Point of the Game

The Real College Recruiting Action is among Assistant Coaches

2012-01-27T09:24:00.000-08:00

This time of year the sports sites like Rivals focus breathlessly upon the commitment wars among schools for elite student athletes. You can follow the preferences and visits of athletes and live through their waffling and changes and commitments. But to my mind, these seasons have become as much about recruiting and changes among assistant coaches at the college level. The influx of conference money, the increasing sophistication of playbooks as well as the need to get top recruiters has meant that assistant college coaching football salaries have risen faster than the head coaches in recent years.

My Washington Huskies provide an interesting but common case study. Steve Sarkesian, the dynamic young Head Coach of Washington, had held together his 9 coaches for three seasons, almost unheard of in the modern world of college coaching. Suddenly inside of two months, the Husky’s wide receiver coach Demetrice Martin left to join Jim Mora’s new staff at UCLA. After the high scoring Alamo Bowl screamer, Sarkesian fired the defensive coordinator, the defensive line coach and the defensive backs coach. Suddenly a stable coaching staff missed four important assistants. Then Doug Nussmeier, the Husky’s highly respected offensive coordinator left to join Nick Saban’s national champion Alabama team.

Now the team was reduced during the height of recruiting season to four coaches, and the stability shattered. This has become the norm in college athletics and the Husky’s response illustrates the speed of movement and the ripple effect.

Sarkesian acted decisively. First, he hired a new Defensive Coordinator Justin Wilcox from Tenessee for 750,000 dollars per year for a three year contract. Peter Sirman followed Wilcox from Tenessee for 225,000 and two years as linebacker coach. Both are successful, aggressive and good recruiters who are returning to their northwest home areas.

Sarkesian then raided California and persuaded Eric Kiseau to be offensive coordinators for 375,000 and Tosh Lupoi as Defensive line coach for 350,000. Both have very strong recruiting reputations on the west coast as well as great skill sets. Lastly Keith Heyward moved north from Oregon State University to be defensive backs coach for $150,000.

In addition Sarkesian reconfigured the positions, titles and salaries of the remaining coaches. For instance Dan Cozzetto, their formidable and widely respected offensive line coach became “run-game coordinator” and Jimmy Dougherty, the wide receiver’s coach added the title “pass-game coordinator.”

Now California must find two coaches, Oregon State one and Tennessee two which in turn will ripple out and impact other schools.

Several aspect of the Husky whirlwind illustrate the new world of Assistant College Coaching. First, all the coaches left for more money, often significant. Sometimes this is added to a chance to to return to home town turf. Second, all involved increases in responsibility and expansion of skill. Third, being a successful recruiter has become almost as important as technical expertise. Fourth, assistant coaches often start out working for very little either as graduate assistants or at lower level schools, but at elite schools they now command not just better salaries but multi-year contracts. This softens the brutal uncertainty of their jobs.

Coaching is a profession, not an obsession. Fans forget this and often feel jilted when a head or assistant coach bolts for another job. Of course fans forget that if a coach falters the fans will turn on the coach and call for his or her head.

Every college coach is a paid professional in a very insecure and unstable profession. By their early thirties most of them have been fired or cleaned out with a coaching change or seen it happen to their good friends. They have had to scramble to find a new job and move family and kids to another town on the spur of the moment. A professional coach knows the fickleness of fans and the tenuousness of any job.

A good assistant will try to maximize their income given the uncertainty surrounding their jobs. So the moves from California to Washington make perfect sense for the California coaches. The Tennessee coaches make comparable salaries but get more responsibility and also a chance to return closer to home, a rare opportunity for coaches. The move to multi-year contracts is a huge boon to the younger coaches and their families.

But coaching also has a career path. Many aspire to be head coaches or coordinators. This means a progression: They succeed where they are; they take on more responsibility there or move to another school to get more responsibility; they often look to move to a higher ranked school in terms of talent and visibility.

Doug Nussmeier, a wonderful coach and person, exhibits the pattern. He served as offensive co-ordinator and QB coach at Fresno State. He moved to same position at a much better school in a higher ranked conference, Washington. I believe he is ready to be a head coach right now, but he reasonably took the job of offensive coordinator under one of the game’s great coaches, Lou Saban, at the national championship team. He will be a head coach soon and exemplify the classic career progression.

Sakesian’s restructuring of responsibilities for his remaining coaches also fits the career path. He permitted internal staff growth where coaches can acquire higher levels of training and responsibility at the same school. All are preparing for more responsibility at better places.

A good and ambitious assistant coach then seeks good money and stable employment. But stability is rare, so the money must go up to compensate. In addition, they want to grow in responsibility and expertise. Often they will look to work with particular coaches who have created coaching trees and know how to train and groom coaches for better position as Tedford at California and Saban at Alabama does. I believe Sarkesian is growing into the same type of teacher coach.

Today while the news hounds focus on the kids, some of the most critical recruiting and hiring occurs among assistant coaches. Keep your eyes open.

Sports Ethics: Show Up

2012-01-20T10:10:00.000-08:00

I was listening to Mike Golic on ESPN radio rail against a team that had lost a game badly that they should have won. He said, “You have to show up.” As I think about it, he hit upon a fundamental aspect of being a successful athlete, professional or human being for that matter. You have to show up.

What does it mean to show up? Well, if we think of it in terms of being an athlete on a team, much like being a professional engaged in a project with other professionals, it means a lot more than simply plunking down your physical carcass.

Show up physically is a start, but just being there physically is not enough. It is a start but barely. We all know when we or others are just “going through the motions.” Your body is moving in space and time; it may even be performing intricate trained motions linked to achieving a goal. But the mere exercise of precision motions does not capture the requirements of high performance.

First, to show up means that the athlete must concentrate upon the physical performance making minute adjustments to adapt to the condition of his or her body and the context like wind or field or more importantly opponents. So showing up requires concentration upon the body and changing or adapting it as required.

Second, showing up means an athlete not only adapts his or her body and skilled action to the context, but he or she must be constantly learning from what is going on around them. Athletic success depends upon reading nuanced changes on the field and adapting accordingly. An athlete may have prepared and trained one way, but the other side may have made adjustments and in realtime an athlete must embark upon a new approach when the old one is not working. This means changing tactics or even strategy—a different kind of fake, a different swing, and an altered position or set up or stance. Showing up means thinking, engaging and adapting our body, not just being physically there. A psychologist would talk about being present with a person's entire perceptual, cognitive and emotional awareness, not just placing one's body on the field.

Third, showing up means the ability to call upon will and emotions to recover when patterns break. An athlete who shows up brings their full concentration, emotional discipline and focus as well as the full training of their body and skills. Showing up involves the ability to dig deeper. When an athlete discovers that their opponent is tougher, better prepared or trying harder than the athlete anticipated, then the athlete also digs deeper; ignores the pain; tries harder or pushes harder or exerts more force or sometimes steps back from trying to hard and flows better.

One of the most dangerous moments in athletic or professional life is when we are “surprised.” Our expectations are not met and the plans we had developed for how to deploy focus and energy fail. Too many people give up or panic when faced with such a surprise. Showing up means that the athlete in a competition not only “brings it” but also adapts as they need if the level of competition or challenge changes. He or she must recalibrate the level of energy or attention that they bring and overcome confusion or hesitation that arises when the opponents break a pattern or succeed quickly.

Not showing up has many mutations. An athlete can dog it and simply not be trying hard enough. They go through the motions but not with speed or precision. On the field, they do not bring full effort, strength or technique to bear in the competition. A person can dog it in practice and enter a competition not fully prepared, so showing up matters as much mentally and emotionally as physical. A player has got to be paying attention in the game and in practice to learn and change as needed.

Attention plus energy defines the key to professional success. If an athlete gets lazy in their perception and pattern recognition, they will fail and bring down their teammates with them.

Another variant occurs when a team expects to win. They do not take their upcoming opponent seriously. This overconfidence haunts coaches as they prepare teams. You can see it in practice that week. People do not show up for practice fully; they do not give maximum effort. Worse still an athlete or group of athletes stops taking pride in their work or they stop listening to their coaches. They do not watch tape as carefully or cut as precisely or execute as sharply. One individual can infect other members of the team and sometimes a team falls into the habit of not showing up during a week of bad practice. The results, as Golic railed against, are predictable.

The difference between showing up and not showing up often manifests itself even in one game. This season LSU football has demonstrated a capacity to not be fully present for a first half of a game. Lots of young college teams fight though these issues; they are young and living lives as students as well as athletes. So more than a few college coaches must be not only excellent X/O guys to make adjustments at half or quarter or timeouts; but they must be able to call players and teams to themselves. To remind them that they are better than they are playing. A good college coach not only motivates but jerks teams out of lethargy He or she reminds the players that they are failing themselves and their team by not fully present to the game, their teammates or the challenge in front of them.

The far more powerful proof occurs when a new coach takes the same talent group and transforms them. Sometimes this is a placebo effect or just a change effect like when a team wins the first couple game after a mid season managerial change in baseball. We know from neural imaging studies that a focused brain looks very different from a bored or unfocused brain. The integration of judgement, memory, and perception is tighter and faster than the much spottier and less integrated status of an unfocused mind.

The change of the San Francisco 49ers under coach Jim Harbough illustrates this phenomenon. With the same talent pool that had failed and underperformed for the three years, Harbough and his coaching staff converted the team to a new way of playing. I use the word “converted” precisely. Schemes changed, personnel adapted to new jobs, but above all Jim Harbough changed the moral, emotional and cognitive belief set of the players in them. The team showed up by altering their internal moral and psychological relation to the game; now they have won the NFL West. You can see this most convincingly in their tackling. Open field tackling (we now say" tackling in space") requires immense focus and awareness. The defender must be prepared and totally present since the ball carrier can fake, juke, shimmy, cut or do a hundred other minute actions with their eyes and body. The defender must read through all this and tackle mid level and lock the person up and wrestle them down or slow them down for back up to arrive. Harbough's Stanford team and his 49ers team demonstrate superb skill at this. Showing up and being present converge in execution.

In moral psychological terms, showing up means being present. A human being is present to him or herself or a situation or another person when they align their perceptions, emotions, body and cognitions to be open and attuned to the person or situation before them. They are alert, prepared and ready to respond, anticipate and act. Their perceptions are open so that the athletes read the entire physical and emotional communication of the other person or situation. When fully present their own perceptual radar expands to take in the range of physical, special and emotional forces around them as well as attending to the patterns unfolding with their own teammates and their opponents.

If an athlete does not show up, they will underperform, not adapt, and fail themselves, their sport and their team.

Nepotism Fails in Sports

2012-01-13T10:31:00.000-08:00

Meritocracy brutally exposes family nepotism. Modern elite sport functions as a raw meritocracy and rips apart well meaning attempts by families to hand on positions as coaches or managers. The recent firing of Vice Chairman Bill Polian, the long time mastermind for the Indianapolis Colts, may have had a lot do to with his probably overmatched son Chris whom Bill had appointed General manager. This story illustrates an oft told tale just as the leaving of Jay Paterno from Penn State now that his dad was fired demonstrates.

We can all understand the desire of a parent to set up their child in a good position. We can understand the even deeper desire to hand on a patrimony such as a successful athletic program. Basketball coaching legend Eddie Sutton tried to do this after many successful years at Oklahoma State. He even made it part of his contract that his son, Sean, would succeed him. Coaching legend Bob Knight did the same when he made it a condition of employment that when he retired the Texas Tech program be handed on to his assistant and son Pat.

The ruthless world of elite sports unmasks weaknesses very quickly. This world only reward success, period. A person cannot live on another’s competence. Competitors lurk waiting for coaches to fail and to snatch their jobs. In this world of intense struggle where successors lurk in the wings, loyalty takes on inordinate importance. A head coach or General Manager desperately needs allegiance and candor. For millennia, the human solution resided in nepotism. Officials appointed blood relatives as allies and assistants. Family values may be one of the few bonds that can withstand the caustic pressures of competition. So not only did Pere Polian hire his son, but Mike Shanahan at the Redskins hired his son Kyle to be his offensive coordinator. Don Shula had launched his son Dave’s NFL career when at Miami as Bobby Bowden did for two of his children while coach at Florida State. I could go on but you get the picture.

The parent can hide the son when he is the head coach or general manager. A competent child or sibling can flourish as a number two or three under the parent’s or older sibling’s protection. But when the parent steps down and hands on the program, he usually hands on a good roster. The son, the inheritor, can succeed for a couple years with the talent pool and remaining ethos of the father’s system.

But elite sport reveals problems quickly. Other teams and coaches dissect tendencies, lay bare flaws, outthink or out recruit. The son cannot rely upon the father’s talent or reputation and must go it alone. At the same time he lives in the shadow of his father and the lingering question of whether he really earned the job.

So three years and Pat Knight is fired. Three years later, Sean Sutton is fired. Gerry Tarkenian tried to hand on the Fresno State program to his son Danny, but Fresno State had enough sense to stop that, although they did hire Tarkenian to begin with.

Genes may sometimes tell, but not as often as we would like to believe. Coaching or management nepotism in sport remains a high-risk low return approach. It almost never works.

I admit anomalies exist. Joey Meyer took over DePaul from his legend father Ray Meyer and coached for 12 years to a 231-158 record and 7 NCAA tournaments. Tony Bennett took over Washington State from his father Dick after three years and lead them to the NCAA. Before the bubble could burst, he moved to Viriginia where he is rebuilding the program. I know there are other cases, but this bequest approach fails far more than succeeds.

John Thompson III, who now coaches the Georgetown team his father John Thompson brought to prominence, illuminates a different path that works far better. He went to Princeton where he succeeded as a student and player and then became an assistant coach under Pete Carroll’s tutelage. He mastered a very different system and eventually became coach at Princeton and later at Georgetown. He earned it all himself and set his own career, his own philosophy. When he arrived at Georgetown, he did not inherit but earned the job.

A related approach occurs when a child or sibling is hired on and succeeds as an assistant coach, then gets hired to move on to their own program. Given the temptation to hire family, if you have to hire family, this approach works better. Bob Stoops coached at Oklahoma and hired as his brother Mike as defensive coordinator and associate head coach. Mike later took a job at Arizona where he had mixed success. But Mike Stoops earned the shot by his own body of work and he succeeded and failed at Arizona on his own terms. Similarly, Terry Bowden started as a graduate assistant for his father at Florida State, but left to earn his own reputation at a series of small colleges and great success and failure at Auburn. He is now at Akron. Terry Bowden may have been launched by nepotism but made his career on his own merits.

Obviously these are anecdotes but I believe they illustrate an important point. Given the role of loyalty in sport and given the lure of family, coaches will hire family and managers will hire family. It only works as a launch that enables a child or sibling to cleave their own path and prove their own worth. They earn a program by work and success, not genetics.

The final irony, of course, lies in the fact that owners can get away with nepotism more than coaches or general managers. Wins and losses harshly define success or failure for coaches. Universities or owners mercilessly fire coaches and GM’s who do not win. But owners cannot be fired. They might create a family culture that hands on culture that can endure the vicissitudes of wins/losses, like the Rooneys in Pittsburgh. Better yet they can hire competent professionals who can assemble winning teams sometimes despite the owner's family.

Nepotism may or may not work with owners, but it is fatal with coaches and general managers.

Why Hazing Won't Go Away

2012-01-09T11:13:00.000-08:00

Drum major Robert Champion of the Florida A & M band of “hemorrhagic shock due to soft tissue hemorrhage, due to blunt force trauma.” The injuries probably happened from running a gauntlet of the other band members in a hazing ritual. The university and administrators across the country have taken up, again, the endless and largely ineffectual call to end hazing. Initiation rites and hazing won’t end; they will hide underground, and it is important to think about why.

I do not want to deny the harm and ugliness for the individuals who have died or been demeaned or hurt by hazing in American colleges. I have no answers for how to end it or lessen it. I do want to think about why hazing exists, will continue and migrates underground and remains important to the young men and women who participate in it.

The Florida A & M band stood as a proud elite institution of highly trained and disciplined individuals committed to a common cause. They made grand music amid intricate and dazzling maneuvers on the field. My dad used to choreograph band movements, and I was mesmerized by their mastery.

To enter such a high performing team, a person must prove their competence. Any group worth its salt will test for skill when enrolling new members. But most groups, especially elite groups, require bonds of trust and will test further. Such groups build a culture and will create traditions of initiation rites. These rites will establish:

1) Whether an individual deeply wants to join the group.

2) Whether an individual will emotionally commit to the group and its cause.

3) Whether an individual will be loyal to the group above other commitments.

4) Whether this desire manifests in emotional and physical strength to suffer to gain membership.

5) Whether the person can hold the secret with other group members.

6) Whether an individual will respect a hierarchy of the elders.

Groups that celebrate their special status will strive to achieve all the above.

They will create tests of membership and I do mean tests. A test means that the person must prepare, endure and prove him or herself. A person can fail the test and fail to exhibit the emotional or physical strength to earn privileged membership. This failure is not about skill but commitment to the group as a group.

Hazing evolves naturally from this. Hazing involves the infliction of potential harm or suffering on the initiate. It creates a barrier that must be surmounted to prove worthiness. It usually requires a form of humbling to prove the group is more important than the individual. Conquering the suffering and humiliation earns acceptance. Many rites can be silly or stunts. They can be easy, hard, ritualistic, demanding or soft symbolic actions. It once looked like a gendered male phenomenon, but sororities and women's teams and groups have demonstrated their own competence at devising rituals and hazing on their own terms.

A person proves him or herself and becomes “one of us.” Passing the test proves their worthiness and trustworthiness—they enter the group in a deeper way beyond competence. The harder the test, as the Marines or Special Forces prove, the more abiding the loyalty. The challenges or tasks often establish a hierarchy to remind new entrants that they are entering at the lowest level and offer obeisance or “pay their dues” to gain higher levels. Ideally this should really occur on the field in competition or task performance. Over time it does; on good teams people earn their spurs by reliable and trusted showing up that the others can rely upon.

But the deeper more atavistic belonging demands the initiation. For many athletic teams and organizations these rites drift off campus and out of sight of coaches or authorities. These are non-sanctioned informal initiations that the students have created and kept alive over time, not the inventions of transient coaches or authorities.

Their hidden and illicit nature make them all the more valuable. These tests of the young by the young degenerate easily into hazing. Peer pressure and the desire to be acknowledged drive people join in stupid, demeaning or dangerous behavior that the entrants would not indulge on their own. They can involve tests that may make sense to a nineteen year old—chugging a bottle of vodka—flashing a random group—running a gauntlet. Often they may feel funny to the perpetrators but feel humiliating or demeaning to those experiencing them.

If the hazing is done in secret, team members share a secret. Secret sharing seals them tighter and obligates them to not tell. Secret hazing cements their membership. Its very danger generates pride at having succeeded at something hard. It also means that next year they can impose the same hazing.

Hazing, initiating, rites of passage speak deeply to sealing membership and consecrating belonging with value beyond technocratic proof of competence and skill. It gives shared pride in passing a test, being worthy. Sharing suffering and sharing a secret bond them as much as the rite does.

The obvious problem with hazing is that groups can create rites that demean, wound or physically hurt members. Too often young unmanaged college students lose perspective or judgment or just get carried away with horrendous results. It is one thing for the special services to provide very hard tests of endurance that match the skill and character needed, and another for a sports team to create tests of rigor. But few student organizations have any justification for harsh actions so they invent other dangerous forms of bonding and subordination. But running gauntlets, a harsh punishment created in the thirty years war for traitors, or drinking to poison someone have little sense beyond stupidity. But then that may be enough for initiation into a 20 year old world.

Athletic teams all build rituals. They need stability and predictability that weave into daily life rituals to integrate but also address hierarchy. The team works at its culture and often initiation rites spur that identity. Small rituals from carrying bags to cleaning up locker rooms make sense. Other rituals make sense in a different way. But rituals that go secret are seductive and powerful and for that reason invite abuse. The very thing that makes them attractive makes them dangerous when not tempered by any maturity or sense of purpose.

Modern coaches largely and ineffectually disavow hazing. They distance themselves for liability purposes but also because it really exceeds the limits of their own authority. In sports at least, they must move beyond don’t ask, don’t’ tell and create real costs to hazing. But the best thing they can do is to cultivate and support strong informal and formal leaders on the team. Beyond the bounds of rules and enforcement, these student leaders will draw the lines between initiation and hazing.

Quebec, the Canadiens and Sports Nationalism

2012-01-05T18:29:00.000-08:00

When President Pierre Gauthier of the Montreal Candiens promoted non-French speaking Randy Cunneyworth to be interim head coach last month, he did not anticpate the firestorm of criticism from Canadien fans and Francophile anger. A mere week later he apologized to the fans all but guaranteeing that Cunneyworth’s tenure would be brief, “I'm sorry if we upset people (by not hiring a bilingual coach). Because that certainly wasn't our intention ... Having a bilingual coach is very, very important and will be part of the decision process going forward." Owned by a Molson with historic Montreal roots, this incident excavated the deep and sometimes dark roots of sport’s connection to politics and communal identity.

Forty years ago people died in Quebec as Front de libération du Québec carried out a decade-long bombing campaign to support Quebec separatism. The uniqueness of Quebec’s French heritage and language inspired massive political resistance against th dominance of English Canada and especially the Ontario/Toronto axis. The artful statesmanship of Pierre Trudeau saved Canada and reached an uneasy but workable compromise for Canada and Quebec. Canada exists as a bilingual country, but especially in Quebec the enforcement of French as the “mother tongue” and primary language remains a critical policy and article of faith among Francophile Quebecers. While support for secession has temporarily abated, the ley lines of French—English Canadian tensions are never far from the surface. Montreal, the cultural and industrial capital of Quebec, embodies all these tensions.

Canadian nationalism always feels like an oxymoron to many Canadians, although the French are involved in a tangle over whether a beaver or polar bear should be their national emblem. To the French Quebecois, however, nationalism matters as a defense against perceived English assimilation of them. To the extent a sport or team contributes to affiliation, hockey and Canada had always been linked. The NHL originated as a Canadian league sprawled across Canada with small and medium, cities joined together with a common passion and pride. In Quebec, the Habs assumed a deeper identity as the avatar of French Canadian pride and aspiration. Their 24 Stanley cup championships resounded across Canada as reminders of the French identity that resolutely would not fade away to an English hegemony.

The Montreal Candiens exist as a source and beneficiary of Quebec nationalism. Certainly, the team does not represent the direct or manipulated investments that an East Germany or modern China make to deploy athletics as an instrument of national pride (this is Canada after all). But history has joined Quebecois pride with Montreal hockey. Even as modern Canada evolves its very uneasy co-existence with Quebec, the team itself epitomizes modern global professional teams. The modern roster has three French speaking Quebecers, five Americans, 2 Russians and a Czech among others.

So last month when the team promoted assistant Cunneyworth as its interim coach, he became the first non-French speaking coach of the Canadians. Non French Canadians had coached the team but always as bi-lingual and aware of the city and state’s sensitivity to the alignment of the team, language and Quebec’s exceptional status in the federation. The appointment of Cunneyworth represented a remarkable tin ear for the emotional and collective role of the team.

The interim internal promotion aroused a firestorm of protest from the press. Quebec sovereignists, always looking for a reason to agitate about what they perceive as English domination in Quebec, jumped all over the symbolic implications of the choice. Follow up polls revealed that French speaking Canadians also wish the team would hire more French speaking players.

It also reminds us how ley lines of communal identity attach to sport and teams, even in a place that seems as placid as Canada (at least to uninformed Americans). I also think it highlights how situational this can be. The Quebec situation still simmers, and some still wish to leave Canada. The last plebiscite on sovereignty for Canada was in 1995, and only 51% voted to stay in the federal union. Teams, even one owned by a beer company, still stand as surrogates for deeper emotional attachments and agendas where identities remain contested and politics remains unresolved.

This nationalist incident highlights a parallel but very different phenomena in the world of soccer. Like hockey the sport has become global with multi-national teams common. But all over the world, the national teams are coached by non-nationals. This often occurs with imports into countries developing their own teams. Recentlythe United States appointed German national Jurgen Klinsmann our national coach for his skill and success. More interestingly he is recruiting and grooming dual citizenship Americans from all over the world. Many of them are products of sports academies and not college soccer. To his mind this gives them thousands more hours of practice and success. For younger players, he farms them out to European or English teams for seasoning and training.

Klinsmann’s approach and appointment reflect the natural evolution of an internationally integrated soccer world. Players sprawl across the globe playing for different teams at various salary scales. Playing for a national team involves giving up salary and a true act of commitment for the players. Badly done, this approach can resemble pick up games of all stars, but I think everyone learned from the total failure of the American basketball approach that relied upon talent and press clippings hanging around together.

Professional hockey parallels the integration of soccer, but with a much smaller cast and much more closed world. Canada is small country with a disproportionate interest in hockey, and Quebec is as an even smaller state with a profound interest in hockey and its team. While modern professional players may come from all over as well as coaches, the Montreal Habs contretemps reminds us that the community affiliation runs strong and sometimes shallow, and sport is seldom just sport.

Contact College Cheerleading: A Modest Proposal

2012-01-01T18:50:00.000-08:00

It is a New Year and I should be writing a thoughtful piece ruminating upon what happened last year and what might happen this year. To be honest I cannot make any sense of what happened and have even less idea what may happen. I also think lots of other folks are doing this for us, we do not need another pontificator. But in the spirit of the new year I have an idea about how to make college cheerleading into a real sport, so I thought this might be a good time to try it out.

I freely admit that I can never figure out cheerleading. I mean I understand it as a symbol and culture of gender dominance and social superiority, and it makes sort of sense as a place for failed gymnasts. I kind of get the pyramids and hurdles, hitch walls and flyers. I even understand the high tucks and tossing small girls into the air and a catching them. But I will never come to terms with the claim that it is a sport. But I have an idea about how to make it one, and this approach addresses one of its biggest problems, it gets away from another judged and point scored sport subject to all the limits and problems and turns it into a sport with clear winners and losers based upon field competition.

The real driver to make it a recognized sport comes from the huge business combines that have grown up around it, the sex appeal of the sport but above all the colleges who see it as a safe way around Title IX gender equity issues. It will also provide another guaranteed set of national championships for the SEC where the state and sports culture fits with and nurtures the sport with its gender overtones.

Leaving aside the ideology of the sport, I do not believe we should have another point-based judged sport. No competitively point judged sport has really solved the problem of fair and accurate judgment across time and places. Nor have they been able to eliminate bias and inconsistency. The whole process, even one as constrained as modern figure skating judging, is too fraught with subjectivity. We have all seen and groaned with the opaque and often indefensible judging we see in gymnastics and figure skating or rhythmic gymnastics and dance. I would really prefer we not foist another judged sport on the world. So if cheerleading evolves into a sport, I think it should be one where the victories are clear and defined by definite outcomes. It should not depend upon obscure grading scales, biased judges and clenched smiles.

I have a modest proposal: how about CONTACT CHEERLEADING?

Two teams would enter onto the mat and be required to perform a specified set of tasks like a hitch wall with three levels or a double pyramid or certain number of back flips and tucks. The actual goals would be picked from a wide array of possibilities and teams would know the range and practice them in advance. They would submit their programs in advance with their defined outcomes. We could also have meets where the challenges are chosen on the spot and teams have to adjust in real time.

Now, here is the neat part. Rather than doing it on their own and being judged, two teams would be on the floor at the same time! They would race in parallel to achieve their goals. This is where it gets interesting. Each team will be simultaneously trying to stop the other team from achieving its task.

The team that achieves their task first WINS.

Now we have a sport--direct head to head competition, clear goals, limited time and contact opposition. Each contact cheer leading team would have its base and flyers and spotters but also defenders and attackers. I could see teams launching players into the air to knock down pyramids or others backing flipping over defenders to knock down bases. The sport would have flyers all over the place in real-time knocking down and building at the same time.

Re-envisioned as a contact sport both teams compete head to head in simultaneous time and space. We could even have noise meters to measure and record required decibel levels that they must reach when they cheer, build and battle all at the same time.

The sport could have specialists like sling shot people you could launch into the other team’s pyramid. Or you could launch anti cheerleader missiles where one small waif intercepts another stopping them from being caught or reaching the apogee. You could recruit small gymnasts as the missle and hunks to do the launching. Of course people would have to wear helmets to prevent mid air collisions but that’s ok, although it will get in the way of ponytails and hairdos. We would have to have much thicker padding on the mat.

Obviously this increases the safety dangers for what already is a very dangerous catastrophic activity. The mat size would have to be expanded and to keep people on the mat walls could be built. Actually the whole space could be enclosed either like a bouncy ball McDonalds world or a padded cage as in Beyond the Thunderdome or MMA fights. These would save participants from accidentally flying off into spectators or hard areas.

We might even add to the mat a trampoline floor that would prevent injuries, then we could really have high flyers and missiles, but it would make it hard to actually build the pyramid, so we need to nix the trampolines.

Anyway, these are just preliminary sketches for ~~cirque de soleil~~, I mean contact cheerleading.

That’s it. We could cross MMA and cheerleading. All we have to do is work on the uniforms, and we are ready from prime time and an NCAA competition!!

Conference Realignment Blues: What is a College Conference?

2011-12-27T16:47:00.000-08:00

I grew up a Big 8 guy. The Missouri--Kansas Game was holy day at our house. I never did recover from when we moved across State Line Street into Kansas and suddenly I was supposed to root for the hated Jayhawks, but I knew my loyalties even if my younger siblings rooted for Kansas. This time of year I knew which bowl to follow because the Big 8 went to the Orange bowl. Not any more. Now I am watching the umpteenth bowl I don't care about and Missouri joined something called the Big 12 and now is on its way to The SEC.

The truth is my Big 8 was a figment of my imagination and misplaced loyalty. It morphed into something called the Big 12 then the Big 12 with only 10 members and it goes on. My old rivalry game no longer exists. College Conferences, in the great DeToqueville tradition, are voluntary associations that can mutate, grow, shrink or even cease to exist. They are voluntary associations created by colleges and their Presidents and Boards for their own purposes.

A college conference resembles the original Articles of Confederation with little revenue, members who can leave at will and no central identity to transcend college identity.Whatever purpose they have, it depends upon self interest and not abiding loyalty or heritage.

(And what is it with this BIG thing. I mean the Big 10, Big 8, Big 12 and even the Big East. I mean only guys could come up with these names!)

The original conferences grew by fits and starts. Many originally had an organic quality of regional proximity and traditional rivalries. In the forties and fifties as scandals sundered college athletes, the Conferences took on the task of regulating competition. It quickly became clear that conferences could not regulate themselves; there was too much conflict of interest when schools that played each other had to stand in judgment over each other. The few good conference commissioners that tried to enforce discipline soon found themselves without jobs.

Many conferences sponsored championships but this did little to enhance them. Most conferences were what organizational theorists would call loosely coupled systems, with little to hold them against centrifugal forces. In a number of cases, conferences signed exclusive agreements with Bowl Games like the Big 8 and Orange Bowl or Pac-10 and Big 10 for the Rose Bowl. There were not many bowls and this gave them cachet and importance.

Two watershed events transformed conferences.

First the NCAA basketball tournament grew in stature, visibility and wealth. The tournament gave preference to conference winners, and independents found themselves left in the cold. Schools scrambled to create conferences just to get access to the tournament and its visibility and revenue. The most successful and artificial of these conferences was the Big East, the first real conference created just for money and NCAA access.

Second, in 1984 the courts ruled that NCAA could not exercise monopoly control over college football. This meant that TV contracts devolved to schools and conferences. Many schools stuck their own deals, but the networks wanted reliable and consistent offerings. Conferences stepped in and offered an entire package as well as quantity and quality of product. This began the era of fundamental economic inequality in college sports as the SEC and Big 10 garnered contracts and TV status that outstripped everyone else.

The basketball tournament and TV deals drove conferences to emulate the SEC to create a " brand" for their conference that could be as powerful as that for schools. The Big 10 soon followed suit. Very quickly the college landscape evolved into Division 1 major conferences and all the rest. Even in Division 1 many mid major schools did not have the visibility or stature to garner TV contracts.

The BCS did for college football conferences what the NCAA tournament did for college basketball. Without a national championship and with conferences controlling television and bowl deals access to the mythical national championship or to the big money bowls depended upon being a member of a marque conferences. The rest of the schools were stuck with secondary and backwater bowls and contracts. Many of the secondary bowls cost more to attend than they paid out.

This led to the last seven years of consolidation and pilfering, so much so a micro-industry has grown up just trying to predict and follow it. All the moves reflect efforts by schools to get access to football TV money. For example, the ACC, a basketball conferences with no real football cache beyond Florida State, stole Boston College and Virginia Tech. This year they dismembered the Big East by grabbing Syracuse. The SEC and Big 12 evolved in similar manners. TCU illustrates this new world order. Desperate to get into a BCS conference for its football team, it joined the Big East. As the Big East disintegrated, it jilted the Big East and joined the reconstituted Big 12. Just look at this map of the new Big East to see the real logic of conferences.

Modern conferences now have a set of clear purposes.

1) Maximize the revenue for all the schools to address the costs of college sports.

2) Maximize television value by capturing top markets or schools with high viewership loyalty.

3) Maximize TV exposure in football that generates revenue and enhances public visibility.

4) Maximize the chance to get schools into the NCAA basketball tournament.

5) Create a strong brand that enhances the reputation of any school in the conference to makes it a destination for schools and networks.
6) Connect with schools that might share common goals or purposes academically or have geographic affinity.

Notice the original purposes are now last, and no one even worries about using the conferences as a tool to regulate competition.

It's not pretty, actually it is pretty ugly. But the Presidents and Boards face continuous budget deficits and hemorrhaging losses from sports especially football. They will pursue anything to increase the attractiveness of games to TV or get more teams into the tournament.

For most fans their loyalties lay with schools and this is a good thing. Keep them there. As the TCU saga illustrates, conferences may be brands but not objects of loyalty.

The Strange World of College Football Christmas

2011-12-24T16:46:00.000-08:00

“The worst Christmases were when I was home with the family. I was grumpy and they were sad. We all wished I was getting ready for a bowl.” So an old and wise football assistant coach introduced me to the strange world of College Football Christmas. A linebacker told me two years ago, “yeah, I’m going home to be with the family, I hate it!” He mused about how he’d have to watch all his friends on TV at various bowls around the country.

I saw the best statement yesterday in the Seattle Times when the Husky’s young coach Steve Sarkesian said, “I tell them don’t ever give me anything for Christmas…They already gave me the best gift that I could have. That’s waking up in a hotel on Christmas Day at a bowl game and then going to practice.”

Waking up in a hotel is the best gift he could have!

Now that summarizes the wackiness and joy of college football bowl season. I know all the arguments for a national championship, but still love the fact that 70 teams of kids get to celebrate with each other and enjoy a visit to a city and one last game all before a new semester starts.

But think about this world. This is a time those of us who celebrate Christmas see to gather with family and friends and celebrate, exchange gifts. We are grateful for the gift of love and redemption in the world that expresses itself in our love for each other. Now college football players and coaches suffer when they sit around the table with family, friends and presents. They suffer the loss of not playing, not being with each other and the knowledge that their season failed.

For the players their closest friends and companions are each other. They share four or five years of sacrifice, pain, competition, joy, suffering, failure and accomplishment with each other. Their most lasting memories will be of each other, not of the victories and loses. They are all young adults and can live time away from family if they are with their second family.

Coaches experience this as a celebration of their work and effort. They see this as vindication for their efforts and commemoration and festivity for the hard work of their “kids.” The coaches live in each others lives and wounds during the season and for them, spending this time away from family and sanity is hard but satisfying.

Really the deepest losses for this strange way to celebrate Christmas are for the young coaches whose spouses and young children spend the Christmas season with tree, family but without dad. This is a deeper sadness at the core of all coaches, male and female, who spend such consuming lives recruiting, worrying, planning and coaching their teams, away from their family. As one coach told me, “sometimes I think I am a better parent to my players than my children.”

But this Christmas on the road, Steve Sarkesian and the Huskies and 60 other teams will wake in hotel rooms on Christmas morning happy and satisfied. They will practice on Christmas day, work hard and eat hearty with the people they have spent the year with, with their friends and team members. For those of us who have gone to their banquets and know that these young athletes express with tears their “love” for each other, then maybe this is the best way to spend Christmas. To be with, play with, and work with those you love and respect.

A JOYOUS AND ABIDING CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL.

Why Athletes Can't Afford Loyalty

2011-12-22T16:10:00.000-08:00

I watch Bruce Jenner on the Kardashian reality show with appalled sadness. Bruce Jenner once stood as the greatest athlete in the world winning the 1976 Olympic Decathlon. Shaggy haired with an ah shucks attitudes, he stood as an American hero. Now he haunts the haunts the outskirts of the Kardashian family circus with a face wrecked by too many bad plastic surgeries, a shadow of fading glory. I remember seeing Mickey Mantle selling autographs at a casino. I read of the fate, genetic and otherwise, of the great East German Olympians many cast off by their society just like some of the recent Chinese Olympic champions who live on streets.

Every athlete lives one injury from oblivion. The brilliant Brandon Roy just retired from the Portland Trailblazers, no longer able to play on knees that betrayed him at the age of 27. The Indianapolis Colts and their fans are cold bloodily thinking of passing on their greatest quarterback Peyton Manning because of an injury. Athletes cannot rely upon the loyalty of fans and owners. It took one second in a meaningless late season game to rupture Adrian Peterson's ACL and MCL. In one second his seven year 100 million dollar contract with the Vikings could be compromised even if he recovers since so much of his skill depends upon his explosiveness, one of the consistent casualties of ACL injuries.

Every athlete will lose their career physically before they are ready emotionally. Too many athletes do not have a backup plan, a degree or altnernative career. When most of us are just launching their careers in late twenties, most athletes are obsolete. With the average pro career 3-5 years, most professional players end on the scrap heap by 27.

Every athlete knows this—even the ones living in denial.

Athletes also know how utterly fickle and ruthless fans can be. Just go to a basketball game, any level, and watch fans wave and yell and scream for a team or athlete. But the fans’ mood will shift almost instantaneously. Fans shower down praise, love and ecstasy, but in a second will boo, scorn or curse the same athlete in the same game. Athletes know that fan loyalty cannot be relied upon; fans want blood and victory, but will settle for blood if they cannot get victory.

Experienced athletes know who we fans are and rightly do not trust us. Just watch the kvetching about Bernie Williams or now Derek Jeter on the downside of magnificent careers with the Yankees. In my hometown fans are turning on Ichiro on the downside of glorious career. Fans do not give unconditional love; it is tightly conditioned. Yet we scream and moan and accuse athletes of being greedy when they leave us.

Albert Pujols just accepted a 250 million dollar ten year contract from the Los Angele Angels, rather than accept a 19 million dollar per year contract with St. Louis for fewer years. More than a few fans and commentators have excoriated him for not staying with St. Louis his only team. They argue that he grew up in the Cardinals system and should stay with them out of loyalty. But Pujols helped St. Louis win two world series in five years. His mentor and manager who helped him grow into the star, Tony Russo just retired. What did Pujolis owe the fans? Nothing. He was willing to take a small discount but 5 million per year difference, 20 percent of the St. Louis offer over ten years added up, a lot. Over the life of the contract it would be worth 50 million dollars or 5 percent of a billion!

We and the St. Louis fans should be glad for him and celebrate his commitment and achievements for the team and the city.

Players cannot and should not trust fans. We forget too easily and remember too long. Fans claim to have loyalty, but the reality is that we do not and turn quickly and viscously upon our heroes. As fans we will forget the journeymen and haunt the retired stars who did not have a safety net at conventions or memorabilia gatherings. The players exist only as amber dipped memories of the fans. We cast off athletes like we cast off almost everyone else. They have no safety net and fans have very short memories. They know the pain of "once I was somebody."

Every professional athlete should be trying to maximize their income. We should not be surprised when they do this. We should not begrudge them seeking to maximize their gain with their very limited economic window of opportunity. We should also realize they understand fans better than we understand ourselves. Our momentary adulation and quicksilver attitude shifts cannot feed their kids or build their homes.

Sports Ethics: Have Fun!

2011-12-15T20:11:00.000-08:00

Several weeks ago the University of Washington football team struggled with a three game losing streak. A season that commenced with great promise teetered on the verge of collapse. The players held a players only meeting, a rare and important event for any team. After the meeting, several players announced that the team had reached a remarkable conclusion. The players needed to “have more fun.”

I believe this is a vital insight into how players should carry themselves in sport competition. Remember that in English we are quite honest about sports; we “play” sports. Many modern sports emerged not from practice for warfare but exciting and challenging activities that pushed the athletes and provided deep satisfaction in accomplishment and winning. You can see this with your pets playing or better yet when you coach or watch kids’ games, before the AAU and Select coaches get to them.

I remember coaching T-Ball for my six-year old kids. We’d set the ball on the T and someone would whack it with her bat and the ball would skitter towards second base. Seven kids would run to the ball laughing and shouting. Of course no one remained on first to catch the ball. We had to remind the hitter to run to first base, and the kids would flutter around second jostling for the ball. Someone would emerge from the six-year old scrum with the ball, but of course she had no one to throw it to at first. All the parents laughed, and as coach I swallowed my irritation and could only smile as all the practice we had gone through disappeared in the thrill of actual play. Now that was fun! That is sport. The joy, thrill and enjoyment of moving, learning, acting together grounds the fun of sport.

I don’t think the football team meant fun as in funny where people tell jokes or do hilarious and silly things that make us laugh. Laughter is an aspect of fun, but it narrows the concept to a particular aspect of fun. In the origins of the word this refers to fun as a form of hoax or silliness but the other fun suggests looseness and enjoyment.

I believe the football team meant, “we need to play loose; we need to play with abandon and experience the ferocious joy that lead them into the sport to begin with.” To have fun empowers athletes to commit and act upon their trained experience and fully perform without holding back, second-guessing or hesitating. Having fun reinforces and supports all the habits of mind and body that players develop. Neurologically when a person is unconsciously engrossed in an activity that engages and satisfies them, their brain lights up in a very different way than when they are worried or hesitating or thinking about what they are supposed to do.

The counterpoint would be the reminder that so many coaches and players will tell you that the NFL means the “No Fun League,” just ask Bill Belichick.

When a player is NOT having fun; they are playing tight. The tightness degrades cognate and physical efficiency and subverts trained habits. They may be thinking too hard about what they are doing; this act of thinking slows them down and complicates reactions. These nanosecond gaps give a competitor a significant advantage in challenging that player. An athlete might be trying to remember the correct response or the options that they have. Either way, it wastes time and reaction giving opponents significant advantages. Worse, when a player plays tight and worries and think it undercuts speed and confuses pattern recognition.

Often the thinking revolves around judging and assessing oneself. The slightest mistake or the concern over making a mistake leads to hesitation or misguided attempts to change on the fly undercutting efficiency of response even more.

Another variation will be when a player is constantly looking over their shoulder to the coach. They feel judged and evaluated, which they are, but they become so fixated upon what the coach might be thinking that they sacrifice their own training and reactions and lose speed and performance efficiency. Even when they may be learning to internalize a coach’s schemes or learn better ways to perform, this transition takes time, hurts performance and slows them down.

When a player is not having fun; they play worried. They hesitate; a hitch develops in their swing or throw or hit. Too much second-guessing spins out into tinkering in the middle of a game and what might become a singular failure turns into a self-reinforced slump. This attitude gets contagious as others pick it up or adjust because they cannot trust the slumping player, then they get out of sync or they have to think because the pattern training falters because the other play is not performing.

Psychologists speak of the moments of flow when a person literally lives the skill. They lose track of time but their mind, body, and emotions converge upon execution of what they are doing. This moment exists for all of us in any endeavor. When an athlete enters “a zone,” we mean they are experiencing flow.

Achieving flow and high performance especially under conditions of stress and competitive counters is allied with having fun. Fun links high performance, neurological efficiency and speed and efficiency of pattern recognition and action. Fun buttresses playing loose, trusting preparation and training and the satisfaction that derives from a job well done.

The Washington players were right; having fun matters to perform well and reach your highest potential.

Late Autumn: Leaves and Coaches Fall

2011-12-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

That time of year again. The leaves are falling and so are NCAA Division 1 coaches—24 and counting. This will exceed last year’s Division 1 windfall.

Along with the firing comes the hiring and the birth of new hope, the higher outlandish salaries and the retreads and often the hiring again of deeply flawed or wounded saviors for programs.

The world of athletic directors and college coaches remains very small and incestuous. Everyone knows each other, has worked or will work for each other. They all keep tabs, and most athletic directors keep a short A List of possible replacements if their coach implodes.

The lists often overlap, but the pool covers five areas:

1) Established high achieving coaches who are moveable from a comparable school.

2) An upcoming coach who has proven his worth at an FCS or lower tier conference and is ready to move up like Urban Meyer earning his moves from Bowling Green to Utah to Florida.

3) A hot coach like Brian Kelly at Cincinnati last year or this year’s Kevin Sumlin at Houston.

4) A senior coordinator either at atop flight college program or a professional program like Charlie Weiss before he went to Notre Dame or now to Kansas.

5) Someone on the sidelines for a variety of reasons, perhaps fired or disgraced like Mike Leach at Texas Tech, massive violations and probation like Rich Rodriquez at Michigan or someone who has voluntarily taken time off like Urban Meyer

The most recent hirings and firings reveal nothing good for college sports.

First, these new hires and their salaries confirm all the cynics that all the new revenue in college sports will be spent on coaches and facilities, not on student athletes. Bill Moos, the aggressive Athletic Director of Washington State University, could be speaking for any athletic director in the country after he spent 2.5 million for Mike Leach to coach his Cougars, “the revenue stream created by the new television contract and equal revenue sharing among conference members has enabled Washington State to invest in facilities, salaries and infrastructure.” Of course Leach’s salary is only the tip of what will be a 4+ million dollar iceberg with all his staff.

Did you see any mention of student support services or academic support services or health or counseling for student athletes there? Neither did anyone else. This is the new norm and the money will not find its way to student athlete welfare issues unless Presidents and Provosts force the issue. (Seattle Times, December 8, 2011 C4)

Second, two years and out! This year confirms one of the worst movements in college coaching: giving less and less time to turn around a program. Realistically it takes five years to turn around a college football program. Normally coaches inherit depleted talent and low morale. It gets worse because many recruits see the firing coming and shy away from the school. Despite this, boosters and fans have high expectations for quick turn around amped up by the high salaries.

A new coach usually takes the job in late December, by then most of the top recruits have committed. He has to run around just to hold on to the committed who are often not really fitted for his system. A new coach only gets a true class of his own student athletes in his second year. Most of them redshirt, so a coach does not field a team made up largely of their own players fitted for their system until year three, and only in year four do the recruits blossom into upper class leaders.

This year two coaches, Turner Gill at Kansas and Larry Porter at Memphis, were fired at the end of two years! Unless serious personnel issues are involved as in the sacking of troubled Mike Locksley at New Mexico.

This two-year trend sets an awful precedent. Two years proves nothing and magnifies the already absurd pressures to win fast and quick. The two-year threat just pushes more decent coaches to borderline practices or cheating or to look the other way when they discover rule violations by their players.

Third, the deeply flawed return. The rehiring of coaches such as Mike Leach at Washington State or Rich Rodriquez at Arizona reflects that small world of athletic directors. It also reveals the real bottom line--WINS.

I remember talking to an athletic director I highly regard and asked him why he had just hired a scandal-plagued coach. The AD cited a number—the total WINS the coach had amassed along with his scandals.

Rich Rodriquez wins, but he wins badly. He does not graduate his students; he downgrades academics and discourages his athletes from being students. He mismanages his coaches, ignores his compliance folks and blames his problems upon everyone but himself. He won at West Virginia without any oversight but at Michigan he failed at the most central duty of a coach, taking responsibility for oneself and one’s team. The athletic Director at Arizona is a smart and fine administrator, so I am really surprised to see Rodriquez back, unless we consider WINS.

The hiring of Mike Leach at Washington State makes its own sense. College coaching can breed some real weird guys whose great skill lies in winning games; Leach ranks right up there. He graduates his kids, but it is not clear he cares about them. He coaches a fun and interesting game but his “unique and quirky” style could not survive in the glare of endless publicity in a big city. Pullman makes sense for him as a second chance, but if the allegations of how he treated his concussed player are anywhere near true; he should not be coaching. WINS are the only reason he is. Someone better be watching WSU’s back.

The most interesting and challenging return is Urban Meyer going to Ohio State one year after retiring from Florida for reasons of mental, spiritual and physical health. He brings one of the quickest and most interesting minds back to the game. I honestly think he needs another year away and would have stayed in the booth if any school but Ohio State or Notre Dame had not come calling.

Meyer is relentless, demanding and a ruthless perfectionist who can demean and drive his coaches batty, but who always respected his players, even if he often let them get out of control off field. But he lost it the last two years. Too much intensity, too much perfectionism and an utter inability to remember why he was coaching, to develop kids, not just WIN. But he saw what he was becoming and knew enough to leave.

I think it is too early, but OSU got a great coach. They will need to watch him in a very different way. I also admire Meyer for his public honesty about the bouts of depression and perfectionism and the cost to his life and family that he permitted us all to see. The life of the modern American coach is brutal and ruthless, and his life reminded us of that.

Fourth, it has been a hard year for black coaches with three losing jobs already, and two of them after only two years. The NCAA and conferences claim to push schools to look seriously at minority coaches, but unless they impose an NFL Rooney rule, we will continue to see immense lag in minority hiring.

Not all the leaves have fallen and the new buds are not yet with us. But this year like last highlights how colleges lose their credibility and integrity in the game of coaches and the game of wins.

Sport Ethics: "I've Got Your Back."

2011-12-04T10:59:00.000-08:00

“I got your back.”

This promise has a profound role in American sports culture and in competitive athletics. The words are deceptively simple but involve a powerful promise that binds individuals together.

Take the words at face value. A person’s back may be their most vulnerable part. Our eyes cannot see behind us, and our ears point forward. The back defines a blind sport where athletes or people can be blind-sided. Notice also protecting another person’s back also assumes not just the vulnerability of the back but that another person or team is out to get a person.

We pledge, “I’ve got your back,” to people who have a vulnerable side and are exposed to competitors out to get them. This pledge binds two people and depends upon trust that the person will in fact be there to protect and that they have the skill and will to do so. Making that pledge takes on a moral responsibility to be there and to be good at what they do.

“I’ve got your back,” anchors the success of a team. It cements trust, loyalty and often competence on the team. On any good team including athletic teams, individuals have defined roles and responsibilities. The roles take tremendous focus, effort and skill. At high performance an athlete narrows their range of vision and effort. To perform at the highest level an athlete must trust that those around them will do their jobs so they can perform theirs.

More significantly when an individual commits and focuses, they narrow focus and create blind sports while zeroing in. Taking this risk and achieving intense concentration depends upon a player not worry about their exposure. They trust their teammates to cover them as in, “I’ve got you covered.”

For instance in football a linebacker depends heavily upon cornerbacks so that linebackers can read and commit. Fellow linemen on defense depend absolutely upon other linemen to fill a gap so they can stand in their own. In soccer the freedom and initiative of midfielders and forwards to attack depends upon having their backs covered by the defenders to prevent breakaways. I could go on but the point is clear.

Sometimes it is even more real. In contact sports, covering a back involves physically protecting a player’s health. For a quarterback the left offensive tackle protects their blind side. The tackle literally has their back and if they fail the quarterback can be blown up. In basketball weak side help literally covers the back of players who must commit on defense and leave lanes exposed. Another aspect of covering a back includes backing someone up when they make a mistake and covering for them to support the team.

This need to protect and cover explains the central role of constant communication in sports to alert, warn and anticipate. These warnings and protection are the essence of having someone’s back.

Sometimes having a back seems to require retaliation. If an opponent intentionally hurts teammates, players will take it on their own to pay back. Retaliation seems to restore the moral balance of the failure to “have your back,” and deters future actions. When a pitcher risks getting fined or thrown out of a game to hit someone when the other team has hit their player, they “got the back” of their teammates.

“I’ve got your back,” becomes a norm for a team culture. It thrives in a culture engaged in competition and combat with opponents. The promise cements the trust and reliance that empower teammates to focus with abandon on their task and take risks knowing loyal team members protect them.

“I’ve got your back” supports high performance. It deepens the loyalty and self-protection that teammates have for each other. It joins bonds that hold under stress. If a teammate is seen as unreliable and cannot be trusted to protect one’s back, the individual will be ostracized and isolated. The promise defines a moral glue and code.

“I’ve got your back,” can also lead to moral blindness. It is very hard to rat out a teammate who has protected you. It is very hard to betray someone you have trusted with your own safety or performance. It is very hard to give up someone who has done wrong if they defended you when you were in danger or being outmatched.

This bond of loyalty can be misplaced if it leads teammates to hide malfeasance. Yet one aspect of having a back involves covering for mistakes and being covered in return. The loyalty and bond of having survived competition or combat can lead teammates to simply refuse to believe or see when a person commits a wrong.

Several times I have participated in investigations of wrongful actions involving athletes on a team. The incident does not matter, what matters is how time and time again, no team members would identify what happened. Even if it involved an assault at a party, no one saw it. No one remembered it. Fellow teammates had each other’s backs not just in the performance on the field and together off the field, but the loyalty and bonding carried over to protect the malfeasance.

The simple promise “I’ve got your back,” can mean everything. It embodies loyalty, commitment, and shared membership in a common enterprise. The promise expresses integrity. It can lead people to sacrifice for others and to master their positions and help others do theirs. But, like all human practice, it can close up people and cover up wrong as well as enable the good.

“Old Men Forget:” Presidents Must Tell Coaches When to Leave

2011-11-25T18:23:00.000-08:00

Playwrights often depict tragedies where the blindness of an aging hero leads to acts of hubris that doom them. Aeschylus, the great Greek playwright, reminds everyone, “call no man happy until he is dead.” In Shakespeare’s King Lear, “robes and furr’d gowns hide all,” tells the familiar story of how position and success can lead to hubris, bad judgment and spawn the “cankers” of the mind that destroy judgment. Old age and unaccountable power ferment a witches brew that through history has corrupted leaders in all walks of life.

The story is all too familiar in every culture—a young hero and leader triumphs. They continue their success and aggrandize power and position and come to they identify with their position. They see themselves as indispensable and refuse to step down with dignity or honor intact. College sports is not immune to this unfolding tragedy.

Woody Hayes assaulted a player on the sidelines during the 1978 Gator Bowl and then attacked his own coaches as they tried to hold him back. Lute Olsen finished out his fine career amid embarrassment, recriminations, strokes and depression. Bobby Bowden was forced out of an extraordinary career after five mediocre years amid the humiliation of having a successor forced on him and being stripped of 14 victories. We have all watched the 84 year old Joe Paterno fall from grace over alleged disinterest in the sexual abuse by an old coach and member of the Penn State family.

Ohio States’ Hayes was 65 and had been regularly reprimanded for loss of control and assaulting people during his career, but despite the warnings of his superiors continued with his behavior. Olsen was 74 at the end of a brilliant and largely untarnished career, a gentlemen coach. He had bitterly resisted efforts to provide an honorable exit for him as he lost control of his game and life. Bowden was 80 and had forged Florida State into a football power He had fought efforts to move him out tooth and nail and the Board did not side with the President just as with Paterno.

Knowing when to leave with dignity and honor intact is a rare skill that few of us arrive at on our own and often we need help from friends or more vitally from our leaders. This is where Presidents should come in.

But knowing when to leave with dignity is hard but not impossible in life and in sport. Tony Russo’s recent retirement at the age of 68 after winning the World Series with the St. Louis Cardinals illustrates how it can be done. John Wooden stepped down at the age of 65 after winning his tenth national basketball championship. Dean Smith of North Carolina stepped down at the age of 66 after a brilliant career. In football Bo Schembechler from Michigan retired at the age of 60 after two Big 10 championships and Tom Osborne retired from Nebraska at the top of his game.

To survive for twenty years at one place in the cutthroat world of college sports requires coaching brilliance and persistence. It means the coach has won time and again and probably had to resurrect himself or herself. To keep passion and interest, they fuse their identity with the consuming activity of coaching. It is excruciatingly hard to step down from what they are great at, let alone what defines them as a person. Only superb self-knowledge or a very good President can deal with this temptation.

The key denominator for all these coaches who ended in embarrassed failure lies in the unwillingness of their Presidents to remove them. In leadership theory we would talk about “mentor them out!” In cases of celebrity coaches, athletic directors stand relatively powerless, and in the case of Olsen, Bowden and Paterno the Presidents refused to act when they should have. For just as the fool tells King Lear, the coaches need someone wiser to help them:

O, sir! You are old;

Nature in you stands on the very verge

Of her confine: you should be rul’d and led

By some discretion that discerns your state

Better than you yourself. (2.4:140-144)

Why do the Presidents fail?

First and foremost, a successful and visible college football or basketball program becomes a lodestar for a university’s identity and brand. Penn State built much of its rise in enrollment and national stature around the signal power of Paterno’s program and his old school charisma. Ohio State’s rise to national prominence followed the same path. A school like Florida State staked its brand and strategy directly upon the success of the football program. From an institutional perspective university administrations and Presidents are very reluctant to remove a coach who has come to represent their university. This is also why coaches must increasingly be pure as the driven snow in their public life because they now stand for the school and its values. The endless drum beating of publicity flaks and the ESPN world augment the college coach’s prominence. As the always thoughtful Don Wetzel argues, the media tends to “goddify” such coaches to everyone’s detriment.

Second, the power base of the coach transcends the power base of the President. The Board of Trustees takes a personal interest in the success of athletic programs. Universities deploy athletics programs as a forum to lobby and wine and dine officials and contributors. This places coaches at the center of the mix of public and private power that sustains modern universities. A coach’s relation with the Board expands to enmesh with rich and heavy weight boosters and contributors. Even if a President believes that the coach should retire for reasons, the Board and boosters may paralyze him or her.

Third, coaches are human despite the publicity around them. Individuals surround and lionize coaches. Fans quasi-worship and deify them. The ESPN media machines amplify this myth making. Everyone around them, their coaches, players, staff, fund raisers and sometimes Presidents have a vested interest in not telling the coach the truth; he or she would protect their legacy by going out on top rather than playing out the denouement of tragedy and mortification.

Coaches are humans. They succumb to the myth of their indispensability just like the political and corporate leaders who cannot give up power, success and repute. No one wants to leave it all behind and risk that horrible question, “wasn’t he once somebody?” Only the Presidents have the perspective and responsibility to deal with this and for them, “ripeness if everything.”

Paterno disgrace symbolizes the problem; the issue will arise soon at some other prominent programs. I do not blame the coaches, really. I would struggle for the self-awareness and discipline to leave in such a position. But very few who succumb to the temptations that Shakespeare and Aeschylus portrayed will leave in dignity and honor. They will bring down their institutions with them.

Just as these feel like classical tragedies, a classical virtue would have lead the Presidents to act and guard their institution and protect their coach—courage.

A Tale of Three Sports & their Unions-Part 2

2011-11-22T12:36:00.000-08:00

Part II

So how did an economically and media successful enterprise like professional football get dragged to the abyss and almost lose its season. Really bad negotiating tactics, animosity and mistrust between the negotiating teams hurt. The players believe correctly that they play the most dangerous and life threatening sport in the world besides boxing. They resent the owners cavalier cover-ups and drive for money by piling on more games at the risk of their health. The owners seemed totally deaf to these concerns driving the enmity. The real drive of the owners grew from a small group of very powerful owners who wanted to change the share split with players to maximize their large investments.

This should have been easy to resolve. The economic policies distributed playoff teams far and wide as well as guaranteeing that many unsuccessful teams could turn themselves around within one to two years. Parity in playoff access had become the norm in the NFL; it worked and inspired fanatical fan and media support. Despite all this and very strong incentives to settle peacefully, the culture of animosity and resentment of players and owners and power of the hard line owners lead to the four month lockout and a new contract at the last minute.

The players actually gained considerable advantages around health and safety issue with limits on practice and full pad time and new pensions for older players. The owners gained a more friendly percentage distribution but had to build in requirements that teams that receive revenue sharing must spend a very high percentage on salaries rather than use for profit and starve their talent pool. The salary cap remained harder than before. More limits upon rookie compensation will lead to more rational risk spending and increase the money balance to veterans. It is not ot a bad deal that could have been struck much earlier. It was worked out after bitter negotiations that reaffirmed a culture of antagonism and rogue owners till wishing unions would disappear.

The fact that the unions did use their Armageddon play and they did disband to challenge the ownership and competitive balance structure shocked everyone, including the players. It emboldened the NBA players, and cast a shadow upon the very similar but different negotiations of the NBA.

The NBA is a mess compared to the NFL. Assuming you can ever believe owners, it claims 22 teams of 30 lost over 300 million dollars. The league had steadily lost cachet, and media interest and attendance had edge downward for a decade with a slight blip last year. The incipient pro soccer league actually passed the NBA in per game attendance. The talent level remained superb, the skill level mediocre, and the too long season and grotesque playoff schedule where half the teams make it diminishes mid season games to the point of meaninglessness. The quality of play reflected it.

The NBA’s soft cap with too many exceptions had become nonsensical only really affecting young players. The league had developed salary ratios of 3 or 4 to 1 despite a cap. Unlike the NFL, the championships remained clustered within a small number of teams with mini-dynasties. The endless playoffs at the end of an insignificant and low TV rated season, generated little interest until the very end. The NBA desperately needs a hard cap or strong revenue sharing to ensure both a quality product and some reasonable level of profits, otherwise the cycle will continue. The losses, the bitterness, the off field culture of the league heightened already bitter anger between the two sides, and neither was willing to compromise despite being well within a ball park. In negotiating terms they had hardened their positions rather than looking to their interests. Unlike the NFL where calls for President Obama’s intervention rang out, very little public pressure arose to demand a settlement. For many folks the NBA season could disappear and no one would notice or care.

The NBA has another huge problem. For many fans, college basketball and March Madness provided an easy substitute. If the NBA did not play, it hardly mattered to many basketball fans because from November through March, they could watch passionate and interesting basketball with far better TV distribution than the NBA has. This substitute effect for the NBA reflects rising college ratings and interest along side slowly declining NBA attendance and wide spread indifference. The NBA culture and negotiations the focus upon zero sum issues and a strong substitute mean the league and players are making themselves irrelevant.

Baseball has had the longest and worst history including a cancelled world series, a nullified reserve clause and collusion actions. Yet this month a new contract will be signed with little fanfare or brittleness. In fact, baseball over the last twenty years has evolved into something resembling a partnership arrangement rather than the adversarial relation of the other sports.

Much of this grows from the abiding fan loyalty and comfort with the sine wave progress of teams and seasons. It grows because baseball essentially owns uncontested market territory from April through September. It grows from a remarkably successful economic model that generates profits, limited but effective revenue sharing from luxury taxes and stable or increasing attendance even as baseball has sunk into the shadow of football in terms of sports interest and wealth.

I wonder how much of this evolves from baseball not having a salary cap and living with incredible inequality in expenditures among teams. Maybe the lack of cap and guaranteed expenditure percentages displace the negotiations in a way that enables them to occur without being seen as zero sum games. I think the lack of a cap but very powerful luxury taxes permits the rich to spend freely but at the same time pay to subsidize others. This softens the libertarian and don't tread on me beliefs of many of the owners. Maybe a league that almost destroyed itself in 1997 and permitted itself to be humiliated by drug scandals collectively knew it could not afford the conflict.

Baseball moves much more slowly than football or basketball in talent development and team transformation. This leads owners to a longer-term view to begin with. But paradoxically baseball has had championships distributed across the widest array of teams of any sport, far more than NBA and more than the NFL.

This distribution of championships should not occur but it does for two odd reasons. First, baseball teams draft college players or invest in international or high school players and can keep them under professional contract for six years. This means that most teams keep players until their late twenties. The problem with baseball occurs when the rich teams simply buy up the best players from smaller market teams.

The catch and irony is that these rich teams must now give six to seven year contracts to players in their early thirties or late twenties, a totally absurd risk calculation. The average players peak years are 23-31, after that they steadily and and inexorably decline in skill and production. This means the rich teams are locking into huge contracts for two to four years of peak performance while the other teams got five years of peak performance years at much less money. This has resulted in older and slower rich teams who perform far more erratically than their salaries would suggest because of the age and long term contract factor. At the same time the sheer inequality has driven teams to be more innovative in player evaluation and scouting to offset these differences.

Oddly enough the bitter history seems to have generated a sense of partnership.This has been augmented by their Commissioner actually learning from past failures rather than magnifying them like basketball's David Stern. It leads to a “handshake” contract but also mutual willingness to address issues like signing bonuses and earlier availability for arbitration as well as moving teams from leagues or adding an extra wild card team. It also leads both sides to realize the integrity of the enterprise depends upon aggressive testing and to create cutting edge technology and requirements to test for human growth hormone.This supplements mandates that players must now wear a new helmet to protect them from 100 mph fastballs. Both sides realize they have vested interest in the reputation and physical integrity of the sport.

I think the fact the baseball achieves most of their competitive balance goals through luxury taxes rather than caps with exceptions makes the negotiations less bitter. The powerful and personally invested owners do have more freedom but they pay a heavy cost of up to 75 to 100 percent tax when they go over the agreed upon limits. The issues do not feel like zero sum games but rather permit owners to act if they are willing to pay the costs. This will now be extended to address the issues of huge rookie costs that are hurting everyone. The luxury tax money then gets redistributed. I don’t like it but the logic has worked to produce competition and balance when it should not.

Three sports. Two wars, one reached a treaty based upon the sheer money both would lose; one is on the verge of imploding for a decade over embittered relations and an economic model that does not work. One lives in hard-nosed comity because they learned their lesson and has made an incentive and penalty economic system that should not work but actually produce real competition. The culture ensnaring the two sides and the focus of economic relations had as much to do with these outcomes as the real issues involved.

A Tale of Three Sports and their Unions-Part 1

2011-11-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

Professional sports leagues require unions. Only a voluntary contractual agreement with organized players permits the apparatus of modern professional sports. Common apparel deals and common pool distributions as well as salary caps, required minimum expenditures on salaries and revenue sharing all need these agreements to protect a league from anti-trust challenges. The contracts permit drafts, compensation limits and trades to occur without restraint of trade challenges. Modern professional sport leagues deploy these devices to several vital goals:1)guarantee profit and return on investment; 2) maintain some competitive balance across big and small market teams; 3) police drug use; 4) give bad teams a chance to become better and construct balance competition over time. Despite each owners desire to win at all costs, they have a joint interests to steward steward a profitable sport with high quality games and competitive hopes for teams and fans.

Despite the central role of unions and their continuing and unique power, two labor negotiations broke down in acrimony—one lead the union to dissolve and players to sue the league, the other has lead to an impasse that may lose the season. Baseball, on the other hand, with little fanfare, just did a “handshake” agreement to extend labor peace to 20 years. I think these different outcomes flow from both the culture created between owners and players and the structure of incentives the contracts focused upon. In particular football and basketball narrowed in on a zero sum view of revenue tied to salary caps while baseball used luxury taxes and revenue sharing to address the chasm between small and large market teams.

Most team owners are unwaveringly entrepreneurial and aggressively libertarian in their politics. They hate having a strong union. In addition they tend to be very personally invested in the status and fate of their teams. This resistance coupled with periodic attempts to break the unions have blighted professional sports with thirty years of lockouts, strikes and bitter recrimination, reaching its height in the disastrous baseball 1997 seven month baseball strike that lead to a cancelled World Series or hockey losing an entire season in 2004-2005.

All professional sports are afflicted by the trend of large market owners buying up the best talent. Left on their own most sports would degrade to permanent oligarchies with permanent winners and losers and very frustrated and lost fans. It would also degrade the talent competition where one small group of teams would regularly trounce others based upon bought talent. Many of the union authorized mechanisms on revenue and drafts are to protect owners from destroying their sport through the dynamics of inequality in revenue as how to allocate costs among players.

In the last seven months the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball had their collective bargain agreements expire. The NFL involved a four-month lock out, ugly negotiations and recriminations and immense public pressure to settle. The NBA negotiations have imploded with the NBA verging on a lost season. Baseball, which has the longest and most bitter history, has a handshake agreement to put a new agreement in place without a lockout or strike four months before the start of spring training.

Why the difference? All the negotiations involved complex and unique aspects but the chasms exist over percentage of revenue dedicated to owners and players as well as devices such as salary caps and luxury taxes to save owners from themselves and sustain some competitive balance and quality product for fans and media.

What interests me is that two sports along with hockey have used salary caps to address the issue of escalating salaries and competitive equity. To me this has always made sense, and it drives me batty that baseball has never used one. Baseball permits oligarchs to dominate talent by letting teams develop players and then the oligarchs like Boston, Philadelphia and New York buy that talent when they become free agents. The irony is that the two leagues with salary caps have generated two different economic and competitive cultures that lead to the labor chaos. Yet baseball has eschewed the rational approach, but evolved this deeper peace and even a common venture model.

While unions are dying everywhere in the United States, they thrive in professional sports because of the monopoly and monopsony of the leagues and the very limited and highly skills population from which players develop. The contacts also insulate the enterprise from many anti-trust and restraint of trade charges. So why the immense differences in outcomes of the last three negotiations?

The issue driving owners remains as always maximizing profit, long term investment and maximizing their freedom and status from being owners. Given whom the owners are, they strongly prefer not to have unions or long-term agreements with their employees.

As an example, the bitterness and contractual brinksmanship in football makes the least sense. Professional football has become the most popular and profitable professional sports enterprise in the United States. If owners are to be believed, only two teams are losing money. Attendance and contracts rise yearly. The Super Bowl like March Madness has permuted into a cultural institution. The major device to generate quality of fan interest and quality of product has been a percentage split of revenue with players and a relatively hard salary cap.

With no guaranteed salaries, the football teams can seem to pay outlandish salaries but guaranteed salaries mean little. The real money has migrated to extremely high rookie bonuses and singing bonuses. This in turn softened the salary cap considerably. This hypothetical equality is augmented by some marginal revenue sharing to prop up smaller market teams who have trouble even reaching the salary cap minimum, but more than a few teams, as in baseball have not even spent their revenue sharing money on talent or salaries.

Part II will examine how the history and incentive approach influenced the approach and outcomes of these three labor negotiations.

The Penn State Scandal: How Good Men become Moral Failures

2011-11-11T14:25:00.000-08:00

This is very hard to write. I have been associated with intercollegiate athletics for 25 years and served for the last ten years in an official position in the enterprise. I have helped my institution through two major scandals. Always in the turmoil and craziness of this professional world, many of us could look to Penn State as a signal that intercollegiate sports can unite integrity and winning. They had a superb President and fine Athletic Director, and they hired coaches of skill and integrity; they won the right way. At the top of the pyramid with his model permeating the organization stood Joe Paterno who could coach, win, educate and do it without any major scandals. Paterno was not a saint but had become a symbol.

Now one of the beacons of an already stained world has fallen. I know many are writing about this unfolding tragedy so I will confine my discussion to the question of how honorable and good men could fail so profoundly to protect the lives and souls of ten-year old children. As I gaze upon the wreckage from a distance I only feel moral heartsickness for the children whose personhood was invaded and stolen while others watched silently.

We have all heard the story before. An admired and respected figure in an authoritative and hierarchical organization is accused of abuse of power. The members of the organization all know each other and work with each other in intense closeness. They know and trust each other. They have hired and promoted each other from within. They know that one of their own would not abuse their power especially not child molestation. No, this is not my Catholic Church, it is modern collegiate sports.

This problem is not only about child abuse, it is about the moral failure of people who are trustees of institutions. Organizations instinctively cover up abuse that can hurt their reputation and stature. Hospital teams tolerate surgical mistakes, police departments studiously ignore institutional corruption, corporations tolerate dangerous products.

We can say with certainty that as this tragedy unfolds two issues will become clear:

1. More and more children who were abused by the Assistant Coach and Defensive Coordinator Jerry Sandusky will step forward. A pattern of predation will be revealed that required a pattern of blindness, evasion and willful ignorance from those who worked with him.
2. It will become evident that more people, assistant coaches, trainers, grad assistants knew or strongly suspected Sandusky's depravity. Football teams and athletic departments are very close worlds. The assistant coaches all know each other’s business including who is having an affair, who has drinking problems and who is skirting rules. Trainers and staff support are all drawn into a tight intimate web of knowledge and mutual support. Nothing stays secret in these worlds.

College football lives in a we /they world. Teams are built as much upon loyalty as on competence. “I got your back,” is not a meaningless slogan but a reality on the field and in the dog eat dog competitive world of coaching and staffing. Being around folks you can trust and give loyalty defines players, coaches and staff.

This world of loyalty refines and hones its members and replicates itself by hiring and promoting from within. Even outsiders usually come in with personal connections; the world of elite intercollegiate athletics is very small.

This internal world of self-reinforcing loyalty, trust and personal networks is reinforced by the way so many of us lavish our trust and loyalty on these institutions. We identity with them, their leaders and players. This trust and loyalty grant them strength and privilege; in many programs the coaches loom far more powerful than the athletic director or the University President. Penn State epitomized this where Coach Paterno had ignored his athletic director and president’s desire to get him to step down for years.

This is the world that protected Sanduskys’s rape of children. His relation to the Penn State program as a defensive co-ordinator and a regular member of the community continued for 35 years. Even after he retired he had the free run of the facilities. He used his access to bring young boys, the vast majority of them minorities, to the facilities as reward. He gave them presents, many of them from the endless stash of stuff Nike and others bestow on schools. He took them to games and paraded with them at banquets and bowl games. These visits and gifts impressed and groomed the young boys for his exploiting. Many Penn State players performed their public service by working for his charity, The Second Mile, to help underprivileged youth.

So Sandusky used his affiliation and status with the program to seduce the children and as a place to sodomize and fondle and get oral sex from ten year old boys. The janitors saw and knew what was going one. They did not tell anyone out of fear of losing their jobs. They believed that no one would believe them. In the Grand Jury testimony the critical testimony comes from a then 28 year old graduate assistant who saw Sandusky sodomizing a ten or eleven year old in the Penn State shower room. The graduate assistant and now an assistant coach did nothing. He watched and did not intervene. He was shaken, talked to his father and reported it to his head coach Joe Paterno. Then, having discharged his conscience and duty. He then spent the next decade rising in the coaching hierarchy while watching Sandusky come in with children day after day. He did nothing to report or stop it.

The Head Coach claims he only heard about “horsing around” or just fondling and sexual touching. He did nothing. He did his legal responsibility of reporting this to his athletic director and to the Vice President who oversaw the operations. In a clear dereliction of moral responsibility, he did not nothing else. Maybe a slight reprimand, never followed up to stop horsing around. He permitted Sandusky to continue to have access to facilities and to bring children in to them.

The senior administrators knew they had a problem and knew they had an legal obligation to report this activity to the police. They did not. They claimed they took away Sandusky's key to the shower! The athletic director and Senior Vice President admit that they never enforced any prohibition against him. Their own testimony feels self serving and defensive. and basically just thought the graduate assistant was just "uncomfortable." The athletic director and Senior Vice President decided no crime had occurred At least the high school barred him from campus and reported him to the police when they heard an accusation about Sandusky's "inappropriate" conduct. But the University had other interests than protecting children.

The President, one of the best in the country, learned something had happened. How the graduate assistant’s picture of anal sex mutated into fondling and sexual touching and mutated into horsing around is a story in itself. Many organization compress and pare information so that senior leaders often miss the full nature of what goes on. For whatever reasons, President Graham Spanier did not ask the police or his administrators to pursue or look into this.

Several things happen to people under these conditions. First, if they see an immoral action of someone they trust and respect, they literally cannot believe what they see. The mind will often perform surgery and reinterpret what they see into a frame compatible with their respect and trust for the person. So rape becomes fondling, and fondling becomes horsing around. People’s minds will reconfigure the information and their mind will deny what they see. This happens first.

Other pressures augment institutional denial and cloaking. The Grand Jury report provides the grizzly initial narrative but below it lies other mixed motives. People who believe their jobs are on the line will also deny or change their perception. They believe they will not be believed because the trusted respected figure could not be a child molester. So janitors who need the job or graduate assistants, even strapping strong healthy 28 year olds, not only deny what their eyes show them, but rationalize it away to keep their jobs or keep open their upward mobility. This is abetted by the way organizations let people off the hook. A person has the responsibility to report what he saw to a superior and that is enough. The superior is supposed to take care of it. This hierarchy reporting lets people off the hook. They can say to themselves, "I did my duty," even when they fail their moral responsibility.

As rumors spread or people get hints, like watching Sandusky rest his hand on the thigh’s of young men during drives, the men who surround him as friends and colleagues cannot afford to admit what they are seeing. They see him taking ten year olds to banquets or to hotel rooms while on the road and explain it away as his "mentoring." In self-deception a person refuses to draw out the full implications of what they see. These are not stupid people, but they are “friends” with Sandusky. They have gone through the trenches of football combat and the ups and downs of winning and losing. They are bonded by fires of competition and having each other’s back.

If they spell out to themselves that Sandusky, their friend and colleague, abuses children, then they must face themselves. They will be human beings who have as a friend and mentor a moral monster, a man who uses his affiliation with them to recruit, groom and sexually abuse children. To unmask him would expose themselves to moral attack and guilt for their own moral failure of their choice of friend and model.

The intensity of this circle of loyalty and identity is reflected by the fact that these incidents occurred in one of the most homophobic institutions in America. The engraved homophobia at the heart of men’s sport’s culture should have exploded this incident. The fact that colleagues looked the other way not just from child abuse but from the homosexuality hints at how powerful this frame insulated people from seeing or acting upon Sandusky’s actions.

Finally, institutional loyalty and preservation play a role. Officials have obligations to protect and build their institution. The rise of Penn State to national prominence was built upon a solid foundation of athletic accomplishments, but the emotional driver and symbolic lodestone had been the football program, and the football program was Joe Paterno. Any threat to athletics threatened 25 years of building the university. An athletic director, a vice president and a president all have obligations to build and protect their institution. The reporting process, the discomfort of people to face the moral truth of a person they know and might admire combine to invite people to self-deception. The culture that limits responsibility to reporting to a superior makes it all the morally convenient. People can avoid being responsible to take action or even report to the police to stop the evil they saw. This legalism releases them from responsibility and falls apart if the superiors fail in their own moral stewardship.

It is too easy to deny or hide abuse. It happens in marriages where wives protect husbands who abuse children; it certainly can happen at a university. These men knew to act publically might bring dishonor and disgrace upon the athletic program and person who personified the Penn State brand. When push came to shove, the leaders found the language and the rationalizations to downplay immorality that could tarnish or scandalize the university and the football program that symbolized and contributed to its rise.

The failure here is profound and simple. Any one of these men could have stopped the evil. Instead they were morally lazy. They settled for benign interpretations that excused them facing the brutal facts and making hard decisions. All they had to do was report it to the police; all they had to do was obey the law even if they washed their own hands. All they had to do stop Sandusky’s access.

They did not.

They all deserve to be fired for moral dereliction.

We are not talking about dishonorable or bad men. That is the horror and lesson. This collective moral blindness can happen at any institutions to whom we give trust and who live by loyalty, “got my back” and competence. But they failed. They refused to see what was before their eyes. They refused to risk friendship or self-worth or their own institution’s reputation to protect innocent children.

In this they mirror of our frailty and remind us of own willingness to vest our own loyalty without accountability. Our own credulity gave them the warrant to continue their own moral blindness.

What is a "Sports IQ?"

2011-11-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

“He has a great basketball IQ!” an announcer exclaims after a fine pass from a point guard. “She has great soccer IQ,” an Irish brogue proclaims after a player slides into position to meet a great pass and head it in. I could go on but you get the picture. Lots of commentators and coaches believe in something they refer to as “sport IQ.” Coaches value it highly when recruiting athletes, sometimes as much as pure talent or skill. I think it is worthwhile to reflect upon what they mean by a sports IQ.

Let’s start by what they do not mean. First, coaches and commentators are not denigrating athletes. Americans tend to think of IQ as genetically determined like inherited talent. A genetic approach does not do justice to the immense investment of work and attention required to develop a sports IQ. Second, both announcers and coaches use it unconsciously to offset the “dumb jock” stereotype. The term reminds people that top quality team athletes deploy the attributes we associate with high-level intelligence. I also think that this language rebuts people who argue that black athletes are not as intelligent as white athletes—the same argument that denied black quarterbacks a chance to play for a generation. Finally, this language separates operational judgment and perception from sheer talent. The theory of multiple intelligences of Howard Gardiner talks about kinesthetic intelligence that would refer to independent aptitudes linked to natural musculature, vision and coordination. A sports IQ presumes far more than having talent or ability; these alone do not guarantee active engaged expertise and judgment.

IQ is supposed to measure a wide-ranging capacity for an individual to recognize, engage and solve complex problems. As we learn more of how the brain works, it becomes clear that intelligence involves the integration of multiple parts of the brain to blend perception, cognition, memory and emotion into the ability to turn sensory data into information and solve complex problems. Intelligence synthesizes both the general ability to employ the brain’s multiple resources and the trained ability to recognize the challenge and apply specialized knowledge to them.

In this sense, it does not make sense to talk about sports IQ any more than a legal IQ or engineering IQ. Instead the term covers refined and trained mastery or domains of expertise, but what the heh!

Sports IQ does fine, and here is what I think it means and suggests about athletes.

It means that athletes must know the game. Not just the rules, but also an athlete must cognitively master the intricacies of the game, its deeper logic and patterns. This takes study, practice, error, learning and more practice. The average time to “master” a field including athletics involves 7,000 hours of study and practice.
This knowledge requires study and practice and to see the game in a particular way. All competitive team sports unfold in patterns of flow. Teams design defenses and offenses as prototypes that players master during practice. Opponents learn them and also practice against them. These configurations have their own internal logics and give aways. The high sports IQ athlete learns to comprehend and act on these. The higher skilled athlete studies tape and practice to see the patterns and know how to recognize the patterns and act.
This means a high sports IQ requires cognitive preparation and knowledge as well as practice that refines perception, cognitive processing and muscle memory so that under the split second demands of sports, the athletes recognize the pattern. Pattern recognition is the foundation of most accomplished professional skills.
This trained recognition permits an athlete on a team to perceive the unfolding patterns of play and make out opportunities presented by them. Because they understand in an intense and trained way what is happening, they see possibilities opening up before them. Good athletes then judge and act with incredible swiftness and precision. Often coaches will comment on how well an athlete sees the court to describe this operational aspect of sports IQ.

Think of a football receiver who sees a cornerback shift their balance to anticipate a run. The receiver bursts through to create a seam to get open. Think of the quarterback who sees this unfolding and ignores his receiver check offs to pass to the receiver who found the opening. Think of a volleyball setter who becomes aware of the defense’s middle blocker shading to a left block. She suddenly changes to a middle quick set while in the air. Then her own middle blocker has to anticipate her action and be there to hit the ball.

In both cases one player sees an opening or opportunity and the other recognizes that their co-player has created this moment. They act in synergy. Basketball and soccer players always look for mismatches and play off each other hoping to create one. The player with the ball must be able to see when one occurs and instantly get the ball by foot or hand to the player with the mismatch.

A high sports IQ is enhanced when a team plays together for a while. Like in all teamwork being comfortable with each other, knowing each others tics and knowledge base and getting a feel and anticipatory sense all matter. The efficiency of teams depends upon building trust, respect and recognition. To maximize the sports IQ of the best players requires team cohesion. This permits that football receiver to know how best to position himself for the highest quality pass that the quarterback is comfortable with or for the volleyball setter to know exactly the optimal height for their quick set for that particular middle blocker. A high sports IQ without an experienced and cohesive team is not enough.

The whole language of sports IQ really means expertise and judgment in that particular sport. Good athletes have devoted the time and attention to develop into experts at what they do. They know the game, understand its structure and have through study and practice internalized perceptual, muscular and emotional knowledge and judgment to be at the right place at the right time. It sounds like a cliché but defines the truth of being an expert.

NCAA Reform: Great Start & the Battle Has Just Begun

2011-11-02T15:11:00.000-07:00

Last week the NCAA Presidents on the Board of Directors passed some of the most significant athletic reforms in thirty years. The NCAA Presidents confirmed their initial start at their retreat and expanded their work. Prodded by scandals, their own desire to reform and Mark Emmert’s relentless leadership, they acted on four major changes.

The reforms cluster in two related but vital areas. All are designed to improve student welfare and improve student athlete academic performance and they will face stiff resistance from many coaches and athletic directors.

They authorized Conferences to permit schools to raise the full grant in aid to student athletes by 2000 dollars over the existing room, board, books and tuition. This attempt to achieve real “cost of attendance” and give student athletes enough money to pay for transportation, snacks, movies and normal living of being a student. This emulates common scholarship offers to top academic students.
They prohibited school teams who do not graduate their student athletes at a rate of at least fifty percent from participating in NCAA tournaments or NCAA certified bowl games. This technically covers schools that do not achieve what is called an APR of 930. This is an algorithm that measures the rate at which players on a team stay in school and stay eligible. This decision builds on an early decision to raise the minimum APR requirement to 930. The original APR number had accreted so many exceptions that it no longer measured a fifty percent graduation rate. Like all major changes it will have a three to four year vesting period.
They put new limits upon the qualifications that student athlete freshman must meet to be eligible. Unlike past attempts to raise qualifications, this does not take away a year of eligibility. The new approach permits a student athlete to keep four years of eligibility but forces them to have restricted practice and devote more time to academics during their first year in college.
They authorized schools to award grant in aids as four year blocks rather than on a year-to-year basis. This gives schools the option to do this and will put immense pressure upon everyone to do this since if one school does it, it becomes a considerable recruiting advantage.

The first point to remember is that this was not easy. Reformers and faculty have been pushing for cost of attendance for decades. The reforms have been stopped by the death by a thousand cut process of the NCAA and by the virulent opposition of the midrange football schools and many basketball schools who do not want to spend the money and fear it will only reinforce the have and have not world. Basketball coaches will be up in arms over their inability to play freshman immediately under the new academic eligibility rules.

The whole process could still falter. The NCAA is a membership organization and Emmert’s strategy has depended upon using the Presidents and the Board to get things accomplished. This bypasses the paralyzed and cumbersome process that takes 2-3 years and kills most good ideas. If enough membership schools can get a petition, they will seek an override vote. First they can send legislation back to the Board and then seek a full membership vote. Membership votes have killed many good ideas in the past where the midrange schools and basketball schools ally and stop “expensive” reforms. Already coaches and athletic directors are mobilizing to stop it. It is also where coaches have great sway given their input with athletic directors.

For me the increase in awards are about simple justice. The average elite student athletes now works 20-40 hours a week for nine months a year on their teams. Even in off-season they work on conditioning, tape watching and skill development as well as informal scrimmages. These student athletes have no time to hold outside jobs given their commitment to the team and the implicit conditions of their scholarships.

In addition a high percentage of athletes in the revenue producing football and men’s basketball teams come from poor backgrounds. They have very little money and scrape by with no way to call parents, return home on holidays or spend funds on small things like movies or hanging out with friends. During the breaks between dorms and apartments, they live a precarious life sleeping on the floors of friends or spending holidays with a few caring parents. Another strong hope is that actually giving them enough to live rather than scrape by at penury will lesson the incentive to take small sums of money from agents and runners or sell their paraphernalia for pocket change. This won’t stop all of it but a surprising number of the cases of money from agents or selling paraphernalia involves very small amounts doled out to help students live.

This is not a perfect solution but much better than what we have now. Most of us who have fought for this would much prefer $3200 that is the best estimate we have of the real cost differential.

Quite frankly, all the schools have gotten away with grant in aids that are too low and should have to pay the real cost for their student athletes. These schools have held the NCAA and student athletes hostage for years. This makes strong sense for reasons of justice and fairness to the student athletes. All the BCS conferences will do this and reluctantly the other conferences will follow suite. The nice part about this is that once one conference does it, everyone else will have to do this for competitive reasons. That is what the Presidents and Emmert are relying on.

Coaches and athletic directors hate the next reform that permits schools to award grant in aid for four years subject to meeting basic academic progress. The Presidents insisted on this one, and it is important. Right now all grant in aids are given for one year at a time. The coaches and athletic directors believe four-year grants will lose them leverage over problem players. They will be forced to keep players whom they regard as poisonous or disruptive or ones who do not try and hurt the team.

To be honest most schools do their best to make an award a four-year award. First, it is good policy because if you run players off, others will counter recruit against you. Second, most coaches accept that they must be willing to live with their mistakes on talent. If a player brings effort and commitment but may not be as talented or develop as high as coaches hoped, the vast majority of schools live up to the implicit bargain of making a one year grant a four year grant. Most schools, if a player really does not match the school for talent or academics, will help the student athlete find a better fit school and transfer in good standing.

Most schools is not good enough. The real crunch times occur when new coaches come in under pressure to win fast and want their kids to match their system. It also happens when a sitting coach is under pressure and needs to win quickly and wants to change their talent level. It is not unusual for such coaches to try and run student athletes off or use informal and even abusive tactics to get students to leave. The Presidents are clearly aware of these dangers and cases like South Carolina make it clear that given the pressure coaches are under, these abuses could continue. Even though I believe most schools treat these boundary carefully and do not abuse it; enough examples exist to make what the Presidents do make sense.

The Presidents also believe that the much larger financial commitment of a four year award—200,000+ at a private or 120,000 for out of state public—will help silence critics who claim schools exploit student athletes with limited return. This is the Presidents voting no confidence in their athletic administrators and coaches. Expect athletic directors and coaches to fight a guerilla war on this on a school-by-school and case-by case-basis.

The last reforms pump up the APR and culminate a decade long growth in reform that began with Myles Brand and the Presidents. The press rigidly ignores the steady increase in graduation rates among student athletes over the last decade. They also ignore the success in the most at risk and money driven teams of men’s basketball and football. Even the rates of minority graduation have gone up.

The key driver to all this has been the APR rate. This rate monitors retention, staying eligible and meeting required benchmarks. Fear of losing scholarships and worse drives this success. If a team or school does not graduate their athletes at a fifty percent rate as predicted by the APR, they lost scholarships and access to NCAA championships.

This changes everything. Suddenly the coaches’ self interest aligns with academic performance. Coaching jobs depend upon talent on the field. This depends upon recruiting and if they lose scholarships, they lose competitive advantage.

For those who work in the trenches of academic support, the transformation has been amazing. Now coaches willingly meet weekly with athletic support to follow each student’s progress. When coaches evince intense focus on academics student athletes pay attention in a way they never could quite take from the blandishments of academic support staff.

Now the Presidents have upped the ante again. After a four year phase in which makes perfect sense given how hard it will be to change behavior, failed APR teams will not get to the tournaments or bowls. The entire post-season world changes.

This may matter most for the basketball schools that already graduate a paltry number of minority athletes. They, however, depend heavily upon post-season participation in the NCAA tournament and March Madness. Being in the tournament brings them the visibility and stature they crave.

The overwhelming purpose for most schools to invest in sports at this level pays off through the tournament or going to a bowl. Now academic failure immediately eliminates the raison d’être of the team. This change amplifies and powers up the pressure to get academic achievement not just from coaches but to push schools to invest in the level of academic support athletes need. If it really works, it will drive schools to invest more money in academic support to help their underprepared athletes become real college student athletes.

This brings us to the last reform and a very vital one. Most elite football and basketball programs bring in a number of superb athletes who are not academically or culturally prepared for college. Not that they cannot succeed at college but for reasons of situation and talent, they are far behind their compatriots in academic preparation and socialization. They enter college very underprepared often at reading and math levels in the mid or high grade school level. With intense support and commitment, these underprepared student athletes can develop into qualified students, but it takes time.

To be blunt, bringing in an underprepared student athlete who identifies as an athlete not a student and is asked to practice 40 hours a week and compete in a full season and then be a student is too much. Given several lost lawsuits, the NCAA has been paralyzed about raising academic aptitude standards around SAT and ACT tests. They rely heavily upon grade point average that can be a very powerful indicator but often distorts real level given the uneven quality of high schools.

For fifteen years the NCAA has moved to increase the requirements at the high school level to increase student athlete preparation. It has helped slowly but steadily. But it is not enough and too many underprepared and “at risk” student athletes come in and are overwhelmed trying to compete in the first year as students and athletes. This is especially the case in basketball where teams rely heavily upon freshmen.

This new rule, which will depend heavily upon the exact standards set, now permits seriously at risk student athletes to enter college and keep four years of eligibility. But it limits their practice time and will not let them compete there first year. It represents a modified return to freshman ineligibility that no one can afford but most coaches and faculty would love to see returned.

This year of “academic readiness” hopefully will help acclimate the young players who most need it to the culture shock of attending college and learn to be a college student. It gives them a respite to learn to be a student and preserves their future as athletes. But expect huge push back on this. The basketball only schools will be incensed that they actually have to educate their players and many elite coaches who live off of one and done players will oppose this. For basketball more than any other sport, freshman players provide quick fixes and the coaches will be loathe to give this up. They will lobby their athletic directors and Presidents to nullify this rule.

If done right, it can also address another embarrassment, the one and out basketball players. Most incoming highly recruited basketball players who plan to be one and done are not academic balls of fire. The hope here is that if they are not academically prepared and know they will have to sit a year, they will forgo college and go right to the pros or Europe, but not come to college to sit for a year. It also means that coaches will have to think hard before they go this route and also push student athletes harder to get a better high school preparation.

This is the second installment; a lot more needs to be done. The athletic directors and coaches will fight back one rule at a time, and the Presidents have to stay involved at the campus level. The moral cesspools of recruiting and agents still remains, but in six months the Presidents and Mark Emmert have broken a twenty-year logjam. It is a good start but the effort cannot slack. .

Membership of the NCAA Board

Division	Committee Positions	Title	Name & Institution	Conference	Term Expiration
FBS	Member	President	Harris Pastides University of South Carolina, Columbia	Southeastern Conference	APR 2015
FBS	Member	President	John G. Peters Northern Illinois University	Mid-American Conference	APR 2013
FBS	Member	President	Lou Anna Simon Michigan State University	Big Ten Conference	APR 2014
FBS	Member	President	Nathan O. Hatch Wake Forest University	Atlantic Coast Conference	APR 2014
FBS	Member	President	Sidney McPhee Middle Tennessee State University	Sun Belt Conference	APR 2014
FBS	Member	President	Stan L. Albrecht Utah State University	Western Athletic Conference	APR 2014
FBS	Member	President, President	David Schmidly University of New Mexico	Mountain West Conference	APR 2012
FBS	Member	President, President	Edward Ray Oregon State University	Pac-12 Conference	APR 2012
FBS	Member	President, President	Guy H. Bailey Texas Tech University	Big 12 Conference	APR 2014
FBS	Chair	President, President	Judy Genshaft University of South Florida	Big East Conference	APR 2013
FBS	Member	President, President	Steadman Upham University of Tulsa	Conference USA	APR 2014
FCS	Member	President	David J. Skorton Cornell University	The Ivy League	APR 2015
FCS	Member	President	F. Ann Millner Weber State University	Big Sky Conference	APR 2012
FCS	Member	President	William R. Harvey Hampton University	Mid-Eastern Athletic Conf.	APR 2013
FCS	Member	President, President	William A. Meehan Jacksonville State University	Ohio Valley Conference	APR 2013
DI	Member	Chancellor	Timothy P. White University of California, Riverside	Big West Conference	APR 2015
DI	Member	President	E. William Beauchamp, C.S.C University of Portland	West Coast Conference	APR 2012
DI	Member	President, President	David R. Hopkins Wright State University	Horizon League	APR 2015

World Series, Comebacks & the Focus of Athletes

2011-10-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

I give up on baseball a lot. If you had followed the Kansas City Athletics and now the Seattle Mariners, you would too. If you look at the gutting of great but poor teams every year you would too. Last night I gave up on the World Series. I turned off it off in the 7^th inning with Texas leading the Cardinals 7-4.

Three minutes later a good friend called, “you have got to see this,” he laughed. I turned it back on and witnessed history and athletic greatness. The Cardinals pulled to within two.

Now it is the ninth inning. Both teams bullpens are fried. Both teams exhausted, but still in the game. The lead changes six times during the game, and the Cardinals come from behind five times in the game. Add five errors to the mix. This is about greatness not beauty

Now it is the bottom of the ninth and the Cardinals are up to bat and down by two runs. It should be over. Neftali Feliz is throwing 98 mph. Two men on base with two outs and two strikes on David Freese, the St. Louis third baseman with one error in the game.

Kids dream of these moments. They hum the roar of the crowd, frown and stare; they focus; the kid can be either the pitcher who strikes the guy out or the batter who hits the home run. Either way, this is baseball, pure.—skill and focus against skill and focus. No people bumping and guarding you, no intermediaries, just one player pitching to another. No more naked moment of competitive testing of skill and focus exists in sport.

More often than not, this moment ends with an out. The great Casey strikes out in Casey at the Bat for a reason; that is the baseball norm. The odds of getting a hit with two outs are low. The odds of getting a hit with two outs in the bottom of the ninth are infinitesimal. Freese looks blank, clear and ready. Feliz delivers, and Freese rips a triple to left; two runs score. Game is tied and on to extra innings.

Top of the tenth, game tied again. The Rangers’ Josh Hamilton has been hobbled all year and is fighting a slump. He comes to the plate with a man on. Hamilton looks oddly at peace but poised, ready. He slams a home run, and the Texas Rangers are up by two in the tenth.

Now it is the bottom of the tenth. The fans voices come out strangled and hoarse; no one can quite believe the game. The Cardinals have no one left on their bench. Somehow two more cardinals end up on base. One scores on a fielder’s choice. The Rangers stand one strike from their first World Championship.

Lance Berkeman a grizzled veteran only Tony LaRusso could love walks to the plate. He settles in, takes in his surrounding and battles. The at bat culminates again with two outs and two strikes. Berkeman loops a single, and a run scores. Game tied, again. I turn off the sound for a moment and can’t shout anymore having blown my voice.

Point of information, like many fans I underappreciated this World Series and I was watching it without really have a team, so I told myself. It was an aesthetic exercise watching for enjoyment of the game. I mean I am from Kansas City and American league born and bred so how could I root for the Cardinals? But as often happens to neutral fans like I wanted to be, your body betrays you. When the Rangers got ahead my stomach clenched. Whey the Cardinals tied, I hooted. So league and state rivalry aside, I could not root for the team that signed Alex Rodriquez from the Mariners.

So a hum drum top of the eleventh and then David Freese walks to the plate again, first batter in the top of the eleventh. No need to be dramatic, he hits a walk off home run. People scream, shout, yell, dance. The Rangers trudge off in disbelief and tonight game seven will be played.

I do not know who will win tonight and do not believe it matters to the greatness of the game I witnessed and the two teams both coming back in the ninth, tenth and eleventh innings.

The point of the game to me is how Freese, Berkeman and Hamilton exemplified moral and psychological component of an elite player.

An elite athlete remains a relentless competitor. As Winston Churchhill admonished they “never, never, never give up.”

Lance Berkman got it right. When asked “what were you thinking when you went to bat” in the tenth? He answered, “I wasn’t thinking.” He is absolutely correct. To succeed at this level a player cannot afford to think. It cuts your reaction time. If you think, you’re done. A good player comes to the plate being totally present; not blank, but fully aware. They are anticipatory without anticipating, that commits them too early.

The art of superb play requires total prepared focus and recognition that enables a fine athlete to strike with the right response at the right time. Players on both teams demonstrated this.

The other side of focus and presence is not to get distracted. The world may be going crazy around you, the stakes may be suffocating and the energy may be flowing, but a player cannot afford to be moved by emotions. Emotions distract perception; they color recognition and push people to give up, try too hard, or just lose their timing.

Any one of the players could have been diverted even a nanosecond by the pressure, stakes and noise. Instead each collected himself called up his prepared awarenss and responded, well.

I know that I do not have the mental intensity and toughness to be an elite athlete or manager. I give up too much easily especially on baseball. Luckily the players in this 2011 World Series did not.

Sean Payton's Injury--Never Forget the Violence in Football

2011-10-24T18:09:00.000-07:00

It can all look so clean and strategic on TV. The TV overlays emphasize the patterns and schemas of the football teams. The dangerous combination of beauty and force enamors football fans. But all this distanced and technologically enhanced viewing can distance and hide the reality from us, one I have mentioned before—force and violence rule football.

This week Sean Payton, the coach of the New Orleans’ Saints sat in the box calling plays, he could not be on the sideline. He is recovering from surgery last Monday to repair a torn meniscus and a broken left tibia. One Sunday ago an NFL player ran out of the sidelines and collided with him and Payton's leg fell under the player. Payton went down. His quarterback later joined him on the disabled list with a shattered collarbone.

Payton is not a small guy and full of the intensity and intelligence common to good football coaches. Yet the collision when he fell under a player fractured his tibia, tore his meniscus and left him with massive contusions.

You can look at the weekly list of broken and battered players who are out for the season in football, college and professional to remember that sheer collective force impacted on the human body by weaponized football players. We can follow the funeral track of premature dementia for men whose brains are battered to insensibility by the game or crippled forty five year olds. We have long lists and codes and forgotten faded once players to remind us.

What happened to Payton really should make clear to us fans on the side of the sheer energy and might unleashed on the football field.

When you stand on the sideline during an elite football game, the sheer vital force on the field overwhelms your senses. The players move so fast; they loom so big and the hits are so fierce you flinch when you feel the concussive power. You can see the players hold their bodies taught to hold the pain or bay or adjust a gait to protect a sprain, hit or bruise. The sheer sound and shaped force can be overwhelming. It feels nothing like the more sterile sense you get watching television. The graph below demonstrates where football hits rank compared to the G force impacts of flying jet airplanes!

Much of that power and ferocity is blunted by technique or the armor that players wear. But in Payton’s case we see the sheer violence unleashed upon an unprotected human being by a weaponized football player in full armor. An 200 plus pound football player impacts with 1600 pounds of force when he hits another player. If both players are moving that combined force grows to multiple G levels of force. In the professional league almost 300 players weigh over three hundred pounds and multiple that force impact even more.

The unprotected human body does not stand a chance. It breaks under the impact.

This reminds us that football employs mass+speed=force=impact to achieve its goals. This collision involves immense force and when it is inflicted upon a human body, it transmogrifies into violence. Beneath football's controlled force lurks ever present violence that impacts and hurts the human body.

Violence is force that inflicts pain and disruption to the human system. Every single football player imposes violence on every player on the field for every play. We should never forget this. Technique and armor diffuse some of this, but each player from grade school to professional ball endures this violence. It requires courage and strength and commitment and perhaps a little bid of madness.

As Payton’s experience reminds us, football would shatter normal humans. It would bruise and rupture our tissues; break or splinter our bones; rattle and disable our brains.

When we watch and take pleasure in the game and the beauty and power of the game, we should never forget the foundation of violence upon which it is build..

Only in Baseball: Fielder & Sabathia as Athletes

2011-10-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

I was watching this most unanticipated World Series and wishing that the Yankees and Brewers were there. I really hate the Yankees so this has nothing to do with loyalty. No, I wanted to sort of test a hypothesis that my son and I argue about over the years. Baseball provides a haven for the most out of shape athletes in the world.

He claims that baseball is the one sport where players play who can in no way be considered real athletes. He strengthens the argument with illustrations of how many obviously out of shape lumpens actually play baseball and do so successfully. With considerable sarcasm he points out that these so called players can’t run fast or far; they are not really strong in a mano a mano sense; they are not real quick and, above all, they do not look like athletes. He likes to cite two obvious cases: Prince Fielder and C. C. Sabathia. See these pictures as evidence.

So I wanted to watch a series where two of the most out of shape and least athletic looking human beings I have ever seen were playing. Oddly enough they both seem to possess unidimensional and unique baseball talents that seem little related to a standard or classical conception of athleticism based upon form, speed, strength, courage and elegance..

Anyone who watches baseball knows what I am saying here. Only in baseball could you get body shapes and types of these two. We are not talking about the muscular strength and size of offensive linemen with their remarkable combination of size, strength, mass and intelligence. We are not talking about the fierce combination of strength and courage that goes into one on one battles in football or soccer or basketball where players jockey for position and movement. Certainly we are not talking about the vast endurance, quickness and strength of the modern soccer player, nor the svelte endurance and elegant form of a modern swimmer.

No, we are talking about guys who never hit triples because they would die of heart attacks between second and third. We are talking about guys who would faint the second time up and down a soccer field and guys who would suffer multiple contusions and life threatening damage if we put them in a football uniform. Can you imagine any of them trying to leap in basketball or volleyball? They would strangle themselves in the volleyball net and would suffer heart failure on the basketball court. Girth and width and ponderousness are not qualities any other sport, except sumo wrestling, values. Of course it is also a sport where the Red Sox demonstrated that star players can eat fried chicken and drink beer during games

I am not denying that some baseball players are superb athletes and many have speed and a remarkable quickness to hit and field. I love baseball but one of its true anomalies is how human beings so obviously and incredibly out of shape and lacking endurance, quickness, speed can actually play and succeed in a professional game.

I think we should celebrate this fact that the nonathletic can play baseball and make it into an icon. After all think about Big Papi, David Ortiz, the immobile designated hitter for the Boston Red Sox. In fact the designated hitter, kind of like being a pitcher, creates a role that permits such individuals to play the sport. We might add the beloved Kung Fu Panda Pablo Sandoval of the World Champion Giants from last year’s World Series.

The best analogues I can think of are the accidental seven footers who populate basketball. Many of them have not so great coordination and might be quite slow or have hard hands or little leaping ability. But they are seven feet tall and can take up space and work in a narrow zone when surrounded by four athletic, swift, quick and strong players. And at least they can run up and down the court innumerable times without dying or fainting.

So let’s hear it for baseball. A last bastion! where out of shape people can still play a professional sport. Who else can say that?

Moneyball: Changing a Culture & the Red Sox II

2011-10-15T19:45:00.000-07:00

In Moneyball Oakland changes their draft approach and the movie hones in on how they significantly change their free agent and trade approach. They do not try to replace the lost star players with their full array of talents. Instead Bean and De Podesta seek to replace their totality with a group of players who can get on base and produce runs. This means scanning the horizon for “damaged” players who may not be great all around but manifest the skills at producing on base percentage and runs that the team needs to compete.

This leads to serious conflict with his scouts who cannot and will not understand what he is trying to do. They reflect battles that still occur today in some organizations and certainly in the blog sphere between people committed to evaluate players and teams by statistical approaches that James pioneers and those who reject it in favor of classic personal scouting and broad gauged character analysis.

With the amount of money invested in modern players and with a very limited budget Beane needs higher probability returns than traditional scouting and building upon high school players can provide. He also needs a more granular analysis of particular and unique skill sets that can produce maximum return in runs and game. This is all prelude to the modern game’s obsession with terms based upon value over replacement where players are seen as radically fungible producers of certain necessary skills and outputs.

Oakland's perilous economics and the new market conditions leave with little room for error also requires that Beane act ruthlessly when things do not work out. In this he must essentially usurp the function of his manager in terms of player assessment and team assessment. When Jeremy Giambi does not work out, he trades him. Art Howe, an almost unrecognizable and spot on Philip Seymour Hoffman, plays his imperial manager who gets all the credit for the success and blames Beane for the failure. When Howe refuses to play Beane’s choice for first base, Beane trades Howe’s preferred player. When Howe will not start one of Beane’s projects, he trades the pitcher Howe was using. In essence Beane redefines the role of the manager as a subordinate to a game and team plan that focuses upon maximizing a production function. It also gives the manager a large number of new tools such as a ball by ball breakdown of the probabilities of hits or outs which can open an entirely new world to a thoughtful manager.

The movie demonstrates Beane and De Podesta slowly educating and changing some of the players approach to the bat by explaining to them the reality of what happens when they are 1-0 rather than 0-1 at the plate. Suddenly not overswinging makes concrete sense in terms of how it increases a person’s chance to get a hit or get on base. Players slowly began to change As they educate and change the culture of the players and club house, they are aggressive to remove players that do not fit or disrupt the model.

The team sets a record with a 20 game winning streak after some disastrous starts. More importantly the success comes in the face of an incessant attack by most of the baseball establishment and insiders on Beane and this new approach. If he had failed, it would have set back the cause of analytic assessment of talent by a decade. Instead it jolts the mainstream, and one year later finds one of Beane’s admirers Theo Epstein reconfiguring the Red Sox by Beane’s principles to bring them two world series and end the “curse.”

Notice that I did not mention once that the movie stars Brad Pit who does an intense but winning star turn as Billy Beane. Pitt makes the movie but does not dominate it. For the movie tells a deeper and powerful story—any culture can become closed and blind to its own weakens. It reminds us that outsiders and good data analysis can reveal hidden patterns and important insights that anecdote and insider common knowledge miss. Too often cultures without clarity of analysis about what it is looking for resemble echo chambers repeating wisdom that sort of worked but may be less relevant for new conditions. Beane saw this and Epstein proved what happens when you couple that analysis with real money in the Red Sox success.

The movie works and reminds us that it takes courage and commitment as well as decisiveness to inject data and analysis into a self-referential and closed world. It helps to add some desperation and urgency to adapt to a new world. Serious culture change also takes a willingness to fail and take the slings and arrows of abuse. In Beane’s case it helps to have a daughter to give him perspective and keep him sane.

I find it ironic and hard that after Billy Beane turned down the General manager of the Boston Red Sox, one of his disciples and admirers, a very young Theo Epstein, deployed the same statistical acumen and focus upon run scoring and bat discipline aided by money to win two world championships. Now exhausted after triumphs and living in the intense world of Boston sports, he may be ready to move on for very human reasons.

Theo Epstein brought two world series and revified a town and region. He ended a curse and held the team together a couple years ago when it might have gone south. Yet his team collapsed last year. Now his manager has left and it looks like Epstein will also leave Boston to go to the Chicago Cubs and see if he can exorcise another curse.The whole Boston mess saddens me but also reminds us about how a culture must be sustained even if the analytic foundations are laid. Remember Beane moved out players who did not work or perform and usurped his manager when he needed to. That did not happen in Boston's nose dive.

No one is quite clear what dynamic lead to the implosion of the Red Sox, but they represented in many ways the best the traditional and sabe metric analysis can buy. But in the stretch, the team fell apart and spun into an emotional tail spin that lead the team to come apart at the seam in terms of cohesion and performance. It happened fast, in less than six weeks. Now ugly stories are leaking out and the blame game has started, but we have some sense that levels of discipline, commitment and focus within the team may have changed.

It may be in modern athletics or in any organization, ten years of leading is enough. The Red Sox owner John Henry saw the power of integrating statistical analysis but mused on the human reality of trying to lead a well assembled team. "The fact is that being general manager in Boston, being manager in Boston, is a terrifically tough job." There may be a "shelf life" to leading in such intense crucibles as Joe Torre or Pat Riley and others have illustrated over the years. It may mean that the community has forgotten what it gained. It might mean that the team forgets what brought it success. It might be that the leader no longer has the energy to see through the emotional craziness—although no one claims the Cubs fans are sane. Epstein’s leaving after the collapse of the Red Sox has its own somber logic.

Luck, culture, contagion, momentum all can play their roles. Good leaders can use fine analysis to assemble a team that should work on paper, but the analysis only changes the probability, humans have to do the rest.

Moneyball: The Challenge of Changing a Culture I

2011-10-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

The success of the movie Moneyball provides a remarkable juxtaposition with the implosion of the greatest success of moneyball’s lessons, The Boston Red Sox. Both the movie’s story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics and the crumpling of the Sox provide strong lessons on the challenges and perils of trying to change a culture, in this case baseball. As is often the case with the sports, the story of Moneyball presents a deeper lesson about society and us.

Changing a culture is hard, very hard. A culture possesses great resilience and is supported by a self-reinforcing world of recruitment where people are socialized into its norms, rise in the ranks and then succeed. The insiders then recruit and train people who replicate them and if the organization succeeds, all these norms and languages and rituals reinforce each other.

Every organization possesses this inertia but few possess such a staggering array of accreted norms and rituals and self-reinforcing clubs as baseball. Moneyball, the movie version of Michael Lewis’ brilliant book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an unfair Game tells a powerful tale of an attempt to confront and change the culture of baseball.

People in organizations spend most of their life evaluating other people. They do this every day even in so simple an act as deciding whether and how to answer someone’s email. The key to a culture lies in self-replication of the people and creating a common set of understandings and judgments. Moneyball sets the stage of professional baseball that bares daily judgments through the relentless competition that exposes players and managers to ruthless culling.If you can change how people see and evaluate others, you can change the culture. This is the story of Moneyball.

Moneyball makes clear evaluating players and building teams has three components. The first involves decisions to draft a player and invest in them through the minor league and bonus system. The second comprises whether to get rid of a player by cutting or trading. The trade involves both a decision to get rid of a player but also to add a player. The third dynamics grows from the decisions involved in trading but plays out as decisions to release or sign a free agent. Baseball teams like any large high performing organization incessantly evaluates, hires, fires and brings in new talent build a high performing team.

The movie introduces Billy Beane the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. The Athletics represent the dilemma of all baseball where some very rich clubs dominate long-term talent and few clubs eke out an existence with budgets 25 percent the total of the rich clubs. Despite this difference, Beane’s teams have done well and in 2002, the year of the book/movie exceptionally well. That year the Athletics, like the Rays last year, their three top players—Beane must perform the impossible task of replacing his best players in two ways through the new draft and with free agent signings or trades.

The movie does not have time to examine Beane’s revolutionary strategy in the draft where he knows he cannot sign a number of players coveted by the Yankees or represented by Scott Boras who will hold them out. Common wisdom called for drafting very young live arms or statuesque can’t miss hitters with “high upsides.” He faces down his own senior scouts who talks about a player who “looks like a player” “has a great upside” has “five tools.” They blather on but Beane has lived the life of a failed can’t-miss five-tool player. Remember these scouts are not idiots and had helped find Oakland’s famous stable of pitchers like Barry Zito , Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson. But Beane has developed an abiding distrust of the wisdom that had such a low prediction rate.

More important Beane must draft in a world of immense inequality of resources where teams like the Athletics and Royals and Brewers and Rays are now farm teams for the rich teams. Here he pursues aggressive decisions to go after college players rather than high school players based upon their higher probability of success in professional leagues. He also goes after players who have unique and undervalued skill sets such as the ability to get on base, walk, avoid strike outs etc. In each case, looking for a different profile enables him to discover undervalued players that other teams are not pursuing. It also permits him to make trades where he can trade a player who looks valuable by traditional standards and get a player who is more valuable by sabermetric standards. This became one of his hallmarks.

The movie focuses its narrative of how he clashes with his scouts in whom he hires as a free agent or trades for. The movie employs an incessant TV/radio background commentary to confirm the animus the baseball world holds towards his approach. The key lies in Beane’s willingness to deploy the power of statistical analysis first pioneered by my fellow Kansas Citian Bill James.

Writing alone and in isolation James developed a wide range of statistical pictures of baseball that gave very powerful insights in such things as the natural rise and decline of the average player or the distorting value of playing in different parks or how positional hitting changed the odds of getting on base so that the percentage of getting a hit rises tremendously if a player gets a first ball rather than a strike. Literally each at bat represents a swing in probabilities. This raises the value of players with plate discipline and raises the value of not giving away outs on things like steals or bunts. The point is that James and an emerging group of young passionate statistical analysts were developing a new way of seeing baseball and creating tools to evaluate players and team construction in new ways.

Unable to compete head up with the rich teams and distrusting the conventional wisdom of his own scouts, Beane converts to this new way of seeing by hiring Paul De Podesta from the Cleveland Indians and relying upon Podesta’s statistical and economic training to rethink how to evaluate players. Well played with tightly wound and guarded intensity Jonah Hill plays him as a character called Peter Brand in the movie. De Podesta believes in algorithms that demonstrate games are won by scoring runs and that run scoring and getting on base are the major variables in the capacity of team to win games. This de-emphasizes pitching, speed and relief pitching and changes the focus to skills like plate discipline, walks, avoiding strike outs and not giving away outs.

More importantly this new way of seeing baseball provides a way to xray players and see their skills in a new light. It enabled Beane for several years to find undervalued players and create a team organized around getting on base and scoring runs which succeeded extremely well at a cost per run one-fourth that paid by the Yankees.

The move manages to inject all these insights in a remarkably well written screenplay with both snappy and insightful dialogues. This really comes to bear when Beane and De Podesta take on the gathered scouts representing a phalanx of insider and established knowledge about what a baseball player should be and look like and think like.

The movie powerfully conveys why rethinking players evaluation matters. The economics of the game without hard caps has escalated salaries and rich teams with strong media markets can now wait upon other teams to develop players and swoop in the take them as just happened to the Rays this last year. The economics has also changed because baseball does not slot players and prices so that agents like Scott Boras have created huge bonuses for high draft rounds like Stephen Strasburg’s 15 million signing salary.

In the status quo that Beane confronted, the highest traditional evaluated talent would get to the richest teams immediately or in five years. A small team like Oakland with an owner who would not spend money, must maximize value. It cannot play the same game other teams are playing. Neither can they play the game of paying exorbitant salaries for eight-year contracts for 31-year-old players who are already on the statistically risky side of their careers.

Part II examines how Beane challenged conventional wisdom as well as the baseball establishment to prove some of his points. It also examines the success and limits that Theo Epstein has in implementing this strategy at a team with serious money, the Boston Red Sox.

Defending College Presidents on Conference Alignment II

2011-10-05T11:58:00.000-07:00

PART II

No President can or will eliminate athletics or deliberately downgrade the athletics by going to a lower status or less economically viable conferences. As Clotfelter’s book and the politics of athletics makes clear, the external constituencies are too strong and the benefits are quite real.

This is where conference affiliation comes in. Conferences control both money and media access and can confer stature.

Let no one romanticize conferences. They are plastic and porous voluntary associations of schools that have changed a lot over the years. The Big East was created solely to gain money for east coast basketball schools. The SEC only took final shape in 1991 after the Southwest conference broke up over Texas’ hubris. The Big 12 was a shotgun wedding of my old Big 8 and the Texas remnants of the end of the Southwest Conference in 1996. The Pacific 10 has permuted from 3 to 5 to 8 to 10 to 12, and even the vaunted stable Big 10 once kicked out Michigan and lost Chicago as well as letting in Penn State. So let us be clear, the conferences are voluntary associations for the combined advantage and regulation of athletics for the member schools. They have no sacred status and constantly evolve.

Thanks to Supreme Court decisions, Universities and Conferences control their media rights. Most of the possible increases in revenues that universities can attain to offset athletic costs are tied into conferences. Media companies care nothing about Olympic sports and barely care about basketball except to fill media slots; the real money is in football. The real football money lies in conference contracts.

Except for Texas and Notre Dame, the most successful and powerful schools have agreed to assign their media rights to conferences, and conferences negotiate the complex media deals and distribute the money among the member schools. Conferences also launch their own media networks. This economic structure launched the incredible wealth of the SEC and the Big 10 in the last ten years. It also drove the consolidation of the western teams into the new PAC-12. So moving conferences offers one major set of opportunities for schools to increase revenue and offset structural deficits and also increase their stature. Any president who seeks to protect their school must consider conference membership.

A clear hierarchy of status and prestige exists among conferences. This cachet is both about sport as in the SEC but also extends to academic prestige as in the Big 10 (even if it can’t count). So switching conferences presents a twofold opportunity to a university and its President. It can increase the revenue stream needed to minimize the internal subsidy; the freed subsidy money can be spent on other university activities. Conference membership can also raise the profile of the school in non-athletic areas.

If you look at recent alignment decisions, the Presidents made good calls for their schools. When Nebraska left the Big 12, it entered a better academic conference and better athletic conferences, a true win/win. It also escaped the suffocating arrogance and control of Texas in the Big 12. When Colorado and Utah jointed the PAC-12, they both experienced similar win/win. The most recent move of Syracuse and Pittsburgh to the ACC not only rationalized the ACC’s geography by connecting Boston College to the rest of the league, but served as huge prestige win/wins for both colleges.

This is not about greed or tradition; it is about financial responsibility, quality of competition and prestige. The Presidents are doing their jobs and should be praised for what they accomplished for their schools in terms of getting more revenue to close their subsidies, better competition and higher status.

Defending College Presidents on Conference Alignment I

2011-10-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

“Greedy!” “Hypocrites!” “Traitors!” No Tradition!” University Presidents have felt a hailstorm of criticism around the most recent movements of schools from athletic conference to conference. More are on the way. Amid the universal dismay and attacks upon college athletics, special bile seems reserved for the Presidents who are portrayed as driven only by greed and hypocrisy. Even NCAA President Mark Emmert has jointed in the condemnation of athletic decisions based on greed. The criticisms are overblown, romanticize very unromantic conferences, and I believe the Presidents are making good decisions and trying to act reasonably in an irrational system.

The modern university President has an impossible job. Wide public support for public universities has collapsed. Public and private universities face yearly deficits, and legislatures brutally cut universities abandoning higher education as a public aspiration for all. The Presidents face endless economic cuts and lack of support.

They are trying to protect their institutions in awful times and must cut jobs, classes and salaries while raising tuition. Modern college Presidents spend most of their time trying to raise money, cultivate donors, deal with legislatures and regulators while articulating a mission that can create coherence in their diverse and divided institutions. The average university President lasts about five years given the stress and political complexity of the position.

One ingredient of this witches brew stands out, the internal subsidies that athletic departments require. Although 80 million Americans care about college football, college sports is accidental appendage to a university’s real mission of teaching students and expanding human knowledge. No college Presidents except in the SEC would wed college football and basketball to universities in this way. Most wish they did not have to bother with athletics and almot all programs run large structural deficits. But external constituencies and reputation force Presidents to take college athletics seriously. The external constituencies highly value college football and basketball, far more than internal university groups. Presidents inherit this historical marriage and must make the best of it.

Good Presidents understand that modern intercollegiate athletics can be as Mark Emmert calls it “the front porch of the university.” High profile athletic competition can generate visibility and repute for the university. It can help solidify relations with alumni and stimulate loyalty with the state electorate and in the state legislature. Done well it can sometimes increase enrollments and solidify contributions to the university as described by Charles Clotfelter in his book Big-Time Sports in American Universities.

In the past major universities such as UCLA and Michigan State University strategically used sports to raise their standing and profile out of the shadow of Berkeley and Ann Arbor. At the same time these universities increased their academic excellence. Even today this siren song tempts colleges to add money-losing football or enter the Division I athletic sweepstakes.

The problem is that athletics lose money. Let me repeat: college athletics loses money, lots of money. With the bare exception of 22 schools, at best, all athletic departments require significant external fund raising and internal university subsidies to break even. The vast majority of Division 1 programs hemorrhage money. Like any academic endeavor, building an intercollegiate athletics program costs money and requires a large infrastructure including stadiums, facilities, coaches, compliance, health and training personnel and scholarships, academic support, staff to maintain facilities and run events and strong marketing and media staffs. The infrastructure requirements of athletic programs are immense.

Modern Presidents oversee huge universities of which athletics is a very very small economic and student part. At Washington we have 45,000 students and 600+ student athletes! The athletics budget have tended to be a very stable 5 percent of total budget at universities for years. But the cost structure and the visibility stand out. In times of great economic distress and endless budget cuts and uncertain philanthropic contributions, Presidents are trying to figure out how to keep the advantages of athletics but minimize or eliminate the internal subsidies.

Some money for intercollegiate athletics comes in independent revenue streams of tickets and media rights and contributions, but faculty see this as a distracting zero sum game. At most schools with small stadiums and erratic attendance, modest revenue is generated. The median structural deficit for Division 1 schools hovers around 9-10 million dollars. Faculty and most students resent internal subsidies whether paying for heating and grounds or electricity for athletics. They really resent internal transfers directly from university general funds, and most students who do not attend or follow athletics resent student fees that support athletics.

Internal constituencies resent and resist funding sports as everything else gets cut. External constituencies either support athletics or are indifferent, few are hostile. As tuition goes up and up to cover the declining state and donor support, Presidents face intense stress to limit or eliminate the subsidy for athletics. More paradoxically as the school raises tuition, it raises the cost of athletics that must pay the increased scholarship costs. In a double paradox many Presidents believe that raising the profile of athletics will help their fund raising and state appropriations in the long run.

In this light College Presidents look at the conference change decisions through the lenses of their stewardship obligations to protect the economic viability of their institutions and raise its reputation and visibility. The conference change decisions are not about greed but Presidents doing their jobs in time of great difficulty.

Put on a Game Face: Players & Coaches

2011-09-26T11:47:00.000-07:00

"Put your game face on" is one of the many sports expressions that pervade American English. It's an odd expression. I mean how do you put on a new face? Much as I'd like to do it, it seems very hard. Of course in LA plastic surgeons will do it for you.

Putting on a game face means something quite important, plastic surgery aside. Have you ever stood in front of a mirror and practiced different faces, no, not guitar gyrations, but different faces? It turns out that something important happens when we change our facial expression.

The human face is so powerful and human perception is so face dependent, that faces not only communicate immense amount of information, but they influence our cognitive and emotional states. Changing your face can literally change our brain activity. Smiling can be an exercise to become more happy; frowning can make you more sad, scowling more angry. The face is an exquisite monitor of our emotions but it is also a generator. So putting on a game face can involve changing your internal emotional and cognitive balance.

When an athlete prepares for his or her game, he or she attempts to develop a focus for the game that is appropriate to how they carry themselves best in the game. Some players play best angry or fierce. Others take on a role of care free but focused players. Still others develop an eerie calm that helps them persevere with an even temper amid the chaotic emotions and emotional momentum of a game. Others manifest a preternatural concentration that unites their body, mind and emotions into a flowing zen like movement. Putting on a game face reminds us athletes perform just like Greek tragedy actors who donned masks to play their roles.

The game face focuses and carries the player into combat. Putting on a game face also implies an element of choice and control. If someone "loses it" in competition, they lost their focus and their face reflects it first. They lose the tuned balance of emotion, focus and skill deployment that enables them to perform at their best. Many game plans are built around trying to get players out of their game face and to lose it. Losing it can be contagious neurologically and socially. Whole teams can lose their composure and you see it in their faces. Teams often know when they've won long before they take the lead by the faces or body carriage of an opponent.

Last weekend I watched the University of Washington team have what their coach called a "melt down." In the third quarter of the game the players clearly lost focus, and their faces and body language showed it. They lost some bad calls and could not let go of the calls. Their anger and frustration kept them from complete focus upon the play at hand, instead they were resenting or replaying what they lost. The team imploded with sloppy play and penalties. But the issue here covers not just players but coaching accountability. If you watched the bench, the coaches yelled and rattled around. They contorted and yelled and shouted at the ref. Several had to be restrained from running on the field.

The coaches are leaders. Their demeanor models what the students expect and live up to. If coaches lose it and yell, how are the twenty year olds supposed to keep focused on the game?

Coaches must also put on game faces. Players take their cues from coaches, and as Sun Tzu and his followers emphasized in the Art of War, a leader must be tranquil and clear thinking at all times. Coachers may think they are firing up their players, but their bulging faces and angry strutting only model losing it to their players. Their own contorted faces give permission to players to remain upset.

The coaches' faces create contagion and pass on to the players the anger and lost focus, not just energy and intensity. Coaches need game faces too and having seen enough coaches lose it and not help their teams, I am becoming more comfortable with the Bill Bellichick or Tom Landry school of keep it intense but keep it controlled. Game faces matter for coaches and players. The Washington Husky's young coach Steve Sarkesian admitted as much in a post mortem, ""I am a passionate guy," he said. "I want to do everything I can for our kids to give them the best chance to win. And I felt like there was a point there that maybe my emotions got the best of me because I didn't feel like it was right. But I've got to show more composure, if I want our kids to show more composure." Motivating athletes is one thing; leading them off the edge is another.

Putting on a game face is fundamental to being an athlete or a coach, or for that matter being a professional of any sort. Like the Greek insight into play, when we "play ball' we put on masks that help us perform but also change and reflect whom we are.

Why the Seahawks need a Leader not a "Game Manager"

2011-09-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

Pete Carroll the coach of the Seahawks has decided he does not need a quarterback. Given the two he signed, I can see why. Carroll has fallen prey to a widespread coaching assumption in the high ego NFL that he does not need a quarterback, he needs a game manager. When he defends his non-quarterback quarterback Tavaris Jackson, the best he can say is that Jackson makes no mistakes. He also generates no points so the Seahawks are off to another losing season with one of the worst offenses in the NFL.

I wrote earlier about what a mistake it is for a coach to seek a game manager rather than a quarterback. It all comes down to coaching hubris, but also the thin spread of talent. I want to revisit the post to explain why the Seahawks are failing and will fail as long as Carroll thinks all he needs is a game manager who becomes an extension of his will.

Essentially Carroll and those coaches like him want a manager, not a leader. A manager works under terms of predictability and implements directives. You expect reliability and consistency from managers. The manager, unlike a leader, implements rather than creates. To be a good manager, you focus upon judgment, but very constrained judgment within a system of limited options. Making a QB a game manager does several things:

1) The plan matters more than the player. The QB under this rubric executes a plan that the coach conceives. In a sense this resembles baseball's VORP measure, it assumes a minimal quarterback at league average with no real value above replacement. So the plan matters more than the player.

2) This demonstrates a very risk averse approach where a coach/team emphasize minimizing mistakes and sticking with the plan. It reifies limits in the team.

3) It instantiates the utter dominance of the coach and the coach’s mind—the plan—over the talent or status of the QB or team for that matter. The QB reduces to an automaton, a certain coach’s dream. The QB's discretion exists but within a narrow universe of calls.

All teams approach games with a plan based upon scouting the other team’s tendencies and built upon one’s own team’s strengths and weaknesses. As Dwight Eisenhower reminded us, “plan, but don’t trust the plan.” A good plan serves as a frame to guide and probe and then adapt to what the other side throws at you. A game manager approach minimizes the guide and maximizes the plan is the plan, a soviet approach to play.

The problem with game manager approach to football lies in the rigidity and predictability. It places severe self-imposed limits it puts on the QB, the team and even the coach. The coach has defined as out of range an array of tactics and strategies for the QB and team. Having a game manager philosophy narrows the job of the opposing defense because they know what not to expect and can concentrate upon the limited repertoire of the game manager.

No plan survives contact with the enemy, and game managers are not trained to overcome adversity or surprise. Game managed team do not come back when down. A game managed team will struggle facing new alignments or surprises. The plan dominates the mind set and schemes, but plan driven teams leave very little room in its captain, the QB, to improvise and adapt. Worse a game manager is not given the chance to grow into a leader and to inspire confidence and high performance from his team when faced with challenges. Managers manage existing resources, they do not lift the performance level to new levels under pressure. Leaders and quarterbacks to that, not game manager mimics of a coach.

All you have to do is see the miserable state of the Seahawks offense. It is not that they are not scoring but they are not even creating runs or series yardage gains. The other teams know so well what limited things the Seahawks will do and they know that the quarterback is under orders to take the least risky approach, that they can be overly aggressive and not worry about repercussions or surprises. So their yards per carry and yards per pass are exceptionally low and it is not just about the talent. It is about a system that precludes innovation and adaption under pressure. That is what a game manager and a game managing coach breed.

Another language exists to describe quarterbacks—leader, playmaker, captain, game-changer. This can flow from talent and skill, but it also describes an attitude of player and coach. More than a few of the game manager QBs reflect a coaching assessment of their limited talent. It reflects the coach's lack of confidence in their players and overconfidence in themselves. It reflects a coach who is not willing to risk the mistakes that growth requires. The plan/manager approach locks in limitations before the game starts. It represents the triumph of risk assessment over play.

Reset Games: the Logic of Football

2011-09-20T07:40:00.000-07:00

The Seahawks numbed my mind this weekend with seven punts and one failed fourth down try. But what struck me beyond the futility of it all was watching the repetition of a sequence. Before the punt, all the action stopped and two totally different groups of players ran onto the field; they punted, returned, then stopped the action, had a commercial and then two other completely different groups of specialized players ran onto the field.

Now this happens so often we take it for granted. But think about this. Unlike in life, in football all the action just STOPS. The game STOPS AND RESETS. The players huddle, coaches call different plays for offense and defense, then the down plays out and action stops and the whole cycle repeats itself.

The game stops. I mean think about it! The game just stops, everyone regroups and starts again. Would that life was so accommodating.

Football epitomizes an entire class of games I call reset games. The shape of the game and competition is determined by full stops in the action. At the end of a play, not even a point, everything stops. A new play can be called; players take their positions and then they play again. Each team has time to regroup and call a play. The reset effect is amplified because teams turn over positions—the teams switch from offense to defense with a staid almost ritual transition. So after three and out and punt, the other side gets the ball. Each team gets to play offense and defense in sequence. Volleyball, tennis, baseball and softball all have the same reset structure, but I will focus upon football.

Reset gives a sport a particular cast. First, it injects the coach far more aggressively into the game. Each reset gives the coach time to call a play, talk/yell at players, adjust to the other side and send in substitutions. This injection makes the games more cerebral because not only can coaches call plays and substitute, but they can change a formation or recast it with new players. Each coach endlessly adjusts to micro-changes from the other side resulting in an interactive battle of wits.

Second, reset games spawn specialization and place immense stress upon stopping the other side. Not only does play stop after each point or score, but in football, if the other team does not score within an allotted time/down sequence, it loses the ball. So team defense becomes incredibly important not just to stop the offense, but to gain the ball back for the offense to score again. Volleyball and tennis changes this dynamic even more when a defensive stop actually gets a point awarded to the successful defender. Reset games place huge emphasis upon defense and specialists.

Third, reset sports have rhythms but not flows. The reset stops play. Runs and cascading moment are discouraged; reset sports slow pacing, undercut momentum and give chances to regroup. The games move with stop/start staccato rhythms. These stops break momentum and give teams chances to recover, and unless complete collapses occur teams can claw back into games.

Fourth, reset games spawn elaboration and complexity in their offenses and defenses, and football represents the most luxuriant growth of this. Because they have the time to stop, think, reset and play again, coaches anticipate and scout and prepare packages and sets just designed for the other team. Modern football breeds unbelievable complexity in play design, scouting, adjustment and specialization. All this is made possible by the combination of reset and substitutions.

The pattern of allowed substitutions profoundly alter reset games. Free substitutions permit coaches to constantly tinker with teams and invite intense specialization. In football whole new teams come for punts or offense and defense. Coaches fine tune formations by putting in specialists for nickel defenses or running or passing plays. If you limit substitutions like in baseball or arrange them like in volleyball, the game becomes much less specialized or unit oriented.

Stop. Think. Reset. Play again. Stop. Think. Reset. This reset structure means that players can reflect and adapt or they can disengage. If they are struggling with the other teams offense or actions, it terminates action for a second. The reset can protect teams from roll ups and huge runs. Each play can be analyzed and adapted to. In football it evolves into elaborate chess matches where teams have studied each other’s tendencies and personnel and have time to implement them because of the stops.

The reset configuration unleashes a bonanza for TV and radio. Each reset offers time for commercials, and now the reset times are determined by commercial breaks. The commercials themselves are constructed to fit within the time of reset.

The structure points to strategies to take advantage of it. The hurry up offenses or no huddle offenses are all designed to disrupt the specialization and regrouping aspects of reset games. Oregon’s speed demon offense lives as much by its ability to disrupt and tire the other team as by its sophisticated approach to the game. But it depends upon subverting the default rhythms of the game.

Reset games encourage disruptive tactics. Because teams rely upon reset and coaching domination, teams tend to plan and invest in sets. If an opponent comes up with surprises or finds a weakness, it discombobulates the other team. Specialization, planning and commitment become a problem as the team and coaches struggle to adapt to the surprise or the suddenly exposed weakness.

Finally reset games encourage teams to get try to work on headgames and influence the other team's mind set. Because of the time to stop and think, reset games can lead to over-thinking. The stop, reset, play pattern lures players to think too much, and the cognitive pattern of thinking diffuses their attention and undermines their pattern recognition and reaction time. Given the speed and force of modern sports, players depend upon trained pattern recognition and trained reaction, if they stop to think, their game dissipates. The same thing can happen to coaches who get twisted up in trying to anticipate the next move and fall back on predictable patterns.

The reset logic highlights how football is just a game with invented rules. We need to remember that despite our penchant to saturate life with sports metaphors, life does not offer instant resets. Life does not stop time and permit substitutions. Life is not football and we should not forget that.

Sports Ethics: Playing with a Chip on the Shoulder

2011-09-14T21:53:00.000-07:00

I was reading an interview with some USC players who talked about how they were handling the pressures of fewer scholarships and another year of probation. One player proclaimed, “we have a huge chip on our shoulders. It will motivate us.”

I have always been struck by that phrase “chip on a shoulder.” I wonder what it means in athletics as a form of identification and motivation. A lot of players carry it as a badge of honor, and coaches build cultures around a chip on a shoulder like the New York Jets. Isiah Thomas a wonderful guard here at UW talked about being drafted last in the NBA draft as "just one more chip to add to my shoulder," and talked about how he would prove everyone wrong.

The term chip on a shoulder grew up in the 18^th century where workers at the London shipyards would put a wood chip on their shoulder to dare another worker to “knock their block off.” A man with a chip on his shoulder lives by challenging others and must prove again and again that they can best others. Their chipped attitude defies everyone around them as possible enemies to be knocked down.

A chip on a shoulder signals a wound, a deep wound that never heals. The person or team with a chip on their shoulder must prove themselves over and over again. Somewhere somehow they believe they did not get their due and have to prove their worth over and over.

The player or team is motivated because deep down they feel disrespected or unjustly criticized. Worse, someone else gets the credit or the spotlight the player should get. An abiding resentment drives them. It provides resilient energy to beat down others and knock their blocks off.

Being driven by a chip on your shoulder requires effort. It takes hard work to feel disrespected and to make enemies out of everyone you play against. It hardens the player and the team. Chip on shoulder guys are not easy to be around, not even on their own team. Even team members must be challenged and beaten. Such players don’t make good locker room folks and often not very good teammates because they are so driven to prove themselves even at the cost of the rest of the team.

The wounded self-worth that the chip scabs over never heals because the player or coach constantly irritates it to keep up intensity. The players never have a chance to grow up or achieve a deeper or better sense of themselves. The players must depend instead upon the relentless need to achieve external domination to prove their worth. Every failure hurts twice as much because it confirms the internal self-loathing, the secret fear in their heart the he or she is not really worth it.

Playing with a chip on your shoulder works for a while, but it hides and deepens internal confidence. A player never grows into their full potential because they are driven by the need to beat others, not develop their complete and highest excellence. It turns victory sour and defeat into humiliation.

Competition tempts athletes to anchor identity into external validation, not internal strength. The chip on shoulder approach intensifies this vulnerability. We all carry wounds to our self but we should not be controlled by them. Playing with a chip may contribute to a win, but not a victory.

"Friday Night Lights"-the Significance of Football II

2011-09-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

As Friday Night Lights unfolds, we realize that for many of the players, football provides the only order in a chaotic life. Mike Winchell escapes his mentally ill mother who quizzes him on plays. Don Billingsley gets away from the mental and physical beatings of his father. Others do the same, and the coach becomes their surrogate father as much as coach. The coach also has to bench them, corral them, encourage or scream at them sometimes in the same game to move them beyond their fears and personal devils. When it is over, the three seniors who have played together for a decade walk away. “I will miss the heat.” “I will miss the lights,” say Chavez and Billingsley. But Mike Winchell was never sure he liked the game and not sure he’ll miss the game, for him it comes as a relief.

In this the players join with the community which anchors so much of its identity with the team and the narrative of victory that the football team provides. But for the town and the players, each game, each season ends; the evanescence of glory only remains as a haunting memory. The town and the players forge their narrative from the team, but the narrative lingers as fragile as fleeting radiance of victory.

At the drive-in an old state champion quarterback prophetically tells Winchell, “Make memories.” Don Billingsley’s father, in a moment of lucidity, begs his son, “you just ain’t getting it…you got one year, one stinkin’ year to make yourself some memories, son. That’s all. It’s gone after that.” For most of the kids who will never play football again, not only did the game give order but meaning and worth, these are their “glory days.” No wonder the town and the older players vest so much in it, because the life awaiting them on the streets of Odessa, forgotten by the American dream, offer little.

To portray football in America also is to portray class and race. The Permian team is working class or poor. The player’s homes have large signs with their names, but no one is wealthy and most barely get by. A few rely upon free meals from local businesses a sort of natural perk for members of the team. But the Permian Odessa team is integrated-white, black, Hispanic-reflecting the diverse groups that work the oil fields. They share a deep blue color ethic and resentment. They fear and distrust the big cities. When Boobie Miles hears from the Midland doctor that he cannot play, he almost assaults the doctor and accuses him of trying to hurt Boobie's team to help Midland. The focus upon the dream and team enabled the players to deal with the racist tensions that bubble up.

Coach Gary Gaines has to deal with the casual racism of the “boosters” of the program. They carelessly throw out the N word referring to their stars and treat them as meat for the grinder. When the championship game is set up, a startling meeting occurs where the Dallas-Carter representatives, all black, face off against the all white state and Permian representatives. They haggle over sites—neutral Astrodome and who will be the refs. The Dallas-Carter representatives want an equal race balanced crew, the state officials expect to use an experienced crew who have worked together. Race chafes the entire meeting.

During the game, one egregious call on a bounced pass reception comes from the sole black referee and goes in the favor of all black Carter. Permian knows it has been shafted but must keep discipline and go on. On the other side, the Dallas-Carter school epitomizes a street swagger and intensity, even arrogance, when they strut past the smaller Permian team. The usually unflappable “Preacher” Ivory Christian tells Gaines, “They’re fast, they’re big, they’re dirty…plus they’re fast.” The dirty play feels race based but it’s as much about urban versus rural and as another voice over announcer broadcasts “East Texas” versus “West Texas” which might as well be a civil war. Remember the late eighties glorified the rogue Miami teams, and dirty play just fed intimidation. The race, geographic and class conflicts spill over into the game, but the rules and demands of the sport channel it and harness it as long as the refs keep it together.

The class pervades in another way. You sense it from the hanger-ons from Dallas-Carter, but Coach Gaines has to entertain or be entertained by the well off boosters of Odessa. They visit his office unannounced with ideas for formation and package sets and demands to play Boobie Miles both ways. Every compliment to the coach is tinged by “when we win the state championship.” In the end the boosters threaten his job, and his first loss produces a yard full of for sale signs placed there by thoughtful boosters. The money speaks but only to victory, the rest, players and coaches, are expendable.

In the movie at half time, the Permian Panthers are been battered. They verge on losing their coherence and will. Suddenly the Preacher, strong and silent and aloof, explodes in outrage at how they are playing and being treated. He demands better of his team and himself and shocks everyone even himself out of their lethargy.

Before they return to the field, Coach Gary Gaines talks one last time. He reminds them that the vast majority of them will never play football again; this is it. He again reminds them to be “perfect.“ But this time it is different and he captures the essence of athletic competition:

“Being perfect is not about that scoreboard out there. It's not about winning. It's about you and your relationship with yourself, your family and your friends. Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn’t let them down because you told them the truth. And that truth is you did everything you could. There wasn’t one more thing you could've done. Can you live in that moment as best you can, with clear eyes, and love in your heart, with joy in your heart? If you can do that gentleman - you're perfect! “

Gaines touches upon the fundamental moral moment for a competitor—being present to self, game, team and excellence. The rest is dross.

The movie ends with Mike Winchell saying goodbye to his friends and tossing a spiral to young kids playing football in the shadow of Odessa-Permian’s huge stadium. It feels like handing on the legacy to the next generation.

But the real end is less theatrical and more real. Coach Gary Gaines is in his office and gazing at the 2 deep chart. One by one he removes the names of the seniors from chart and drops them into a drawer. One by one the players we have come to know and watch fight through games and lives drop off. Coach Gaines places a new name at the top of the depth chart. At last he comes to Mike Winchell’s name. He pulls it off with ritual care, stares at it for a moment and gently drops it into the drawer.

The season is over. The memories made. The glory passed. The players departed. But the coach and town continue the narrative with a new cast and new dreams the next day.

"Friday Night Lights"-the Significance of Football I

2011-09-06T21:33:00.000-07:00

“Can you be perfect?” Coach Garry Gaines asks his Odessa-Permian high school team at the start of August practice in the movie Friday Night Lights. Perfect, the word will have profound importance for the team later, but at this beginning of the football season, at the beginning of every football season like this week, perfect beckons players to a faultless season of wins and a state championship. To garner the championship the team must surmount the favorite Dallas-Carter, an all black power house with eight D-1A scholarship players. As the ubiquitous overlapping radio announces “It’s football time in Texas.” And this movie presents one of the finest portrayals around of the relation between football and identity by focusing upon high school football in Texas where the lineaments are inscribed with crystalline clarity.

Friday Night Lights is one of the best American sports movies and the second best football movie. The rise of fine football movies reflects the cultural shift to football as the axis of national sports consciousness. The movie later morphed into a critically acclaimed soap opera on TV. For two generations, however, the best movies and books on American sports focused on baseball, but as the center of sport gravity moved, art has caught up and FNL epitomizes this new generation of books and movies.

H. G. Bissinger’s book Friday Night Lights: a Town, a Team, and a Dream is a modern American sports classic. It reveals an intimate painful look, almost anthropological in its intuitions, of the 1988 quest of the Odessa-Permian football team to win a state championship. The huge sign before the school and stadium announces the four prior state 5A championships as a warning and challenge to every player on the team. The community expects this team to win the championship for the town and the book, and movie etch an unforgettable portrayal of football as a way of life that still resonates today

The movie pans over the dry flat arid plains surrounding Odessa,Texas. An oil town surrounded by brown plains and monotonously pumping rigs, it lies in the heart of the Permian basin, old oil country and in the shadow of Midland. This is East Texas where football grows from the soil and players, like the warriors of Thebes, grow from the dragon teeth planted by parents and culture. Forgotten and feeling forsaken, the town defiantly proclaims its identity and worth through its team.

“You have played since you were 8 years old,” Coach Gary Gaines, played with superb understatement by Bill Bob Thornton, tells his team. Beleaguered, thoughtful and realistic, he reminds his players, “You have dreamed of this for 17 years.” The first day of practice he informs them they will win the championship; they have no options, and by the way, neither does he. The movie sweeps along with a track of ubiquitous overlapping radio announcers incessantly dissecting the team and especially the coach.

The movie engraves the deep-rooted relation between the town, forgotten and barren, and the team, its crowning glory. The coach challenges his team “can you accept the responsibility to protect this town.” In the final showdown, he demands, “show them who we are.” The team represents the towns avatar, and generations of people haunt the players from trophies to the sheriff with his state championship ring to the disturbed alcoholic father of Don Bllingsly who tortures his son over his own failures. The team offers redemption and purpose to a town simmering with resentment and little hope.

Rooted in the soil and town, the team must be carried by its players and above all by its coach. The first glimpse of Gary Gaines frames him sitting watching film with laser intensity. Behind him stands the totem of all coaches, the depth chart with 2 deep names attached. It provides the first glimpse of the names that will be so familiar by the end of the movie.

Mike Winchell plays quarterback. His leg pumps constantly as he sits across from his mother reciting plays and responses as she shoots football situations at him as unerringly as a linebacker breaking through. Her medicines lay on the table nearby. Some families might use flash cards for French; she uses them for plays. Mike never smiles and carries the weight of the team, town and caring alone for a very ill mother on his frail shoulders. He feels cursed, and only trusts Coach Gaines who recognizes in Mike the courage and resilience to take control of his own life. Mike’s perplexed resignation leads a recruiter to ask him, “is it fun for you?” It is “supposed to be fun.” Football should be fun, but for the players of Odessa it feels like a burden. After one critical loss, Mike Winchell bangs his head against the concrete wall groaning, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

James “Boobie” Miles stands as the polar opposite. Arrogant, self-absorbed and abundantly talented Miles is destined for greatness. He is the star and the reason for the team’s high rating. Letters from schools such as USC and UCLA rain down on him offering scholarships, although he can barely read the letters they send him. Brian Chavez, linebacker, Harvard bound and the emotional center of the team, helps him read them. But Boobie does not believe he needs to know how to read since he proclaims he will be a star and all Winchell has to do is hand off the ball to him. Boobie skips on weight training and succeeds through sheer bravado and athleticism. He represents the ideal and temptation of sport. A young man raised by his beloved uncle and whose life depends upon the dream of getting to the professional ranks. After he is hurt in an utterly senseless play, the team falls apart and loses a game. Their offense and morale collapse. He and his uncle travel to Midland hospital where the doctor tries to inform him that he needs surgery and cannot play.

Boobie and his Uncle ignore the doctor; lie to the coach, and Boobie gets into the last regional game when Permian must win. In the game he destroys his knee and leaves in pain. The coach walks over to him and turns away expressionless, “he’s gone.” No room to mourn or miss, the coach has to send in a play, find a new back and somehow hold a shattered team together. They lose for the second time and only get into the playoffs on a coin toss. Later Boobie, now diminished from the extravagant personality he had adopted, watches a garbage man pick up trash seeing his own future. After collecting his gear for the last time, he breaks down with his uncle “I can’t do nothing else but play football.”

The fragility of athletic glory lingers behind every play along with the fickleness of fans. When Boobie goes down, his third string understudy, Chris Comer, whom Boobie had named “the water boy,” emerges as a star. By the end of the movie, all the colleges have lost interest in an injured Boobie Miles, and the town has replaced him with Comer in their mind. For the coach, the losses lead to threats to be fired by the leading boosters. All their schmoozing with him hid the moral ignominy of boosters solely dedicated to winning, heartless and racist about using the kids for their own dreams, and ready to dump a coach on a dime. It reminds us why good high school coaches are quitting in droves and how the big time football boosters mirror a deep model of callous sycophants.

The movie does not flinch from nor romanticize the physical violence of football. The day-to-day brutality of practice, the tortured drills in 102-degree heat unfold as normal for these kids. They have played in the Odessa leagues since 8 years old, rising up through the ranks culled and groomed to participate on the team. The movie relentlessly reminds us how much sheer pain a football player must endure. Chris Comer remains on the sidelines from his fear of being hit. Even when Boobie Miles goes down, he must grapple with the reasonable fear of being hit by multiple G forces. Boobie Miles ends his career in pain and despair as two players on the side slap each other “job well done.” Players stumble out unable to figure out where they are. Harried trainers send injured players back into the chaos of the field to plug holes. Don Billingsley has his dislocated shoulder popped into place on the sideline so he can play the last series in excruciating pain. Mike Winchell, the QB, faces dislocated fingers, punched faces, bleeding scars when someone kicks him and plays on with a scary resigned stoicism. Anyone who has played or been close to football knows the sheer physical assault and pain experienced by the players. A stoic courage drives the players to stay in when most of us would quit.

That courage plays out in another way. Not only must they overcome their fears like Chris Comer but also discipline their demons. Don Billingsley wrestles with his father’s endless abuse and periodically erupts on the field causing penalties or blown chances. Like so many young men who channel their barely controlled anger, he can lose it and in the final game gets a penalty for a late hit. Coach Gaines tells his team, “We are small” and the only way they will win is with “heart,” “mind,” and “discipline.” The movie makes clear how discipline, focus and courage must exist on the football field.

Part II examines the movie's insights on race, class and community.

Sports Ethics: Sportsmanship versus Taunting

2011-09-01T22:04:00.000-07:00

A new NCAA rule this year continues the ongoing effort to assert the primacy of sportsmanship over moral ugliness of taunting that stains sport. The new rule makes taunting on a touchdown a live ball foul that will lead to the recall of the play and touchdown. It has ignited a firestorm of controversy over how it will lead to awful decisions and stolen losses, but the rule makes good sense and draws the line exactly where it should be.

As the football seasons start I think we should remember why sportsmanship matters and why taunting deserves this type of treatment.

Taunting is morally ugly. To taunt other human is in the same class of actions as sneering, jeering and tormenting them. All these actions demean and insult. They derive from a person asserting superiority and using strength to bully and inflict hurt on another. Taunting people deliberately seeks to provoke a fight. It focuses upon failure or weakness, real or imagined, and is the tool of bullies who taunt people weaker then they are.

The actions of taunting make it clear: simulating a fired gun, slashing a hand, pointing fingers, altering a stride all are designed to intimidate, demean and emphasize arrogant power. This is not about swagger or confidence, but insult and embarrassment. Taunting revels in weakness and assaulting the esteem and dignity of the other person.

Taunting grows from a fractured individual or collective ego that can only prove itself by dominating others in an oppressive and emotionally degrading manner. Sport teams can legitimately seek to break a team’ cohesion and focus, but this occurs through skilled success in play not emotionally dishonoring others. Taunting persons and teams take their pleasure not in achievement and victory but in putting down and subjection.

Sportsmanship is the sworn enemy of sportsmanship. Taunting defiles the game and opponents and sadly diminishes the players who must gain satisfaction by degrading others.

Sportsmanship begins with respect for oneself as a human being and as a player. It grows into respect for teammates and the game itself, for the excellence, rules and forms of the game. Finally, it plays out on the field as competition where players battle opponents, not enemies. Sportsmanship does not preclude dominating victory or asserting effective superiority, but it prohibits emotional flagellation of the person or teams that do not succeed on that day.

The essence of sportsmanship anchors one aspect of the moral defense of sport and games. It helps defend sports games as reflections of the many games of life and presents a way of being in competition that offers people a way to harness competition, drive, and skill in engagement with others. The collapse of sportsmanship not only lowers the quality of the game and people, but the quality of aspiration that athletic competition can convey to those who follow it.

The moral ugliness comes from both the harm and insult aimed at others but also the nasty sense of self that it carves out in the taunting players. Taunting is NOT CELEBRATION. More than a few commentators have complained that the rules against taunting get in the way of natural and high-spirited celebration. But taunting insults demeans and provokes the other side. It does not celebrate a success so much as celebrate an ego’s need for dominance. It transmutes success into humiliation and legitimate victory on the field into mean spirited denigration of the others.

Sportsmanship depends upon respect for the game, its rules and beauty and form and for the other team and players. Taunting disrespects the opponent and the game because it asserts a person’s need to shore up their own ego over respect for the game and the effort and skill of their opponents. Worse, taunting dares the other team to respond in kind. A culture of taunting and the inflated ego centric superiority it engenders slowly drives out the sportsmanship in the game and undermines teams that try to win right.

The new NCAA rules along with the NFL’s ongoing battle against taunting is the right thing. There will be controversies, but these are boundaries that need to be patrolled for the good of the game and the good of the players.

Jock Sniffers and Nevin Shapiro

2011-08-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

You all know the type. Not quite good enough to play, but they took some serious benders and hangovers for the team. Usually white, male, well off and tethered to a dream of being an athlete. If they cannot be one, at least they can buy access to one—players call them jock sniffers.

Nevin Shapiro the Miami booster now confessing to hundreds of NCAA violations, represents the archetype. Through eight years of handouts and gifts from cash to hookers to parties to abortions, he basked in the reflected glory University of Miami football players. At 5’6” he could never be a star, just rich. But he needed to feel the rush of associating with the players and pretend to be one of them. They called him “Lil’ Luke after Big Luke Campbell who helped bring down Miami in the eighties.

He sniffed around practices like a bloodhound. Invited players to parties and strip clubs and made his mansions a hangout for players. He obsessively muscled into pictures & finagled a sideline pass where he strutted to prove to himself that he mattered to the team’s success.

The key to understanding jock sniffers—they need the players more than the players need them. Having money or status or success is not enough for them. They need association with the players to bolster their self-worth and plaster over the edifice of their ego by collecting and hanging with the dogs.

A jock sniffer walks over and gives the guys “daps.” He’ll call the players by their nicknames and use their slang. Maybe he’ll drop down and have a push up competition on the side during practice. He’ll pretend to be part of the team, and because of his wealth, the team accommodates the illusion.

He’ll drop player’s names in conversations with his friends and dribble out tidbits of insider information like gold nuggets to raise his status and inflate his own self-esteem. His lifestyle boasted his access and status.

Jock sniffers like Shapiro and his ilk Shapiro and his ilk insinuate themselves into player’s lives. This makes them so dangerous to programs and players. The sniffers need the pheromones of the players to excite them and boost their own fractured selfhood. They will do anything to buy and keep that access. If the team starts to lose, they’ll even chip in to help recruit with money and gifts.

If the players need a place to hang out, he’ll provide a place. If they need a ride, he’ll provide a ride. If they need a contact, a woman, a little money, he just might provide it. He’ll show up where the players are and shower gifts to buttress his stature as a pseudo player. The school might designate him a “mentor” to some players to give him an “official” role. A jock sniffer uses these gifts like honey to attract players ito his orbit. He imagines the players are actually like his “family” as Shapiro put it. These jock sniffers surround every program and are violations waiting to happen corrupting themselves and the players. Their existence requires serious compliance work, something lacking at Miami and Ohio State.

The Miami mess illustrates the jock sniffer problem in its extreme form where it has lasted for years and involves literally millions of dollars, but it grows everywhere guys need to bolster their egos with the illusion of being part of the team. The players aren’t fools. More than a few of them will not turn down the offerings and will even brag about it. Then their friends will want to get in on the action.

The players know what they are getting. Most of them have had posses and followers psychically living off their status and accomplishments for years. They see right through the guys who need to use them to buff an ego.

The players play along, but feel an abiding contempt for these seemingly powerful but needy guys who try to collect them. The players know themselves, and they know the hard work and effort accomplishment takes. They don’t need the boosters. The jock sniffers aren’t phonies, just needy deluded guys who could not make it on their own.

From his cell Shapiro is pulling down the Miami program out of anger. He cannot believe his “family” guys whom he courted and showered with gifts have abandoned him. Shapiro is deluded because he considered the players his friends when they were exploiting him just as he exploited them for his own psychological neediness. Most of them are too embarrassed or fearful to use their own names as the story comes out.

The players call these guys jock sniffers for a reason. The jock sniffers need the fake intimacy and insider status they try to buy. They shore up their identity by proximity—by breathing the same air as the team. But the reality is, they just sniff the dirty jock straps.

The Cold Hard Eye of a Coach

2011-08-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

The Seahawk’s coach Pete Carroll, he of perpetual optimism and glorious surfer zen, loves Lofa Tatupu. He recruited him at USC and coached him to an all American status. He inherited him as a five-year starter and the heart and mind of the Seattle Seahawks defense last year. Pete Carroll cut Loftoto last week.

He cut him cold and clean and cauterized the wound with bigger, faster, stronger rookies. Pete may love him, but love has nothing to do with coaching a professional team. Tatupu carried a salary that hurt the cap and had been slowed by nagging injuries the last two years. I once suggested that John Wooden demonstrated that love of game and love of players informed his actions, including his disciplining. But Wooden coached college where coaches can afford to love their players and help them grow as human beings—they cannot really cut them for one thing, have a larger pool than pros, and they recruit and woo them and feel a deeper obligation.

But even at college a coach can have affection and even respect for a player and never play them.

At the core, college or professional, a coach must possess a cold clear third eye to assess the skill, talent and accomplishment of their players. This assessment remains their fundamental job and governs the heart of their relations to players.

I remember asking one of our football coaches what he looked for when he first viewed a young player, and he answered with no hesitation “body size and type.” Pure and simple, nothing else really mattered if the players did not have the basic physical shape, strength and speed to endure the rigors and grow into the skills required of elite competition.

Let’s go back and remember what we ask of coaches. We ask coaches to WIN.

What do we ask of coaches? We ask coaches to WIN.

All coaches, even the best and most committed to education and growth, know this. Owners and colleges fire coaches who do not win, no matter how many athletes graduate or how much athletes contribute to their community. If a coach does not win, the coach is fired.

A coach knows that they compete in a physical world. The body and skill/talent array are the foundations upon which everything else depends.

So a coach must analyze each player and group of players in a very straightforward way:

Body: does a player possess the strength, health, and durability appropriate to task and achievement in the coach’s system.
Skill Set: can an athlete develop the high quality and split second physical, intellectual and judgment skills needed to bring disciplined strength and focused intelligence to bear under the heat of competition.
Mental Makeup—Work Ethic, Focus and Teachability: does an athlete have the discipline and focus to show up with body and mind focused and to work constantly during off-season and practice to perfect the skill set, the body and the judgment needed to compete against elite opponents.
FIT: not often discussed, but will the athlete’s mix of the above match the style of play and the particular strengths and mind set needed by players in this coach’s system.

Talent matters but only if connected to the rest. A fragile talented player is no help. A talented player without the ability to translate it to the skill under pressure is no help. A talented player who is unstable or does not work hard is no real help. Character issues including moral rectitude beyond the mental makeup issues matter only on the margin. High character guys who cannot produce are no help. In the end talent and character are secondary or even tertiary characteristics.

Now the coach must constantly assess players each game, each practice and each day. Competitive dynamics never stop evolving and what works one day, may fail the next. The coach must attend to this in each player.

The coach must watch the body unremittingly because the dings and attrition of play, practice and injuries mount up and undermine effectiveness, durability and reliability. In Tatufo’s case slowly accumulated injuries and wear and tear eroded his resilience on the thinnest of margins.

The competition is so fierce and the margin of gain so fine in games, that coaches cannot afford slippage in performance over the season even by elite players.

They evaluate each player against the player’s own skill and potential, but most importantly coaches assess each athlete against any available replacements in the minor leagues, secondary markets or taxi squad. The baseball statistic WAR (wins over replacement) captures the statistical fungibility of players. If a coach can replace a player with a better player or if a player declines and now is less than a potential replacement, a coach will replace them. A coach has to replace them given the coach’s obligation to WIN and their obligation to other team members to field the highest caliber and most effective players.

Not only is a coach always comparing a player to him or herself and to immediate replacements, the coach must compare the player to the competition. Competitors always are evolving and developing new plays, new systems and combinations. Every competitor is continuously bringing in new and more talented or younger and quicker or stronger players.

The coach has to keep each player in a constant matrix of cold-eyed calculation.

Their own body and capacity and skill level.
Their own skill and reliability relative to immediate replacements.
Their own skills relative to the evolution of the competition.

When I think of a coach's eye I am reminded of Arnold Schwarzenegger's vision in the movie the Terminator. The computer assisted vision brought down a screen that measured and assessed data on speed, size, weight, effectiveness relative to opponent. The coach’s calculations lead to judgments of the player; there is no room for sentiment or love in deciding whether to play an athlete. Every player knows that they are watched and judged with cold precision every day, every hour, every minute, every play. Every player knows that loved or not, they can be benched or cut. That is the deal. In his own way Bill Belichcik exemplifies the ideal. Belichick loves the game, but he does not love players; they fit, succeed or fail, and he disposes of them with clean brutal efficiency, just like the Terminator.

A coach knows that no one is indispensable.

No one is indispensable, including the coach.

For folks who must compete every day in their lives at their jobs and succeed or watch their job disappear, Coaching provides an XRAY view of the core of their own life.

The NCAA Presidents Stage a Governance Coup

2011-08-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

The NCAA retreat of last week created immediate results and serious momentum towards major reforms. Most commentators have been pleasantly surprised or astounding by the progress made. I want to highlight one very important aspect—the NCAA Presidents staged a coup in the NCAA governance structure.

I agree with their decision and use the word “coup” specifically. Their actions bypass the existing elaborate governance structure to achieve immediate action. I want to emphasize their actions are totally within the constitution of the NCAA; but their approach reflects a lack of confidence in the existing governance structure.

Larry Scott the Commissioner of the Pac 10/12 stated it well; the NCAA governance structure creates “death by incrementalism.” As one who has participated in the structure, I agree. Often this is not a bad thing because bad ideas can fail and good ideas refined, but the process does not foster quick response or serious reform.

The NCAA is a member organization. 1400+ members participate at has three levels—Division I, II and III, and each level has its own voting procedures and laws. NCAA legislation and initiatives pass through a Byzantine system. Most legislation begins with schools or conferences and proceeds to subject area Cabinets where each conference is represented. Cabinet business proceeds at a very very slow rate. Each conference, each division has its own concerns and these tend to slow down and often halt progress on major issues.

Because of adverse court decisions, the NCAA is wedded to proceeding only where it has clear data suggesting that new policies are supported by data; this slows things down even more and creates a huge and powerful knowledge bureaucracy. Finally even after the Cabinets deliberate, often for two to three years and carefully cull data, the proposed legislation goes out to all the conferences for comments, then it goes to the Legislative Council for refinement and often is sent back out to the collective body for further refinement and voting. Finally, the legislation goes out for a vote to the entire membership.

This process takes two to four years and discourages significant change. Death by a thousand cuts normally occurs.

I have worked for three years on pieces of legislation that go through endless vetting only to see it defeated and this is not uncommon. The process also invites immense focus upon picayuane issues such as the size of letters sent recruits.

However another avenue exists where the Board of Directors made of Presidents from each conference can pass directly pass. This is normally reserved for issues requiring immediate attention and seldom used. But even then, the Board decsions can be blocked by an override process where a limited number of schools can petition to have the legislation revisited. In the last three years the Board of Directors has passed good reform legislation only to have it stopped by override votes.

Past NCAA President Myles Brand grew to distrust the system and grew very impatient. His solution had been to create outside ad hoc committees populated by some Presidents, Athletic Directors, Senior Athletic Directors, as many relevant coach groups as possible and one or two faculty. These groups met and generated legislative packages that went directly to the Board of Directors after a pro-forma review by the system. In the case of Baseball and Football reform, it lead to significant and good changes, in the case of basketball, the committee results were DOA. This process got results but generated a lot of resistance and resentment from the 1400 member institutions and especially the 350+ 1A basketball and football members.

The organization has faced this dilemma for years. Glacial and unsatisfactory process creates reactive legislation loaded with nuance and minutia.

President Emmert is risking a different model. He has used this window of opportunity and near universal dissatisfaction with the NCAA as a chance to move the Presidents forward. The retreat tested Presidential support and courage, built some consensus. The immediate passage the APR legislation resembled a blood pact to stay together. Immense covert and overt opposition from many athletic directors and have not schools will oppose good reforms that cost money. To make this work the Presidents have to stay together and they have to ride herd on their athletic directors.

NCAA President Mark Emmert and the Board convinced the Presidents to take control and act now and quickly. A few short time line committees are charged to generate specific legislation on very fast time lines.

To announce their seriousness and will, he Board of Directors passed unanimously and proudly new APR limits that will prohibit teams that do not meet APR minimum—an APR of 930 projects to a 50 percent graduation rate—from going to NCAA championships or NCAA certified bowl games. This matters affects every team and every championship.

This is a great piece of legislation. It never would have passed through the cumbersome cabinet, review, and Legislative Council process. The legislation also severely limits appeals, another bane of the NCAA that draws out the endless processes. In addition, the Presidents struck a blow for sanity and against ESPN and Texas by prohibiting university affiliated sports stations from televising high school games.

The Presidents have asserted control of the organization. By law and constitution, they have this right. In less troubled times, the endless complexifying process may be barely tolerable, but it makes significant and timely reform impossible.

The biggest untold story here is that the Presidents have declared their control. The reforms are the byproduct of this and will only work if the Presidents stay together.

The NCAA Vacating Victories Makes Moral Sense

2011-08-11T14:07:00.000-07:00

“Well I know who really won.” “They can pretend to take away victories, but they can’t take my memories.” “This is stupid, the NCAA is trying to rewrite history. We know who won the game.” Once again pundits and newscasters willfully misunderstand the NCAA’s increasing use of “vacating” wins and titles from teams that cheat to win.

The last point is critical to remember. Strong moral reasons exist to “vacate” wins and titles as ill begotten gains. We need to remember this because more games and titles will be vacated this year.. At this moment both football teams in the national championship are facing scrutiny for just such ill begotten gains issues. The NCAA basketball champion also is under scrutiny.

So why vacate game at all?

The penalty responds to the fundamental fact—the “winners” cheated. They fraudulently fielded teams that by the rules of the game were illegal. So I don’t care who won; they won ill begotten gains. Good legal and moral principles lead to the conclusion that they should not be entitled to the glory, recognition or prizes associated with games won through deceit and illegality.

Vacating games or titles is a very clear and tight moral response to immoral and illegal activity. Notice it does not “forfeit” games. The NCAA does not award victories to teams that did not earn them. And it does not humiliate duplicitous teams by imposing a loss after many of the players competed with passion and good will to win. In addition, the decisions are timely compared to most glacial NCAA consequences; the punishment is immediate and clear.

The NCAA does not rewrite history, but it annotates history by pointing out the games “won” and titles “won” are not recognized by the authorizing and sponsoring bodies because the team cheated. So the name exists with an asterisk or a vacant space exists on the listings. The annotation reminds people that the victories were gained through dishonor. The “victors” are disgraced, and they should be.

The moral defense of vacating victories flows from two different moral sources. First, quality players like Marcus Camby at Massachusetts or Derrick Rose at Memphis should not have been allowed to play. They cheated and broke the rules to get to that place. (John Calipari of course knew nothing of this). Similarly Reggie Bush violated rules, and his coaches negligently denied and ignored this.Terrelle Pryor and other starters violated rules. Their coach knew but lied and withheld evidence to cover it up.

These Massachusetts, Memphis, USC and Ohio State teams lied and misrepresented themselves. They claimed to abide by rules and authorized their players as legal and eligible, certified. So the players and the institutions collaborate in mutually beneficial denial and sometimes cover ups to field teams that are corrupted by the chain of illegal actions and complicity. The ineligible players compete, and the coaches, administration and other players are complicit or negligent as they deny or ignore the irregularities compounding the deceit. The team is immoral and illegal as constituted.

The second moral issue arises from fairness. Not only is the one team tainted despite its high caliber as one built upon deceit and illegal actions, but the other teams actually abided by the rules. The other teams are at a fundamental disadvantage because they played fair, and the cheating team did not. Vacating victories reasserts the priority of fairness in competition.

In other words, the team that “won” did not deserve to win. They cheated and defrauded others and had unfair advantages. Now Massachusetts may have won a championship without Marcus Camby and Ohio State may have won 11 games, the Big 10 title and the Sugar Bowl without Terrelle Pryor, but we do not know. The point is that they played and tainted the “victory.” The rest of the team may have played their hearts out and won fair and square on the field of play, but the talent and depth surrounding them had been acquired or sustained by violating rules and had an unfair advantage before they stepped onto the field of play.

I think the decision to vacate needs to be followed by requirements to pay back money from bowls or championships or at least to face major fines the compound and create strong financial as well as moral incentives to comply.

This approach can result in seeming punishment of the innocent. An angry letter of an Georgia Tech player dared the NCAA to pry his championship ring from “my cold, dead of finger,” after the NCAA vacated 3 games and the ACC championship for Georgia Tech for playing two ineligible players.” These punishments are not perfect, but the coaches who ignore, deny or abet the violations were negligent and often the other players know and do not disclose the issues. No one knows what the outcome would have been if the illegal players had not played, but the existing outcome does not have moral or legal standing.

Vacating does not deny the game or the effort and worth of the play. But vacating victories stands as a good and defensible moral response to illegal and immoral actions that created tainted victories.

Mark Emmert's Strategy for NCAA Change II

2011-08-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

President Mark Emmert has summarized the need for the retreat as follows: “The integrity of collegiate athletics is seriously challenged today by rapidly growing pressures coming from many directions. We have reached a point where incremental change is not sufficient to meet these challenges.”

President Emmert must tirelessly speak and flog the idea of the crisis and and focus the diffuse and often misconceived media pressure into a viable and meaningful agenda of action. The Strategic Retreat on August 9 and 10 brings together all of the major presidential actors in the NCAA governance structure and pries open a window of opportunity to push and motivate the Presidents for significant change. Emmert needs to address five major groups: the Presidents, the Commissioners, the athletic directors, the coaches, and the student athletes. The media need to be addressed, but in their own way, they are both hopeless but central to entire enterprise of change. The Presidents and Commissioners are the key actors at the strategic retreat this August 9 and 10.

Presidents—They are the critical actors here. With them reform will succeed; if they are divided or half-hearted, it will fail. This is why Emmert must test out their willingness to act. All of them have seen their honorable compatriots raked over the coals to defend disgraced coaches or behavior that humiliates the university and its ideals. Even beholden to boosters, the Presidents know that a new generation of givers are less interested in athletics and more interested in academics and the academic reputation. The irony is that many got into the business of athletics to raise their academic reputation.

Even more heartening the SEC presidents have lead the country over the last decade in their zeal for increasing the academic profile of students and have set aside a portion of their TV money to invest in athletic support.They can align with the Big 10 and ACC to lead the charge. I think Emmert can win them over. The key will be their willingness to hang with each other against the combined lures of more money and the outrage of boosters who have made the system what it is. They also need to hold together and address the tensions among the haves, barely haves and have nots that sinks so much good legislation. Even a place like Connecticut with a new reform minded President or Rutgers with its see no evil president will go along. To the extent Emmert can link the reforms to raise academic standards, get higher minority graduation rates and protect universities’ reputation and from scandal, he can build this coalition. To the extent that the reforms cost money, the mid major Presidents who do no have money and hemorrhage money on their sports will balk at efforts. Emmert will need money and a willingness for the NCAA to set dual standards if this will work. This brings in the commissioners.

Commissioners—If he gets the Presidents, he can get the Commissioners. In some conferences the Presidents have vested so much power in the Commissioners and trust them, that getting the Commissioners is critical. The two smartest and most powerful Bill Delany of the Big 10 and Mike Slive of the SEC are staunch supporters of the reform. They know the costs to their franchises and both are firmly committed to the whole array of NCAA sports and know the money comes from football but the scandals are sullying the rest. They also live at the legal edge of the tangles with the BCS. Beebe of the Big 12 has been too busy holding his conference together and now is a wholly owned subsidiary of Texas so they will go where Texas goes. The mid major commissioners are the biggest problems. Their schools are in trouble financially; they cannot afford to pay cost of attendance to student athletes; they cannot afford the higher level of academic support needed; and they have no TV deals to bail them out. One of the key decisions the NCAA will have to make and the Commissioners will be critical will be to separate and create different award levels for the haves, barely haves and have nots.

Commissioners understand the issues better than the athletic directors and with the BCS have the power to destroy the NCAA by virtue of pulling out. The most valued commodity TV football remains a conference prerogative and regardless of the frantic drum beat of the media, little will happen about college football unless the major commissioners come together. Interestingly they may be more important than the Presidents but most of the commissioners now are far more aligned with their Presidents for whom they run TV stations and offset deficits than the athletic directors. So getting the commissioners matters as much for the Presidents.

Athletic Directors—The momentum for change will not come from athletic directors who are hemmed in the obsessions to win, raise money and prevent anyone else from gaining a competitive advantage. Many of the have not directors don’t want things to change because they benefit from the corruption and economic inequality. Athletic directors are too imbedded in their own job security issues and the demand to win and placate boosters and super star coaches that they will not have the unity or the vision to lead the fight to change. As a force for change the athletic directors are paralyzed by the need to make money and win at all costs. They are often eclipsed by their own coaches and often go down with the coaches they succor and protect.

Coaches—Emmert has worked with the top tiers of coaches from the beginning of his administration. He has hired and managed top flight coaches—he broke the million dollar barrier by hiring Nick Saban at USC. He has hired and fired and knows their world well. He has cultivated them and has a level of trust and respect from the top tiers. More important, the top tier now knows they are not immune given the fate of Tressel at Ohio State or Pearl at Tennessee or the USC impact. Now with Shiva option as USC and the destruction of Tressel at Ohio State and destruction of Bruce Pearl at Tennessee and possible pillorying of Jim Calhoun, then has weapon to wield. Coaches now know no one except Calipari is invulnerable to NCAA or Presidential response. Emmert has worked hard, and circumstances have come around so that the coaches just want clear and consistent rules and to eliminate many low return rules that generate violations they can barely control like rethinking agents or phone calls.

Student athletes—The student athletes have their own organization inside the NCAA and it inhabited by the best and most thoughtful of the student athletes. They are committed and intelligent. They serve on NCAA cabinets and often contribute well and thoughtfully to deliberations. But like the rest they are riven by their very different levels of schools and the irony is that you never see basketball, football or hockey players as the student athlete

representatives. They don’t have the time and as the most professional obsessed, the interest. If the NCAA can address the cost of attendance issues and the level of academic support issues, a lot can be done and will win their support. The need to rethink agents is also tied to students because they need good advice for post career moves and while it impacts a trace element of them, the rest feel tarred by the shenanigans of the few and they know that if done right early agent contact can help and support the student athletes. I think the student athletes can be brought along more by the content of the reforms, than the process per se. They know that if the cost of attendance issues and the agent and phone issues can be addressed a huge array of the petty corruption that weaves through the fabric of teams dominated by low social economic status kids can be minimized and everyone would benefit from that.

The Media—Emmert was partially chosen for his ability to communicate and work with the media. This task is impossible. Too many reporters and TV commentator are wedded to a narrative where they pitch themselves as protectors of the student athlete—actually about 500 of 400,000 who might go pro—and assault what they regard as unfair recompense or opaque and crazy enforcement procedures. The best Emmert and the NCAA can hope for is to build and keep their legitimacy among their membership and students; the media will do what the media does and search for scandals and cover them with glee. Emmert will continue to try and reach out like the day long workshop on enforcement, but expect no real help or fairness here. Too many reporters are making careers out of portraying the NCAA as Darth Vader without understanding the difference between infractions or reinstatement. Emmert has and will continue to make efforts here and the messaging is critical; but nothing will be done here for long.

The NCAA and Mark Emmert have a remarkable window of opportunity to change. The window is created by the membership’s own travails as well as the pressures that are breaking the system apart in football and basketball. Emmert has seized upon the moment and is generating the conditions of focused crisis, attractor solutions and coalition building that something good might come out of it.

Good luck to them.

Mark Emmert's Window of Opportunity for NCAA Change

2011-08-04T10:54:00.000-07:00

NCAA President Mark Emmert is trying to generate momentum for significant changes in the NCAA. His “retreat” on August 9 and 10 with 50 college Presidents and Chancellors along with a few Commissioners, Athletic Directors and one faculty member represents a major gamble to test the appetite of the Presidents for serious change. If the Presidents align, the NCAA can launch a serious reform agenda.

Changing a large institution is not easy. With 1400 members and three levels of voting and a byzantine process of legislation, NCAA change initiatives face death by a thousand cuts and interest group vetoes. Glacial passes for supersonic at the organization.

To understand Emmert’s strategy and gamble, we need to realize that significant organizational change usually requires a confluence of conditions.

1) An institution needs a leader who is willing to take big chances to set an agenda, build coalitions and fight for change.

2) A sense of urgency and stress needs to arise to generate real pressures on organizational members to be open to change out of fear and worry. Institutions seldom change unless forced by crisis. For most members fear of change is stronger than a desire to solve problems, so unless they sense the franchise is in danger, most will passively or actively resist change.

3) The institution needs to see a way out of the mess; the leader and his cadre of support must produce a way out. They need to fashion an attractor that moves beyond the defensive fear, denial or inertia.

4) The leader must marshal a strong coalition committed to move beyond the inertia and fight for the change against the forces of defensiveness that will array against it.

President Emmert must articulate the nature of the CRISIS facing the NCAA. This is hard for an organization that has 13 billion dollars of guaranteed income for the next decade and possess a cartel franchise on every college sport but football.

He has several things going for him. The endless array of scandals has waterboarded college sports especially elite football and basketball for three years. The public perception exists that things are out of control, and Emmert needs to build this into a crescendo.

Even more importantly, no one is now immune. The implosion of USC created a supernova across intercollegiate sports and brought down not just a fabled program but senior coaches and a fabled AD. What I call the Shiva Option that destroys programs without the death penalty now exists in the NCAA’s arsenal. Even more important it created the precedent that nobody, coach or athletic director is immune. I mean no one. (except John Calipari) So at a pillar of integrity the athletic director and football coach at University of North Carolina are gone. At Tennessee the basketball coach, football coach and athletic director are gone. Michigan got off easy but still jettisoned their coach, and now Ohio State, once a pillar of integrity, has been smeared across the constellations for a remarkable hear/see/do no evil approach to a cheating and lying coach and nationally successful program.

The Crisis has many dimensions and each scandal has its own nuances, but Emmert’s job is connect them in rhetoric and strategy. He has been tirelessly building up enforcement and carefully linking the array of scandals into a crisis of confidence in the NCAA. The media frenzies and unbelievable media cynicism around college football and basketball need to be used to push a reform agenda against the inertia of programs and boosters.

Mike Slive the experienced and incredibly successful Commissioner of the SEC has served as a good stalking horse for the reform agenda. He has helped forge rhetorical strategy of linking them all into a crisis: “We have lost the benefit of the doubt.” This is true especially in the media and it is doubly sad for the 87 other NCAA championships, most of which epitomize hard and prized competition and amateur athletics. So the entire enterprise’s legitimacy is threatened and besmirched.

Mark Emmert has the crisis and he has the fear in place. He has augmented it by bolstering enforcement and coming out in favor of more. He and a couple Commissioners are doing a very good job of mounting a rhetorical sense of urgency even if they have not yet hit upon a clear and focused articulation of the core values issues. Now he has to build the coalition, and Part II will discuss how that can be done.