When in Doubt: Fire the Coach

Four and a half months, six coaching fired in professional baseball. I have chronicled the yearly blood baths at the end of college seasons, but this baseball season is on its way to a record. I'm painfully familiar with this year since the Mariners put Don Wakamatsu out of his misery and replaced him and his entire staff with their top level minor league coaches. The impending retirement of Jim Leyland and Bobby Cox and Lou Pinella  highlight the fates and limits of being a coach.

Like Baltimore when they fired their manager, the Mariners quickly won a few games, but they will regress to their mean because in baseball of all sports, managers really contribute the least. The bromide of impatient owners facing unrealistic expectations, "when in doubt, fire somebody." You can't fire the team of guaranteed contract players, so the coaches get fired.

I believe that in college sports, coaches have far more impact on player development, team cohesion and growth. They get greater commitment, build tighter systems and have total control over personnel through recruiting. In pro sports free agency, guaranteed contracts, the self protective career needs of players mean coaches have significantly less impact. Pro coaches inherit and seldom shape the talent and roster. They may have systems but the systems depend either upon getting the right players for the system or convincing players to buy into their system. Good systems take 3-5 years to establish.

The real determinant, especially in baseball, of wins and losses is quality of performance. Here coaches have minimal impact upon the composition of the team and erratic impact upon the season to season performance of players. Lineups. pitching management, base-running decisions yes, but The GM builds the team. Teams regularly turn over 90 percent in five year increments in modern baseball, even with long term contracts.

Firing a coach/manager midseason is a ritual form of sacrifice to propitiate fans and sports gods. It almost never changes the projected number of victories and quick upticks regress to the norms of the team. The regression is more pronounced in baseball given the length of the season, but also true in the other pro sports. It might increase attendance slightly over the remaining term, but that's it. A midseason replacement might make some sense if the owner or GM has concluded they plan to fire the coach in the off season, and the team might as well get on without the coach who is now a lame duck. But this assumes the owner/GM gets a new permanent coach and is willing to go with youth and start a new system midseason, both highly improbable outcomes.

Firing the coach midseason is a reflexive act of despair or scapegoating. Sometimes nothing could be done with a team like any hapless manager of the Pirates or Royals knows. But somebody has to manage them to failure, then get fired. Teams like that make it impossible for managers to commit and worse for players to commit because they know the manager will be gone and the system has no traction.

Besides abject failure, teams with high expectations who underperform lose managers fast. Usually impatient owners and on the line GMs have alot invested in quick success of such teams and meeting the high expectations of fans. If a team stumbles, the GM  cannot dump the entire team of underperforming long term contract bound players, so someone has to go and take the blame. The most interesting cases are the teams who are on the bubble and who have the potential to get better and compete. These are the teams where coaches can really make a difference, but when such team fails, the coach is most exposed even when the answer may lie in ill constructed rosters as in the Mariners' or Orioles' case.

The reality in baseball and most other professional sports is that coaches success depend upon a fortuitous combination when coaches and players align for periods of time. The alignment takes time. Time depends upon patient management, supportive general manager and the coach's ability to execute the system under stress. The really great moments of alignment often involve a fine coach and superb star who exemplifies the system such as Chuck Noll and Terry Bradshaw  or Bill Walsh and Joe Montana.  Even the best coaches go through up and down periods as teams must rebuild after one generation grows older. Watching Bellichik's Patriots is a good example here. Jose Torre's Yankees went through these cycles as have Bobby Cox's Braves or LaRusso's Cardinals.

Of course none of this matters for two types of teams. Underfunded and underlead disasters like the Royals or Pittsburgh guarantee high turnover. The other would be the Yankee model. A rich proud mean owner like Steinbrenner at his worse when his dugout resembled a managerial charnel house. An impatient owner who wants to win WIN IT ALL NOW will undermine the very conditions of success by yanking managers at will if they fail to meet immediate expectations to win it all. Just look at the modern Redskins and half the NBA teams.

The most awful teams in baseball over the last decade also have the highest turnover in managers such as Mariners, Pirates, Orioles, Royals. It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle where no coach/manager has the time to work with a stable group of talent suitable to their system. Players know a manager will be gone soon and have no incentive to commit to or risk their bodies for a coach who will be gone in a year.

The the powers that be know winning teams depend upon leadership and management stability. Successful coaches breed long term plans and alignment of talent and system. Yet time and again owners and GMs panic, look for a quick fix or someone to blame, and fire the coach. It never really works midseason and in the pros very rarely achieves a quick turn around.

We know what works, but very few owners have the courage of their knowledge.

Why Steroids Suck

Steroid users lie and cheat. They lie by claiming to others that they do not use steroids. They cheat by claiming to competitors that they are competing on the same ground rules.  They cheat by the unequal playing field effect. Their actions degrade the sport into an activity no longer connected to being human but to being augmented humans.

The deepest moral problem with using performance enhancing drugs extends the lying to stealing and betraying. Human sport as a practice grows from the drive to achieve excellence. In every society we know of the perfection and display of physical excellence in war and play exists. Play teaches humans to refine physical and mental skills through joyful repetitive actions. Play grows into sport and athletes develop what Aristotle would call virtue. They integrate mind, body and will to practice and through thoughtful repetition become better and more skilled at their fields.

The worth of athletics, the reason to admire it as a human endeavor lies in appreciating human possibility, human achievement. Real athletics is not scripted, it is not entertainment but carries a thrill and challenge of watching individuals and teams push themselves and others to excel and win. Athletics depends upon the attribute of its humanness and the uncertainties of being mortal.

This drive to develop our capacities and skills through games explains why we play and enjoy sports. We connect to the drive for distinction and the expansion of human potential in the best athletes. Beneath it all lies the sheer joy at play and skill cultivated from practice.

Performance enhancing drugs have three moral problems in how they impact competition. The first, we might call the equal playing field problem. This means that using them gives a player a special advantage over everyone else. Secretly using them gives you an immoral competitive advantage because everyone else is playing by regular rules. Part of the issue is fairness, but the deeper issue is that the player is living a lie. He or she is pretending that they are playing by the same rules. They pretend to practice, condition, work just like that other players and they win because their work ethics and refined skill surpasses other players. They live a lie, even worse, they deny and lie about it as did the three baseball players and Marion Jones and the whole crop of cyclists who perpetuate the frauds on the cycle tours.

The second moral problems is one I've often talked about, the Achilles Choice problem. Once the fair and straight players discover others are cheating and not only not getting caught, but getting rewarded, they start to use them. The prisoner's dilemma, if I don't cheat, I won't win or stay on the team, pushes many players to use them who normally would not. They do so because of fear of losing and outrage over the cheaters winning. This corruption seeps down into high schools and club ball where young athletes emulate the stars and come to believe they can only win by using drugs, drugs that will undermine their minds and bodies in the long run.

Third, it degrades the sport into a charade. Athletic competition no longer drives outcomes, chemical cheating does. Baseball, cycling, or football reduce to World Wrestling steroidal enhanced entertainment rather than real human sports. This rush to performance enhancers leads to human loss and cost. As we continue to discover from the awful fate of East German and Russian swimmers and track and field athletes, long term damage is done to the body and even to the children of athletes who use the drugs. Short terms damage distorts the mind and judgment.

I have mentioned the tendency in humans to cheat in order to win and excel. This is not unusual, it exists as a temptation and reality in all domains of life. It is why the role of referees is so vital. What matters with athletes and steroids is that the athletes deny the premise of acting on the basis of their body and effort. They augment their body and betray themselves, the sport and their achievements.

The issue comes up often in battles over technologies whether new softball bats, swimming suits, tennis rackets or golf balls change performance of similar athletes by virtue of the technology alone. Most of these are solved by equalizing the technology used across competitors so that the game remains a human contest. To the extent technology affects it, it does so equally. The circus that passes for the American cup racing now has no relation to sports but has become a mere technological arms race.

Some suggest just letting everyone use performance enhancing drugs and pretend it is still a human sport. But this misses the point that it not only means the quality of the human beings changes chemically, and  the sport moves to technology and arms races much like what happened with the East Germans who created an entire pharmaceutical industry to support their Olympic achievements.

Steroid using athletes steal false gain. Just as Prometheus stole fire from the gods, athletes steal  performance enhancers to make themselves more than human. This disqualifies them as honest human athletes.

The most common steroids and human growth enhancers have two related impacts. First, they help generate human protein and muscle faster from the same amount of effort. They permit this through enhancing the efficiency of protein production and utilization but also promoting recover time. You can get bulked up monsters like Barry Bonds or smooth toned muscles like Alex Rodriquez depending upon the sophistication of the applications. Second, the steroids enable faster recovery time from effort. This helps with conditioning, but more important and the reason so many aging or borderline pitchers use them is that they enable a much faster recovery time. So age impact can be staved off, and work loads can go up with less cost.

The key here is that an individual human could achieve a certain degree of excellence upon the basis of his or her own work, talent, skill. They can push to their boundaries by their work ethics, which really separates those of roughly equal talent form each other.

But a Mark McGwire on steroids is not longer an honest human competitor; he is an augmented human. His muscles build faster, larger and stronger. He recovers quicker than a non-using human being because of his  drug use. Given the same effort and same talent, he will succeed more than an equal by virtue of his chemical use, no other reason. This makes it unfair and inhuman.

Steroids and human growth enhancers can help people recover from illness or  hold off debilitations of aging and chronic illness. These protect against conditions and illness, but steroid using athletes use drugs to enhance their performance beyond what their own body and efforts would achieve.

Steroids users betray their humanity. They betray themselves. The early Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriquez were great athletes as human athletes;  the later ones sacrificed their integrity. None of them was the same physical being after they used steroids. In fact none of them was the same psychological being given what we know about the impact upon judgment and emotions. They literally are not longer the person they were before they ingest the drug.

These athletes steal from science to become more than themselves. They betray themselves. Finally they betray the game by pretending that they achieve  by honest means. They lie to everyone and claim records, victories and championships based on the false premises that their human bodies achieved them, not their scientifically altered bodies and minds. This is the moral failure of  performance enhancers.

Why Steroids Suck--the violation of the Game

The indictment of Roger Clemens for perjury once again recalls the disgraceful era of baseball when steroidal grotesqueries lumbered to the plate and blasted home runs and records to pieces. I don't want to get into the whole denial blame game that surrounds the whole era and that Clemens perpetuates with his bald lies. I want to remember why using steroids and performance enhancing drugs is wrong.

We need to remember why steroids and performance enhancing drugs are wrong. The people who use them should not be respected or rewarded. Oddly  fuzzy nostalgia and rationalization creeps up in commentators and broadcasts. Last week I was watching a game where the national broadcasters lamented the decline of the long ball and how this impacted the attendances at games. You could almost hear a longing, "bring back steroids for attendance." Others mutter, "well everyone did it, so it's ok and we should not penalize them." Of course this flaccid excuse justifies most evil in the world and  is also patently untrue. Finally, some folks talk about how human growth hormone and steroids and other new mechanisms both benefit healing and are helpful to athletes. They suggest a laissez faire attitudes.  They are all fundamentally wrong and misunderstand the moral nature of sports.

Clemens like Barry Bonds poses a unique challenge. Both were genuinely great players, but not great humans, who seemed to defy the statistical odds and get  second winds. We felt something was amiss but it at least seemed plausible, although less so with Bonds' World Wrestling Entertainment body. The other players like Sammy Sosa or Mark McGwire were above average players who soared to heights beyond their talent thanks to chemically augmented physiologies. The Huffington Post has an interesting sequence of pictures of McGwire over the years to illustrate the change of body form.

Performance enhancing drugs have three main moral problems. The first, we might call the equal playing field problem. This means that using them gives a player a special advantage over everyone else. Secretly using them gives you an immoral competitive advantage because everyone else is playing by regular rules. Part of the issue is fairness, but the deeper issue is that the player is living a lie. He or she is pretending that they are playing by the same rules. They pretend to practice, condition, work just like that other players and they win because their work ethics and refined skill surpasses other players. They live a lie, even worse, they deny and lie about it as did the three baseball players and Marion Jones and the whole crop of cyclists who perpetuate the frauds on the cycle tours.

The second moral problems is one I've often talked about, the Achilles Choice problem. Once the fair and straight players discover others are cheating and not only not getting caught, but getting rewarded, they start to use them. The prisoner's dilemma, if I don't cheat, I won't win or stay on the team, pushes many players to use them who normally would not. They do so because of fear of losing and outrage over the cheaters winning. This corruption seeps down into high schools and club ball where young athletes emulate the stars and come to believe they can only win by using drugs, drugs that will undermine their minds and bodies in the long run.

This degrades the entire sport so it becomes a charade, again baseball, cycling, football reduce to World Wrestling steroidal enhanced entertainment rather than real human sports. The other moral cost here is that the rush to performance enhancers leads to human loss and cost. As we continue to discover from the awful fate of East German and Russian swimmers and track and field athletes, long term damage is done to the body and even to the children of athletes who use the drugs. Short terms damage distorts the mind and judgment.

A drugged world of sports spawns a shadow world of cheating and scams, much like the drug wars spawn drug cartels. All the testimony surrounding Clemens and Bonds involve shady half hidden creatures who develop illegal drugs without regard to costs to humans but only to how to beat tests. So the sport degrades, the human suffer in the long run and a shadow world of drug dealers supply the athletes.

Each athlete who uses the drugs lies to other athletes, lies to the fans and lies to themselves. They participate in a path the will undermine their health, makes a mockery of their sport and contributes to an illegal underworld of drug traffiking. I will discuss the deepest moral problem in my next entry.

Stopping Offers to Children II

The whole early offer dynamic is driven by colleges who press coaches relentllessly to to win now. Colleges seldom give the coaches the four to six years they need to develop a strong culture and pipeline of athletes committed to their system. When teachers like myself bemoan the absurdity of offering college scholarships to 13-15 year old, I have to remember that the Presidents and athletic directors motivate this corruption by their hair triggers on coaches.

No sane coach would make an offer to a fourteen year old. It might make sense in rare cases and in rare sports, more Olympic women's sports where body shape maturity arrives earlier and in a few exceptional basketball cases. But to be honest, many sports coaches have no real ability to predict the development ceiling or work ethic and certainly not academic potential of an 8th. grader or freshman. The dynamic gets the most media coverage in basketball where coaches like Mark Few at Gonzaga or Tim Floyd would make offers to seventh and eight graders. But the real rush occured in sports like women's soccer, gymnastics and volleyball. The problem is not relegated to the high profile sports but permeates all the sports, even teams we do no normally associate with money obsessions. As one coach told me, "I simply can't let her stand out there with an offer from another school without signalling my interest. Otherwise I am out of the running with her parents."

Even football is now being infected. For obvious reasons the coaches wanted to see more age and body development, but now the sport sponsors national eighth and seventh grade tournaments.Seventh and eight grade football players have their own national tournament where offers cascade down on children, granted big bodied children, who have not attended high school so a 13 year old now has a full offer from Hawaii. The apocryphal story of USC's offer to a 13 year old quarterback will become increasing common violating not just an academic pretenstions but any reasonable sport logic. All the coaching associations despite repeated announcments have failed to stop or even slow down the practice. The inimitable Tim Floyd formerUSC paragon of recruiting integrity summed up the logic when he offered a scholarship to a 13 year old to stop Duke and others from getting the young man.

The real solution is blunt, direct and clear. All offers of scholarship aid before the first day of class in second semester of the junior year of high school should be illegal and subject to a major violation—the prospective student athlete would be declared ineligible to attend the violating school. No waivers would be allowed; no appeals allowed. We could add penalties for coaches, but the key is to sever the attendance from the offer. This gets at the issue of parental certainty because they can no longer rely upon the certainty of any unofficial offers. It takes away the publicity and glory from the family and young athlete when all the such offers are illegal and could prevent the athlete from attending the school.
There are two keys. Make the oral offers illegal. Make the penalty loss of the student athlete. The coaches have to see real penalities and the parents have to see real loss of uncertainty to break the chain.

This reduces the coaches’ incentives to make informal offers because they lose the athlete. The media dynamic changes because unofficial offers now become big news as violations, not big news for kids and parents and recruiting services. This approach turns the media into a watchdog rather than parade dog. Since the official ldmedia with rare exceptions will not follow this up, the NCAA and regulators will need to rely upon the blog reporters who spend immense time watching other schools for violations and tracking high profile recruits as part of their niche.

Coaches will immediately say, well, coach X will cheat anyway and just say "well, if you keep you keep your grades up, I will offer you a scholarship in two years." It of course violates the whole spirit of the law and what coaches believe they should not be doing. But I can live with this conditional. First, it no longer gives the parents or the athlete the level of certainty; second, the conditional offer is not a guarantee and makes the athlete sill open to recruiting from other coaches; third, it reminds the student athlete that they have to go to school, attend class and get good grades in core classes or no offer can occur. More than a few coaches will invent sophistical ways around, but the offer will not longer have the full guarantee and will cut the umbilical chord of certainty for parents or the sense of obligation from the athlete.

Coaches should have a strong incentive to self-police and report on early violations; unfortunately the coaching fraternities have incredibly strong rules against informing on each othe. The culture against snitching that their own teams accept, pervades the coaching fraternities. No one wants to be known as a snitcher and to some extent it gives them mutual dirt on each other. It's odd given how many good coaches get hurt by the coaches who violate the rules. In some of the fraternities the coaches will go after those they don't like, but most will keep silent when they learn of the illegal offers. They might make a personal call to the offending coaches, but coaches like Caliperi and his ilk are immune to peer pressure. It's a big mistake modelling for their own players how to cover up cheating on the team. I think some of this is career protection, people are afraid of not getting hired if they get the reputation, but it brings down the entire profession.

Ironically the recruiting services will be big winners because the recruiting uncertainty will linger, and they can invent new categories to try and figure out what a student athlete is thinking. It would take aggressive and high profile NCAA pursuit to create those examples. The informal blog sphere will follow these with microscopes and the most information about violations would come from the informal medi, not the mainline media.

Thankfully the NCAA Recruiting and Athletics Personnel Issues Cabinet has courageously come out with very similar proposals. The committee had to fend off immense opposition. The constant refrain was it is impossible to monitor. The Cabinet correctly concluded that early offers mock the academic mission of college athletes and with pesistence and courage made the proposal. It will face a lot of opposition especially as coaches who hate doing it but are now accustomed to it claim it will hurt them and be unenforceable. The coaches present a classic case on getting accustomed to what you know is morally wrong.

The rule is simple, clear and enforceable. The new approach will not be pleasant. Initially it will create a climate of recrimination and coaches watching coaches like hawks, but they already do. The rule takes away the incentives of parents and media to go for early offers. Above all it respects the academic and personal development of the student athlete.

That Time of Year: Arrests & College Football

A brawl in Tenessee, disorderly conduct in Mississippi State, breaking and entry and possession and general fights in Oregon, drunk, disorderly, resisting arrest at East Carolina, Georgia, UTEP, assault at Pitt. I lost count at 14. The six weeks of summer prior to the start of college football practice is the most dangerous time for college football players and programs.

College football players are in town for the summer. Many are taking summer classes. They are not allowed to practice or meet with coaches. Most need the classes to meet NCAA progress toward degree requirements, but players also take the classes because coaches want them on campus to lift, condition, watch tape, all of course, on a voluntary basis.

Young football players are recruited for strength, speed, football intelligence and above all competitive ferocity. Coaches want fierce competitors who push themselves to get better, who push their teammates and ultimately push competitors around the field.

As I have mentioned before football involves the disciplined application of force, of tremendous force. Young men 6'4" 235 pounds colliding with other young men of similar dimensions. It involves explosions off the line, quick cuts, intense running, challenges and two players hitting each other as hard and fast as they can. The recent death of Jack Tatum, one of the most implacable hitters of all time reminds us of this. In one hit Tatum made Darryl Stingley a parapalegic. In another he literally knocked off the helmet and concussed Danny White, before this became normal. In his book, They Call Me Assassin, he stated "I like to believe my best hits border on felonious assault."

Players need the capacity for contained explosive violent application of force. This capacity crosses easily over into the capacity for violence. Many football players grow up ia population where their size, strength and capacity for anger or violence made them successful football players. Their anger and violence also helped protect or rescue them from violent and harsh backgrounds.

The combination of anger, ferocity, fierce competition and applied force breeds fights and quick tempers on the field and in practice. Coaches simultaneously use it--they often speak of controlled rage--and set boundaries around it. The anger, rage, and intensity can slide into brutality only too easily. The key lies in a structure of team, coaches and culture that channels the violence. It lies in support and reinforcement for behavior that sets strong absolute limits to what can be done and enforces it relentlessly. The team provides a chance to players to grow into men of disciplined focus and ambition, if it works.

These six weeks with a critical mass of players on campus taking summer classes, not necessarily the most engrossing activity for anyone. Without the constant structure and guidance of coaches this time together produces the restless energy and quick tempers, partying and drinking, brawls, DUI, assaults, robberies and the passel of violent activity that signals the near start of football season. High spirits, boredom, free time, stupidity, aggression, easily sparked anger, criminality, all slide only too easily into each other. It's a dangerous time for anyone and especially college football players.

It is important to remember that lots of college kids get arrested on alot of charges, but none of them make the headlines. On a weekend in Eugene, Oregon, there might be 27 arrests for minors with possession but only one makes it on the front page of the paper, the football players. Also this is a sign of less corruption, as the inimitable Steve Spurrier points out that thirty years ago the players would be let off, now they "go straight to jail."

This recurs every summer and reminds us of the difference between crowds and teams. Crowds remain essentially unpredictable, fickle and easily ignited. Teams provide focus, order, intensity and direction. The paradox is that free unstructured time poses a danger for the football players, especially the younger ones. Most of the turmoil will end when practices start and coaches reassert control, besides the two a a day practices exhaust them. The players need the coaches and structure of practice and team culture to check, refine and direct the anger, rage and violence into skillful and directed force.

"Competitive" Cheerleading Violates Title IX in Sooo Many Ways

Everyone knows a sham and scam. For years certain colleges have sought to turn cheerleading squads into competitive "teams" to rescue the  schools from serious Title IX issues. When Quinnipiac College cut women's volleyball and replaced it with cheer squads, the courts yelled NO. Seriously, cut volleyball and expand cheerleading!!!!  Think about it.

The desire to shift to cheerleader squads could save money, avoid expanding the number of women's teams and keep government scrutiny at bay. A desire to turn cheerleading into a recognized NCAA sport has rumbled around in the south for years for cultural and economic reasons.The recent court decision states that cheerleading squads do not meet NCAA or reasonable competitive standards to qualify as Title IX counters. This is clear, but the decision should be applauded for another reason. Pretending cheerleading squads qualify as competitive sport violates the entire cultural intent of Title IX.

First, competitive cheerleading keeps the social order intact. Attractive, self-selected, somewhat athletic cliques jump, leap, cheer and get tossed around by larger males. High school reality and myth reinforce a very strong hierarchy of pseudo social values about who counts and who does not or what it means to be a desired or successful girl. The alluring and revealing outfits emphasize traditional notions of value and status so much so that the sexuality and traditional femininity override the athleticism. Just think Kirsten Dunst, Gabrielle Union and fellow travelers in Bring it On  (now in its fourth iteration) and you get the picture. Better yet just look at this picture from deadspin of college cheerleaders practicing outside their hotel reveals a chief attribute of cheerleading.


Second, cheerleaders stand on the side cheering on the largely male dominated teams. Its origins signify the hierarchy of women supporting men's sports, women's customary place. The whole culture of cheerleading and competitions resembles the culture of beauty queen pageants. The path feels similar to gymnastics except gymnastics grows from deep roots and is far more rigorous, disciplined, demanding, rule bound and does not replicate what values should determine who is at the top of the social hierarchy.

Third, moving cheerleading into a competitive center transposes the stunning emergence of powerful athletic women dominating and claiming sports as their own as in basketball, softball, soccer, lacrosse or running. The growth of women's sports has accompanied and amplified a growth in conceptions of what women can be. Cheerleading would displace this expansion with an activity that simply reinforces traditional valuations of women around narrow notions of beauty, body shape, strength and their relation to men. It feels eminently safe much as early women's college swimming did because it grew from images of Esther Williams and ideals of beauty, not competitive athleticism (thanks to Courtney Beyer for this insight).

The battles over Title IX will not go away. They are going to get worse with the reality of 60 percent female undergraduate populations. They will get worse as long as football dominates the budgets and numbers of scholarships and as long as football and men's basketball generate so much money.

These battles, however, are not  just about numbers and budget; they are about culture and women's possibilities.