A couple of times a year confrontations happen between two parties that I normally root against. That always poses a dilemma for me because it is hard to bring myself to root in favor of either one. Fortunately, in this case, nothing of any consequence is likely to come forth so I probably don't have to worry about news reports today that the Congress of the United States will investigate the NCAA and the way it oversees/governs intercollegiate athletics. The House Judiciary Committee wants to know about how the NCAA investigates university athletic programs. The motivating force behind this investigation is a Congressthing from Alabama – where the NCAA has spent a lot of its investigatory time and effort recently – and he said that the NCAA denies due process in its investigations and has repeatedly failed “to adopt meaningful reforms” and has “lost the public confidence”.
There should not be a single reader here who should be even mildly surprised to know that I would be prone to believe any charges of incompetence or pettiness or venality leveled at the NCAA. I've said in a Topical Rant that it is at best a necessary evil. I said that the NCAA is “about as useful as a pair of inline skates to someone who uses a walker”; I have been given no compelling reason to change my mind on that. My views on the leadership in the NCAA – from Dr. Myles Brand to the genius who runs the investigation program – have also not changed; I believe their pronouncements like I believed the Iraqi Minister of Information's reporting on the progress of the fighting in Iraq last year. But there is a delicious irony in having any Congressthing complain that any other organization has repeatedly failed “to adopt meaningful reforms”. And let me say that many Congressional investigations of alleged improprieties by its members might not be considered by all parties to have been completely fair and unbiased – as is the intention of the concept of due process.
The only thing to root for in this investigation is that both sides expose each other for the necessary evils that they are and for the people involved to soil the reputations of everyone involved in some significant way.
That news item got me thinking about college sports this morning and – as usual – there is a lot of nonsense going on there. You may have noticed the silence of that cadre of sportswriters and commentators who routinely wail about how the cards are stacked against those poor “mid-major schools”. You know, the ones who just can't get the big guys to play them on a level playing field because the noble “mid-majors” really are better at coaching and getting the most out of their programs. The MAC is the conference that is usually the poster child for these columnists and commentators. They jump on Miami (Ohio) and Toledo and Bowling Green and Marshall and Northern Illinois every time they do something good and bellow about how these schools are being held down. So why the quietude now? Might it be that the MAC teams opened the 2004 football season with a cumulative record of 1-10 and that the single win was over the noted football powerhouse, VMI?
Thinking about “football powerhouses” like VMI reminds me that when TV networks are flashing scores of “other games around the country” they really ought to tailor those scores to the audience for the game. When COMCAST is doing a regional telecast of a game like Delaware/UMass, there ought to be an appreciation of what the audience is likely to be. So focus the scores on eastern schools and even eastern small schools in that case; don't bother these folks with South Dakota State/Azusa Pacific because the odds are that audience won't care. When ABC is telecasting a national game, focus on games that might have a wide national interest. South Dakota State/Azusa Pacific does not fit that bill and neither does Delaware/UMass or Iona/Coast Guard Academy. For telecasts of games that have “national interest”, I would rotate the scores of those games on which there is a Las Vegas line. That is not because I want to cater to gamblers but because those games are the ones that have national interest; that is what generates the wagering that encourages the oddsmakers to set the lines in the first place.
When you are feeling sorry for those poor teams in the MAC that got their lunches handed to them last weekend, please also remember that they collected some significant coin for their troubles. This is a way for them to raise revenue to invest into their programs so they can grow; that ought to be what they are teaching their students in their business school courses, no? According to reports, the University of Central Florida picked up a check for $350K for going to Madison to play Wisconsin and will score another $425K for a visit to Happy Valley to play Penn State. The University of Richmond reportedly got $250K to go to Raleigh for a game with NC State last weekend, as did William and Mary for their trip to Chapel Hill. In addition to fattening their bankrolls, this also gives schools “exposure” and that supposedly will help recruiting – assuming that the schools use the money they generated in those games for those purposes.
Kansas State is infamous for its cupcake scheduling of non-conference opponents – all of whom seem to find a way to travel to Manhattan Kansas. This year, Western Kentucky, Fresno State and Louisiana-Lafayette are the invited guests. Fresno State beat Washington last week so they are probably not awful even though the University of Washington program is not anything like it was 10 -15 years ago. This scheduling is exactly why the BCS needs to find some way to incorporate “strength of schedule” into their rating system.
Enough about college sports. I read something yesterday in columns by Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times and Jerry Greene in the Orlando Sentinel about a survey done among men that revealed that 40% of the respondents said that their “overriding thought during the day” was fantasy football. Another 30% said that sex was their “overriding thought during the day”. Using Darwinian precepts, we can guess which of these categories of people is most likely to produce offspring. These results could indicate that fantasy football may indeed be a passing fad. (We can only hope!) Here is what frightens me. We have a Presidential election coming up and we have campaign directors who will seize on any poll results as a way to reach out to segments of the electorate. If they read these numbers, we may not have Presidential debates this year about political issues; we may have candidates arguing over the relative merits of taking running backs in the early rounds of a fantasy draft versus a quality wide-out. Then again, maybe that would not be lowering the bar very much for the content of these nominal” debates”.
Finally, Norman Chad had this observation about Arizona Cardinals' coach, Dennis Green:
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“He coached seven different quarterbacks into the postseason. He went to the playoffs with Jeff George – that's tougher than going to the Grammys with LaToya Jackson.”
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