of their traffic off pictures of Andrews.

I don’t have a problem with making a distinction between an “acceptable” form of leering and “unacceptable” forms. That’s probably going to be the second thing in a month that makes me run the risk of being flamed by feminists, but the fact is that men leering at hot chicks is as old as time, as is limits on it. That distinction, really, is everywhere in our society. As far as I’m concerned you can do whatever you want on the “right” side of the line as long as you stay on the “right” side of the line.

In fact, I’m going to go further. If I were in the position of a sports blogger who liked posting pictures of Erin Andrews, I would not have come to the sudden, shocking (SHOCKING) realization that this is WRONG and pulled back on the EA exploitation like, say, Fang’s Bites did. No, I’d keep up the EA parade at the same pace I always did.

If you’re going to decide it’s wrong to exploit male lust for hot chicks for hits, regardless of whether or not the object is okay with it as Andrews has been, then be consistent with it and maintain the policy all along. (As I do. I prefer my site to be porn for the mind. Hey, maybe that’ll be my tagline when the site relaunches: “Porn for the Mind”. I’ll get more hits than I otherwise would, certainly. Eh, maybe I’ll stick with “Ideas every day”. Even though I don’t post every day.) But you can object to Andrews being exploited in the wrong way and still continue to exploit her in the right way if you feel it’s okay. (Not that I’m precluding a legitimate change of heart here, of course.) All you have to do is make clear that you and your readers know where the line is and not to cross it.

Why Title IX is hopelessly broken in brief: the post that will get me flamed by (some) feminists forever

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Title IX was never intended to be the protector of women’s sports. It was intended to ensure women’s access to all education and educational services. But thanks in part to myopic administrators, its identity has become entirely consumed with college sports, and a misreading of the law (not only did the law not refer to athletics it begins with “no person…”) has led to even well-meaning regulators becoming misguided – the modern interpretation of the law obsesses over how much sports schools offer in proportion to the student population, and – in part to schools today having a gender imbalance in favor of females, and the lack of female football programs when football teams are massive compared to other sports – actually calls for, if one gender must have more sports than the other, that gender being the female.

This is totally bass-ackwards.

If a girl wants to play lacrosse, let her play lacrosse, assuming she can find enough other girls to field a team. But bringing bureaucracy into the mix and enforcing insane hard limits and reverse discrimination not only misses the point of the law, it misses the point of sports.

Sports is rooted in the spirit of competition: in beating the other guy to achieve dominance. It’s a modern expression of our ancestors fighting each other to woo the women. It’s an inherently male institution; in some sense, there are not only cultural but biological reasons for women to have less interest in sports. Women are, generally, more interested in cooperation than competition; when women do turn against one another, it tends to take more subtle, less physical forms. (It is shocking to me that two of the three most popular female sports in this country, golf and tennis, are individual rather than team sports. Then again, golf doesn’t involve direct competition and the appeal of women’s tennis isn’t in the game.)

Part of the problem is deeper, of course, and points at the bureaucratization of society…