The NCAA Presidents Stage a Governance Coup

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

“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

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

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.

Ivy League takes on Head Trauma to Save Football from Itself

Two a day practices begin in three days for college football teams. The start of bone crunching practices is a good time to remember clearly documented threats football contact poses to the human brain and cognitive functions of players. Saving the sport in all its brutal beauty requires addressing head trauma for moral and legal reasons. The Ivy League has taken the bull by the horns and limited the number of full contact practices to two per week during season and three during pre-season. Why?

The American university enshrines the mind at the center of its aspirations. The university nurtures knowledge, creativity and reflective thinking. Without a strong mind, a university education makes no sense given its role to shape knowledge, imagination and reflective practice. As stewards of the gifts the mind universities should take the lead in addressing the plague of brain injury resulting from football.

We know without a doubt that long-term football contact not only cripples knees, legs and shoulders, but cripples the brain. The range of cognitive impairment afflicting ex-football players is staggering. We used to think that having your "bell rung" was part of the game; now we know it slowly changes the electro-chemical constitution of the brain. It precipitates vicious protein build up that slowly congests neural functioning and destroys cognitive and physical capacities.

It initially appeared that the problems might be associated only with concussions, but the research now finds the damage grows as much from repetitive contact over time.  The vast majority of contact occurs not in games, but in practices. The type of contact in games may rise in intensity and players may play through more pain, but the vast number of contact points that cumulative reshape the brain occur in practice.

Practice, especially at college, matters immensely. Players compete constantly for playing time. The depth charts are far more fluid in college than professional ball. The number of players is larger. The pool size and permeability of starting line ups intensifies practices. Coaches still, for very good reasons, watch full contact practices to get the full measure of the talent but also the decision-making players under the speed and pressure of full contact competition.

Practices can be brutal and designed to cull, weed out and isolate the weak and unprepared as well as reward the committed and prepared. This is integral to the excellence of achievement in any sport, any activity for that matter.

The Ivy regulations will limit in season contact practices to two per week, not five. It will limit the contact during preseason to one per day not two, and during spring it will permit three per week. The Ivy League effectively cuts the number of potential repetitive brain impacts by 40-50 percent. This is a             GOOD THING.

College student athletes are not professional athletes but still students. As long as the university believes in the student aspect; our schools have strong moral obligations to protect and nurture the quality of mind. It makes no moral sense to place students activities over time that we now know will destroy the physical foundation of the purpose of the University.

The chorus of naysayers will claim that people want to turn football players into wimps or to sissify the sport. You can hear talk show ex-players already complain that modern professional practices largely consist of morning walk-throughs and afternoon partial pads. In "my day" they had brutal ugly confrontational two a days of 3 hours each in full pads at game intensity. They might be right. But right now modern football players are bigger and faster with more efficient muscle mass and technique than even fifteen years ago. A modern 1A offensive tackles ranges from 6'4" to 6' 8" and 290-350 pounds while a guard would be 6' to 6' 5" and 280-330 pounds. That is 30 to 40 pounds heavier than twenty years ago.

This size+speed+strength equation equals far greater force impact. So you add up mass impact that are significantly greater with the additional number of contacts, and this amplifies the cumulative head trauma. This also increases the number of injuries that accumulate over the course of a season leading to attrition. It could be a win-win for coaches and players and you can see some of this coming up in how the NFL union is opposing the lengthened season but also negotiating over controlling the nature of practices and workouts required.

A study quoted in the New York Times found that a season of practice time will generate 2500 collisions that have a G-force of 50-79. It will create 300 collisions with concussion range G force of 80-119 and 200 collisions with ranges above 120 Gs. Doctors compare the last to hitting a concrete wall at 40 miles per hour. Regulations like the Ivy League can cut the number of concussive impacts by 42 percent and keep players fresher as well as minimize other physical attrition that occurs.

The Ivy League is not the SEC or Big10 or Big East and they will not change easily unless forced to by civil litigation. But the Ivy decision has created a laboratory to test if these changes can lower the dangers of head trauma. This will give the NCAA and players and doctors better data to move the process along. No big league conference will change on its own because they all fear handing over a competitive advantage to other conferences. But a BCS or NCAA wide change could grow from the data that Ivy league wil help generate.

I do not want football to become a sentence to to limited mind and brain function. It is appalling for universities to be a party to this and the Ivy League’s efforts give college football a chance to think hard about dealing with head trauma and the integrity of the mind.

How a Team Collapses: 2011 Mariners

My Mariners are not really in a death spiral, although it feels like it. My daughter tells me I tend to overdramatize things, but we Mariners’ fans are watching a complete team collapse. Today the team managed to stop their headlong pursuit to set a modern major league record for losses in a row; they had to settle for 17. This is not a choke where the stakes are high and the team has it all on the line and fails to play up to its capability. Now they are simply collapsing.

No one expected much of this team, and yet, for a glorious moment, they produced unexpectedly good baseball. Now they have collapsed into beyond pathetic and it got me wondering what happens when a team collapses?

A team collapses when it suddenly starts to play below its capabilities and enters a spiral of losing and declining competence fed by the losing. To collapse suggests the team has been performing well or at least OK, then it suddenly devolves to a lower, I mean awful, level of play. The Mariners were playing at or above their projected talent+skill+commitment capabilities. Then in a very short time, the team swoons to compete far below its talent+skill+commitment level. This results in a self-reinforcing corkscrew of losses reinforcing each other until the team has played itself out of contention.

A team collapse involves the well-documented psychological phenomenon of contagion. In a collapse, the low level of performance begins somewhere. In the Mariner’s case, the entire batting lineup, but especially the collapse of Sean Figgins and Ichiro who are both hitting about 70 points below their career averages.

Other players begin to feel obligated to up their game. Team members push themselves to try to do more than they are capable of. They try to hit homers when they are live drive hitters; they swing at marginal pitches; they lose patience. This singular response is compounded because team members lose trust in the other players. They believe that other players will not do their part. This lack of trust in the rest of the lineup motivates them to push harder, move beyond their comfort zone and strengths. If they were role players and had defined comfortable positions, they press beyond these and fail.

This pressing beyond talent+skill level leads to disaster. Leaving aside sudden blips, hot games or streaks, most good to average players will decline when they move beyond their comfort or strength zones. Pitchers will magnify the problems once the scouts let them know a batter is now vulnerable to new pitches. So player-by-player individuals fall into patterns of failure and fall below their norms and even below replacement value.  Suddenly you have a team that is last in the major leagues in 7 of 9 offensive categories and that is offensive (ugh!). Yesterday they set a record in Yankee stadium—18 strikeouts  against good but not great pitching. This only occurs when an entire team anxiously presses and swings at balls at bad or marginal pitches.As in the Yankee game, they flail, check swings, watch third strikes; they manifest a collective lack of decisive confidence in their ability to engage or hit.

The offense woes lead managers to play mix and match and call up anyone in the farm system that looks like a hitter. This approach generates chaotic and unreliable patterns in the in field. So precision infield play or outfield fielding efficiency plummets. The trusting communication and internalized sixth senses of trust and anticipation disappears. Fielders overplay and compensate and even ignore scouts. This results in more errors and egregious mistakes that erode trust further. The team brings up minor league “hitters” who are marginal outfielders, so mistakes multiply and bloopers become a sort of expected norm.

The slow collapse of hitting coupled with the gradual wearing down of fielding competence finally infects the pitchers, and this nailed the coffin shut.

The Mariners were held together by superb but young starting pitchers and journeymen relievers enjoying career years. But now the contagion spreads in the same way. Young pitchers like Michael Pineda start to over throw knowing they cannot rely on run support. Doug Fister and Jason Vargas both need control and fine fielding to work. But like Pineda, they are forced to try for more strikeouts because they cannot trust the fielding. The pressure on each pitch goes up because so little run support exists (Fister had 8 runs scored in 6 starts). So “pressure pitches” multiply which increases the stress load and impact on pitchers wearing down their mental focus more quickly.

Pitchers know they cannot afford mistakes because the fielding is no longer reliable and the offense cannot offset errors. The mental and physical strain of every pitch intensifies. Pitchers wear down faster and young pitchers even faster. Now every player's failure feeds their own lack of confidence and also infects every other players eroding competence. The psyche of the team guarantees failure because no one believes they can succeed with this group of team mates.

On top of this the pundits demand trades and heads to fall, everyone now finds himself mentioned in columns and potential trade bait. So every at bat and every pitch now becomes an audition to be traded; this of course fosters even more nervous tension as well as harvesting massive insecurity in a clubhouse.

At this point many teams give up. We see it all the time on the field when a coach loses control of the team. Players not just collapse in skill set but they quit trying or they quit caring which leads to the same result. The talent+skill equation depends upon the commitment level of give it life. The Mariners, unlike the last two years, are still playing as a cohesive unit and have neither given up nor taken to attacking each other. They do not manifest a complete death spiral where the team and the coach have lost control of their destinies. I witnessed this happen at Washington with Tyrone Willingham’s last college team.

17 losses in a row. They are not that bad; but they will never recover this year. Felix Hernandez staunched the record run; but more loss streaks on are the way and a slow agonizing season lies before us. 

Why Sports Unions Succeed and Others Fail I & II

The Paradox of Modern Sports Union Success

Unions are dying in the United States. Less than 8 percent of the private sector work force is unionized. So why do unions flourish so successfully in professional sports?

Well it is not because the owners like them. Both professional football and basketball owners are trying to destroy their unions with lockouts. Both will fail, and the owners know it even as the football lockout enters its fourth month and will be resolved soon.

The owners hate the unions; I mean they hate the unions. Many of the owners are self-made wealthy using the teams as forms of ego gratification or extensions of their own Ayn Rand self images as self-made individualists. They will do anything and have tried everything including collusion to destroy the unions, but they fail. Why?

I think the reasons sports unions succeed derive from the very unique shape of the labor market that makes it relatively immune to the global forces that undermine unions all over the world.

The global market enables employers to shift jobs to lower wage countries. Borders mean little, and even technical jobs can be outsources at will an connected via the internet. If owners don’t shift jobs abroad, they can always shift to the south or southwest where government war on unions will ensure lower wages, benefits and working conditions. The shape of the labor market in sports limits these options for owners.

Traditional unions depend upon their ability to organize workers and get workers to perceive that a common good can be achieved by negotiating wages and working conditions together. A common good gets disturbed across all union members. The gain is greater for all workers over the long run than if workers negotiated individually for their contracts. This is the key; if the union stays together, the long term benefits are huge, but if they fall apart, then the benefits fail them.

The benefits of a union revolve around guaranteed wages for work. But the combined power also generates benefits and work rules around safety, none of which individuals on their own could gain. Left on their own,  individual workers would end up with lower benefits, lower wages or job security and less safety over the life of the contract—this is exactly what has happened in the modern American private sector.

So why do sports unions work?

The first and more ironic point is that the owners actually gain an immense legal advantage from having unions to negotiate. This enables owners to get things like salary caps, entry salaries but above all transferrable contracts that can be traded within the league or cartel. The negotiated contract protects the owners and their cartel from potential anti-trust and restraint of trade challenges. The contract protects certain aspects of the game that permit some level playing field and the patterns of player investment and trades that the teams depend upon.

The professional unions move to decertify themselves removed this cover for the superstructure of the sports and their profitability. This enabled the union members to launch a series of law suites that would destroy the profit structure as well as the competitive balance of the leagues upon which the profitability depends. This is doubly important for basketball and football because both depend upon salary caps which could not be sustained without a strong union agreement.

So against their better judgment, the owners need and accept but hate the unions.

Part II will examine the exceptional form that unionization takes in professional sport to adapt principles of unions with the need for compensation for superstarts.

The recent settlement of the NFL lockout simply reminds the owners that they cannot conduct their business without a union of their players. At a deep level, the professional sport unions flourish because the number of elite athletes who can play professional sports is vanishingly small.  A small level of depth exists in the labor markets to permit some reasonable substitution for medium or low range skill players. The baseball statistic of value over replacement (VORP) suggests this.

The replacement level is so high and the number of replacements so limited, however, that the drop off of play would be precipitous. There is no reserve army of the unemployed to take their place and you cannot move place bound teams at will to other countries with lower wage scales.

Second, the players are highly skilled and the skills take a long time to develop. Most of the investment in skills comes from the individuals who forgo other options to achieve that exceptional skill. The player also takes a very high risk because very few people succeed so they have forgone other opportunities. The  players want to get maximum gains in the shortest time because pro careers especially in football and basketball average 3-4 years. So players have a very strong incentive to maximize their gains in a very short time of professional play and to band together to achieve this.

Third, only a small number of owners compete for the players; this permits cartel like behavior that can escape court scrutiny with legal contracts with unions.

This small group and limited substitution pool makes the value of the workers very high, doubly so because on the margins the addition of a couple players can profoundly impact the success of a team. So the union involves relatively little cost day-to-day cost to the players, and workers are socialized into the union at a very early age. The unions focus upon limiting entry, early salary scales, common mobile benefit pools and retirement benefits works well for players. The contracts also enable owners to have reserve clauses and trades and salary caps that game or owners needs to create some form of parity.

This common gain involves two major sacrifices by the players: the need to contribute money to a common strike fund and, second, the requirement to go on strike or endure a lockout if necessary to protect the common goods.

Sports unions, then, have a huge advantage over traditional unions. The members possess incredibly rare talents that take huge personal investment to develop over time. This means that they cannot easily be replaced by workers or technology. Despite the myth of movies like The Replacements, elite professional athletes cannot be substituted en masse and still provide a powerful, skilled and entertaining sport and spectacle. The inability to outsource, replace or move to a different venue means the owners are stuck with an ultra small elite and irreplaceable group of highly skilled elite employees.

Now two huge revisions have been made to traditional union values that promote egalitarian and limited wage differentials. First, athletes sign contracts that permit the teams/owners to trade the contract and trade them. This is incredibly rare; imagine Google trading an employee to Facebook!! The closest to this might be noncompeting contracts that some highly skilled employees sign. This enables a mini-market to occur across teams but players benefit from the loss of control of place of employment with strong portable pensions and benefits that build a substratum under all players. It also benefits everyone by creating strong minimum salaries and step increases.

The second major change from traditional unions is the free agency. Traditionally unions have been hostile to merit based compensation arguing that it undercuts solidarity and sets members against one another. This has been an Achilles heal for unions.

Professional sports unions solves this dilemma by permitting individuals to become free agents after set periods of time. The initial apprentice years have tracked salaries after bonuses, then after having served this time, free agency releases a player from the team and permits the player to sign with any other team. Now some restrictions exists in football, hockey and basketball about how many and levels of agency signing, but the point is that this permits players to have the advantages of unions—solidarity, portable benefits, strong control of entry salaries—with the advantages of strong merit based or market payments to players after they have served an apprentice period.

Another lingering aspect that makes unions strong by increasing the value of the players is that modern sports teams market themselves largely through star power or faces of the team. Teams invest immense money in their brands but they depend heavily upon a few hyped players with their faces and names splattered all over the city or nation to create a unique brand and bridge the emotional range from corporate team shells to fan association with the team.

One final point seals their stature. In economics many goods are vulnerable to competition because they can be substituted for. So if you take away my house, I can move to an apartment or condo. In professional sports, there are no easy substitute goods. It is interesting that many football fans will not find basketball a suitable substitute for football. Likewise baseball and hockey core fans will not regard the other sports as substitutes. So along with the limited labor market and difficulty to replace skills, lies the other problem that most sports cannot be substituted for by other sports. When a sports team leaves a town, people who watched that sport don't migrate to others; they might follow the sport on TV, find another team to root for, or simply lose interest. This cements the unique bargaining power of the elite athletes.

The success of modern sport unions depends upon player possessing a unique set of skills that counteract the anti-union pressures of a global market. I can’t think of anywhere else it would work.