Patrick Hruby

The Wrong Man for the Job

2013-05-17T12:04:00.002-04:00

Why is Elliot Pellman still associated with the NFL?

Sports on Earth

Bill Barr couldn't believe it. It was early last year, and the New York University neuropsychologist had just received an email from National Institutes of Health neurologist Russ Lonser, thanking Barr and other experts for reviewing a series of brain injury research grant proposals for NFL Charities, the National Football League's philanthropic arm.

A few hours later, a second message appeared in Barr's inbox.

Russ: thank you and your reviewers from myself and the entire charities board. Well done!

Elliot

"It was from Elliot Pellman," Barr says. "I was just surprised, thinking, 'Oh my gosh, he still has himself in there somehow.'"

You're an NFL player. You care about your brain. Do you want your health and safety connected in any way to a man who once wrote that concussions in professional football "are not serious injuries" and that "many [concussed] players can be safely allowed to return to play on the day of injury?" A man who spent nearly a decade downplaying and dismissing the long-term cognitive damage associated with repeated blows to the head, despite ample evidence to the contrary? A man who headed a league-created concussion committee that has been blasted by Congress, discredited by independent researchers and accused of producing dubious, industry-sponsored pro-tobacco pseudo-science that now serves as the smoldering gun for more than 4,000 lawsuits filed by former players against the league, alleging negligence and fraud?

No?

Too bad. You're out of luck. The above man is real. His name is Elliot Pellman. A Long Island-based physician and former team doctor for the New York Jets, Pellman served as the chairman of the NFL's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee from 1994 until 2007, when he resigned amid criticism. In subsequent years, the league has significantly altered its stance on brain trauma -- admitting that concussions can cause long-term cognitive harm, enacting stricter, standardized return-to-play rules for concussed players, donating money to medical research and even disbanding Pellman's committee, all part of what NFL commissioner Roger Goodell calls a "relentless" focus on health and safety.

So relentless, in fact, that Pellman is still giving the league medical advice.

Oh, and he's still involved with the league's brain-related health and safety efforts, too.

Three years ago, Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Stewart Bradley and quarterback Kevin Kolb both were concussed during the same game and allowed to continue playing before being pulled off the field, a dangerous practice now prohibited by NFL guidelines. During a subsequent league inquiry, Eagles trainers spoke to Pellman. In 2011 Cleveland Browns quarterback Colt McCoy was concussed on a vicious helmet-to-helmet hit from Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison. After Browns trainers failed to administer a standard sideline diagnostic test, McCoy reentered the game. To determine how that happened, Browns team president Mike Holmgren later met with medical representatives from the players' union and the league. Including Pellman. Earlier that season, Eagles quarterback Michael Vick suffered a concussion and had to be examined by a neurologist before being cleared to play. Who reportedly helped choose the neurologist? Pellman.

On the same day last January that researchers reported that the brain of former NFL linebacker and suicide victim Junior Seau tested positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) -- a neurodegenerative disease associated with repetitive head trauma -- former NFL quarterback Bernie Kosar held an informal press conference in a Cleveland luxury hotel touting the work of Florida-based anesthesiologist Marvin "Rick" Sponaugle, whose controversial treatment of intravenous fluids and nutritional supplements Kosar credits with helping relieve his brain trauma-related ailments. Despite a lack of scientific evidence supporting Kosar's claims, NFL spokesman Greg Aiello confirmed that the retired quarterback had spoken about his treatment with Goodell; moreover, the league reportedly put Sponaugle in touch with -- you guessed it -- Pellman.

Pellman's precise role with the NFL is opaque. During a player health and safety presentation at the league's 2012 spring meetings, NFL executive Jeff Pash referred to him as "our medical director." On the website for his private practice, Pellman calls himself the league's "medical advisor," with duties that include "advising the league on medical and health matters" and "administrating NFL health committees." Contacted by Sports on Earth, Aiello confirmed that Pellman is a medical advisor to the league office, but does not establish policy or assist in the administration of the Head, Neck and Spine Committee, the successor to the now-defunct Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee once headed by Pellman.

Still: You're the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Do you retain Mike Brown for advice and administration? Or send him to gather information from disaster relief sites?

"The NFL can say all they want about all the things they are doing [for player health and safety]," says retired NFL lineman Kyle Turley, one of the plaintiffs in the concussion lawsuits. "But you have to question why they have people like Elliot Pellman still involved with the league to this day. A guy like him is going to give us answers on this problem?"

* * *

Curiously enough, Pellman is not mentioned on the NFL's football safety website, nor in the pages of its first-ever Health and Safety Report, which contains the bold-faced names of dozens of doctors and scientists serving on various committees. Why the omission? Perhaps because people like Barr have called Pellman's continuing involvement with the league the equivalent of having "the fox guard the henhouse." And perhaps because the NFL would rather not talk about its ignominious recent brain trauma past, particularly while being sued over it.

(Speaking of which: The league's new-ish ~~marketing magic wand wave~~ safety slogan is "forever forward, forever football." As a wise man once put it: If you don't like what is being said, then change the conversation.)

When former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue formed the league's original concussion committee in 1994, he tabbed Pellman to run it. The Jets team doctor was a rheumatologist, specializing in joint and muscle injuries. He was not a neurologist. He later claimed in biographical material that he had a medical degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook; according to The New York Times, he actually attended medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico. In a mid-1990s interview with Sports Illustrated, Pellman discussed players getting "dinged" and sounded: (a) not particularly scientific; (b) an awful lot like Dr. Nick Riviera:

"Veterans clear more quickly than rookies ... they can unscramble their brains a little faster, maybe because they're not afraid after being dinged. A rookie won't know what's happened to him and will be a little panicky. The veterans almost expect the dings. You have to watch them, though, because vets will try to fool you. They memorize the answers. They'll run off the field staring at the scoreboard."

According to a 2006 ESPN the Magazine article written by Peter Keating, several leading brain scientists were troubled by Pellman's lack of expertise. Neuropsychologists jokingly called him "Mr. Pellman." Another doctor told Keating that, "I would hear [Pellman] say things in speeches like, 'I don't know much about concussions, I learn from my players,' and, 'We as a field don't know much about concussions,' and it used to bother me. We knew what to do about concussions, but he was acting like it was new ground."

Medical research and policy conclusions coming out of the NFL's committee also proved equally disconcerting. Following nine years of academic silence, Pellman and his colleagues published a series of papers in the mid-2000s. They concluded that concussed professional football players, even those knocked unconscious, could be "safely returned to play" on the same day of their injury. That returning to play after a concussion did not involve "significant risk of a second injury either in the same game or during the season." That players with previous concussions had no risk of repeated concussions. That there was "no evidence" that multiple concussions produced "worsening injury or chronic cumulative effects." In a 2006 article, Pellman and co-author David Viano summed up 12 years of the committee's work by writing that concussions in professional football are not serious injuries.

Not surprisingly, independent studies indicated otherwise. Research on the pathology of CTE, known as "punch-drunkenness," dated back to the 1920s; a 1952 study determined that concussive and subconcussive blows to the head caused brain changes and damge in boxers; British studies in the 1970s found CTE in the brains of deceased boxers, steeplechase jockeys and wrestlers, sports that involved enduring repeated blows to the head; in 2005 neuropathologist Bennet Omalu published a paper identifying the disease in the brain of deceased Pittsburgh Steelers lineman Mike Webster. In 1973, researchers first identified Second Impact Syndrome, a rare but often-fatal swelling of the brain that occurs when a concussed individual absorbs a second blow to the head; a decade later, University of Virginia scientists determined that concussed college football players suffered long-term pathological damage, and that players who suffered one concussion were more likely to suffer a second.

Beginning in 1999, a series of University of North Carolina studies found that: (a) concussed football players were three times more likely to suffer a second concussion in the same season; (b) former NFL players who had been concussed during their careers were more likely to have neurological problems than those who had not; (c ) former NFL players faced a 37 percent higher risk of Alzheimer's disease than other males of the same age; (d) a history of repeated concussions and "probably subconcussive contacts to the head may be risk factors for the expression of late-life memory impairment, mild cognitive impairment and earlier expression of Alzheimer's."

Pellman's committee remained unconvinced. Nor did it acknowledge that some NFL general managers seemed to understand that concussions were serious injuries, and that multiple concussions were worse than one. How else to explain Pellman's team, the Jets, restructuring receiver Wayne Chrebet's contract in 2004 to include a "concussion clause" that would slash his salary from $1.5 million to $500,000 if he was placed on injured reserve -- a clause inserted after Chrebet, who previously had suffered at least five concussions, missed the last eight games of the 2003 season with post-concussion syndrome? How else to explain the Carolina Panthers signing linebacker Dan Morgan to a 2007 contract that paid out a $2 million roster bonus on a per-game basis, an unusual arrangement drawn up after Morgan suffered his fifth concussion? Even the league's own retirement board appeared less in denial than the concussion committee: According to a report by ESPN's "Outside the Lines" and PBS' "Frontline," it awarded disability payments during the late 1990s and 2000s to at least three former players after determining that football caused their crippling brain injuries.

Outside scientists criticized the committee's methodology as insular and slipshod, and its findings as both dubious and dangerous. In his ESPN the Magazine article, Keating describes a Pellman-headed committee study comparing the neurocognitive test scores of healthy players, concussed players and players who had suffered multiple concussions:

… a lot was riding on the analysis. The committee had never imposed recommendations on team medical staffs. But this was the first study ever to analyze the brain function of NFL athletes. If it showed that concussions were significantly impairing players, the league might be forced to institute new rules for evaluating and treating head injuries …

According to the article, Pellman and study co-author Mark Lovell failed to collect complete test score data from at least four individual team neuropsychologists, including Barr, and that as a result did not include at least 850 baseline test results in their research -- more than the 655 that ultimately were included in their study. "At best," Keating writes, "their numbers were incomplete. At worst, they were biased." (Lovell later sent a letter to the magazine staying "at no point was there ever an attempt to exclude teams from participating ... to suggest that there was an effort to suppress the collection of data for the study ... is completely baseless.") Published in 2004, the committee's paper concluded -- big surprise -- that NFL players did not show a decline in brain function after suffering concussions. An anonymous scientist who reviewed Pellman's work was apoplectic. "They're basically trying to prepare a defense for when one of these players sues," the scientist told Keating. "They are trying to say that what's done in the NFL is OK because in their studies, it doesn't look like bad things are happening from concussions. But the studies are flawed beyond belief."

"If you look at the papers they published in [the journal] Neurosurgery, they note no conflicts of interest," Barr says. "I thought that was the most hilarious thing."

Pellman defended his work, in part by attacking any scientist that contradicted it. When Omalu published his study of Webster's brain in 2005, Pellman and two of his committee colleagues wrote a letter to Neurosurgery demanding a full retraction -- almost unheard of in the academic world. (Three years later, the NFL finally asked independent neuropathologist Peter Davies to examine Omalu's findings; according to GQ magazine, Davies concluded that Omalu "was absolutely right … I was wrong to be skeptical." The league reportedly declined to make Davies' report public.) According to ESPN the Magazine , North Carolina researcher Kevin Guskiewicz was scheduled to appear on HBO in 2003 to discuss his research showing link between multiple concussions and depression in former NFL players. Before his appearance, he received a phone call from Pellman. "I had never spoken with him before, and he attacked me from the get-go," Guskiewicz told the magainze. "He questioned whether it was in my best interest to do the show. He was a bull in a china shop."

Barr can relate. In the early 2000s he worked with Pellman as a consulting neuropsychologist for the Jets, conducting preseason baseline tests on players and evaluating them again if they suffered concussions. "The boundaries were clearly set between us," Barr says. "I would provide objective cognition information -- cognitive dysfunction or not, detected through the testing -- and Elliot was in charge of all the return-to-play decisions. I felt he listened to my opinion and respected what I had to say. At that time, I had no problem with him."

Things changed in 2004. Also a research scientist, Barr had collaborated with Guskiewicz on a study of concussions in almost 3,000 college athletes. The study found that the best time to conduct neuropsychological tests of concussed players was after their symptoms had completely cleared, between five to 10 days after the injury -- longer than the one or two days that NFL teams preferred.

Barr presented his findings at a brain injury conference in New York City. About a week later, he says, he received a call from Pellman.

"He was angry," Barr says. "The study had received a lot of press. Elliot already had made a comment to me that he didn't really believe the findings. I had told him it was impeccable research design, very carefully done. Now somebody was telling him that I was saying bad things about the NFL. He told me if I was ever to say anything about sports concussions at all, I would have to clear it with him."

Barr was taken aback. I'm an NYU faculty member, he thought. I have more of a research background than you. You can't tell me what I can say about concussions.

"That's not going to happen," Barr recalls saying.

Pellman, Barr says, immediately fired him.

* * *

The committee's danger-denying, dissent-dismissing approach didn't just produce academic fights. It helped inform the NFL's laissez-faire concussion policy, putting players at additional brain trauma risk. In 1952 -- 1952! -- the New England Journal of Medicine recommended that football players leave the sport after suffering three concussions; 40 years later, Jets receiver Al Toon retired after suffering his ninth diagnosed concussion. (According to a 2011 New York Times report, Toon still suffers health effects, though he declined to discuss them publicly.) In 1997, the American Academy of Neurology recommended that concussed athletes knocked unconscious be withheld from play until asymptomatic for at least one week. The NFL rejected the recommendation. Seven years later, an international panel of sports concussion experts recommended that concussed athletes should not return to play the same day, even if they never lost consciousness. The NFL again rejected the recommendation, with Pellman subsequently writing in a paper that linking "concussion symptoms to arbitrary, rigid management decisions" was not "consistent with scientific data" and that team physicians should instead "treat their players on a case-to-case basis."

Among those team physicians? Pellman himself, who managed concussion care and return-to-play decisions for the Jets. In 1995 quarterback Boomer Esiason was concussed and missed four games. He later wrote a letter to The New York Times praising Pellman's handling of his injury. Chrebet's experience was different. During a 2003 game, he was knocked out. Drawing on a New York Daily News report, Keating described what happened next:

… "there's going to be some controversy about you going back to play." Pellman looks Chrebet in the eye in the fourth quarter of a tight game, Jets vs. Giants … a knee to the back of the head knocked Chrebet stone-cold unconscious a quarter earlier, and now the Jets' team doctor is putting the wideout through a series of mental tests. Pellman knows Chrebet has suffered a concussion, but the player is performing adequately on standard memory exercises.
"This is very important for you," the portly physician tells the local hero. "This is very important for your career." Then he asks, "Are you OK?"
When Chrebet replies, "I'm fine," Pellman sends him back in …

Like Toon, Chrebet reportedly still suffers from post-concussive ailments. As does Turley. The former offensive lineman was diagnosed with two concussions during his NFL career. He believes he suffered dozens more. After getting knocked out while playing for St. Louis in 2003, he spent the night in a hospital. He played again the next week.

Today, Turley suffers from vertigo. His eyes can be sensitive to light. He sometimes battles troubling impulses. Suicidal thoughts. He takes psychiatric medication. He has a wife, a 2-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son. He's afraid that football has damaged his brain.

"Why couldn't I have sat out a couple of games after getting knocked out?" Turley says. "Players all accept that the game is dangerous. We all accept that there's a high risk factor. But we did not accept or understand at all anything to do with concussions.

The NFL has a standard statement on the concussion lawsuits: Any allegation that the NFL intentionally sought to mislead players or otherwise conceal information from players concerning the risks, treatment or management of concussions is entirely without merit.

Still: You're the publisher of The New York Times. Do you hire Jayson Blair as a fact-checker?

"We did not know before the NFL admitted to this problem," Turley says. "Had that not occurred, only guys like myself who have had difficulties with this and have researched it would have the knowledge. Because guys like Pellman have done everything they can to hide it."

* * *

Eight years ago, Pellman testified before Congress. Jose Canseco was on hand. Mark McGwire, too. The subject was steroids. At the time, Pellman still was leading the NFL's concussion committee, and also was working as Major League Baseball's medical adviser.

(According to MLB spokesman Pat Courtney, Pellman currently has a "continuing relationship with the Commisioner's Office but now is focused on" the league's New York office workers. Sports on Earth is co-owned by USA TODAY Sports and MLB Advanced Media.)

In 2002, Pellman had said that "[baseball] players and the team owners have sold their souls to the devil with steroids, and I know, because I've been treating professional athletes since 1986." Things change. Addressing lawmakers, Pellman still touted his experience, testifying that "unlike some other medical professionals you will hear from today, I have had extensive experience in the area of professional sports." He then defended baseball's steroid policies, calling them as rigorous as those in any other professional league.

Congressional members were unimpressed. Scornfully so. They forced Pellman to admit that he was not aware of a loophole that would allow a player to leave the room for an hour during a drug test, nor of a loophole that would allow a $10,000 fine instead of a 10-day suspension for a first offense. One lawmaker called Pellman "pathetically unpersuasive" and likened him to a tobacco industry executive; another found Pellman "unable to answer even the most basic questions" about baseball's steroid policy.

Does any of this sound familiar?

After Pellman stepped down as the head of the NFL's concussion committee in 2007, Guskiewicz called him "the wrong person to chair the committee from a scientific perspective" and "the right person from the league's perspective." When the NFL shut down the committee three years later and asked neurosurgeons Hunt Batjer and Richard Ellenbogen to create a new Head, Neck and Spine group, the two doctors said they would not use any of the old committee's data or ongoing studies on helmets and retired players' cognitive decline -- all of which had been overseen by Pellman and blasted by Congress as "infected" -- because they didn't want their "professional reputations damaged." They also asked Pellman not to speak at a league-sponsored brain injury conference, with Batjer telling The New York Times that "it's not about Elliot. It's about a complete severance from all prior relationships from that committee."

About those severed prior relationships: Pellman committee member Rick Burkholder, a former Eagles athletic trainer, is now the head trainer of the Kansas City Chiefs. Members Andrew Tucker and Doug Robertson remain team physicians for the Baltimore Ravens and Indianapolis Colts, respectively. Members Mark Lovell and Joseph Maroon -- a neuropsychologist and a neurosurgeon -- both reportedly remained NFL advisers as of last year. New York Giants athletic trainer Ronnie Barnes, Colts neurosurgeon Henry Feuer and former Chiefs physician Joe Waeckerle all served under Pellman and remain closely involved with the league's brain health and safety policy, because all three are members of the reconstituted committee.

Like Pellman, they've all managed to keep themselves in there, somehow.

"I hadn't realized that was going on," says Eleanor Perfetto, the widow of former NFL player Ralph Wenzel and a plaintiff in the concussion lawsuits. "I guess I find it surprising since the NFL was claiming to make changes and improve what was going on.

"Say that you're one of these [former players] who is [brain damaged] and struggling. And your family is struggling, because there's a lot of stress from dealing with your illness. How do you feel hearing that Pellman is still involved? This man who was part of the smokescreen of denial?"

Perfetto knows struggle. She watched her husband slowly degenerate from a fit, energetic high school football coach in his early 50s to a dementia ward resident who couldn't walk, write or bathe himself. Who could only eat his favorite apple cinnamon doughnuts if they were first mashed up. When Ralph died last year at age 69, he had dropped from 225 pounds to 140 pounds; a scientist who examined his brain said it had shrunk to the approximate size of a 1-year-old's. He was posthumously diagnosed with CTE and Alzheimer's.

Perfetto is a senior director at Pfizer. She holds a doctorate in public health. She has testified on behalf of former NFL players before Congress. In 2008 she personally confronted Goodell for locking her out of a meeting between the commissioner and a group of former players with health problems. Some things, she says, have changed. Others have not.

"If you say you're going to do away with you old committees, start with a clean slate, get the right people involved to do the right thing, why do we still have these lingering remains of that old negative effort?" she says. "Why would they not completely divest themselves of the committee they had put together that really had done such poor, shoddy work? It's more evidence that the NFL is not as serious about handling this as properly as they say they are."

An optimist might believe that Pellman remains in the league's orbit because he has something positive to contribute. A cynic might suspect that he's kept around because he knows where the bodies are buried. A realist -- and by realist, I mean a couple of smart lawyers I know -- might observe that the NFL has painted itself into a corner, regardless of its intentions, and that the league can neither cut ties with nor fully repudiate Pellman and the committee. At least not now. Not when the league's legal defense largely consists of insisting that nobody ever did anything wrong.

On the other hand: You are an Italian cruise ship company. Do you give Captain Francesco Schettino within 50 nautical miles of the Costa Concordia?

Ten days after Pellman allowed Chrebet back on the field against the Giants in 2003, the receiver was placed on injured reserve. He was sluggish. Exhausted. His head hurt. His season was over. Post-concussion syndrome. Speaking to reporters, Pellman was unapologetic. He said that Chrebet's diagnosis was unrelated to his return to play. That the decision to re-enter the game was based on scientific evaluation. That he was ending Chrebet's season so he -- Pellman, that is -- could sleep well at night.

"Nobody gets second-guessed," Pellman said.

Last week, Goodell delivered a speech at a sports medicine conference in Boston. "We consider the health and safety of our athletes our first priority," he said. "And our second and our third priority." During Super Bowl week, the NFL Players Association released a survey showing that around 90 percent of its members don't trust team medical staffs and are not satisfied with the way their team manages injuries. Can you blame them? Elliot Pellman still works with the NFL. Nobody gets second-guessed.

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Dan Snyder's Nickname Math Will NEVER Add Up

2013-05-10T10:33:00.000-04:00

Why the Washington Redskins' vow to never change team nickname doesn't make economic sense

Sports on Earth

In the annals of credible public pronouncements, it ranks somewhere between Colin Powell’s United Nations speech on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and anything emitting from Donald Trump’s mouth. Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder told USA TODAY Sports this week that he will never, never, NEVER change the club’s nickname — note: the all-caps were Snyder’s suggestion — even if the franchise loses an ongoing federal trademark lawsuit.

Simple math suggests otherwise.

Look, I get that Snyder is a local boy made good, had a team belt buckle as a kid, wants to HONOR the PROUD tradition — you know what? All-caps is contagious – of Sonny and Sam and Gibbs I and Albert Haynesworth’s shuttle cones and unsold Bruce Smith “Sack King” T-shirts and throwing footballs over great distances, yadda yadda yadda. I also understand that Snyder, like many people, doesn’t find the team’s nickname personally offensive, demeaning or just plain racist — after all, it’s not an anti-Semetic newspaper doodle or anything – and couldn’t care less about people who do, with the sole exception of not calling those people “Redskin” to their faces.

Still, the notion that Snyder won’t budge is dubious. The idea that he’s taking some sort of principled, line-in-the-sand stand for the nickname is downright laughable. “Redskins” for the sake of “Redskins?” Please. No chance. Mark my words: If the franchise loses the trademark suit — thereby losing the exclusive right to profit off the team’s nickname — it will have a new moniker within 18 months. Guaranteed. Put that in all-caps. In fact, I’d be shocked if the club didn’t have a rough contingency plan already in place. Because as I’ve written before, the entire nickname controversy is really about money — specifically, Snyder’s ability to make as much money as possible. (Which, in his defense, doesn’t make him any different than any other NFL owner.)

It’s often said that the federal government is actually a massive health insurance company with a standing army; similarly, Washington’s pro football team is an enormous ATM with a stadium operations staff. Forbes estimates that the franchise was worth $1.6 billion last year — the third-highest valuation in the league — and that the club turned a $109 million profit in 2011. The club’s nickname contributes to those numbers in two ways: through the amorphous (but very real) concept of brand equity, and via merchandise sales of jerseys, beer cozies and keychains featuring “Redskins.”

Experts estimate that the costs of changing an NFL team’s nickname — from legal work to revamping stadium signs to redrawing the pixels in “Madden NFL” – could run as high as $20 million. Trademark lawyers are expensive, too, but for now, it’s much cheaper for Snyder to fight the nickname case in court, the better to financially keep on keepin’ on. Should the club lose the case, however, that equation will change. How so? Selling “Redskins” gear no longer will be the exclusive domain of the team. Anyone will be able to print T-shirts, sweatshirts and flags and sell them with impunity.

That, in turn, will cut into the club’s sizable merchandising profits. Currently, all NFL teams save Dallas pool and equally split merchandising revenue; according to a 2006 article in the Fordham Intellectual Property Media and Entertainment Law Journal, the Redskins made about $5 million from NFL Properties in 1999, a number that likely has grown over the last decade. So do the math: Without trademark rights, both the team and the rest of the NFL will potentially lose millions per year, as well as control over the use of the “Redskins” nickname. (Do pro football teams value control? Is that a question for one of those Geico commercials?)

There’s simply no way — NO WAY — Snyder will stand for that. After all, the Washington owner is a man who tried to sell an “official mattress” of Six Flags, $20 Redskins-branded lottery tickets and $30 Redskins-themed Cleatus the Fox Football Robot dolls (price on Fox Sports’ website? $23.96); who once sold fans out-of-date peanuts from a bankrupt airline; who once forced a local broadcaster to deliver news from a parking lot because his station wouldn’t pay to become an official “media partner” of the team; who has successfully been sued by a former nanny and team employees for underpayment; who once charged fans for access to training camp, and also for parking to attend said camp; and who once charged fans $25 to park on … Fan Appreciation Day. Snyder may truly treasure his club’s retrograde nickname, but all available evidence indicates he treasures his bottom line a lot more.

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Faith Hill, Carrie Underwood and Next Man Up America

2013-05-09T10:29:00.000-04:00

Younger and cheaper isn't just for "Sunday Night Football" theme-singers

Sports on Earth

You have to hand it to ol’ Bocephus: when Hank Williams Jr.’s 22-year run as Monday Night Football’s poet laureate came to an inglorious end in 2011, the country musician who brought Godwin’s Law to cable television wasn’t phased out in favor of Brad Paisley or some other younger, cheaper replacement. He was simply fired. Which hardly happens anymore.

Take Faith Hill. On Monday, NBC announced that the “Sunday Night Football” opening theme singer was out, and that Carrie Underwood was in. Hill is a long-legged, bleached-blonde, Grammy-winning pop country queen; Underwood is, well, ditto. Squint your eyes, apply a bit of makeup and CGI magic, and the two are more or less indistinguishable. Except for one crucial factor: Underwood is 15 years younger than the woman she’s succeeding.

And that, of course, makes all the difference.

This is how modern America works, and how work works in modern America: you are useful and valuable right until the point that you can be jettisoned to make room for someone who costs less, and maybe hopefully produces more. Or better. Or just good enough. Someone who is typically younger. More pliable. Less likely to demand onerous things like health insurance, a livable wage or an afternoon off to catch a child’s soccer game. None of this is overt ageism, and frankly, I’m not even sure it’s sinister. It’s just good business — good business being the ruthless pursuit of maximum efficiency.

In other words, the ethos of our socio-economic era.

Conspiratorial speculation aside, there’s no evidence suggesting that veteran NFL punter-cum-gay rights advocate Chris Kluwe was cut this week for being outspoken. There’s ample evidence suggesting he was cut because the Minnesota Vikings used a fifth-round draft pick on former UCLA punter Jeff Locke, saving themselves about $1 million. (Oh, and where did Kluwe play in college? UCLA.) Next man up. Such is the way of things in professional football — see the New England Patriots essentially swapping Wes Welker for Danny Amendola, or the failed replacement referee experiment — and increasingly everywhere else, too. It’s Oklahoma City parting ways with James Harden and Memphis bidding Rudy Gay adieu. American tech companies leveraging H-1B visas to offshore jobs without actually offshoring them. Foxconn — yes, that Foxconn — replacing ~~factory floor serfs~~ human workers with robots. Heck, it’s Bruce Willis breaking up with Demi Moore, and then dating a 20-something actress that looks just like her. It’s the story of every industry that can pull it off, particularly journalism. Goodbye, middle-aged feature writers, hello young n’ hungry post producers! (Hey … wait a second … gulp). In the pursuit of profits, productivity and squeezing a few extra points out of the margins, everyone is expendable. And barring another miraculous 30-year credit bubble, I don’t see that changing.

So cheer up, Faith Hill. You didn’t do anything wrong. You just became the iPhone 3. Eventually happens to all of us.

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Not the Mentoring Type

2013-05-08T10:17:00.000-04:00

Serena Williams and Sloane Stephens: What else would you expect?

Sports on Earth

I’m shocked. Might have a serious case of the vapors. Luckily, I’m sitting down. As it turns out, Serena Williams isn’t much of a metaphoric big sister to up-and-coming tennis pro Sloane Stephens. Nor does Stephens seem to be looking for Williams’ imprimatur. To the contrary, a new ESPN the Magazine story indicates that 20-year-old American is more than a little sick of the notion that Williams has served as her mentor:

“I’m annoyed. I’m over it,” she says of all the Serena comparisons. “I’ve always said Kim Clijsters is my favorite player, so it’s kind of weird.” She attributes the media hype over her relationship to the star to “just being African-American and them wanting to link to something.” Then she begins to tell the story of when she was 12 and first saw Serena play. Her mom took Sloane, her younger brother, Shawn, and her stepdad to the Fed Cup in Delray Beach, Fla., and the family waited around all day for the Williams sisters to sign their posters.
Stephens’ mom, Sybil, is sitting next to her, looking almost like her sister — the same classic beauty, both of them in shades of gray athletic wear — and gives her daughter a look of incredulity. “Are you really telling this story?”
“Yes!” Sloane says. “The people need to know! I waited all day. They walked by three times and never signed our posters.” She pauses to ask whether she ever hung it in her room. Her mom nods. Sloane continues: “I hung it up for a while. I was, like, devastated because they didn’t sign it, whatever, and then after that I was over it. I found a new player to like because I didn’t like them anymore.”

But wait. There’s more. Writer Marin Cogan describes a Williams-Stephens relationship that was never particularly close and deteriorated rapidly after the latter upset the former at the Australian Open in January, with Williams unfollowing Stephens on Twitter, Tweeting a cryptic put-down – “I made you” – and not saying “one word” to Stephens or “looking her way” since the match. All of this, of course, flies in the face of the narrative propagated before the same match, when reports suggested that the two players were the tennis equivalent of Luke and Obi-Wan, with Williams in the role of sage Jedi Master.

The last part is why I need a fainting couch.

Serena Williams, tennis mentor? To a rival player who’s actually, you know, good? Ah ha ha ha ha ha. Ha. Okay. I’m better now. Just had to let that out. But seriously: do tennis writers actually watch tennis? I know that the Gracious Vet Giving Back to the Next Generation is a comforting sports trope, right up there with Undersized Scrappers Sporting Oversized Hearts and Father-Son Catch as Proxy for Genuine Emotional Connection. I also know that sometimes – once in a rare, rare while – it’s even true: witness former New York Jets fullback Tony Richardson helping train his replacement, John Conner, a few years back.

Mostly, though, it’s balderdash. There is no Circle of Sports Life. There’s just brutal, survival-of-the-fittest competition. Particularly in tennis, where there are no teams and players eat what they kill. That said, you don’t have to be an athlete to relate. Think of this way: you have a job. You’re good. Well-paid. You’ve been doing it for a while. Along comes an intern. The intern is good. Could end up as good as you. Could end up taking your job. Are you really going to help said intern out? Pay it forward with a friendly smile? Or are you going to crush them underfoot, then enjoy listening to the lamentations of his or her women?

Brett Favre didn’t exactly tutor Aaron Rodgers. Joe Montana wasn’t concerned with helping Steve Young become all he could be. I covered the Washington Wizards when Michael Jordan made his creaky-kneed, mostly-forgotten comeback: his Airness was downright cruel to rookie Kwame Brown and had talented shooting guard Richard Hamilton shipped to Detroit for being sufficiently non-deferential. Why would Williams be any different?

Please note: this isn’t to disparage Williams. Not in the slightest. I would never, ever expect her to look out for Stephens – or anyone else on the WTA Tour, for that matter. Looking out for others isn’t what has made Williams one of the best players in history; disregarding others and looking out for No. 1 is. Williams is a giddy winner, a ungracious loser, a tenacious fighter, a stone-cold competitor. She always seemed far less pained to beat big sister Venus than the other way around, and that probably has something to do with why she’s had a better career. Regarding her relationship with Stephens, Serena basically said as much before her Australian Open loss:

“I would need a better definition of the word ‘mentor.’ It’s hard to be a real mentor when you’re still in competition.”

Why did people miss the obvious? Was it due to race? Gender? Wishful thinking? I truly don’t know. But after a decade-plus of covering sports – and plenty of time living in the world – I do know this: great people help others. Great champions help themselves.

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Amateur Grifters

2013-05-08T07:46:00.000-04:00

On Ben McLemore, middlemen and the NCAA

Sports on Earth

An Amateur Athletic Union basketball coach claiming to be on the take. A "sports mentor"-cum-aspiring runner allegedly handing out goodies. Mysterious agents and financial advisers operating in the shadows. A cousin -- and really, isn't it always a cousin? -- supposedly along for the ride. In the wake of a USA TODAY Sports report that Ben McLemore's former AAU coach accepted cash, trips, meals and luxury lodging in exchange for steering the former Kansas guard toward future NBA representation, uncertainties abound.

What did McLemore know about this? What did Kansas know? How will the NCAA's intrepid enforcement staff get to the bottom of this? Who, if anyone, will end up getting punished?

Lost in the news, however, are two basic questions. Questions that aren't asked nearly enough. Questions that ought to be asked -- or better yet, scrawled on NCAA president Mark Emmert's office walls, "Zero Dark Thirty"-style -- every time a college sports scandal erupts because someone took something from somebody in exchange for something else.

Namely, what's the actual crime? And who are the actual victims?

Granted, a rule may have been broken. Specifically, a NCAA bylaw that states that athletes are ineligible if they, their friends or their relatives receive benefits from an agent, in turn defined as anyone who "seeks to obtain any type of financial gain or benefit from securing a prospective student-athlete's enrollment at an educational institution or from a student-athlete's potential earnings as a professional athlete." Like all of the association's amateurism edicts, this rule ostensibly exists to shield college athletes from ~~Candyman and the Hamburglar~~ the supposed evils of commercial exploitation; like all of said edicts, it effectively bars McLemore, his peers and everyone they know from engaging in the same quid pro quo transactions the rest of us take for granted.

Here's the nitty-gritty: St. Louis-based AAU coach Darius Cobb asserts that he received two cash payments of $5,000 from Rodney Blackstock, the founder of a North Carolina-based sports mentoring organization. Cobb also says he went on three all-expense paid trips to Los Angeles -- joined by Blackstock and twice by Richard Boyd, McLemore's cousin -- to meet with sports agents and financial advisers hoping to represent McLemore. The men stayed at a Four Seasons and a posh hotel located on Rodeo Drive. They ate for free. They went to a Los Angeles Clippers game gratis. Airfare was covered. In return, Cobb says, he introduced McLemore's mother to Blackstock at a Kansas basketball game. And all of this is bad. Very, very bad. At least by the NCAA's morally irreproachable amateurism standards.

Which are, it should be noted, utterly alien to the wider culture around them.

Extremely wealthy people fork over staggering amounts of cash to attend political fundraisers. They're not going for the eloquent private speeches. Salespeople take clients out to lavish dinners, then fete them inside luxury boxes. Food and games aren't the main point. Prospective employers will pay for your flight to a job interview. Casinos will comp your room and drinks. Timeshare salespeople will take you on a cruise. Account reps will take you golfing and to gentlemen's establishments. Light beer manufacturers intent on securing your brand allegiance will subsidize your cable and network college sports viewing. Educational institutions intent on securing your student-athletic enrollment will have totally and coincidentally attractive young members of the opposite sex show you around campus. In America, people don't just give you stuff in exchange for money, labor or other favors; sometimes, they give you stuff simply to listen to their pitch. Particularly when your time and talents are in demand. Access is currency. It has value. And that's fine. Not always seemly. But okay. Definitely not a crime, because no one is being harmed.

Go back to the McLemore story. Did Cobb pull a hamstring sitting on a wallet stuffed with cash? Was Boyd emotionally scarred from allegedly watching a Clippers game he didn't buy tickets for? (Note: a Clippers game from 2013, and not the preceding quarter-century.) The answer, of course, is no. And no. In fact, the only entity possibly injured by this whole set of utterly unremarkable transactions is Kansas -- which as of now doesn't even appear to have even been involved, much like McLemore -- and that's only because the NCAA could punish the school for a violation of amateurism rules, the very same rules that make Cobb and Blackstock's Excellent Adventure a problem in the first place.

Assuming your name isn't Colonel Cathcart, does any of that make rational sense?

Look, I've assailed the NCAA's motives many, many times. For argument's sake, suppose the people who run college sports are well-intentioned. Selflessly devoted to the welfare of students who just happen to play sports. Like a cheer squad. (Also: pretend University of Texas women's athletic director Christine Plonsky's statement that four-year guaranteed scholarships breeds "entitlement" among college athletes never happened.) If the association and its member schools truly want to protect college athletes from shady, exploitative grifters and parasitic, money-sopping middlemen, here's what they should do: Stop creating a market for both.

After all, a future NBA lottery pick such as McLemore has value. Lots. Agents and financial advisers will always want his future business. Moreover, McLemore and his family likely will want and need their corresponding services. And again, that's completely fine. It's not immoral for either party to sign a contract, talk business, recruit each other, seek to obtain financial gain and benefit. Remember the part about this being America? The NCAA pretending otherwise in order not to pay worker's compensation claims doesn't make it any less so. Similarly, a 400-plus page rulebook largely devoted to amateurism enforcement doesn't replace the laws of supply and demand; it simply drives the college sports economy underground, generating value for otherwise unnecessary intermediaries like Boyd, Blackstock and Cobb.

Consider the following from Eric Prisbell's story in USA TODAY Sports:

Cobb says he is telling his story because he wants to help educate basketball families such as the McLemores and expose individuals who pursue college athletes and their families while the players still have amateur eligibility.
"I don't want to hurt the family, I want to protect the family," Cobb says. "If there had to be a bad guy, if there had to be a fall guy, let it be me, as opposed to ruining a great kid who has busted his butt to get where he is. Let me be the crooked AAU coach. I was willing to take the brunt of it for the sake of this kid. I wanted to keep him pure."

How magnanimous. Noble, even. I wanted to keep him pure! If this whole talent broker racket doesn't work out, Cobb has a bright future with the NCAA. That said, forget good and bad. Never mind crooked and -- no giggles, please -- pure. Instead, ask yourself this: Why was Ben McLemore's high school summer ball coach taking Beverly Hills meetings in the first place? Was he optioning a script? And why was Blackstock -- essentially some random dude from Greensboro -- plying him with cash in order to meet McLemore's mom, the better to possibly introduce her son to some agents and financial planners?

Isn't that at least two go-betweens too many?

If McLemore was a talented young musician, he would have been taking meetings himself. Listening to pitches. Weighing his options. Enjoying a few days of the Southern California good life. Kicking back at a Clippers game. Returning to Kansas with some cash in his pocket. In a sane system, he would have had his mom and a reputable lawyer by his side. But no. The NCAA doesn't allow that, and rightfully so, because ~~it would prevent him from studying hard and excelling on the floor as a student-athlete, which is kind of the whole loudly-proclaimed point of college sports~~ the rules say otherwise. Or something. Truth is, amateurism didn't protect McLemore from Cobb and Blackstock. It made them necessary. It hurt McLemore and his family, too. And not in some theoretical, value-denying Econ 101 sort of way.

As Prisbell reports, McLemore grew up impoverished. He lived in a 600 square-foot house that had a single bed, with as many as 10 relatives sleeping there on any given night. His family couldn't always afford to have hot water; sometimes, he would heat up bowls of water in the microwave, then run them to the bathtub to create a lukewarm bath. He worked odd jobs around his neighborhood with his younger brother Kevin, cutting grass, moving trash, fixing bikes, anything to earn a few dollars. He still went hungry, sometimes going two days without something to eat.

"You get those hunger pains," McLemore told USA TODAY Sports. "I am so hungry. We don't have any food. What are we going to eat? Your stomach hurts. Then you get so upset and mad, like, no food. You start having tantrums and don't want to do anything. You get mad at everybody because you don't have any food. That's what happens when you don't eat. You are so sluggish. It's just bad, man."

The good news? As a Kansas basketball player, McLemore didn't have to worry about where his next meal was coming from. The bad news? He told Prisbell in late February that his mother was still unemployed, living in the same small house, and that his family was struggling financially -- a struggle exacerbated by amateurism. Think that $10,000 allegedly pocketed by Cobb might have helped pay for hot water? For another bed? For a few full stomachs back home? According to Cobb, Blackstock paid $500 for a February bowling party celebrating McLemore's birthday, complete with a custom cake.

Bowling and cake. Do those sound like accessories to a crime?

When McLemore entered Kansas, he was a partial academic qualifier -- likely because he grew up inside a Missouri school district that was dissolved by the state because of poor academic performance. He had to sit out his freshman season. Prisbell tells the story from there:

… [Kansas coach] Bill Self said McLemore sat in his office a little over a year ago and told the coach that he was starting to really enjoy school and develop a confidence in learning. Self said the school's academic support staff almost has to run McLemore out of tutoring. He'll stay three hours and, when told to go home, will respond, "No, I've have not got this yet."
As [former Kansas basketball coach Larry] Brown says, "If you ask Ben if he wants to stay at KU for four years, I bet he would want it in a minute. But he can't."

In other words: If not for amateurism preventing him from capitalizing on at least some of his economic value, McLemore would have been more likely to stay in school, supposedly the whole point of the NCAA's student-athlete exercise. Only that's not the point. Not really. Not when the current college sports system acts as the ultimate self-perpetuating middleman.

Shoe companies want athletes like McLemore to sport their latest wares. Thanks to amateurism, coaches keep the cash for themselves. Boosters, alumni and television networks pour money into athletic departments and the NCAA. Thanks to amateurism, administrators decide what to do with it. Results are predictable. According to Drexel University sports management professor Ellen Staurowsky, the average big-time Division I athletic scholarship falls short of the full cost of attending school by an average of $3,285, leaving the vast majority of players living below the federal poverty line; meanwhile, Steve Berkowitz of USA TODAY Sports reports that athletic directors at those same schools are paid an average of $515,000 annually.

In February, McLemore told Prisbell that he had a simple goal: I just want to keep working hard so one day I can help my family. I am going to get a big house one day and we all can stay in it and eat. Also that month, Emmert boasted about "holding people accountable for their behavior" when an investigation into amateurism violations at Miami imploded in embarrassing, emperor-has-no-clothes fashion. He still has a job. Still earns a reported $1.6 million a year. Remains a glorified go-between. Athletes over here. Money over there. Bureaucrats with Gingrich-ian coifs in the middle, skimming the cream and the milk, too. Nothing much has changed. Presumably, the NCAA will look into the McLemore report; depending on what it uncovers, it then will look for someone to punish. Rules are rules. Seeking commercial gain is verboten. Accountability and such. Only Cobb and Blackstock aren't criminals. They're copycats. And amateurish ones at that.

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One of These Things is Not Like the Other

2013-05-04T13:00:00.000-04:00

The most ridiculous thing ever said about football-related brain trauma

Sports on Earth

Football makes people say some pretty gobsmacking things. Like National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell aiming to “take the head out of the game.” (Did the league give General Electric $40 million to work on detachable noggin technology?) Or USA Football executive Scott Hallenbeck insisting that “there is no question that the game can be played safely and is safe, as long as it is taught properly and the players execute it properly.” (Ahem. There are plenty of questions. Does Hallenbeck not have a television or an Internet connection?) Or former NFL concussion committee co-chair Ira Casson denying that there is any evidence linking multiple head injuries among pro football players with long-term cognitive damage.

Still, when it comes to the single most head-scratching public statement I’ve seen regarding brain trauma and football, University of Missouri neuropsychologist Thomas Martin takes the pole position. Hands-down. In a piece about youth football and cognitive risks published this week in the Columbia Missourian, Martin compares brain damage to … knee injuries (bold added):

Martin feels for the families [whose children suffer concussions]. He recognizes the blurry nature of concussions causes tension in itself. But he also worries their risks are overstated.
Now 47, Martin played college football and then won several national semi-pro championships with a team in Racine, Wis. He sometimes wonders if he should have quit playing earlier because of health issues he faces today. But it’s not the “three or four” concussions he suffered that concern him. It’s his knees. He’s had 18 knee surgeries to date, and he struggles to stand up from a sitting position.
Martin doesn’t see why people should react differently to the two types of injuries.
“If you play the sport, you have a chance of blowing out your knee,” he says. “Does that mean that no one should play this sport? Of course not, but you do have to consider whether you want to go back to the game. You might do some long-term damage.
“The same goes for concussions.”
Martin even has a mystique-killing analogy for the repeated subconcussive hits that are thought to cause long-term brain damage.
“My feeling is that it’s like running on a knee,” he says. “You eventually wear out a joint.”

This blew my mind. I had to read it twice. And then a half-dozen more times. It still blows my mind as I’m typing this. Here’s why people react differently to brain and knee injuries, and why football is in a world of potential trouble: because the potential harm resulting from a brain injury is nothing like that resulting from a knee injury.

Hurt your knee? Best-case scenario is medical repair, followed by complete return to previous function. Think Adrian Peterson. Worst-case scenarios are not being able to play football again; not being able to run; not being able to walk; chronic pain; degenerative issues; significant decrease or loss of function; life with a cane or in a wheelchair. Now, none of those are desirable outcomes. Frankly, they all stink. But they don’t change how you think. They don’t change who you are.

Brain injuries are different. They can change both. They can change both for a few days. A few weeks. A few months. The rest of your life. The worst-case scenarios are heartbreakingly, unspeakably, infinitely worse. Ask Mary Ann Easterling. Ask Junior Seau’s friends and family. Ask George Visger, or Gil and Michelle Trenum. Like eventually wearing out a joint? Dealing with dementia in your 80s is different than dealing with it in your 50s; dying in your teens is different than dying as a grandfather.

Thing is, Martin knows better. As a trained neuropsychologist whose self-professed research interests include dementia and traumatic brain injury, it’s his job to know better. In fact, the Missourian reports that Martin helped write a state law that more strictly regulates how soon high school athletes suspected of suffering concussions can return to play.

Oh, and here’s Martin describing brain trauma in 2011:

… so this injury, the brain controls everything we do. And this injury to the brain can impact every aspect of what an individual does …
… [symptoms] may be enduring, they may last, they may rob the individual of opportunity, they may impact vocational performance, educational performance, social functioning …

In the above speech, Martin makes a valid point: when their concussions are properly diagnosed and treated, most people make full recoveries. Putting aside open questions about what proper concussion diagnosis and treatment actually entails, that’s important to note, and something to consider when deciding whether playing football is worth the physical and cognitive risks inherent to the sport.

Also important? Acknowledging that physical and cognitive risks are not the same. A knee injury is not a brain injury. Suggesting even a crude equivalence is preposterous. Why would anyone do so? I really have no idea. I just know it’s wrong. Or, to put it another way: one kind of injury can make it hard for a 47-year-old neuropsychologist to stand up from a sitting position; the other can make it impossible to become a 47-year-old neuropsychologist in the first place. Which one do you find more alarming?

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Laboratories of Hypocrisy

2013-05-02T12:25:00.000-04:00

Introducing a semi-regular roundup of ridiculous college sports amateurism news

Sports on Earth

I wanted to stop. Take a break, at least. For months -- years, really -- I've been railing against the essential unfairness of amateurism, the blinding hypocrisy of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the "Catch-22"-shaming absurdities of campus sports.

Problem is, there's just too much to write about.

From the ongoing Ed O'Bannon case to NCAA president Mark Emmert's increasingly ridiculous public pronouncements, college sports are the gift that keeps on giving, a bottomless Christmas stocking full of coal. As such, I'm launching a new, semi-regular feature, dedicated to cataloging, commenting on and sometimes just laughing at the entire wheezing enterprise.

Welcome to the Laboratories of Hypocrisy. Let's get started …

The Real Victims

Picture this: A group of individuals gathers in Santa Monica, Calif. They hail from across the nation. They labor in college sports. Live and breathe college sports. Call them The Real Victims.

TRV, for short.

TRV have come together because they feel put upon. Aggrieved. They're tired of the NCAA ignoring their concerns. Fed up with the association disregarding their input. Mad as heck that Emmert and university presidents make policy decisions without giving anyone else much of a say, even though those decisions shape and constrain the workaday lives of … college athletic directors.

Oh, sorry -- did you think I was talking about campus athletes?

According to Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples, several dozen Division I athletic directors gathered at a beachside hotel in Southern California last week to discuss the major issues facing college sports without anyone from the NCAA around -- and also to carp about the association's imperiousness, the outgrowth of a governance structure that "puts all the power in the hands of university presidents and chancellors." As Staples reports:

… the athletic directors want to have an open dialogue with the NCAA about the pending Ed O'Bannon lawsuit, which could radically reshape the business model of major college sports. They want to talk about the potential impact should former football players sue over concussion-related issues. They want to talk about conference realignment, which has upended the industry in the past three years. They talked about all those issues Thursday and Friday in Santa Monica because the NCAA leadership doesn't seem to want to discuss any of it with them. And the people in charge of some of the nation's most powerful athletic programs are fed up …

Imagine that. The bureaucrats and administrators who manage the day-to-day operations of college sports in self-enriching fashion feel shut out. Tread upon, even. They'd really like to be heard -- only they're not comfortable speaking openly to Staples, on the record, because who knows how their bosses will retaliate?

… why are these ADs -- all of whom work in BCS automatic qualifying conferences -- being quoted without their names attached? Still another AD explained the need for anonymity. "We don't want the NCAA getting back at us by going looking for one of our kids who might have gotten a free soda once," the AD said.

That may sound extreme, but that's how toxic the relationship has become. Respected professionals making six- and seven-figure salaries are afraid to speak out for change because they worry their governing body will take revenge on them by making a 20-year-old suffer. This doesn't necessarily mean the leaders at the NCAA would actually do that, but the fact that the fear exists is proof enough that the people running some of the nation's biggest athletic programs have lost confidence in the organization that governs them …

You know who has been speaking out for change? And on the record, no less? College athletes. The same people whose sweat, toil and hard-won talent makes those six- and seven-figure respectable professional salaries possible. Turns out they have plenty to say about the business model of major college sports. And about football-induced brain trauma, too. And you know who's not listening? Athletic directors. The real victims. The people too busy getting together by the beach in order to ~~drive a final wooden stake into irony's undead heart~~ air their collective grievances. A group that according to Staples has decided there's only one way to shake up the status quo:

… the ADs who met last week decided they need to form their own representative body of veteran administrators that can go to Emmert and company and voice concerns as well as help shape policy. That way, the presidents can still approve the creation or removal of rules, but they'll be doing so on the advice of the people who must deal with the fallout from any decisions. That's how it should have worked all along …

Yes. Banding together so that the people who shape and run college sports by what amounts to fiat have no choice but take your concerns and desires seriously. Quite a concept. How things should work, actually. Where have I read that idea before?

* * *

Mythbusters: College Sports Amateurism Edition

If you've read any of my previous work, you know I think the entire concept of college sports amateurism belongs in history's dustbin, next to chunks of the Berlin Wall and unsold copies of John Romero's "Daikatana." Exhibit 100-A? A recently released report by the Drake Group, an independent organization of campus thinkers dedicated to ending academic corruption within college sports.

Co-authored by economics professor Andrew Zimbalist and business professor Allen Sack, the report attempts to answer two questions that are at the core of the potentially game-changing O'Bannon lawsuit:

1. Are NCAA restrictions on athletes' participation in the market for their images, names and likenesses -- in other words, athletes getting a piece of the college sports money pie -- necessary to uphold the principles of amateurism?

2. Is amateurism necessary to preserve college sports?

Short answers? No. And no. In just 21 pages, Zimbalist and Sack demolish the standard arguments for preserving the college sports status quo, in which revenue-producing athletes are forbidden from receiving market-level compensation because that would be impure. Or open a scary Pandora's Box of players getting money handshakes and free tattoos with wanton impunity. Or force Nick Saban to make a little less money. Or something.

You should really read the whole report. In the meantime, here are the highlights:

1. In theory, amateurism is un-American

The Constitution. Jazz. The IROC-Z Camaro. American exceptionalism comes in many forms, and if you've ever thought that aristocratic snootiness belongs on the list of things that make this country great, then congratulations! Amateurism is right up your alley. As the Drake report reminds us, no-pay-for-play is a distinctly British idea, rooted in Victorian Era divisions between the rich and everyone else, an inherently snobbish, un-egalitarian concept that was copied from English universities and prep schools:

… British students took sport very seriously, but the amateur's casualness and dislike for professional drill were very much in evidence among athletes. [They] took great pains to distance themselves from the highly trained professional, the latter being viewed as "a mere segment of a man" … at the center of this ideal was the belief that leisure activities are qualitatively superior to those associated with making a living or whose motive is material gain. The aristocrat had time to appreciate activities like literature, science, and sports merely for the love of it …

According to ABC News, Americans work longer days, take less vacation and retire later than anyone else in the industrialized world. In a poll, 70 percent of us said we believe we can get anything we want in this country through sheer hard work. We are not a nation of casual amateurs. We are a nation of strivers, and we expect to be rewarded for our efforts accordingly. Why hold college athletes to a different standard?

2. In practice, amateurism is mush

What does it mean, exactly, to be an "amateur" athlete? Depends on whom you ask.

The Amateur Athletic Union allows "broken time payments" -- that is, payments to athletes in training or competition to compensate them for lost income while absent from their day jobs. It also lets athletes cash in on endorsements. The United States Golf Association's amateur rules permit the same, and also allow athletes to hire agents.

The NCAA allows none of the above. However, the association does permit scholarship payments. And bowl game and/or postseason tournament gifts worth thousands of dollars. Neither of which is considered compensation for -- ahem -- work. In some cases, the Drake report notes, the NCAA has different rules for European student-athletes than for American student-athletes -- professional tennis players from Europe are allowed to compete in college while Americans who have earned income playing tennis are not, because, well, amateurism. Small wonder, then, that Zimbalist and Sack conclude that:

… the NCAA maintains its own, idiosyncratic, changing, frequently arbitrary, and often illogical definition of amateurism … amateurism in intercollegiate athletics is whatever the NCAA says it is …

3. Amateurism does not promote competitive balance

College sports fans and administrators alike often claim that if college athletes were paid -- or allowed to get paid -- then schools like Miami of Ohio would be unable to compete with schools like Ohio State, because pay-for-play limitations essentially act as a salary cap. (Note: Nobody in college athletics administration would ever use that term. But that's the basic argument.)

In reality, however, college sports already are rife with have and have-nots -- does the term guarantee game ring a bell? -- and the Drake report makes a compelling case that the current NCAA system actually underwrites the disparity. Consider the financial evidence:

* In 2011-12, the NCAA redistributed $467 million -- 61 percent of its revenues -- to Division I schools, which constitute just 32 percent of its membership;

* The 73 schools in the six Football Bowl Subdivision conferences -- just 6.9 percent of all NCAA schools -- received 48 percent of that money, while the 267 other Division I schools received the other 52 percent.

* Meanwhile, Division II schools (26.5 percent of the NCAA's total) and Division III schools (41.5 percent) received less than five percent of NCAA revenues, respectively.

* The NCAA allows -- and does it really have a choice? -- six elite athletic conferences to essentially run and exclusively profit from their own college football postseason. From 2007 to 2011, those same six conferences Hoovered up $618.4 million of a total $722.1 million paid out by BCS Bowls.

The Drake report also points out that the NCAA's power structure is dominated by the major conference schools. The upshot? When it comes to the financial treatment of college athletes and of small-time schools alike, college sports follows the Golden Rule: Those who have the gold, rule.

4. College sports would not go broke without amateurism

I've already made the case for this here. Long article short, not paying competitive market wages to your labor force -- in this case, the athletes on the field -- means you can spend far more than necessary on other things. Like gold-plated weight rooms. Inflated athletic director salaries. Stay-Puft-Marshmallow-Man-in-"Ghostbusters"-inflated coaching salaries.

Zimbalist and Sack put the latter into particularly stark perspective. Between 1985 and 2010, they report, the average salary of head football coaches at 44 Division I schools increased by 750 percent, from $273,300 to $2,054,700. During the same period, the average salary of university presidents rose by 90 percent, while the average salary of full professors rose just 30 percent.

Which group is more essential to the collegiate educational mission?

Another way to look at college coach pay: According to the Drake report, campus football and basketball coaches are paid on average nearly the same amount as their professional league peers, even though college programs generate a fraction of the revenue of pro teams. While NFL teams generate a rough average of $260 million annually, the top college programs earn between $40 million and $90 million. In college basketball, the top 30 schools average $15 million in revenue -- one-tenth that of the average NBA team.

So, why are college coaches enjoying such a disproportionate windfall? The Drake report has the answer:

… these salaries make little sense economically. Defenders of the multimillion-dollar head coaches' salaries invariably chant the mantra: "Compensation packages are driven by market forces." Perhaps this is so, but in college sports market forces are artificially influenced by several factors: (a) no monetary compensation is paid to the primary workforce - the athletes; (b) the presence of substantial tax preferences; (c) the absence of shareholders demanding dividend distributions or higher profits; (d) extensive subsidies from the university and state budgets; and (e) athletic directors whose own salaries increase proportionately to those of the department's head coaches.

The factor contributing most directly to the inflated coaches' pay is the athletes' amateur status. In significant measure, coaches are paid for the value produced by others, most notably the athletes they or their assistant coaches recruit. That is, the marginal revenue product of the star players accrues largely to the head coach, rather than to the players themselves, just as was true for professional athletes prior to the days of free agency. The value produced from recruiting - whose success relies on many factors, such as assistant coaches, the school's conference, its reputation and facilities - is attributed to the head coach …

Dump amateurism for a market-based player compensation system, Zimbalist and Sack argue, and conferences like the Big Ten wouldn't actually be forced to abandon big-time moneymaking for Division III, no matter what rolls off Jim Delany's forked tongue. They'd simply have less cash to bid on the likes of Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer. How horrifying. The line must be drawn here!

* * *

Plausible Deniability

The plaintiffs in the O'Bannon case filed a new round of documents and arguments last week, and as Jon Solomon of AL.com reports, one of the key takeaways is this: College sports officials aren't dumb. They know they're exploiting their workforce.

For the uninitiated, a quick O'Bannon case primer: Former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon and a group of plaintiffs that includes NBA Hall of Famers Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson, as well as other former college athletes, are suing the NCAA, EA Sports and the Collegiate Licensing Company over colluding to use their names, likeness and images in products like sports video games without paying athletes. In essence, the plaintiffs are challenging the entire business model of college sports, and if they prevail, the outcome likely will be seismic change.

So, the new case documents. Emails obtained by the plaintiffs' lawyers show that NCAA officials are well aware that they're getting away with economic murder, and that the veneer of amateurism is Professor Plum in the study with a candlestick. From Solomon's article:

… in one e-mail exchange in 2005, former NCAA official Bo Kerrin noted there is "real concern" that the NCAA's use of athletes' images in video games "adds to the argument that student-athletes should be unionized and receive a cut of the profits, etc."
During a different 2005 e-mail exchange with NCAA Vice President David Berst, then-Ivy League compliance coordinator Brian Barrio questioned whether the use of personally identifiable characteristics of players in video games was a liability for the NCAA. Barrio said he heard the same concern at his previous job at Ohio State.
"This seems to go beyond the plausible deniability inherent in selling a jersey with a uniform number but no name on the back," Barrio wrote. "Is anyone at the NCAA tracking on this issue? We wanted to make sure there is an awareness of the level of identification in this game, given that it is presently one of the highest-selling video games on the market."
Later in that e-mail thread, NCAA membership services official Steve Mallonee raised similar concerns with NCAA colleagues Kevin Lennon and Kerrin.
"The jersey number along with the position and vital statistics is clearly an attempt to have the public make the association with the current student-athlete," Mallonee wrote. "And it appears to be working. The Best Damn Sports Show was aired several weeks ago and had (then-USC football players) Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush acknowledging that they were in the video game.
"That then raises the issue of whether getting in line with technology means being more restrictive or lenient with our rules. ... The biggest concern I have is that such a position really does allow for the maximum commercial exploitation of the (student-athlete) and if that occurs, will it be long before we can defend not giving them a piece of the profits?"

Notice the bolded part. The NCAA isn't concerned with "maximum commercial exploitation" of college athletes -- the very thing amateurism allegedly "protects" said athletes from, a concept whose sheer unabashed dubiousness makes New Coke look like a brilliant idea -- but rather with damaging the plausible deniability that helps it defend itself from having to share the profits.

Plausible deniability is crucial. It's basically the lifeblood of contemporary American legal defense, how everyone from politicians to corporations to Wall Street bankers gets away with, well, everything. First rule of Plausible Deniability Club? Don't talk about plausible deniability, not even in your emails, because somebody might subpoena them.

Naturally, the NCAA's chief legal officer claims that the email quotes have been taken out of context. Which sounds totally plausible.

* * *

Culture of "Entitlement"

Rules of thumb: iI you have to call yourself a "guy's guy," you aren't. If you have to explain why a joke is funny, it isn't. And if you have to run commercials asking the public to think of your organization as a spirit squad for college athletes … well, you're the NCAA.

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure most campus sports administrators want what's best for student athletes. Provided said best doesn't interfere with what's best for most campus sports administrators. Here's an example: According to a new report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, some of the wealthiest programs in college sports refuse to give guaranteed four-year scholarships, while many others hand them out sparingly.

Show of hands: Did you even know that college athletic scholarships were annually renewable contracts?

Yep. That's right. This season's National Letter of Intent signee can be next season's thanks, but no thanks, you're a lousy player, now get lost for the good of the program roster cut. Jay Paterno's amazing below-market deal actually isn't so hot. Coaches and administrators will never admit that, of course. They adamantly maintain that scholarships are only revoked in extreme circumstances -- when a player flunks out of school, or gets in trouble with the law. This is often the case. But not always. Just ask John Calipari.

The net effect of renewable scholarships is simple: They give schools a lopsided amount of leverage when dealing with -- or dictating to -- college athletes. History is illuminative. In 1948, the NCAA stipulated that schools could not withdraw financial aid if a student stopped playing a sport. After all, college athletics are an educational, amateur exercise, right? Two years later, the requirement was dropped. According to the Drake report, athletic directors in the 1960s began complaining about four-year scholarship recipients who were ending their college athletic careers early; one AD said the practice was "morally wrong" and that "regardless of what anyone says, this is a contract and it is a two-way street." The NCAA responded by passing rules that allowed immediate scholarship cancellations for athletes who voluntarily withdrew from sports or did not follow a coach's instructions, and in 1973, the association prohibited multi-year scholarships altogether.

"This rule thus allows a coach to cancel an athlete's scholarship at the end of one year for virtually any reason, including injury, contribution to team success, the need to make room for a more talented recruit, or failure to fit into a coaches' style of play," write Zimbalist and Sack. "The contractual nature of this relationship and the control it gives coaches over the player's behavior has many of the trappings of an employment contract."

A few years ago, I asked Dave Meggyesy -- a former NFL and Syracuse University player and outspoken athlete and union advocate -- about the renewable scholarship switch. His answer was even more blunt than the Drake report.

"You know why they do one-year renewable scholarships?" he told me. "Because back in the early 1970s, the [expletive] was hitting the fan. There were a number of athlete protests, including Syracuse, Oregon and Washington, back athlete protests following [Tommy] Smith and [John] Carlos raising their fists at the [1968] Olympics.

"One of the responses for the NCAA was to change the four-year grant-in-aid to a one-year renewable, to give the coaches a hammer over any scholarship ballplayer who would think about acting out. It was just a measure of control."

Back to the here and now. Last year, the NCAA reversed course -- possibly out of the goodness of Emmert's heart; probably out of antitrust concerns, since renewable deals really do smell like employment contracts ---and adopted a policy allowing multiyear scholarships. We're cheering for student-athletes! Yay! Unsurprisingly, athletic officials are less than enthused. An anonymous major college tennis coach told The Chronicle that "if you give a 60- to 70-percent scholarship and the guy's not panning out, that kills you. That's a difference in 30 rankings spots easily." (Editor's note: The coach is not talking about academic rankings.) Tennessee associate athletic director Chris Fuller said that scholarships should be tied to performance, while Missouri compliance officer Mitzi Clayton said, "I'm also a big incentive person, and think it's important to teach students that, no matter what we do in life, we're all judged by our performance. That's how you move up in the world." Apparently, the NCAA spirit squad only sings when college athletes are winning.

Texas women's athletic director Christine Plonsky all but argued that multiyear scholarships do college athletes a disservice.

"Who gets a four-year, $120K deal guaranteed at age 17?" she wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle. "The last thing young people need right now is more entitlement."

According to calculations by Drexel University professor Ellen Staurowsky, the average Texas football player would be worth approximately $567,922 under a fair market revenue-sharing plan similar to the one collectively bargained between NFL owners and players -- far more than the $21,090 value of a Texas football scholarship in 2011-12.

Meanwhile, Plonsky makes a reported $359,000 annually. Plus incentives. Her freely negotiated contract runs through 2017. Her men's athletics counterpart, DeLoss Dodds, makes $1 million-plus per year -- and after his contract expires in 2015, Texas will pay him $100,000 a year through 2020 for serving in "another capacity." Both individuals manage an athletic department that boasted a $25 million operating surplus (read: profit) in 2011-12, thanks largely to $103.8 million in football revenue, of which just $1.8 million went to cover the scholarship costs of 85 football players.

But sure, the last thing college sports needs are participants with a sense of entitlement.

* * *

Agree? Disagree? Have a tip for future editions of The Laboratories of Hypocrisy? Drop me a line here. I'm listening.

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

Human Triumph

2013-04-29T19:51:00.000-04:00

The Atlantic Sports Roundtable on Jason Collins, the NBA's first openly gay player

The Atlantic online

In retrospect, it seems overdue. In this week's edition of the Atlantic Sports Roundtable, we discuss NBA center Jason Collins' coming out:

Jake Simpson: ... in many ways, Collins is an ideal choice to be the first gay man to come out and keep returning to the locker rooms of a professional sports team. An imposing figure—Collins comes in at seven feet, 265 pounds—the veteran center is unlikely to face significant verbal harassment from the rest of the league. (Preemptive note to all homophobic athletes out there: You don't want to be the guy who gets your ass kicked for your bigotry, it won't look very good on your CV.) And basketball has been a leader of sorts on openly homosexual athletes. In addition to Griner and now Collins, former NBA power forward John Amaechi came out in 2007 after he retired ...

... there will undoubtedly be negative reactions from homophobic fans and players alike. But the tide of public opinion has inexorably shifted against the bigots. When the 49ers' Chris Culliver went on a homophobic rant before the Super Bowl, the condemnation was swift and universal (and as Culliver's recent Instragram post shows, bigots are bigots across the board). If Collins's coming-out party is a success—and it will be—other active athletes will follow, and not just in the NBA ...

Hampton Stevens: ... Yeah, maybe Collins will get some bad vibes in the locker room or on the court. My guess, though, is that the negative responses will be vastly outweighed by the good ones. My guess is that NBA players, coaches, and front-office people will offer Collins their acceptance and support. Some will be gay, sure. Many will be straight, but have gay friends or family. Some will simply love freedom.

We also know that whatever team signs Collins will see a little blip of protest. A few season-ticket holders might even be jerks and choose not to renew. Rest assured, they will be replaced—and far outnumbered—by new fans showing their support for whatever club gives him a contract.

Then, in a year or so, an even better thing will happen. No one will care who Collins sleeps with. After the frenzy of publicity dies down, the only thing that will matter about him is how he performs on the court. Period. End of story. That's the real beauty of it ...

Patrick Hruby: ... put yourself in Collins's shoes. It's not hard. Anyone who has ever been afraid of rejection—which is to say, everyone—can relate. Sexuality is irrelevant. Sooner or later, we all bake. Imagine the lack of joy, the sheer, inescapable loneliness, a lifetime seeking support with a finger planted on the censor button, wondering if anyone will embrace you for being, you know, you. Now realize how utterly unnecessary all of that should be. How unnecessary all of that actually is. Sports can be hugely symbolic, but in this case, sports is a small part of the larger picture. We have a short time on this planet. Life is hard enough, in ways great and small. Why make it harder for each other? Roger Ebert once said that "to make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts." He was right. For 34 years, Collins missed out on the world in a very real way. This was a crime. For 34 years, the world missed out on Collins. This was a crime, too.

I'm happy that's over. I'm happy Collins gets to be himself and be loved exactly for that. I hope his story helps others do the same. In 1938, researchers began a study that followed 268 Harvard undergraduate men for 75 years, measuring everything from personality type to IQ to drinking habits to family relationships, all to determine what factors contribute most strongly to human flourishing; recently, longtime director George Valiant published a summation of the study's insights. The key takeaway, according to Valiant? "The 75 years and $25 million expended on the Grant Study points ... to a straightforward five-word conclusion: happiness is love. Full stop." Jason Collins is a 34-year-old NBA center. He's black. He's gay. Starting today, he is as free to pursue happiness as the rest of us. Full stop.

Read the full article at The Atlantic Online

The Beginning of the NCAA's End?

2013-04-28T11:30:00.000-04:00

The Atlantic Sports Roundtable on The College Football Playoff and the future of intercollegiate sports

The Atlantic online

Simple. Direct. Downright literal. And notable for the four letters - N-C-A-A - it leaves out. The College Football Playoff (TM!) is almost here, and in this week's Atlantic Sports Roundtable, we ask: what does this mean for the future of the National Collegiate Athletic Association?

Patrick Hruby: ... Forget administrative incompetence, the ongoing O'Bannon lawsuit, the fundamental unfairness and unsustainability of amateurism, the fact that college athletic directors are increasingly fed up. The biggest reason the NCAA is teetering is that the big-time football schools don't need the organization. Not anymore. Not when they can make tons of money without NCAA interference. In men's basketball, the association acts as a profit-skimming middleman, selling the multibillion-dollar television rights to the popular postseason basketball tournament and spreading the spoils around; in football, the power schools and conferences broker their own broadcast deals for even larger piles of cash, which they get to control and keep.

As Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports—and speaking of corporate names!—points out, "College Football Playoff" does not include the terms NCAA, FBS or Division I-A. The reason? "That way," Wetzel writes, "if the high-major college football schools decide to bail on the NCAA itself, the playoff isn't tied to outdated labels." And bail they will. Maybe not in five years. Maybe not in 10. But eventually, just as soon as institutional inertia gives way to full-fledged opportunism. The people who run big-time college sports adamantly refuse to share their profits with their own labor force; why on Earth would they indefinitely continue to share them with a bunch of redundant bureaucrats in Indianapolis? One day, we're going to have a College Basketball Playoff, too, and that point the NCAA as we know it will cease to exist ...

Hampton Stevens: ... With the NCAA a shell of itself, there will be no one to enforce their innumerable, inscrutable, mostly exploitative rules governing student-athletes. There will be no compliance officers. That means, simply, no one will comply. With nobody to stop boosters from giving cash and gifts, and no meaningful penalties for players taking them, it's simply bound to happen.

Now you might say the universities still won't feel liking sharing. With alumni handing out money almost over the table, why would they?

They will. Because of the very same, insane, win-at-all cost mentality in college sports that's so often (rightfully) decried.

Someone at a future version of Michigan or USC—or in the leadership of the coming Big 20 or Pac-25—will realize that offering a players a legal, regulated, above-board stipend will be the greatest recruiting tool in the history of college athletics ...

Jake Simpson: ... The athletes may get paid eventually, but the CFP won't be the tipping point. That will be a labor-friendly appellate court panel that forces the Supreme Court to hear a case like Ed O'Bannon's.

As for the action between the goalposts, I'm stoked for new playoff system, though not because I think it's any better (or even significantly more meritorious) than the BCS. I'm excited for CONTROVERSY, with a capital C. Of the four entrants into the new playoff system, one will be the highest-ranked team from the five (for now) power conferences. The other three will be determined by a selection committee a la March Madness. But instead of deciding between Team No. 68 and Team No. 69, these committee members will be forced to choose who is the fourth-best team in the country, and who is fifth. You think the computer nerds who made up a third of the BCS got it bad from the media and public? Wait until an SEC at-large team slides into the last playoff spot ahead of a 12-0 Boise State team. The accusations of bias will be swift and vitriolic. I can't wait ...

Read the full article at The Atlantic online

Heads Up Their ...

2013-04-28T11:22:00.002-04:00

What Roger Goodell's youth football safety letter leaves out

Sports on Earth

Editor’s note: earlier this week, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell took to the airwaves to discuss the league’s annual draft and promote “Heads Up” football, a youth safety initiative that Goodell claims will teach children how to “play the game safely.” The comissioner also released an open letter on the initiative to NFL fans – and below, Sports on Earth writer Patrick Hruby, a vocal critic of the program, imagines what the first, unedited draft of the letter looked like:

To NFL Fans:

During the 2013 NFL Draft, young men will see their dreams realized as they are selected to become professional football players ~~for an average career of 3.2 years~~. And countless younger football players ~~who will grow into cheaper, healthier replacements~~ will be watching them. No matter what level they play, all football players ~~except those in college whose totally legitimate safety concerns we aren’t addressing~~ should be taught the proper fundamentals and know that ~~parents not worrying about~~ their safety ~~because that could dry up our talent and fan feeder system and threaten the long-term viability of our multibillion-dollar television contracts~~ is the top priority as they participate in the sport they love.

That is why the NFL is proud to partner with USA Football to ~~try to keep Congress off our case~~ announce the national launch of Heads Up Football, a comprehensive youth football initiative whose aim is to ~~broker lasting Middle East peace~~ ~~discover additional North Korean unicorn lairs~~ ~~build a working U.S.S. Enterprise~~ take the head out of the game possibly by creating detachable heads you can leave on the sideline, like the snap-off noggins on little Lego men, but in the meantime, don’t think too hard about what it means that even the 6-year-old players are still wearing helmets. Your ~~credulity~~ support is a vital component.

Heads Up Football was created with direction from independent football and medical experts, ~~the kind of experts that our own concussion committee ignored and attempted to discredit for years, and that one of our current committee members is still casting climate change denial-style doubt on.~~ All coaches in a Heads Up Football league must be certified via USA Football’s nationally accredited Level 1 coaching certification course, ~~which sounds even more official, impressive and reassuring if you read it out loud.~~ These leagues also appoint a Player Safety Coach, who is trained by USA Football. Every coach, parent and player affiliated with a Heads Up Football league receives training on the following subjects:

* Heads Up Tackling, which teaches tackling in ~~what we would like both parents and potential trial jurors to think is~~ a safer and more effective way even though some former players don’t think that makes any sense given that football tackles are dynamic and violent physical snowflakes, and besides, football already tried “proper tackling” as a head trauma cure-all in the 1970s, a strategy which has gotten us to exactly where we are right now. The head is always up in order to lessen the risk of head or neck injuries which can still happen with devastating consequences for children given the inherent violence of the sport and the fact that boys as young as eight years old hit each other with the physical force of college players;

*Concussion recognition and response in which Centers for Disease Control and Prevention protocols are learned because let’s be real, this is a collision sport and there are going to be both concussions and subconcussive brain trauma regardless of how you try to tackle, so let’s hope youth football coaches can become as good at spot-diagnosing a notoriously difficult-to-identify medical condition as the trained, independent sideline neurologists NFL players are getting for their own sideline concussion recognition and response because again, let’s be real, this is a multibillion-dollar collision sport and professional players are slightly more valuable corporate assets than your 10-year-old Pop Warner-playing son; and

*Proper equipment fitting to ensure the correct fitting of a player’s helmet~~, which prevents skull fractures but not concussions, despite what some manufacturers have insinuated in their marketing campaigns,~~ and shoulder pads, ~~which prevent neither skull fractures nor brain trauma, but still sounds like something we should do.~~

Piloted in three markets in 2012, Heads Up Football will expand to more than 900 youth leagues across all 50 states in 2013. Many of these leagues will receive the guidance of Heads Up Football Ambassadors, former NFL players ~~not including the more than 4,000 currently suing over brain trauma~~ who will collaborate with the league’s coaches, administrators, player safety coach, parents and players to help ensure that the game is played the right way, because if we define football-induced brain trauma problem as the accidental outcome of improper tackling technique as opposed to the inevitable result of the intentional collisions that are part and parcel of tackle football, then horrifying injuries and ruined lives are not the fault of a risky sport that one of our own medical advisors says children under age 14 shouldn’t be playing, but rather the fault of irresponsible people who fail to play it “the right way,” whatever that actually means.

We want to institute ~~an Oz-like public relations illusion, complete with slick videos~~ a culture of safety at every level of the game, ~~because “culture,” unlike “physics” and “biology,” is a term we can define, massage and use to control the frame the public uses to think about football-induced brain trauma~~ and we encourage youth coaches, players and parents to join us ~~and keep buying merchandise, too~~.

We can play a part in making the game ~~seem~~ safer, in part because our lawyers have advised us not to use the term “safe,” even though USA Football executive director Scott Hallenbeck has asserted that “there is no question that the game can be played safely and is safe, as long as it is taught properly and the players execute it properly.” If something bad happens, sue him! As an NFL fan, here is what you can do to make a difference. If you are the parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, friend or neighbor of a youth football player, tell them to think long and hard about the very real lifelong risks inherent to the sport, and weigh them against the fleeting minor glory of participating in a pee wee or high school football game, no matter how important the entertainment-starved adults around you make it seem about Heads Up Football and encourage their coaches or guardians to visit www.USAFootball.com to sign their league up as a Heads Up Football league. If you are a youth football coach or commissioner, we invite you to join the Heads Up Football ~~public relations campaign~~ movement by clicking here.

We are committed to football that ~~makes a group of wealthy Welfare King owners even richer~~ fans love ~~we’re not stupid, we know you love the violence as long as you don’t have to feel empathetic or God forbid indirectly responsible about the health costs to the players~~ and the safety the players deserve at all levels of the game. Your support is critical.

Thanks for your help, and we hope you ~~have adequate family health insurance and competent nearby emergency room staff~~ enjoy the NFL Draft.

Sincerely,

Roger Goodell

Commissioner, National Football League

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

Abolish the NFL Draft

2013-04-27T18:10:00.003-04:00

More fair, free and fun: the case for dumping the draft

Sports on Earth

Are you sitting down? Good. Are you more than 50 feet away from the nearest pitchfork and/or torch? Even better. I have an idea. A proposal, really. A plan to make sports better. It's a simple plan, but also heretical, so much so that I probably should divide it into 95 parts and nail it to your computer screen. Consider yourself warned. Still with me? Here goes.

It's time to abolish the National Football League draft.

I know what you're thinking: This way lies madness. And also: Cool story, bro, but I'd rather be reading Mock Draft Version 7.91. Fine. I understand. The NFL draft has much to offer. It's a multi-day professional football marketing bonanza. A supposed guarantor of competitive parity. An opportunity for New York Jets fans to vocalize their displeasure -- well, make that another opportunity -- and for Buffalo Bills supporters to experience a faint, flickering moment of inner warmth, an emotional state that the rest of us recognize as hope.

Far removed from its humble beginnings, the draft is a human auction with slickly-produced highlight reels; the engine of a cottage industry that has grown to corporate campus proportions; a prime-time stage for the most delightfully awkward exchanges of male affection this side of a Tiger Woods high-five. The draft gave us Roger Goodell getting booed, Eli Manning holding a San Diego Chargers jersey as if it were a soiled diaper and the Minnesota Vikings forgetting how to use both a stopwatch and a telephone. It is, without question, supremely good TV.

It's also an exercise that we'd be better off without.

Way back in 2011 -- you know, when Apple stock was something people wanted to buy -- sports agent Brian Ayrault floated a series of increasingly crazy notions on Twitter. Why should there even be a draft? Players should be able to choose who they work for and where they live. No draft would also help prospects choose the best roster situations. Market should determine the value of all contracts. Competitive balance is a fallacy. The success of teams is determined by good ownership and scouting. Period. Mike Florio of NBC's Pro Football Talk collected Ayrault's sentiments and respectfully pummeled them, citing draft-produced parity as a key factor in the NFL's booming popularity. In the comments section below Florio's article, his readers were far less diplomatic:

Who is this idiot? If they cancel the draft, they can cancel my NFL Sunday Ticket subscription as well …

The fact of the matter is that fans love the draft, because the draft gives everybody hope …

No draft = maybe 3-4 teams who will always win the Super Bowl …

Happy Easter! This agent just left an egg-shaped turd on our collective floor …

Putting aside metaphoric chocolate eggs, Ayrault was right. In fact, his only real mistake was failing to fully develop his argument. Like the portable MP3 player, the draft is an invention that largely has outlived its usefulness. Scrapping it would be better for players and teams alike. Fans, too. Even the ones who adore it, happy supplicants at the holy altar of Cardinal Gruden and Pope McShay.

I'm serious about this. Swear to Kiper.

Start with competitive balance. The draft levels the NFL's playing field, helps narrow the talent gap between haves and have-nots. Crummy teams get first dibs on the collegiate pick of the litter. The worst shall be first, and they shall select ~~Tim Couch~~ Andrew Luck. Dump the draft, the thinking goes, and big-market, bigger-money clubs like the Dallas Cowboys will corner the incoming player market, winning every bidding war for the likes of Luck and turning pro football into top-heavy European soccer, terminal-stage capitalism masquerading as professional sports, where if you're not ubermensch Manchester United or Real Madrid, you're basically playing for second place.

Not so.

The NFL has a salary cap. Revenue sharing. Franchise tags. Restricted free agency. A limited number of roster spots per team. It has a whole host of socialist mechanisms geared to limit talent stockpiling -- mechanisms that mostly don't exist in international soccer -- and all of them (especially the salary cap) are arguably more important than the draft. Indeed, I'm not convinced that the current college player selection system does anything to help poorly-managed teams avoid or erase bad personnel decisions, let alone ensure semi-parity.

The Cleveland Browns and Arizona Cardinals routinely draft relatively high and it doesn't seem to help. The Baltimore Ravens and New England Patriots usually pick relatively low and have little trouble finding productive players. In 1958, the then-Chicago Cardinals had the top two picks in the NFL draft. They selected King Hill and John David Crow. Decades later, Ryan Leaf, Akili Smith and Joey Harrington happened. What did Ayrault write? The success of teams is determined by good ownership and scouting. Period. Good teams hire good general mangers and scouts who acquire good coaches and players, sometimes nabbing the latter through the draft. Also -- and there's really no way to understate this -- they get lucky. Bad teams don't. The rest is mostly kabuki. As Grantland's Bill Barnwell puts it in a piece discussing how NFL teams selected Todd Blackledge, Tony Eason and Ken O'Brien ahead of Dan Marino, "There's plenty of evidence telling us -- at least on an anecdotal level and on some quantitative levels -- that teams routinely do a subpar job of judging college talent as it enters the league."

Maybe you're unconvinced. Maybe you're a Jacksonville fan. You want the draft, because you want your team to have a chance. Go back to Luck. Imagine a draft-free world, with NFL teams free to bid for his services. Would the Cowboys have been able to sign him? Maybe. But they would have had to clear a lot of cap room to do so, cutting proven players. Would they end up as better team? It's hard to say. And what about the Indianapolis Colts? Would they be, well, screwed? Not necessarily. They could have bid for Robert Griffin III. Or for Russell Wilson. They could have picked up some of those Cowboys cut in free agency -- including, mostly likely, Tony Romo, because it's doubtful that the cap-constrained Cowboys could have afforded two in-demand quarterbacks.

Speaking of which: Getting rid of the draft would actually make it harder for teams to hoard great players who play the same position. A few years ago, the Green Bay Packers selected Aaron Rodgers when they already had Brett Favre. Think Rodgers was happy about that? Think quarterback-starved teams that would have liked to outbid the Packers for Rodgers were happy about that?

Put yourself in Rodgers' shoes. You're coming out of college. There is no draft. You can sign with anyone. Is Green Bay your first choice? New England? The Peyton Manning-era Colts? Do you aspire to hold a clipboard? Is that even what fans around the country want to watch? Players want money, for sure. They want to play in particular cities for a variety of reasons (weather, nightlife, team tradition, proximity to family). But mostly, they want a chance to play -- and crummy teams can almost always offer that.

Fact: The draft was not primarily created to help the league's dregs. It was created to prevent costly bidding wars over incoming college talent. In 1934, the Philadelphia Eagles and Brookyln Dodgers competed to sign college All-America Stan Kosta, driving his salary up to an eye-popping $5,000 -- as high as that of Bronko Nagurski, then the NFL's best player. At a subsequent league meeting, Eagles owner Bert Bell proposed a incoming player rights draft, with a worst-chooses-first order that -- totally coincidentally -- would benefit his last-place team. Wary of another Kosta, cost-conscious clubs adopted the system, which has been robbing leverage-lacking rookies of market value ever since.

Over at footballperspective.com, writer Chase Stuart calculates that NFL players in the first three years of their contracts produce between 30 and 38 percent of the total value on any given team's roster, but only receive 16 to 20 percent of team spending under the salary cap. In other words, they're getting the short end, particularly when the average league career only lasts about three years. Moreover, the players' union is happy to sign off on preserving the draft during collective bargaining negotiations, because less money for future rookies means more money for current veteran free agents enjoying an actual competitive market for their services. (In the 1970s, Washington Redskins draft pick Yazoo Smith lost a lawsuit against the team asserting that the draft constituted illegal restraint of trade. Ryan Rodenberg, a Florida State University sports management professor who specializes in sports law, says that the outcome of the Smith case suggests that "the next high school or college athlete looking to play a professional sport but has no interest in submitting to the draft should look to sue the respective union, not the league.")

"Andrew Luck probably would have been given a $100 million contract if he was on the free market last year," Stuart says. "That's not an exaggeration. If he was a [free agent] tomorrow, he'd easily sign for something in excess of $20 million a year due to his age and skill level."

Instead, Luck's current salary is reportedly around $21.3 million over four years, artificially constrained by: (a) the draft nixing competition among potential employers; (b) a new, collectively-bargained NFL rookie wage scale that drives down salaries even further. While this might be legal, it's hardly fair. It might even qualify as un-American. Like amateurism, it's only something we accept in sports because we've been conditioned not to think about it, and instead train our collective focus on 40-yard dash times.

Unconvinced? Try the following thought experiment. You're a soon-to-graduate computer science student. Not just any student. A really sharp student. Top of your class at one of the country's best schools. A budding video game design genius. Which means you're in demand. Microsoft wants you to work on the next "Halo." Activision is dangling "Call of Duty 6: All of the Guns." Sony is letting you mess around with an actual PS4 devkit. Nintendo keeps calling. As such, you have some pretty big decisions to make: Do you want to live near Seattle? Move to Tokyo? Work with the people who created Mario? Ask for more money? Negotiate for stock options?

Actually, scratch all of that that. You have no decisions to make. Turns out there's an annual software developer draft, and you're the No. 1 pick. Which means that in the alleged interest of competitive parity, you'll be working for EA Sports … on the next edition of the troubled "NBA Live" franchise. Assuming one ever comes out.

Oh, and you don't even like sports games.

Economic fairness aside, wouldn't it be better if an incoming NFL player who wanted to, say, stay close to his family had some say over where he lives and works, just like the rest of us? Wouldn't it be better if players could shop themselves to teams whose coaches and systems provided the best possible fit for their individual skills? Heck, wouldn't a draft-free league be better for those teams, too?

For general managers, the draft provides a degree of certainty -- you know the rules and order of selection, even if you don't know exactly which players will be available when you pick -- but limits flexibility and creativity. It can be a straitjacket, too, with clubs artificially compelled to place draft value above roster needs (see best available player) or vice versa (see reaching with a pick). As Stuart notes: Kansas City has the No. 1 pick in this year's draft. Philadelphia picks at No. 4. Neither team needs a left tackle as much as San Diego (No. 11) and Miami (No. 12). Nevertheless, most draftniks project the Chiefs and Eagles to select some combination of tackles Luke Joeckel, Eric Fisher and Lane Johnson -- all three prospects grade highly -- while the Dolphins and Chargers select from the best available players at other positions.

Does that sound efficient to you?

An industry-wide system that prevents potential employers and employees from freely selecting each other. That keeps companies from building product teams and pursuing staffing goals the best way they see fit. That arguably punishes struggling firms by forcing them to make risky, double-down, blow-up-in-your-face hires -- what economists call "The Loser's Curse," and what the rest of us call "the Detroit Lions under Matt Millen." If the human resources department of your company came up with the idea of a draft, they'd be fired on the spot. (If Dave Chappelle came up with the idea of a racial draft, it would be one of the funniest television comedy skits of the last decade. But I digress.)

Thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. Ditch the draft, and pro football will start to look like the real world. And also college football. That would be a good thing. Teams and players would get to know each other. They would build relationships. They would have more time to figure out if they belong together. They would get a chance to shop around. The NFL draft is a series of arranged marriages before ~~an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas~~ Goodell at Radio City Music Hall; college football is dating before heading to the altar. Granted, both can end badly. But given a choice, which one would you prefer?

If nothing else, an NFL without drafts -- but with college-style recruiting -- would be wildly entertaining. Everything we love about the current system would be preserved: list making, prospect ranking, film breakdown, scout jargon, Kiper's coif, the Bod Pod, bench-pressing with John Lott. Everything else would be enhanced. College football recruiting message boards would be joined by pro football recruiting message boards, which is kind of like adding Studio 54 to the Mos Eisley Cantina. Hilariously overwrought NFL coach and general manager recruiting letters would become a thing. The league would inevitably become even more of a year-round national obsession: in college, Cam Newton's dad shopping him among SEC schools was a scandal; in the pros, Newton's dad shopping him between the New York Jets and Giants would be an NFL Network reality show. Best of all, my colleague Tommy Tomlinson's visionary dream of a National Pro Football Signing Day would become reality. I'll let him explain:

… the drama would be ridiculous. The draft is a classic inverted-pyramid news story -- all the interesting stuff happens at the beginning. NFL Signing Day could delay the gratification like a Hitchcock thriller. Imagine if Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III had waited all day to announce where they're playing. And imagine if every team had a shot to sign them. They'd have to crank up the Red Zone Channel just to cover all the announcements … which team hat will Jarvis Jones pull out of the bag? Will Star Lotulelei pull up his shirt to reveal a giant Cowboys tattoo? Will there be awkward look-ins to the [Manti] Te'o house while they wait for the phone to ring? Would you not watch this for hours?

I know I would. Especially if Goodell remained on hand to congratulate the top players in person. And understand: This is coming from someone who has sworn off watching football for enjoyment. So I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be the only person tuning in.

Heresy? Only until it isn't. Fairer for players. Freer for teams. More enjoyable for fans. The time has come. Lose the draft. Keep the bro-hugs. You're welcome, America.

Read the original article on Sports on Earth

Hooray for Me

2013-04-22T11:12:00.003-04:00

The Virginia Press Association honors some of my work

Truth be told, I wish the journalism business handed out fewer awards and more cash. Still, you take what you can get. Turns out my Washington Times work from 2012 won a pair of honors from the Virginia Press Association over the weekend: first place for feature writing portfolio, and third place for health, science and environmental writing (as I always tell my Georgetown students: a good journalist is an even better fake expert).

Anyway, huzzah for me and for all of the other worthy winners. Except the ones who beat me out in various categories; I hope to someday teach them the Conan (barbarian, not late night talker) definition of what is best in life. Just kidding.

If you'd like to read the pieces that were honored, here's the full list:

Feature Writing Portfolio

"Full Speed Ahead"
It's not just coffee anymore. From drinks to inhalers, the race is on to feed America's caffeine addiction

"Do It Yourself Drones"
Out of 'hobby' class, pilotless aircraft lifting off for personal, commercial use

"Even Hollywood Can't Make This Up"
'Argo' recounts the incredible CIA rescue of six Americans in Iran

Health, Science and Environmental Writing

"Chilling in Congress"
Ohio Democrat uses mindfulness stress-reduction techniques to get through day

"Baseball's Senior Phenom"
Nationals manager Johnson, 69, at top of his game

"Where No Website Has Gone Before"
Engineer boldly goes into a project to develop a real-life USS Enterprise

After Boston

2013-04-22T09:48:00.002-04:00

The Atlantic Sports Roundtable on the Boston Marathon bombings

The Atlantic online

In this week's Atlantic Sports Roundtable, we discuss the Boston Marathon bombings, and what comes next for sports:

Hampton Stevens: ... the motivations behind Monday's attacks still aren't totally clear. The target, though, suggests an attempt to strike at the democratic values we hold dear, for the Boston Marathon may be our most fully, authentically patriotic event: held in Boston, where the American idea was born, on a holiday that celebrates the start of the American Revolution.

But even beyond all the flag-waving, the very nature of the race speaks to democratic values—right down to the name of the event, "Marathon," taken from a battle that ensured the survival of Ancient Greece.

Fittingly, no other great sporting event on earth is so radically egalitarian and free. Almost anyone can enter, of any gender, age, ethnicity, or creed; and elite international runners will compete beside first-time qualifiers and those in wheelchairs.

That radical openness extends to spectators, too. They need no ticket to watch, and are often separated from competitors by nothing but a strip of police tape and the invisible bonds of the social contract.

As we so often have been reminded since Monday, that very openness, and the invisibility of those bonds, is precisely what made the marathon look like a soft target. That target, though, is far harder than it seems ...

Jake Simpson: ... Among those inspiring stories is the tale of marathon runners finishing the race and then running two more miles to Massachusetts General Hospital to donate blood. These weren't elite runners—most of them had braved the course in roughly four hours and were probably exhausted to the point of collapse. But they kept putting one foot in front of the other because other people needed their help. No terrorist, radical group, or malevolent individual can steal that collaborative spirit from us. As Hampton said, anyone who thought the marathon was a soft target is mistaken. Same goes for our collective courage and peace of mind.

The truth is that a marathon, like a golf tournament or outdoor musical festival, is virtually impossible to completely secure. Over 26.2 miles of suburban and city blocks, some seventh-story window above the course will not be swept, and some mailbox or garbage can tucked in an alley half a block away will not be inspected. Runners and spectators alike do risk falling victim to the asteroid of random human evil. But so does every American who gets on an airplane or a city bus, or travels abroad, or attends any large public gathering. This cowardly act will not stop runners from entering or watching the marathon, just like the September 11th attacks didn't stop us from taking planes or working in lower Manhattan.

I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other, Hampton, as we all will. And I have faith in the maxim of Jim Valvano: Every day, ordinary people accomplish extraordinary things ...

Patrick Hruby: ... What gives me the most hope following the Boston Marathon bombings isn't so much what people on the scene did—as brave and compassionate as they were—but what the rest of us didn't do.

Namely, we didn't freak out. Flip out. Start torturing suspected terrorists. Fire a missile into a wedding party. Go to war on blatantly false pretenses because, hell, we were scared, and somebody was gonna pay. We didn't lose ourselves to fear and loathing and collective shock; we didn't soothe ourselves by lashing out; we didn't decide that this was the day that everything changed, as if the past was a pointless footnote and the future could be both shaped and controlled by sheer, bullish will.

We've been a little more humble and a lot more wise, this time, and if that's the price of a nightmarish decade—a price far too high—at least we've made a bit of progress ...

Read the full article at The Atlantic online

Herbal Remedy

2013-04-22T09:41:00.002-04:00

The case for allowing medical marijuana in sports

Sports on Earth

The pain was a whisper. A shout. The pain was always there, like a shadow, and when Nate Jackson moved, the pain moved with him. Moved through him, really, from throbbing joints to separated shoulders, from a strained oblique muscle to a hamstring damn near torn from the bone. Something would heal. Something else would hurt. Life in professional football was an excruciating game of whack-a-mole, the grand prize forever out of reach.

"You never live pain-free in the [National Football League]," says Jackson, a former Denver Broncos tight end. "You don't discuss it. But you manage pain on a daily basis. Every morning there's this moment -- especially when you wake up in training camp -- when you're like, what the f--- am I doing? How am I going to make it through this practice? Even getting out of bed is hard. How you deal with it is your own personal thing."

Guys popped pills, Vicodin and Oxycontin, serious stuff, at first a few and then a few more. Guys took injections, Marcaine and Toradol, potent liquid lifelines that wouldn't be out of place in a trauma ward. Jackson did the same, swinging the rubber hammer. The shots made him uneasy. The pills made him groggy. Still, the sport remained a demolition derby, only without the cars. And so Jackson coped with the pain, in his own, personal way.

Sometimes, at night, he smoked marijuana.

"I never smoked weed before practice or games, before going to work," Jackson says. "I didn't think that was a good idea. I had no desire to be a stoner. But as the season would wear on and I would be in more and more pain, I found find myself smoking a little bit. It helped the pain. It helped my mind get away from the game. I think it allowed me not to dive too far down into the opioid [pain-killing drugs]."

Understand: Jackson didn't need to get high. He needed to get well. He didn't need to make a late-night Fourth Meal run to Taco Bell; he needed to make punishing catches over the middle. Marijuana fit the bill. In 18 states and the District of Columbia, the plant is legally considered medicine, like cough syrup, a remedy for conditions ranging from migraine headaches to glaucoma, neuropathic pain in HIV patients to chemotherapy-related nausea. See a doctor. Fill out the appropriate paperwork. Obtain state permission. Visit a dispensary. Pick up a prescription. Voila. In California, Oregon and elsewhere, you are largely free to use cannabis for legitimate health reasons.

Under federal law, however, the exact same drug remains a Schedule 1 controlled substance -- illicit and illegal, with no accepted medical use, a target for the Drug Enforcement Agency and/or Crockett and Tubbs. Drug polices in professional sports reflect the federal approach, as Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and the NFL all forbid marijuana, even for therapeutic use; had Jackson failed a urine test or been caught while toking up, he would have been subject to enrollment in a treatment program, fines and suspensions. Not to mention tsk-tsking disapproval from a sports culture that enthusiastically embraces prescription painkillers and alcohol, yet traditionally views cannabis consumption as either a Jeff Spicoli-like indulgence (at best) or a draft stock-sinking character defect (at worst).

Question is, does any of the above actually make sense?

"I've heard arguments presented about marijuana potentially being allowed for players to use as an alternative way to deal with pain," says free agent linebacker Scott Fujita. "I don't think there's any harm in having that kind of conversation and exploring whether something like that is feasible and would make sense from a health standpoint. I've said before that maybe we should consider granting [therapeutic use exceptions to the NFL's drug policy] for marijuana use for guys who prefer to manage pain more naturally as opposed to using synthetics.

"That always gets a laugh. But again, I think there's no harm in at least having the discussion. And as long as something like that is managed by a health care professional, just like with everything else we're prescribed, then perhaps it can be governed and administered responsibly."

Fujita has a point. A valid one, actually. Three years ago, an ABC News poll found that 8 of 10 Americans support legalizing marijuana for medical use. Professional sports should take the hint. Indeed, if the NFL and other leagues are serious about the health and well-being of their athletes, it's time for them to reconsider their prohibitions of medical cannabis. High time, even.

After all, did you know that marijuana is scientifically associated with "significant analgesic effects" in the treatment of certain types of chronic pain?

Or that the drug is recommended by doctors for headaches, sleeplessness, light sensitivity and loss of appetite -- all of which can be symptoms of a concussion?

Or that according to researchers, low doses of smoked marijuana -- the same naughty substance that makes Tyrann Mathieu such a risky, roll-of-the-dice NFL draft pick -- "can decrease anxiety, fear, depression and tension?"

Heck, did you know that there are gels and oils infused with cannabis that are simply used to treat joint pain?

"They're a great invention, specifically for older patients," says Amanda Reiman, a policy manager for the Drug Policy Alliance, a national drug policy reform organization. "Completely non-psychoactive. You won't get high. Really great for people looking for pain relief. But it's only available in [medical marijuana] dispensaries."

* * *

Reiman knows dispensaries. Also a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Social Welfare, she moved from Chicago to Berkeley in 2002 to pursue a doctoral degree. Struck by the area's embrace of medical marijuana, she wrote her dissertation on the topic -- spending an entire summer visiting seven different dispensaries, surveying and interviewing patients.

"It opened my eyes," she says. "A lot of people were consciously using marijuana for pain instead of prescription drugs. They kept saying, 'I don't think I'll get addicted to this like my Vicodin. I'm not worried about overdosing like with my Oxycontin.' I probed further and they were even using it as a substitute for alcohol. The side effects were a lot less."

Three years ago, Reiman was performing for Cheer San Francisco, an adult cheerleading squad that raises money for HIV/AIDS patients, when her leg was kicked out from under her. She tore both her meniscus and anterior cruciate ligament and underwent reconstructive knee surgery. The post-operative pain was intense. Only Reiman had a problem: She couldn't take standard pain medication. It made her sick. She tried cannabis oil. "I was able to use just a little bit," she says. "It gave me complete pain relief. I didn't get constipated or nauseous. I didn't lose my appetite."

Think professional athletes might find the same balm useful? Here's the thing about high-level sports: They hurt. Tackles hurt. Body checks hurt. Throwing a baseball 90-plus miles per hour 45 times in an single afternoon hurts. Sprinting up and down the court on consecutive nights in Atlanta and Miami hurts. Lifting weights in the offseason hurts. Even when athletes aren't injured, they're still dealing with pain, and as their bodies get older, the aches get more persistent. "The adrenaline that used to really carry you, the idealism and hype and all that, it starts to fade," Jackson says. "You need more coaxing for your body to feel good." Enter marijuana. Last year, former NFL lineman Lomas Brown said that at least 50 percent of the league's players smoke weed. Former NBA guard Robert Pack once put the association's usage rate at 70 percent. International cricket star Sir Ian Botham used cannabis regularly during his career. Pro wrestler Rob Van Dam told Cannabis Culture magazine that he personally knows "boxers, bodybuilders, cyclists, runners and athletes from all walks of life that train and compete with the assistance of marijuana."

Are they all just getting high for fun? Perhaps. Or perhaps they know something medical investigators are beginning to discover, something that's no mystery to the cannabis users interviewed by Reiman. "People say, 'I'm just smoking because I want to get high,'" she says. "But if you really talk to them, a lot of them are actually using it therapeutically to reduce stress and pain, or to help them sleep."

Because marijuana is a Schedule 1 controlled substance, clinical research is both rare and difficult to conduct; as Donald Abrams, a cancer and integrative medicine specialist at the University of California, San Francisco puts it, "You have to get a special license from DEA. You have to get the cannabis from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. They can't fund clinical trials looking at potential benefits of cannabis, so you have to get funding somewhere else. Then you have to get the Food and Drug Administration to approve it, because you're looking at a plant for a potential medicinal purpose. Depending on who is funding your study, you might need approval from the National Institutes of Health. Here in California, you also need to get approval of the research advisory panel of California. At your university, you need to get your school review board. And if it's an inpatient study, you have to get approval from a clinical research center."

Nevertheless, a 1999 Institute of Medicine study on medical marijuana -- a report funded by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, hardly a bunch of longhaired hippies -- found that marijuana has pain-alleviating properties. Two years ago, the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology published a review of 18 randomized controlled trials of cannabis; in 15 of the trials, the drug proved "safe and modestly effective" for treating neuropathic pain, with "no serious adverse effects" and "preliminary evidence of efficacy in fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis." Oh, and patients mostly slept better, too -- which just happens to be a crucial component of athletic recovery from injury and physical strain.

According to a Men's Journal article -- one that asked "is pot better than Advil?" -- marijuana's analgesic effects work in the body as follows:

… our perception of pain is a function of neurotransmitters relaying messages ("my legs are sore from mountain biking," for instance) through our central nervous systems to our brains. Certain drugs (opiates, including morphine) and many of the body's own agents can turn those switches off or at least slow down cellular communication to the point that the perception of pain is diminished or interrupted. Such is the case with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), [a] chemical found in marijuana, which, when it binds to two types of "cannabinoid receptors" (CB1 and CB2) in the brain, nervous system, and the body's peripheral tissue, "reduces reactivity to acute painful stimuli in laboratory animals… [and] was comparable with opiates in potency and efficacy" …

"Basically, it helps pain by blocking the signal to the brain for pain," Reiman says. And that's not all. Marijuana has been found to have anti-inflammatory properties, too. According to Mitch Earleywine, a psychology professor at the State University of New York at Albany and a medical marijuana expert, the drug works in similar fashion to … aspirin. "It's essentially the same mechanism, like a fatty acid that helps us communicate with our own bodies when inflammation might be a good reaction to an injury," he says. "So if it's swelling, cannabis will help. It's great for a migraine headache or a knee injury, which seem like different things but aren't. Anything that you would use an NAISD [non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, like ibuprofen or naproxen] for, you could certainly use this for."

Small wonder, then, that Earleywine believes athletes should at least have the option of using medical marijuana. Reiman agrees. So does Frank Lucido, a Berkeley-based physician who has two former NFL players as patients. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lucido said that he thinks marijuana was practically designed for football ailments, ranging from headaches to depression. "The most common thing I see in NFL players is chronic orthopedic pain," he told the newspaper. "I say marijuana should not be a banned substance [in the league]. It has too many medical benefits." Among those benefits? Potentially better mental health. Former NFL running back Ricky Williams once told ESPN that marijuana was "10 times better for me than Paxil," a drug he had been taking to treat social anxiety disorder. Suspended for an entire season for violating the NFL's substance abuse policy and dismissed as a late-night talk punch line, Williams may have been onto something. A 2011 paper in the American Journal of Sports Medicine that specifically considered marijuana use by athletes found that cannabis induces euphoria. Improves self-confidence. Induces relaxation and steadiness. Reduces anxiety. Relieves the stress of competition. In addition, the authors noted that marijuana plays "a major role in the extinction of fear memories by interfering with learned adverse behaviors" and speculated that "athletes who experienced traumatic events in their career could benefit from such an effect."

Miss a big putt? Fumble the ball on the goal line? Give up a game-winning home run? Suffer a nasty crash on the Super-G?

Toke up. Your nerves -- and your subsequent career -- may depend on it.

(Also notable: Israeli researchers are developing a cannabis-based drug that could help protect the brain following head trauma. Think the NFL might find that useful?)

"It not just physical pain you deal with," says Jackson, who currently is writing a book about his time in football, "Slow Getting Up." "It's this really intense mental aspect. You're sitting in meetings 3-4 hours a day. Being told to focus. Being told that this week, this game, this play is f---ing everything. It creates a lot of stress and anxiety. It's hard to relax. Marijuana allowed my body and mind to relax. The relaxation was really important. Everybody has to have that thing they can do to step away from the game, or they are going to go crazy.

"We hear it every year, college kids coming out [for the NFL Draft] and smoking marijuana and it's a red flag for teams and all this s---. But I don't think there's a discernible difference between the dude who smokes weed and the one who doesn't. In fact, I think the guy who smokes weed might be a little more calm and not as high-strung."

* * *

Mark Stepnoski was a college football All-American. A two-time academic All-American. He played 13 years in the NFL, went to five consecutive Pro Bowls, earned two Super Bowl rings and was named to the league's 1990s All-Decade second team. Following his 2001 retirement, Stepnoski became a spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a Washington-based lobbying group; in an interview with Sports Illustrated, he said "after a game you hurt so much, you need something to relax. I'd rather smoke than take painkillers."

Like Williams, he may have been on to something.

America has a painkiller problem: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, prescription drug abuse has become an epidemic, with opioid medications involved in 14,800 overdose deaths in 2008 -- more than cocaine and heroin combined -- and more than 475,000 emergency room visits the next year, a number that nearly doubled from 2004. Professional sports have a problem, too. Popular NHL enforcer Derek Boogaard died in 2011 from an accidental overdose of painkillers and alcohol, with the New York Times reporting that he received more than 100-plus prescriptions for thousands of pills from more than a dozen team doctors. Also in 2011, ESPN and researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published a survey of former NFL players' painkiller use. The results were disturbing. More than half of the respondents had taken opioids during their pro football careers. Nearly three-quarters of that group had misused the drugs. Seven percent of all players said they had misused prescription painkillers within the last 30 days -- an abuse rate more than four times higher than the general population. In an eye-opening recent Men's Journal investigative article, former New York Jets quarterback Ray Lucas detailed his crippling, near-fatal painkiller habit -- six or eight Vicodins with his morning coffee, half a dozen Percocets to wash down lunch, double that to make it to bedtime -- while author Paul Solotaroff labeled the NFL "a professional league so swamped by narcotics that it closes its eyes to medical malpractice by many of its doctors and trainers. It does so not because it lacks the will to police its staff and players, but because the game itself could not survive without these powerful drugs."

"I've always been concerned about the use, overuse, and in some cases, mismanagement and abuse of painkillers among us," Fujita says. "Generally, I tried to avoid using painkillers if I could get by without them, because I was always concerned about creating a dependency or an addiction. But I've had to rely on drugs of some kind quite a bit throughout my career, whether it's Toradol, other NSAIDs, Vicodin, Percocet. And even though I would consider my use much less than that of many others, I still feel like I've put way too many harmful materials in my body to play this game."

Opioids such as Vicodin and Percocet are powerful, addictive and potentially deadly. They can cause withdrawal symptoms after a single day of use. They engender rapid tolerance, requiring patients to consume larger and larger doses to achieve the same analgesic effect. They affect the area of the nervous system that controls breathing -- which means that if you overdose, you run the risk of never breating again. They are hell on the liver. Then there are the lesser side effects. "The unspoken truth is that they cause all these weird problems that nobody is ready to discuss," says Earleywine. "Like constipation. Imagine trying to run for a touchdown while you're constipated. That can be rough." Other locker room alternatives aren't much better. The anti-inflammatory drug Toradol can cause kidney damage, ulcers and brain bleeding if given more than several days in a row; according to reports, some NFL players take injections of the drug for months at a time. Even over-the-counter pain medications like aspirin and ibuprofen can cause gastrointestinal bleeding if taken in high doses or for extended periods of time.

"There were times I had to take a little bit of pain pills," Jackson says. "I always had some remaining in bottle. Never refilled a prescription or had to ask for more. In the back of my mind, I knew they were bad for me. But you'd see some guys popping a lot of pills as part of their normal, daily routine. Some guys were ordering big bottles of them. It's a big problem. These guys are set up for a lifetime of addiction. I have non-football player friends dealing with opioid addictions. One is still in denial and one is just coming out of it. It's really, really serious s---."

Marijuana is not a perfect drug. Side effects can include increased heart rate, dizziness, greater appetite, paranoia and disorientation. On the other hand, no one has ever died from a cannabis overdose. It's not physically addictive. Withdrawal symptoms are mild to nonexistent. Use vaporization -- a process that heats marijuana to a temperature where active chemical vapors form, but below the point of combustion -- and the toxin-inhaling respiratory risks associated with smoking vanish. Following a six-year study, the United Kingdom Drug Policy Commission likened the risk of using cannabis to that of … gambling. And eating junk food.

Earleywine is more blunt. No pun intended.

"One of my grad students just gathered data from medical [marijuana] users," he says. "Consistent low does usage does not see many negative consequences at all. The concerns we had about tolerance and withdrawal seem to be appearing only in heavy dosage situations. So what are the big negative consequences? Look at the standard measures of drug abuse. Impaired family relationships? Cannabis is not notorious for that. Trying to raise money for drugs via prostitution? No one is on the street giving [sexual favors] for pot. Impaired functioning at work? There's not a big hangover effect. How about actual physiological problems? We don't see the liver damage notorious in alcohol use. We're not seeing the respiratory problems that you see with tobacco use, especially when using vaporizers.

"So what are we left with? Scare tactic things about mental illness. I guess, yeah, if you have a schizophrenic twin brother, you shouldn't use it. Other than the occasional cookie dough binge, I really don't see what the big negative consequences would be. It's certainly safer than Oxycontin and the stronger opiates. Oddly enough, aspirin at higher doses is much harder on the liver than cannabis."

Sure. But what about getting baked -- and then trying to play sports?

"I just got a call from a skiing magazine," Earleywine says. "They asked, 'Is this going to make people dangerous on skis?' I don't think anybody means somebody should go take a giant bong hit and then go play football. We're talking about medical use. People don't understand that low doses don't change cognition much. You can get these anti-inflammatory effects with essentially no psychoactive effects."

A research review published in the International Journal of Drug Policy concluded that cannabis used in conjunction with opioids produces greater pain relief -- allowing patients to use lower opioid doses, a huge plus -- and also helps prevent withdrawal symptoms. By contrast, mix opioids and alcohol and you can end up dead. "Guys after games get pills," Jackson says. "They're in pain. Then they have a few days off. They drink. It's really dangerous to combine the two. But it's very common."

Speaking of alcohol: A few years ago, then-Cal football coach Jeff Tedford asked Reiman, who teaches a substance abuse treatment class, to speak to his players about alcohol and how it could negatively affect their on-field performance. Reiman discussed hangovers. Being sensitive to light and sound. Dehydration. She brought up behavior choices -- how alcohol leads to bad ones, like bar fights and driving while intoxicated, choices that could keep them off the field altogether. "At the time, I wasn't talking about it in the context of substituting marijuana," she says. "But when I started doing research, that idea started making more and more sense. I realized a lot of the reasons why individuals might choose marijuana instead of alcohol and prescription drugs. Athletes especially. It's a harm reduction choice."

Jackson concurs. Sports leagures are awash in beer, from stadium taps to corporate partnerships, television commercials to player nightlife. Marijuana is relegated to a don't ask, don'te tell closet. Should it be the other way around?

"If you're talking about booze, marijuana is by far the lesser of two evils," he says.

* * *

Impairs skills requiring eye-hand coordination and a fast reaction time. Reduces motor coordination, tracking ability and perceptual accuracy. Impairs concentration, and time appears to move more slowly. According to Dr. Gary Wadler, a New York University School of Medicine professor and lead author of the book "Drugs and the Athlete," these are just some of the potential effects of marijuana on athletic performance -- deleterious possibilities that make current sports prohibitions seem wise, even necessary.

That is, unless you consider actual athletic performance.

Michael Phelps is arguably the greatest swimmer in Olympic history. Tim Lincecum is a two-time Cy Young winner. Randy Moss is going to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. All three have been known to use cannabis. Lifting the sports world's pot ban does not mean athletes are going to start toking up during television timeouts; nor does it mean they'll suddenly become Cheech and Chong-esqure slackers and stumblebums. NFL wide receiver Santonio Holmes was named Super Bowl Most Valuable Player during the same season that he was charged with marijuana possession. Tony Villani, a trainer who has worked with 70-some NFL prospects over nearly a decade, told the Wall Street Journal that he has seen "no correlation" between players' marijuana use and on-field work habits.

In an ESPN the Magazine story published last year, 19 current or former members of the University of Oregon football program revealed widespread marijuana use by football players for at least the past 15 years, with estimated usage rates between 40 and 60 percent. "If you're not hurting the team, everyone's cool with it," a Ducks player told writer Sam Alipour. "Some of us smoke, and then we went out and won the Rose Bowl." And why not? The previously mentioned American Journal of Sports Medicine article noted that "athletes under the influence of cannabis indicate that their thoughts flow more easily and their decision making and creativity is enhanced. Health professionals have encountered athletes including gymnasts, divers, football players and basketball players who claim smoking cannabis before play helps them focus better." The authors also wrote that cannabis increases "risk taking, and this perhaps improves training and performance, yielding a competitive edge. Cannabis increases appetite, yielding increased caloric intake and body mass. Cannabis enhances sensory perception, decreases respiratory rate and increases heart rate; increased bronchodilation may improve oxygenation of the tissues. Finally, cannabis is an analgesic that could permit athletes to work through injuries and pain induced by training fatigue."

In other words: Marijuana may allow some athletes to work harder. Or smarter. Forget "Reefer Madness" and everything your junior high basketball coach ever said. The drug just might be a performance enhancer. On and off the field.

"You'd be surprised to know the athletes out there who are full-time, everyday stoners who are in great shape, never huff and puff on the field, and are actually good guys, productive citizens, stay out of trouble off the field," Jackson says. "I'm writing about that in my book. A joint might make you content to sit on the couch and think instead of going out, getting drunk, popping pills and needing action to pacify you."

According to California-based physician and medical marijuana expert David Bearman, cannabis has been used as a medicine for more than two millenia. It was listed in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia until 1942; an active ingredient in medications manufactured by companies such as Eli-Lilly; prescribed for ailmets ranging from migraines to menstrual cramps. When the drug was criminalized in 1943, lawmakers did so against the advice of the American Medial Association. "American physicians [gave] three million [marijuana] prescriptions per year in the 1920s," Bearman says. "[Professional] baseball seemed to get along okay."

If medical marijuana won't hurt athletes -- and arguably may help them -- then why can't the sports world just say yes? Blame the same laws. The federal government remains intransigent. Medical cannabis is still illegal in a majority of states. When Washington and Colorado legalized recreational marijuana use last Election Day, the NFL and NBA were quick to inform USA TODAY Sports that marijuana remained a banned substance under their collectively bargained anti-drug programs. Similarly, spokespeople for both leagues and MLB recently told ESPN.com's Shaun Assael that they had yet to receive a single therapeutic use exemption request for medical marijuana -- and would be highly unlikely to grant any.

"Right now, there is absolutely no way either the leagues or the players' unions are going to agree to do something that the federal government does not support," says Jordan Kobritz, a sports management professor at the State University of New York at Cortland. "They just rely on the government for so many things. Public funding of stadiums. Television blackout policy. Antitrust law and exemptions. They like to position themselves as private businesses, but they need government handouts. So as long as the federal position is entrenched, I don't think you'll see any changes."

Dana Larsen is more optimistic. A former editor of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of the Vancouver Medical Cannabis Dispensary, he once thought that he wouldn't see legalized marijuana in his lifetime. But the culture is moving. Attitudes are shifting. The public is increasingly open to medical marijuana use, and government is catching up. Only sports leagues, he says, are still behind the curve. And not because of health reasons. "Their rules are based on a perception that marijuana is immoral in some way, and that athletes should be role models and role models shouldn't use," Larsen says. "But I think that perception is not valid anymore. I think it's possible to use marijuana medically and be a good role model. There's not contradiction there. And I think most of the public now agrees."

Does the public agree? Do athletes? In the end, we're talking about their bodies. Their choices. In and around Berkeley, Reiman gives frequent lectures on drug policy and medical marijuana. Afterward, she says, she's often approached by college athletes. Some use. Others have teammates who use. All of them fear getting caught, but none of them worry about the drug itself.

From firsthand experience, they know better.

"Image is extremely important to sports organizations," Reiman says. "But that's no reason to reject athletes' desires to use something that is effective and safer than the alternatives. At the very least, it makes sense for the organizations to acknowledge this, to acknowledge that these individuals are making good choices and to support their ability to seek health care in whatever way they see fit, even though the substances are currently considered illegal in some places. Having an honest conversation is the way to go."

And how does that conversation start?

"If we could show that marijuana grows hair, helps you lose weight or helps you maintain an erection," Reiman says with a laugh, "it would be legal in 24 hours."

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

One Foot in Front of the Other

2013-04-16T10:45:00.001-04:00

On the Boston Marathon bombings, and sports fandom in the age of terror

Sports on Earth

One foot in front of the other. So it goes in running, and in life, and so it went at the Boston Marathon, before the horrible white smoke. One foot in front of the other. So it went for the first responders, the cops and the EMTs, running toward the blasts, not away, toward the wounded and the dead, past the barricades that were supposed to protect them.

One foot in front of the other. That’s how the rest of us get to the stadium, too, or the ballpark, or the street corner, all to watch the best of us put one foot in front of the other with skill and strength and something approaching grace. I saw the suffering on television. The fear and the panic. The terror. I was at home, perfectly safe. I felt a chill. I couldn’t believe it. Somebody mentioned secondary devices. Emergency amputations. A murdered child. Hours later, I still can’t believe it.

Part of me — the small, nervous part of me that appreciates every half-hearted at-arena security search of my computer bag, the part that worryingly scans the klieg lights above big games for sniper nests — can’t believe this doesn’t happen more often.

I covered the Athens Olympics. I saw Michael Phelps begin. I saw Marion Jones end. I saw barricades. I saw the Iraqi national soccer team. Everything was on lockdown. Day after day, I lived inside the ring, passing through metal detectors, putting my cell phone and sunglasses in plastic buckets, nodding at grim-faced security guards. Following the closing ceremonies, I trudged back to the main media building, expecting more of the same. Only things were different. Things were done. The guards were smiling, feet up; the metal detector was turned off. I still had my laptop in my bag. It could have been a pipe bomb. I was relieved, happy, and so were the security officers. They were drinking. I would soon join them. Everyone could breathe again. At least for one night.

It is impossible to remain perpetually vigilant. It is impossible to feel total escape. To attend a sporting event is to wish the world away, and also realize it could explode at any time. It has been this way since Munich. Atlanta, too. Definitely since 9/11. We are spectators in the age of terror. Perpetual witnesses. Perpetual potential victims. We stomp and cheer and carry on, roaring with lumps in our throats, knowing deep down that maybe, maybe, this time we won’t be so lucky. Someone will pull a gun. Or set off an IED. So it will go. The how will require painstaking, bloody forensics. The who will be pursued and punished. The why won’t matter. Does it ever? There will be a before, and an after, and the survivors — all of us — will be left to cope. To walk on. To run, even, with something approaching a kind of grace. One foot in front of the other.

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

The Boston Marathon Bombings: Sports as Terror Targets

2013-04-16T10:40:00.000-04:00

A Q and A with terrorism expert Bill Braniff

Sports on Earth

Following Monday’s bombing at the Boston Marathon, Sports on Earth spoke to Bill Braniff, the executive director of the Maryland-based National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism for insight into terror attacks on sports events.

What makes sports events attractive terror targets?

Braniff: Several things. Terrorism is propaganda via the media, and sporting events allow terrorists to leverage the presence of the media which is already on the scene. There’s already human interest in the event as well. If you want your greivences highlighted in the national media, there has to be a camera rolling – and [terrorists] know the cameras will be rolling if they can create the spectacle.

Sometimes the sporting events are symbolic of the grievance, at least to the perpetrators of the grievance. There have been about seven other incidents that we know of in which marathons have been attacked, from the 1970s going forward. A host of different reasons. In many cases the government officials [present] at the start of the race were the targets. Or [terrorists were] targeting a specific individual along the course of the race. In 2008 in Sri Lanka, a government diplomat was the target at the start of the race. Attempted assassination. In Lahore, Pakistan, there were individuals rioting about men and women running in the race together. More of a social, religious motivation. The race itself was the target.

Any other reasons particular to sports?

Braniff: There’s something communal about a sporting event. Something that you can see [in an attack] - the moment where the social fabric gets ripped apart. You have thousands of spectators cheering, people accomplishing something positive, an apple pie moment. There’s something comforting about our passion for sports. And marathons are very communal events. Really positive and pleasing. With an attack like this, they talk about the record scratching and the moment being torn. The attack stands in stark contrast to the moments leading up to it.

We’ve seen attacks on the daily commute. That is somehow less iconic [than a sports event] – although it is part of our day-to-day routine, which gives it its own psychology. Equally frightening, but in a different way.

And there is also the pragmatic part — at a marathon, you’re not [necessarily] passing through a security checkpoint. It’s a much softer target. And you don’t just have the cameras rolling, but also crowds of people. And crowds of first responders and security people. Symbols of the government. I was nervous for the fist responders [in Boston]. This is something that happens frequently abroad. You attack something like a wedding, and then when the cops and first responders come, you attack again.

Given all of that, why haven’t we seen more terror attacks on sports events? What makes them unattractive terror targets?

Braniff: There’s an assumption that terrorists are bloodthirsty, deranged individuals. But they tend to be discriminating in their targeting preferences, as distasteful as they may be. This is not a justification for terrorist behavior, but terrorism is often a rational behavior from someone who might have a starting set of assumptions that are abominable. They often aren’t interested in killing civilians that are unrelated to their grievance. We talk about soft targets like shopping malls, but the threshold to get someone to kill civilians indiscriminately is much higher than, say, explicitly targeting a government facility. Like a police station. Or maybe a business if you’re an animal rights or environmental group that has a beef with a certain business. Very few terrorist organizations in the scheme of things target completely indiscriminately, at least in the United States. But [Boston] seems pretty indiscriminate so far.

What is being done to secure sporting events, and how has that evolved over the last decade?

Braniff: A lot of work for high-profile sporting events gets done in the months leading up to these events. Not just the day of. Teams are put together from federal to local levels. Their mission is to secure, say, the Super Bowl. They work on it for a year.

[On site], there are small fixes and big fixes. Developing remote and standoff capabilities, technology to try to identify explosives from a distance, so you don’t have to search bags individually. That’s always being worked on. There also has been a behavior change, with law enforcement having more people walking around the parking lot, through the crowd. If they see something out of the ordinary, they chat people up, try to identify people acting uncomfortable and acting out of the norm, as opposed to relying on static checkpoints.

We all get frustrated by bag checks and [Transportation Safety Administration] checkpoints, but these things have a deterrent effect. There was a huge decrease in the number of air hijackings after the institution of metal detectors at airports.

They’re not perfect systems, but you can get to a more secure environment.

What are the limits that come with trying to secure sports events like the Boston Marathon, an NFL game, the Olympics?

Braniff: We live in a free and open society and we love that. In the United States, we love going to the ballgame. In the absence of perfect technology that allows people to be screened without invasive measures, there is a tradeoff. Usually the the tradeoff is between inconvenience and freedom of movement. What’s the right point in that tradeoff, where the level of inconvenience and invasiveness is too high for the threat that is warranted? There’s no right answer and no obvious sweet spot. You arrive at that as a society as you try to navigate difficult scenarios. Law enforcement feels that their mission is to keep [attacks] from taking place, but if you’re going to have a free and open society, you can’t have a risk-free environment. That’s why weak groups adopt terrorist tactics.

What can and should fans, spectators and participants do? What do should they be aware of?

The [Department of Homeland Security's] “see something, say something” campaign is straightforward and appropriate. There have been incidents where people have identified suspicious activity and acted on it. A Times Square street vendor notified the fire department and NYPD. They secured the location and addressed it. I think there is a role for anyone, just the same as if you see a crime taking place you would report it. Same as if saw someone looking through every car window in your neighborhood, looking to do a smash and grab.

At the same time, it’s important not to be preoccupied with these things. They are very infrequent as events. It’s important to put them in a broader context. I ran the Marine Corps marathon a few years ago. I remember thinking that there might be certain risks involved. [A terror attack] crossed my mind. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking, this is a symbolic target. Someone had recently fired some shots at the Marine Corps Museum. But I don’t look over my shoulder going about my daily business. I don’t think that’s the right response. I’m signed up for several races this summer.

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

Bob Stoops: Disingenuous, or Just Plain Dumb?

2013-04-11T19:25:00.003-04:00

An open challenge to the amateurism-defending Oklahoma football coach

Sports on Earth

As a persistent critic of college sports amateurism, I’m grateful for people like Oklahoma football coach Bob Stoops. Because they make my case for me, largely by offering unfathomably dunderheaded defenses of the status quo. (See also: Jay Paterno.)

In case you missed it, Sporting News published a story yesterday in which Stoops offered a prickly, paternalistic, self-satisfied endorsement of the current NCAA model. There’s a whole lot to take issue with, from Stoops’ assertion that college football players are “paid quite often, quite a bit and quite handsomely” — does Stoops realize that: a) getting paid a below-market rate due to collusive wage suppression is not exactly “handsome”; b) his admitting that scholarships do constitute a form of payment for work performed completely undercuts the bogus rationale for amateurism in the first place? – to his tough s— declaration that “I tell my guys all the time you’re not the first one to spend a hungry Sunday without any money.”

That said, the single dumbest remark in Stoops’ avalanche of idiocy deserves special comment. Here’s the $4 million-plus coach on why his on-field labor force doesn’t deserve a bigger cut of the athletic department revenues their brain damage-risking work directly generates:

When Sam Bradford was in the middle of his Heisman Trophy winning season in 2008, Stoops pulled his star quarterback aside one day after practice and decided to make a point.

“Sam Bradford was one of the most humble and grounded players I’ve ever been around; he got it,” Stoops said. “But I even told him, what makes you think those fans in the stands are wearing No. 14 for you? Who says it’s not an old Josh Heupel jersey? I tell our guys all the time. It could be you — or it could be anyone else.

“Those 70,000 fans in the stadium are cheering and buying tickets to see Oklahoma.”

Look, university branding and affiliation is a big part of why college sports have fan interest and generate financial value. School athletic departments certainly deserve a cut of the profits, and some say over how they are distributed. They do not, however, deserve to sit at the top of a neo-fedual economic arrangement because it could be you — or it could be anyone else.

This is disingenuous. Demonstrably false. Downright laughable, really. If Stoops was more full of it, he would qualify as a human sewage treatment plant. Sure, fans cheer and tune in and buy tickets to see Oklahoma — but they also do all of that to see Oklahoma win. And winning takes talent. Rare athletic talent. College football is not the same as working the drive-thru window. It is not an entry-level greeter job at Wal-Mart. It can’t be done by “anyone else.” If it could, Oklahoma and other schools wouldn’t spend a minute or a cent desperately wooing the biggest, fastest and most-skilled high school football players, and National Signing Day wouldn’t serve as Christmas II: Lid Boogaloo in some parts of the country.

As such, I’m issuing an open challenge to Stoops. A wager. If Stoops wins, I’ll apologize for likening his remarks and logic to the thoughtful musings of a half-eaten bowl of clam chowder; if I win, Stoops has to take and pass an Economics 101 course. Here are the terms: Replace all 85 of Oklahoma’s scholarship football players the roster of a NAIA school. Or just replace them with randomly selected Oklahoma students. Literally anyone else. After all, that’s how little economic value a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback like Sam Bradford has, right?

If Stoops’ team subsequently has a winning record next season — heck, if Stoops manages to keep his job for the entirety of next season — I lose. If not, I win. I like my odds. How about it, coach?

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

Unionize College Athletics

2013-04-08T19:18:00.000-04:00

Why college athletes need to fight for their own union

Sports on Earth

H Waldman won't confirm the rumor. On the other hand, he won't flat-out deny it, either. The story goes like this: Prior to the 1991 NCAA men's basketball championship game, members of the top-ranked and undefeated UNLV squad planned to stage a boycott -- either by delaying the game's start or refusing to play altogether -- in order to protest both the NCAA's longtime feud with their coach, Jerry Tarkanian, and the fundamental economic unfairness of college sports amateurism.

The move would have stunned viewers, piqued television executives and left school administrators in a state of flop-sweating panic. It would have sent shockwaves through college sports, redefining the neo-feudal relationship among athletes, schools and the NCAA. Alas, the game-changing protest that might have been never had a chance to take place: UNLV lost in the national semifinals to Duke, one of the biggest upsets in NCAA tournament history, and the title game went off without a hitch.

Recently, I asked Waldman, a backup guard on UNLV's 1991 team, if the boycott rumor was true.

"I don't think so," said Waldman, now the chief operating officer of a technology company. "I don't think we were going to be protesting anything like that."

Wait -- you don't think so? Are you sure?

"Well, we had some black uniforms made up for the championship game," he said. "Nobody had ever worn that. Now, I'm getting old, but I'm pretty sure [the uniforms] were going to be our protest."

The Runnin' Rebels, Waldman explained, had a siege mentality. The team and its fans against the world -- and, in particular, against the NCAA. Case in point? Guard Greg Anthony, who was financially supporting his cancer-stricken mother and hemophiliac sister, had founded a lucrative T-shirt printing company. The NCAA told Anthony he couldn't keep his basketball scholarship and operate his own business. Amateurism violation. Anthony, a summertime Congressional intern who was double-majoring in business and political science, gave up his scholarship, worth roughly $12,000. The NCAA subsequently ruled he still couldn't operate his own business, because -- in theory -- a booster could funnel money into enterprise, another amateurism no-no.

"We were always ready to protest something that year," Waldman said. "The uniforms were going to be something special. I didn't even know about them until after we had lost [to Duke]. The equipment manager at the time was like, 'Hey, we were having these made up.' They hadn't finished all of them. I got one of the ones that was made. I still have it somewhere. It would have made a statement."

Some two decades later, a statement is still in order. The college sports system remains rigged. Football and men's basketball players are the primary labor force of a multibillion-dollar industry. They invest their time and effort. They risk their physical and mental health. They serve as programming for television networks; walking billboards for sneaker companies; living, breathing marketing brochures for universities. In return, they receive below-market compensation set by a powerful cartel, are punished severely for the horrible crime of accepting money that people want to give them and watch an endless procession of do-as-we-say, not-as-we-do coaches, athletic directors and useless middlemen cash in. In amateurism's upside-down, "Catch-22"-shaming moral universe, the members of the Rutgers University basketball team are the ones taking bullet passes to the head while school-hired investigators fret not about abuse, but about potential hostile work environment lawsuits; meanwhile, fired coach-cum-rageoholic Mike Rice is the one pocketing a $100,000 bonus for the epic feat of finishing a season without getting fired. (In retrospect, that should have been a tell.) Worst of all, college athletes have absolutely no say in any of this. No rights. No bargaining power. They are atomized and ignored, treated like serfs, told to take it or leave it.

So, yeah: It's time for a statement. More than just a statement. Real, meaningful action bringing real, meaningful change. As was the case in 1991, Monday night's NCAA championship game is a historic opportunity. An opportunity to address -- and redress -- the imbalance of power that shapes and sustains the galling inequities of big-time college sports. Forget black uniforms. What players from Louisville and the Michigan need to do is walk onto the Georgia Dome floor for the opening tip, sit down at center court and refuse to play.

Oh, and also hold up union cards.

Winston Churchill once said that Americans always can be counted on to do the right thing -- that is, after they've tried everything else. The NCAA and its member institutions are the same way. Except for the doing the right thing part. The NCAA refuses to entertain -- let alone adopt -- commonsense measures that would reduce brain trauma risk in college football, because doing so could result in additional legal liability if injured players sue. Two years ago, I personally listened to NCAA president Mark Emmert propose giving college athletes an additional $2,000 cost-of-living stipend, the better to almost make up for an average $2,763 annual gap between a full athletic scholarship and the actual cost of attending college; two months later, 125 member schools asked for an override, suspending the proposal. (Amateurism rules do not prohibit needy athletes from receiving Pell Grants and food stamps, however, which means the NCAA is perfectly happy to have taxpayers pick up the same tab its wage-suppressing collusion creates. Only in America!) Last week, Adidas and Louisville briefly attempted to sell T-shirts referencing basketball player Kevin Ware's gruesome leg injury for $24.99 a pop; in February, the NCAA made sure Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel couldn't indirectly profit from sales of T-shirts featuring his nickname. Throughout March Madness, the NCAA has been running ~~Orwellian propaganda~~ commercials asking viewers to think of the organization as an earnest "spirit squad" that is "always there for student-athletes." The spots do not mention that the term student-athlete was cynically and intentionally crafted in the 1950s as a way to avoid paying athletes' medical bills and worker's compensation claims, and has served as a dual-purpose tax dodge and legal shield ever since.

Left to their own devices, the power brokers of college sports -- coaches, athletic directors, conference commissioners, university presidents and the armies of lawyers who support and assist them -- will never dismantle the current system. Never ever. They have no incentive. The status quo works for them. It should. They built it. They have most of the cash and all of the control. (A short list of individuals and institutions in recorded human history that have voluntarily relinquished money and power: a) None of the above; b) See A.) As such, change will only come though force. External pressure. And big-time college sports as we know them have a glaring pressure point: the aforementioned money. Television money. The entire enterprise depends on it, the way heroin junkies depend on smack and the American economy depends on oil. As I've written before, networks such as Fox, CBS and ESPN are the sugar daddies of college sports, the phone call that never can be ignored. Do television executives care about the dubious morality of amateurism? No chance. Do they care about compelling sports programming, the kind that attracts eyeballs, eyeballs they can sell to their sugar daddies, advertisers and cable providers? You bet.

Think back to this year's Super Bowl, the chaos and embarrassment created by an inadvertent power outage and subsequent 34-minute game delay. Now imagine Louisville and Michigan intentionally delaying the start of the title game by 54 minutes. Or college football players engaging in a rolling series of strikes, sudden and unpredictable, wreaking havoc with packed and preplanned Saturday broadcast schedules. Picture network executives taking panicked calls from advertisers and corporate accounting. Picture those same executives placing angry calls to university athletic directors and presidents. Fix this. We don't care how. Pay the players. Give them all the free tattoos they want. Just fix this. During the last NFL lockout, Fox Sports writer Lisa Horne spoke to sports business analyst Kristi Dosh about the economic damage a full-blown college football strike could create:

"The average number of people at college football games on any given Saturday is five million," Dosh said. That's a significant jump from the NFL's average stadium game-day attendance of 1.1 million.
"Aside from the money generated just on game days, there's advertising, television revenues and licensing. The number of towns and enterprises [a work stoppage] touches would have much more of a far-reaching impact [than an NFL lockout]."
Penn State University's surrounding area is an example of the adverse effect a work stoppage could have on a local economy. According to the 2010 census, there are 42,034 residents in State College, Pa., but the Nittany Lions' Beaver Stadium can swell to over 107,000 fans on game days.
Jose Felix, an employee at Marriott's Residence Inn State College, said half of the hotel's yearly profit comes from college football season, which is roughly six weekends a year.
Penn State football season is to them what December is to retailers. You can get a room right now for $169, but on game days, "It starts at $349 and for bigger games, $399 and up," Felix said. "You have to call at least a year in advance for reservations."

Horne called a potential college athlete strike "a fan's worst nightmare." I call it leverage. Because here's the thing: Strikes work. The threat of striking works. In 1927, Howard University canceled food, housing and tuition payments to the members of its football team; in response, the team refused to play until the food and housing payments were restored. They were. Thirteen years later, the Stanford football team demanded -- and received -- $50 per player to compete in the Rose Bowl. Former Syracuse football player Dave Meggyesy recalls that before the 1961 Liberty Bowl -- a made-for-television game played in frigid Philadelphia in mid-December -- he and his teammates told coach Ben Schwartzwalder that they wanted wristwatches, nice ones, like the ones players got at the Orange and Rose Bowls. Otherwise, the Orangemen wouldn't play in the game.

"Ben could see we were pissed off and serious," Meggyesy later told me in an interview. "He was looking at us like, 'Wait a minute, I'm not going to piss off my top players.' He came back a few days later and we got our watches.

"Athletes are in the same position today. Who's the one percent in NCAA sports? And who's the 99 percent? They don't realize the power they have. The players are not replaceable. That is what gives them power. Who else is going to play?"

Of course, strikes are generally most useful for winning short-term concessions, and on their own often produce … more strikes. To create lasting college sports change, revenue-producing athletes would have to take the next logical step and form a union, the better to both strike and collectively bargain under the protections of preexisting labor law. This matters. A lot. As Thomas Jefferson School of Law assistant dean Josh Winneker points out:

As a legally protected union … you can engage in a statutorily protected strike to try to get ownership or management to give in to some of your demands. If this occurs, the result will be memorialized in a "collective bargaining agreement," which is essentially a giant contract between the employer and employees that lays out the terms and conditions of employment. There, the end would justify the means.
However, for college players, without a union, nothing will be memorialized in a collective bargaining agreement. The players may be able to get the NCAA to concede on something small simply to get the games back up and running, but they will not be able to secure a contract between management and the employees that will dictate terms and conditions of employment going forward long-term. Between that and the fact that if the players "sat out" they would be unable to showcase their talents for professional scouts, college athletes stand to lose more from sitting out than they would have to gain.

Winneker also notes that because college athletes are not considered university employees under federal and state labor laws, they can't legally form a union. (Remember the term "student-athlete?" This is also why the spirit squad NCAA coined it.) No union means no statutory protection, which in turn means that if the Louisville basketball team went on strike, the school would be under no legal obligation to sit down and hammer out a good faith contract, nor breaking any laws if it retaliated by pulling scholarships and financial aid. Game over? Not quite. In a recent Buffalo Law Review article titled "A Union of Amateurs: A Legal Blueprint to Reshape Big-Time College Athletics," Nicholas Fram and Thomas Frampton make a compelling case that college athletes should be considered employees under the National Labor Relations Act, the federal law that governs labor relations at private universities. Athletes generate money for universities through labor that school officials directly control. Playing sports is not a prerequisite for -- and is arguably a hindrance to -- earning an academic degree. Both facts suggest that student-athletes are actually employees, and that play is really work.

"Not too long ago, universities made a very similar argument to [the one they make with college athletes] to deny other employees collective bargaining rights," Frampton says. "Clerical workers. Dining Hall workers. Maintenance staff. The idea was that special circumstances at the university made it somehow separate and distinct from the sphere where real business happens, that labor law is basically confined to factory workers at a Ford plant in 1937. That worked for a while, but as the economics of the modern American university made it clearer and clearer that real work was happening, the [National Labor Relations Board] rejected that. Now unions are very common at universities, and the universities have not crumpled."

As for public universities, home to the majority of big-time football and basketball teams? They are governed by state labor laws -- a more friendly set of rules -- and as Frampton and Fram demonstrate, student employees in at least a dozen states have the right to unionize. If an undergraduate student assigned to answer phones in the athletics department qualifies as a union-eligible employee, they ask, then why shouldn't a classmate whose scholarship requires him to compete weekly before 110,000 paying spectators? Fourteen states seem particularly promising, including Michigan, Florida and Nebraska. Or take California. Under state law, students who provide services for the universities they attend automatically qualify as "employees" when: a) "the services provided ... are [un]related to their educational objectives"; b) "the students' educational objectives take a back seat to their service obligations." Now consider football and men's basketball graduation rates. Consider the time away from class traveling for games and tournaments. Consider a survey that found the average men's Division I basketball player spends about 39 hours a week playing his sport -- almost double the maximum 20 hours a week college athletes are supposed on sports according to NCAA rules. Is there any way that college athletes at UCLA don't count as employees?

"Intellectually, it seems obvious to me and many people who have looked at the issue that someone can be both a student and a worker at the same time," Frampton says. "But the NCAA has done a remarkably effective job of promoting the idea of the 'student-athlete' -- not just in legal system, but in a broader cultural framework as well. It taps into all of these noble ideals when the NCAA speaks of amateurism as this virtue that it is protecting. That has persuaded lots of people and lots of judges. In one case we cite, you can see this palatable disgust of the judges: 'How dare you speak of these kids as workers? Is there noting pure left?' Judges, like anybody else, are susceptible to public relations campaigns."

Ultimately, the biggest obstacle to collective college athlete action likely isn't legal. It's psychological. In the 1980s, former Duke point guard Dick DeVenzio wrote a book, "Rip-Off U," that blasted NCAA amateurism. He started an athlete advocacy group out of his Charlotte, N.C., townhouse, mailing newsletters to 300 college athletes. In 1986, DeVenzio asked Duke basketball players to boycott the Final Four; a year later, he asked Oklahoma football stars Brian Bosworth and Spencer Tillman to delay the start of a game against Nebraska. The players considered the idea, but ultimately decided to kneel for pregame prayer intended to draw attention to athlete's rights. Similarly, former University of Massachusetts guard Rigo Nunez told HBO's "Real Sports" that prior to the opening games of 1995 NCAA men's basketball tournament, a large number of teams from across the country -- including UCLA and Wake Forest -- intended to walk to the middle of the court, sit down and let the ball bounce, a demonstration that would alter "the whole scope of amateur sports." Instead, the players got cold feet. The tournament is exciting. Players like competing. Moreover, they were afraid of getting blackballed by the NBA. Afraid of retaliation from their own schools. Some are still afraid. Frampton and Fram talked to Nunez for their law article. They reached out to a number of other former players.

"A few have alluded to having certain memories of that time period and the organizing that happened, but declined requests for interviews," Frampton says. "Or they weren't willing to go into any substantive detail. A lot of the figures who were on the teams that Nunez has talked about are now working as assistant coaches or in the athletic departments at various D-I programs. I can understand their wariness to go into detail about how they almost brought the entire house crashing down."

Striking and unionizing would take courage. Real sacrifice. Individual and collective. It would invite fan backlash and make enemies. It would trade potential opportunities within the current college sports system -- coaching, commentating, trading on campus community goodwill years after one's playing days -- for an unknown future. John Carlos and Tommie Smith paid a price for raising black power fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics. Curt Flood paid a price for knocking down the door of free agency in professional sports. Nothing important comes easily. Still, the alternative is worse. Untenable. Immoral. The alternative is the current system, and the true problem with college sports as we know them isn't that athletes are denied compensation -- it's that they are denied basic rights. They have no voice. Do they want Tuesday and Thursday night games? Do they want a football playoff? Do they want more stringent return-to-play concussion protocols? Do they want to make big money the way their coaches do, or to sign their own shoe endorsement deals? Do they just not want to get punished for accepting a free hotel room and a meal from an alum, like former Vanderbilt center Festus Ezeli?

Right now, no one knows. Because no one asks. Nor bothers to listen. Two years ago, more than 300 college athletes from schools like Kentucky, Arizona and Georgia Tech signed a petition asking the NCAA to set aside some of the $775 million it makes in annual television revenues for an "educational lockbox," which would cover athletes' educational costs if they exhaust their athletic eligibility before they graduate. The NCAA responded with a boilerplate written statement, claiming that it "redirects nearly all of its revenue to support student-athletes."

Nothing changed.

"I used to work as an organizer for a hotel worker's union," Frampton says. "The workers fought to win raises. Thirteen dollars an hour instead of eleven. But at the end of he day, it was about having a voice on your job. The people that actually made the hotel run had some amount of power, instead of all the decisions being 100 percent controlled by the bosses.

"For me, the interesting thing about this is that if we took amateurism really seriously, the notion that the athletes should have a bigger voice, that's not antithetical at all. In fact, it's the opposite. Amateur sports are supposed to benefit those who are playing. At least, that's what the NCAA would have us believe."

In 2001, then-Penn State graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary saw convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky standing behind a prepubescent boy in a campus shower. He heard a "skin-on-skin smacking sound." He was alarmed. In shock. He told his father, coach Joe Paterno and two university administrators about the incident. What if his time as a college athlete had taught him to speak out, to feel a sense of efficacy? What if he had just gone to the police himself? At Rutgers, members of the basketball team endured Rice's abuse and did … nothing. They relied on administrators to act in their best interest. On ESPN's edited tape of Rice's raging, you can see his players flinch. Look down. Act powerless. As if they didn't know any better. As if they didn't know they could tell him to stop -- or better yet, just walk off the court, as a group, leaving Rice all alone, a sad little man throwing basketballs in an empty gym. For college athletes, having a voice -- a big, booming collective voice -- isn't simply about economic justice. As Yahoo Sports writer Eric Adelson puts it: If practices are so intense that players are at risk of passing out or worse, how will we know? If players with dizziness or vomiting are told to suck it up and go back into the game, how will we know? If a university representative if doing something untoward or even illegal, how will we know?

A college sports strike might seem implausible. A college sports union might seem impossible. That doesn't make either any less essential.

Once upon a time, black uniforms were considered crazy.

"It happens less and less frequently, but there are people all over the country who put their jobs, families, immigration status at risk to make the chose to stand up and fight for a union at the workplace or to stand up and go on strike," Frampton says. "I don't know why it's so inconceivable that another group of workers might do the same."

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

The Rutgers Mess

2013-04-07T12:38:00.000-04:00

The Atlantic Sports Roundtable on Rutgers, Mike Rice and abusive coaches

The Atlantic online

In this week's Atlantic Sports Roundtable, we tackle Rutgers and Mike Rice. Just how angry do we need to get about a coach with anger issues?

Jake Simpson: ... This year's Final Four week has been marred by a coach with anger issues, a misguided (at best) athletic director, and a 30-minute video that actually becomes more disturbing with each viewing. Rutgers' men's basketball coach Mike Rice was fired Wednesday after a clip emerged of Rice verbally and physically abusing his players in practice. On Friday, Athletic Director Tim Pernetti—the man who watched the video in December and recommended to Rutgers' president Robert Barchi that Rice should just be suspended for three games—followed Rice out the door ...

... I agree with ESPN's Ian O'Connor, who on Wednesday called for Barchi and Pernetti to be canned as well. Pernetti's resignation is a good start, but Barchi must also be given the boot. Given that a previous Rutgers' men's hoops coach forced his players to run naked wind sprints if they missed free throws in practice, it's time for wholesale change at the New Jersey public university, which takes in a whole lot of taxpayer dollars ...

Hampton Stevens: ... the coach deserved to lose his job. He does not deserve to become a national object of scorn for the viral mob, a symbol for bully coaches everywhere, and fodder for debate about What it Means to be a Man. He deserves a chance to get help, and change his life like anyone else.

I can't defend Rice's actions as a coach, but still find it hard to stomach the national reflex for outrage, and demands that everyone fall on their sword, as Pernetti did today. What Rice did was bad. No doubt. But it wasn't off-the-charts, beyond-the-pale, rabid craziness. Right after CBS aired their segment on Rice, after all, they aired a commercial for Applebee's with Bobby Knight joking about throwing a chair. Where, one wonders, was the moral outrage when the network cashed that check?

Obviously coaches can't make players run wind-sprints naked. But coaches do have to be able to make players run normal wind-sprints, or make them do laps, or push-ups or something. Coaches must exert some form of discipline. The giant flap over Rice's case seems to have become a touchstone for our changing norms about what kind of discipline our society is going to find acceptable. That's a good conversation for us to have ...

Patrick Hruby: ... Imagine this: You're a college student, and during class with your English professor, he shoves you in the back, kicks you in the shin, throws a Thesaurus at your head and calls you a fucking faggot, loudly and repeatedly, because he's unhappy with the wording of the thesis statement in your midterm Shakespeare paper. Would you want that professor suspended for three classes, forced to pay a fine equivalent to half of his year-end bonus put into anger management counseling, because, hey, the angry professor just wants to win? Or would you want him gone?

How about if you were the head of the English department? Or if the student in question was your son or daughter?

Rice is lucky he's not in jail, and luckier still that his players aren't in jail for beating him half to death. Because if he acted the way he did in a bar, a classroom, or an office, there's a good chance one or both of those scenarios would have taken place. But that's the thing: Take Rice out of a practice gym, and it's highly unlikely he would have behaved so badly. He did what he did because he's a coach, and as a coach he had the power to do it. He knew his players wouldn't fight back ...

Read the full article at The Atlantic online

Code of Silence

2013-04-05T12:20:00.000-04:00

Rutgers, Mike Rice, Mark Emmert and college sports omertà

Sports on Earth

College sports have yet to ascend to a state of pure, hypocritically ironic -- or ironically hypocritical, take your pick -- energy. This is not for a lack of trying. Before a National Collegiate Athletic Association men's basketball tournament game last week in the nation's capital, association president Mark Emmert appeared on the Verizon Center Jumbotron. He was sitting next to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. He was booed. Loudly and enthusiastically. So loudly, in fact, that the gist of his videotaped message, a public service announcement, went mostly unheard.

If you see something, say something.

The members of the Rutgers University men's basketball team saw something: former coach Mike Rice throwing basketballs at their heads; shoving, kicking and grabbing them; screaming obscenities and homophobic slurs; and generally acting less like a public educator than a man auditioning for a starring role in a reality TV show centered around incorrigible toddlers. The players said nothing. Rice's assistant coaches -- another fine group of public educators -- said nothing, too. Rutgers athletic director Tim Pernetti saw video of Rice's conduct and said as little as possible. University president Robert Barchi reportedly knew the video existed but never asked to see it, the better to say, well, nothing. Former Rutgers director of player development Eric Murdock said something, giving the video to ESPN, but only after he was let go by the school -- a move, his lawyer alleges, that happened because Murdock said something about Rice's conduct to his superiors. As of Wednesday, according to a report on the Daily Beast, Rutgers athletes in other sports were specifically being instructed to say nothing, even though the video already had been made public and resulted in Rice's termination.

None of this should be surprising.

If you see something, say nothing. Keep your head down. Don't derail the gravy train. Protect the status quo. Above all, defer to power and cover your a--. These are the real, rubber-meets-the-road values of our college sports system, the same values shared by corrupt, exploitative and entrenched regimes everywhere, the values never mentioned in frothy NCAA mission statements and coach-penned, pablum-packed Win At The Games Of Business And Life self-help success manuals. A code of silence. A code of silence forever left unwritten and unspoken, because really, if you have to spell it out, you've already messed up. Omertà doesn't work like the Bill of Rights, big bright rules on a big piece of paper. It works silently, in the shadows, through fear and intimidation, bullying and retribution, threats implied and examples made. Why did Rice's players and assistant coaches keep their mouths shut? Why did Pernetti say so little? Why did Murdock wait so long to come forward?

Because college sports whistleblowers get blown up. Snitches get stitches.

Once upon a time, a college basketball coach did a very bad thing. His name was Dave Bliss. He worked at Baylor. One of his players, Patrick Dennehy, had been murdered in the summer of 2003; one of his other players, Carlton Dotson, was charged with the crime. Bliss had personally been making Dennehy's tuition payments, a violation of NCAA rules. He panicked. He told his assistant coaches and players to tell investigators and the press that Dennehy had been dealing drugs.

Abar Rouse was one of those assistants, just 27 years old, on the job for only a few months. He didn't want to lie. He thought Bliss was crazy, that he would come to his senses. He told Bliss as much; according to Rouse, Bliss responded by asking him if he wanted to be fired. Rouse surreptitiously audiotaped his subsequent meetings with Bliss, in part to protect himself, in part because he felt a duty to the truth and to the slain Dennehy's memory. When the tapes were made public, scandal engulfed the school. Bliss already had resigned. A Baylor graduate, Rouse thought he was doing the right thing by his alma mater. He was let go, asked to drop off his basketball office keys. On an ESPN broadcast, he was condemned by Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, then-Oklahoma coach Kelvin Sampson -- Kelvin Sampson! -- and Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.

"If one of my assistants would tape every one of my conversations with me not knowing it," Krzyzewski reportedly said, "there's no way he would be on my staff."

Over the next decade, Rouse worked the night shift at an airplane parts factory. He worked at a women's prison. He worked exactly one basketball job, an $8,000-a-year graduate assistant gig at Division II Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls. He reportedly had been blackballed. Meanwhile, Krzysewski co-authored a book called "Beyond Basketball: Coach K's Keywords for Success." He put his name on a Duke University Business School center for -- ahem -- leadership and ethics. He taped an American Express commercial in which he called himself "a leader who happens to coach basketball" and proclaimed that his players leave Duke armed not just with dribbles and jump shots, but also "armed for life."

Question is, what kind of life -- and what kind of arming -- are we talking about?

Too often, this is the pattern in college sports: speak uncomfortable truth to power and end up disappeared; stay quiet and be richly rewarded. In 2001, then-Penn State graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary saw convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky standing behind a prepubescent boy in a campus shower and heard "skin-on-skin smacking sound." He told his father, coach Joe Paterno and university administrators Tim Curley and Gary Schultz about the incident. He did not tell police. He spent the next 10 years getting promoted. In 2003, by contrast, ESPN.com's Tom Farrey profiled a group of college sports whistleblowers. Jan Kemp, who exposed academic fraud within the University of Georgia football program, was demoted and dismissed before ultimately being reinstated after winning a lawsuit against the school. Linda Bensel-Meyers, who did the same at the University of Tennessee, was stripped of her administrative duties and relocated to a basement office. At the University of Minnesota, tutor and athletic department secretary Jan Gangelhoff confessed that she was writing papers for men's basketball players; she lost friends, jobs and 68 pounds over a two-year span.

According to former University of Massachusetts guard Rigo Nunez, college basketball players from a number of schools planned to stage a sit-down during the opening round of the 1995 NCAA tournament, the better to protest what they felt was an economically exploitative amateur system. The demonstration never happened. The players got cold feet. They were afraid of being blackballed. I've reached out to a number of the players likely involved. Even now, none want to talk. It's hard to blame them. Most are still involved with high school and college basketball. They're still afraid of being blackballed. The college sports code of silence is powerful. It can arm you for life. When then-CNN/Sports Illustrated producer Robert Abbott reached out to former Indiana University guard Neil Reed to confirm eyewitness accounts that he had been choked during practice by then-coach Bob Knight, it took a year of late-night phone calls to convince Reed to go public with his story -- and Reed had left Indiana and was living in Australia at the time.

(Recall, too, that Indiana mostly dismissed CNNSI's original report, and only fired Knight after: a) the network aired a tape of the incident; b) Knight grabbed an antagonistic student on campus. Sound familiar?)

According to ESPN.com's Don Van Natta, Murdock is preparing for a life without basketball; friends have told him he will never coach again. Is that the sort of lesson we want college sports to teach? Former Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis had a famous saying: Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Therapists have a saying, too: You're only as sick as your secrets. The irony of college sports' self-protective speak-no-evil culture is that it ultimately protects nothing. The truth has a way of getting out, particularly in the digital age, and in hiding and dissembling and covering things up, troubled individuals and institutions are only setting themselves up for harder falls. Penn State went down. Knight went down. Georgia, Tennessee and Minnesota went down. Rice went down, and both his athletic director and school president may be next. Somebody always sees something; sooner or later, somebody says something, too. Maybe men-molding campus coaches and their bureaucratic superiors ought to teach that from the start, as opposed to slavish, get-along-to-go-along deference; perhaps they could even set an example that might doesn't make right and that some things are more important than tribal loyalty and hierarchical self-preservation.

Call me crazy, but I've always felt that college is supposed to be a place where students learn to question authority and think for themselves.

Then again, what do I know? I'm not a college sports administrator, and certainly not one who makes $1.6 million a year. Not like an administrator who once was the chancellor at the University of Connecticut, where he supervised a massive construction project that later devolved into scandal and more than $100 million in losses. An administrator who according to a subsequent investigation knew about the problems with the project, but failed to disclose them to the school's board of trustees or the state legislature.

The administrator in question? Mark Emmert. He saw something. He said nothing. He fits right in.

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

The Mark Emmert-to-English Translator

2013-04-04T11:49:00.000-04:00

Making sense of the NCAA president's contentious press conference

Sports on Earth

National Collegiate Athletic Association president Mark Emmert held a pre-Final Four press conference Thursday that was described as “testy,” “defiant,” a “filibuster” and “one long, sonorous fart noise.” Criticism aside, what did the most popular man in college sports actually have to say?

Herein, Sports on Earth presents an Emmert-to-English translation:

Emmert: First of all, I wanted to talk about the changes that have been going on and we’ve been engaged in in the NCAA. I guess anyone would describe this as a challenging, dynamic, occasionally difficult time in intercollegiate athletics, but at the same time it’s one of dynamic change, one where we’ve got people all across the association being involved in driving some significant changes … while there’s always people that don’t like change when it occurs, the fact of the matter is that change is what we’re about in the NCAA right now and we’re trying to work our way through some very, very difficult changes to make the whole notion of intercollegiate athletics strong and viable going into the second century of the NCAA and of college sport.

English: “The part where the athletes do the work and we keep the money? That’s not changing.”

Emmert: This is the so‑called miscellaneous expense allowance, the proposal to allow schools to, at their option, increase the value of scholarships an additional $2,000 to cover what’s referred to in higher education jargon as a ‘miscellaneous expense,’ sometimes confused with ‘pay for play,’ which is absolutely wrong. It is to cover the real cost of attendance and only the real cost of attendance for a student‑athlete.

English: “These are not the taxable revenues you’re looking for.” [Waves hand in direction of IRS officers.]

Emmert: There’s been a piece in the past day or two talking about my experiences, my past stops. You need to know this, and I don’t expect to spend any time on this today, but the fact of the matter is that everywhere I’ve been, I’ve been asked by boards or other bosses to help drive change. I’m very proud of the changes that have been made at every place I’ve ever been along the way.

English: “Of course, nobody at the University of Connecticut asked me to change a massive construction project that later produced scandal and $100 million-plus cost overruns. Probably because I knew about the problems but didn’t tell anyone. Did I mention the word ‘change?’”

Emmert: If you’re not getting sued today, you’re not doing anything. I don’t know anybody that doesn’t have litigation pending.

English: “All of my friends, family members and acquaintances also work for monopsonic cartels.”

Emmert: We’re an athletic association. We don’t accredit academic institutions. We don’t go into the classroom and say, ‘we don’t like the quality of this degree.’ That’s not the job of an athletic association.

English: “We’re an athletic association. We don’t make and enforce eligibility rules related to academic performance any more than we allow a consortium of chemistry professors to determine the length of the shot clock. We don’t go into high school classrooms and say, ‘we don’t like the quality of this degree.’ We didn’t coin the term ‘student-athlete’ to dodge paying workers’ compensation claims, and we haven’t run a decades-long propaganda campaign to make it seem like our primary purpose is to enhance academics. Oh, wait — we totally do all of that. But that’s not the job of an athletic association.”

Emmert: Yeah, the Rutgers case in particular is such a new case, I haven’t spent any time looking at it. I saw the video, like most everybody did. I find that video pretty appalling, to say the least. At the least, I think it requires us to have a conversation.

English: “By conversation, I mean a new special working group attached to the auxiliary board of a special subcommittee.”

Emmert: The Miami case is obviously a significant blow to the confidence people have in enforcement, and we’ve worked very, very hard to be as open and frank about that case. We’ve dealt with it directly. If we have to change, continue to change, the culture of enforcement, that’s certainly on me and something I’m working hard on.

English: “The buck stops with the people I fired.”

Emmert: I don’t think the Ohio State infractions case caused a loss of confidence in the enforcement process.

English: “People say O.J. did it, but can we really be sure?”

Emmert: First of all, I think it’s very important to recognize in that case at Auburn, what there is is a newspaper story. That’s it. We haven’t done anything with that case because we don’t know anything about it. What we know is what we read in the newspaper.

English: “I read the entire newspaper story, and there wasn’t a single allegation from a convicted Ponzi schemer. So I’m not sure why we would do anything.”

Emmert: We’re not a state actor, don’t want to be a state actor. There will always be limitations to what can and can’t be done.

English: “We really, really don’t want to be a state actor, because if we were, we would have to worry about things like due process.”

Emmert [to CBS Sports writer Dennis Dodd, who has called for Emmert's resignation]: Thanks for the job advice. Kept my job anyway.

English: “Whooo! S–k it, haters!

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

Change We Should Believe In

2013-04-03T11:56:00.000-04:00

More on college sports gold-plating and the problems with amateurism

Sports on Earth

When I recently wrote about the Gold-Plating of College Sports -- and how amateurism makes things like $1 million athletic director salaries possible -- I expected feedback.

Boy, did I get it.

Tweets. Comments. Emails. Some of you had questions; others had bones to pick. Either way, your responses called for a follow-up. So here goes:

If college athletics is such a bad racket for SAs (student-athletes), why are there so many willing to participate?

- The Winthrop University compliance office

If Foxconn's Chinese electronics factories and the Cambodian sweatshops that allegedly made Dallas Cowboys gear are such a bad racket for their workers, then why are so many willing to participate?

Let's remember that no student-athlete is forced to play in college. Can seek "market value" elsewhere #NBADL

- Ryan Squire, associate athletic director for compliance at the University of Illinois

I guess I missed where anyone was being kidnapped, thrown into the back of a van, and forced to participate in any activities against his own free will.

- Phil Poirier

Sigh. In repeatedly arguing against college sports amateurism, I've never asserted that young athletes are forced to participate in a rigged, unfair system. There are no roadside abductions, and stupid recruiting letters are not a gun to the head.

To the contrary, I'm simply arguing that from an economic perspective, the collegiate system is rigged and unfair. Rigged and unfair because while athletes get something in exchange for their labor -- an athletic scholarship -- they are prevented from getting both actual money and a free-market level of said money because a cartel has agreed a) not to compete for their services with offers of money; b) not to allow them to accept any money that anyone might want to provide them.

Whether the current college sports system is a bad or good racket isn't the point. The point is that it's a racket. A racket based on collusion among schools and price-fixing for talent. The fact that athletes choose to participate -- or choose not to participate in the NBDL -- doesn't make it any less of one. Arguing otherwise is a red herring.

Let's go back to my sweatshop analogy. Am I saying that playing basketball for Winthrop University is exactly as awful and inhumane as working in an overseas sweatshop? No. That's why it's an analogy, and not an equivalence. Here's how the two things are alike: People work in sweatshops for the same reason revenue sport athletes accept the college sports system -- because it's the best deal they individually can get within a system that is set up to ensure they have no power or ability to negotiate a better deal. They are presented with a Hobson's Choice, which is no choice at all.

Faced with that reality, college athletes are acting rationally. Participation beats non-participation. If you were living in Soviet Russia, joining the Communist Party made a lot more sense than not, because the former was a good way to get rewards, and the latter was a good way to get thrown in a Siberian prison. Does that mean communism was a just and fair way to order the political and economic system of an entire country?

Let's stay on topic.

The Division-I athlete gets taken care of. Should be no complaints. More selfishness if they want to get paid. Do we forget that they get school, housing, athletic clothing and top-notch training facilities for free as [a student-athlete]?

- Adam Ledyard, East Texas Baptist University sports information director

Jay Paterno wrote a piece a while back that touched on this a little: Jay Paterno: Pay Student-Athletes? They're Already Getting a Great Deal

- Kristi Dosh, BusinessofCollegeSports.com

I'll admit it: For me, an article written by Jay Paterno and republished on the NCAA's official website is about as credible as Colin Powell warning the United Nations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But those are my personal biases. In the interest of fairness, here's what Paterno wrote:

Let me start the argument by making a proposal to parents and students alike. I am going to ask you to work no more than 20 hours a week for 21 weeks -- with at least one mandatory day off every week. For another 23 weeks you'll work no more than eight hours a week. You'll get eight weeks off. (These are all NCAA-mandated time limits).

You will receive fall, spring and both summer sessions of education, plus room, board and all fees paid. For the 604 hours you put in, you'll get an education valued at $33,976 in state and $50,286 out of state (using last year's numbers from Penn State, the latest available). Keep in mind that number does not include several hundred dollars per semester for books and supplies, which are covered under the NCAA scholarship.

At those rates, the student-athlete on full scholarship to Penn State will earn $56.25 per hour if he is an in-state student and $83.25 per hour if he is an out-of-state student.

As a bonus, this full scholarship allows you access to tutors and computer labs and player lounges -- all free to you, the student-athlete. Any medical costs incurred beyond your insurance are covered. You can be flown home at the school's expense for funerals or family emergencies. There can be bowl gifts of several hundred dollars as well.

If you and your family have financial difficulties, this scholarship also allows you to receive any Pell Grant money you are qualified for up to the federal maximum of $5,550 per year. There's also a needy student fund allowing for several hundred dollars a year to buy clothes.

When it comes right down to it, this pay package looks pretty good to most of America. An opportunity to attend some of the top universities in the country and graduate with no student loans to pay off looks good when you consider the average college student in this country starts off with $24,000 in debt the day they graduate.

Paterno is right: This would look pretty good to most of America. Thing is, most of America can't play linebacker for Penn State. Definitely not the way LaVar Arrington did. In discussing the essential unfairness of the college sports system, I'm not talking about the average kid who is average at sports, whom no one outside his or her parents wants to watch. I'm talking about the exceptional kid with elite sports talent, living in a country with a voracious appetite for elite sports entertainment and a willingness to pay lots and lots of money in order to feast.

Again: Getting a scholarship and some perks (like bowl gifts of SEVERAL HUNDRED DOLLARS!) is not the same as being allowed to realize your value in a competitive marketplace for your talent. The college sports system is unfair because some athletes could be getting a much better deal than the one Paterno outlines, and the only reason they aren't is because they are constrained by a bogus philosophy and arbitrary set of economic rules that we don't allow in any other walk of American life.

In my original article on the gold-plating of college sports, I noted that University of Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds was paid roughly $1.1 million last year, making him one of nine athletic directors making $1 million or more. According to USA TODAY Sports, athletic directors at FBS schools are paid an average of $515,000 annually, an increase of more than 14 percent over the last two years. How did Texas A&M President R. Bowen Loftin explain the large -- and rising -- salaries? By telling USA TODAY Sports that "it's a marketplace out there."

Right. A market. Now imagine if it wasn't:

FADE IN:

OFFICE OF UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESIDENT BILL POWERS - MORNING

DELOSS DODDS enters and sits across from BILL POWERS' desk.

DODDS: I'm here to interview for the athletic director job.

POWERS: I think you mean student-athletic director.

DODDS: Oh.

POWERS: And hold on a second. Did you say "job?"

DODDS: I did. I'll be working, right?

POWERS: No.

DODDS: Well, being an athletic director requires overseeing a large budget and dozens of teams, making coach hiring and firing decisions, negotiating rights and sponsorship deals, glad-handing with alumni and boosters, complying with NCAA rules and lots of other tasks both at and away from my desk. Vanderbilt's David Williams says that to be an athletic director, you should "go spend a year in law school, a year in business school and a year over in the college of education, and then take some communications stuff. And then get yourself a big old box of aspirin." That sure sounds like work to me.

POWERS: Nope. Working is for professional athletic directors. As a student-athletic director, you're an amateur.

DODDS: What's an amateur?

POWERS: An amateur is someone who is not an employee, and therefore not entitled to things like workers' compensation.

DODDS: I guess I could use my salary to pay my medical bills if I ever get hurt on the job.

POWERS: Don't worry about that. [Laughs]. There's no job for you to get hurt on!

DODDS: But there's a salary, right?

POWERS: Of course not! Salaries are for employees. [More laughter]. Dodds, let me ask you something: Do you know how much this athletic department made last year?

DODDS: I do. About $163 million. Very impressive. One of the main reasons I wanted to work -- excuse me -- be a student-athlete director here.

POWERS: And do you know where that money goes? To people who work for it. Like our starting quarterback. Look out the window. See him? He's practicing right now. Working. If we make the Cotton Bowl this season, he gets a $60,000 bonus. Worth every penny, too. Kid is damn good at throwing the football. Heisman candidate. On TV almost every day. Alums love him. Boosters love him. I can't tell you exactly how much money he's made for us, but the marketing folks tell me it's a whole lot. Millions. And get this: We landed him for a $150,000 signing bonus. LSU offered only $75,000 and a new car. They must be kicking themselves.

DODDS: Speaking of signing bonuses, I'd like to talk about one.

POWERS: [Laughs.] You are a persistent son of a gun. I'll give you that. I already told you that there's no salary. No signing bonus, either. That would be against NCAA rules. Are you sure you have previous sports administration experience?

DODDS: So what do I receive if I sign on here?

POWERS: You get a hell of a deal, is what you get! Ask Jay Paterno. Room and board, all paid for. A free year of tuition for every year you serve. The opportunity to train to become a more valuable professional job candidate someday. Access to administrative assistants, university computers and faculty lounges -- all free to you, the student-athletic director. Any medical costs incurred beyond your personal insurance are covered. If you have a death or emergency in the family, we may fly you home. And back, even. You're also free to receive federal grants up to $5,550 a year -- I didn't ask, do you have kids? -- and are allowed to tap into our needy student-athletic director fund for several hundred dollars a year to buy suits. Plus, football box seats, 50-yard line, gratis. And all the locker room access you want. You know, the opportunity to have a roof over your head, eat prepared meals, work out at our swanky new gym and watch one of the most popular college football teams in the country for free looks pretty good when you consider the average American has to work all day just to pay for all of those things, doesn't it?

DODDS: I'd still like a salary. I think I'll go apply at Texas A&M.

POWERS: OK, but they offer the same deal.

DODDS: Texas Tech?

POWERS: Ditto.

DODDS: Baylor? Rice? SMU? Houston?

POWERS: Yep. Every college in the country offers the same deal. We've agreed on that. Room, board, perks. No salary.

DODDS: Is that legal?

POWERS: It is for amateurs.

DODDS: Can't you make an exception for me?

POWERS: We could, but then all of the other schools would boycott us.

DODDS: [Low whistle.] That's a hell of a catch.

POWERS: The best there is. Look, if you want more than what I'm offering, I suggest you apply for a team president job with the NFL or the NBA.

DODDS: But … there are only about 32 jobs in each of those leagues, and 347 Division-I athletic director jobs. I'm pretty good at what I do, but not good enough for the NFL and NBA.

POWERS: In that case, you should go to Europe. Or Mexico. Japan? Perhaps there's a youth sports academy job for you there. Anyway, nobody is holding a gun to your head and saying you need to be an athletic director. You're free to go sell life insurance. Or work at Arby's. We have one on campus. I hear they're hiring.

DODDS: That seems unfair.

POWERS: Unfair? Trust me, you can live on a food and housing allowance -- if you do the math, it's better than what we pay the people who wash dishes at the Faculty Club, and you don't hear them complaining.

DODDS furrows his brow. POWERS places a national letter of intent and a flat-brimmed Texas hat on his desk.

POWERS: So, are you in?

DODDS: I need a day to think about it.

POWERS: Great! Before you make up your mind, you should check out our weight room. It's not as nice as Alabama's, but it's pretty darn impressive.

Is a million dollars an outrageous salary for someone who runs an extremely visible $100 million-a-year business? Personally, I would suggest that it isn't, and that [athletic director] salaries are more or less in line with what similar top executives make at similarly-sized businesses in the sports and media industries, which is really the business these guys are in.

I don't agree that a sharp reduction in AD pay would make a meaningful difference in a school's ability to compensate athletes. Your own chart demonstrates that even if Dodds were to work for nothing, the money saved would not provide fair market value to even two [Texas] football players.

- Mikey

Good points. Let's address them one at a time:

1. College athletic departments are considered non-profit educational enterprises, much like the schools they are attached to. If that's the case, a $1 million executive salary seems a bit high -- as I pointed out in my previous piece, American Red Cross president and CEO Gail McGovern earns a base salary of $500,000.

However, if college athletic departments are actually businesses -- and specifically in the sports and media business -- then sure, $1 million for the head of a $100 million company isn't particularly noteworthy.

(Note: I'd actually argue that college athletic departments amount to giant marketing departments for universities, in that they exist to attract students, encourage alumni giving and increase school name recognition and brand awareness. But that's a column for another time.)

1a. The notion that college athletic departments are not businesses is traditionally what has allowed them to get away with instituting and enforcing across-the-board amateurism, which in turn caps athlete compensation in football and men's basketball -- and probably particular athletes in other sports as well -- at below-market rates. If you think that's not the case, try a quick thought experiment: Without amateurism, how much cash would Duke have to offer Jabari Parker to beat out Kentucky for his services?

1b. Thanks to the above compensation cap, athletic departments have more money to spend on other things. And since they have no profit motive, they do so. Hence gold-plating, which I believe extends to athletic director salaries. Lower on-field labor costs means higher executive compensation.

Now, I could be wrong. Perhaps athletic directors have an undistorted market value of $500,000-plus annually. Perhaps schools paying competitive prices for players would continue to compete just as hard -- and lucratively -- for administrators. Maybe those schools would simply cut corners in other areas of their athletic budgets, or find ways to make even more money. Hello, corporate sponsor patches on college jerseys!

Of course, the only way to find out for sure is to dump amateurism. The fact that athletic directors are in no hurry to do so ought to tell you something.

2. I think you have things backwards. I never asserted that reducing athletic director pay would make a meaningful difference in a school's ability to compensate athletes; as explained above, I simply argued that compensating athletes would result in a meaningful reduction of athletic director pay. In fact, compensating athletes would result in less money for athletic departments in general -- which might not be as apocalyptic as people like Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany predict.

Again, consider this chart from antitrust economists Dan Rascher and Andy Schwarz, which shows average spending difference Division I schools with major football teams (like Alabama) and those without (like Georgetown) various non-revenue college sports in 2009-10 and 2010-11.

Given that many FCS schools manage to field competitive Division I non-revenue teams -- such as Brown's 2011 championship rowing team or Georgetown's NCAA runner-up men's soccer squad -- for less money, is the extra FBS spending really necessary?

Your screed [on] Sports on Earth neglected to mention the thorny issue that no one who advocates paying college athletes is willing to address. How do you decide who gets paid what?

Your article quotes one study that each Texas football player is worth more than $500K. That's not true. That would suggest that the starting quarterback is worth the same as the guy standing on the bench waving a towel. They don't have the same value!

How do you value a recruit? What do you do when an underpaid player outperforms his salary? What happens when an overpaid player underperforms?

- Brian Simon

Great questions. The temptation here is to come up with some sort of one-size-fits-most plan that covers the majority of athletes and schools. Joe Nocera of The New York Times has a thoughtful proposal that combines free-market recruiting and a per-team salary cap for football and men's basketball. Sports Illustrated presented a detailed scheme that would pay all campus athletes a stipend. As a thought exercise, "Wages of Wins" author Dave Berri calculated how basketball players could be paid according to their Wins Produced statistics. (Berri estimates that Indiana star Victor Oladipo would have made $737,129 this season, while teammate Taylor Wayer would have pocketed $2,138.) The plaintiffs in the ongoing, potentially landmark Ed O'Bannon antitrust case -- if you're unfamiliar, Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples has a great summary here -- have a plan to split television revenues between schools and athletes, similar to the way professional football splits TV money between owners and players.

Personally, I prefer a hands-off approach. No plan. No universal solution. Let the market figure itself out, the same way it does in other lines of work. On Schwarz's blog, he puts it like this:

There is no need for a central committee to make this decision. Since 1776, with the publication of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations," we've understood that markets generally find their way to efficient outcomes without the need for a committee, NCAA or otherwise, acting as a wage politburo. No centralized commission or study group is needed to decide what we should pay the athletes. Let schools make offers, and let incoming high school athletes and their parents decide which to accept. Competition is a wonderful thing, on the playing field and in the marketplace. This is how salaries are set across the world. This is probably how your pay was set.

At first it might be a little messy, just as when a firm prices its stock in an IPO. The initial price may end up higher or lower than the right value, but the company picks a price, sells its stock, and then the market adjusts. For example, Linked In went public on May 19, 2011 and closed up 107% from its initial offering after two days of trading. The following month, Pandora went public but closed down 20% two days after its launch. Opening up the market for student-athletes would not be much different. At first, many schools might continue to offer the Grant in Aid ("GIA") package without additional cash. A few programs might want to set the gold standard and offer $10,000 stipends. A few up-and-comers might make a play for some talent and offer $25,000 to see if they could jump-start their programs at a higher level. The following year, maybe a few more schools would up the ante, and maybe some of the Old Guard might start matching offers to avoid losing talent. Just as water finds its own level, so too do prices in a liquid market. A decade in, everyone would have a great sense of what a blue chipper is worth to a program and what it takes to land him. Problem solved.

One more thing to consider: collective bargaining. It's quite likely some form of it would take place between teams and athletic departments, or between the NCAA and a national college player's union. As much as I rail against the sheer moral odiousness of amateurism, the fact remains: Schools generate a good chunk of the value in college sports. Put Louisville and Duke's basketball squads in street clothes in a high school gym, and they won't command nearly as much television revenue as they do in the NCAA tournament. Both sides of the college sports labor-management equation deserve a piece of the pie; one side should not be allowed to dictate slice sizes via fiat.

One more thought that is often ignored. I have a degree from the University of Texas. It does NOT have the same value as if I had played football at the University of Texas (even if I failed to get a degree). Aside from the opportunities to pursue professional sports, a former player [has] a cachet that has significant value in the business world. My friend once took an appointment on a cold call because the salesman was the punter on the Texas national championship team. Playing college football has value beyond the traditional play-for-your-tuition model suggests.

- Brian Simon

Sure. Lots of things have intangible value. A degree from Harvard probably has more cachet than a degree from Florida Gulf Coast. Does that mean a talented collegiate actor shouldn't be allowed to make money while participating in Harvard's student theater program?

Rich keep getting richer. Mid-majors cannot keep up with the Big Boys. Being paid by boosters can be dangerous [and] bigger schools have more to offer than mid-majors #dangerousroad

- Adam Ledyard

Amateurism caps salaries. It does not ensure equal talent distribution. Because rich schools can't hand out cash to attract talent, they do things like build $9 million, 37,000-square foot athlete weight rooms and $7 million basketball dormitories featuring private chefs. These are secondary recruiting inducements, and while they might be economically inefficient, they are still effective.

To wit: Rascher and Schwarz examined where the top 100 high school basketball prospect over a 10-year-period went to school. Take a look.

More than 99 percent chose the Big Boys. The #dangerousroad already exists, and it is a freshly paved superhighway. If anything, amateurism hurts competitive balance. The hardest, most expensive way to attract top high school athletes is to hire high-priced coaches, build tricked-out facilities and spend countless man-hours on recruiting. By contrast, the cheapest, most efficient way to land talent -- not coincidentally, the method employed in the actual job market -- is to offer a better salary. As an economist explained to me last year: "The sixth man on Kentucky's basketball team might not be worth as much to them as they would be to, say, Ball State. But right now, price-fixing keeps Ball State from competing. If you let schools use cash, they would at least have a chance."

The hurdles with Title IX and nonprofit laws and [regulations] make it much harder to contemplate pay-for-play than most realize. You make it sound like it's simple to decide to pay [student-athletes]. Maybe morally, but not in reality.

- Kristi Dosh

Ah. Title IX and nonprofit laws. The great bogeymen of college sports economic overhaul. Both are reasons to maintain the status quo. Are they compelling reasons?

I think not.

Consider a college sports Olympic model, in which athletes would be allowed to sign individual endorsement deals and receive booster money handshakes without sanction. Said transactions would be matters for the IRS; Title IX and nonprofit laws wouldn't apply. As for direct pay-for-play? Dosh has a point. Title IX could make it more difficult for schools to pay football and men's basketball players. On the other hand, it might not. The same goes for nonprofit laws and their application to campus athletic departments.

Also remember: We're talking about laws. Human laws. Not the laws of thermodynamics. Laws that we collectively agree to as a society; laws that are subject to interpretation and re-interpretation; laws that can be changed. All change takes is political will. If Congress wants to pass a law taxing revenue-producing college sports but not taxing universities otherwise, it can do that; if Congress wants to amend or reword Title IX so that athletes in revenue-producing sports can be paid without having to pay non-revenue athletes, it can do that, too. Trust me. I live in Washington, D.C. I know all about federal loopholes.

Look, change is never easy. It always brings complications. But since when is comfort a good reason to perpetuate injustice? Amateurism isn't a condition. It's a choice. A system we can choose to dismantle.

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

The Myth of Safe Football

2013-04-01T11:09:00.002-04:00

Why NFL rules changes and the "Heads Up" tackling program are dangerous propaganda

Sports on Earth

When was the last time you planned out a car crash? Or practiced the safest way to run full speed into a brick wall? Never? Pity. You're not much of a problem solver. Definitely not proactive. Not like the National Football League. Facing a brain trauma crisis that threatens both football's medium-term profitability (via a series of lawsuits) and long-term viability (via a critical mass of Americans deciding not to watch nor participate in cognitive Russian Roulette), the sport's powers-that-be have settled on a two-step self-preservation strategy that basically works as follows:

1. Eliminate hitting and tackling that results in blows to the head;

2. Continue hitting and tackling otherwise, because, hey, this is football.

Last week, the NFL passed a rule prohibiting runners and defenders from lowering their heads and striking a forcible blow with the crown of their helmets when they are outside the tackle box, a football move seldom seen outside of vintage Earl Campbell YouTube clips, primarily because deliberately deploying one's head in the manner of an enraged Bighorn ram against another large human attempting to knock you flat is an excellent way to break one's neck. But never mind that. As league commissioner Roger Goodell put it, "We've demonstrated the game is safer and the game is better." The demonstrating doesn't stop there. Since last fall, the NFL has partnered with the Indianapolis-based national youth organization USA Football to expand and promote "Heads Up Football," a program purporting to teach new techniques that "literally take the whole head" out of actual tackling, thereby: (a) theoretically reducing the risk of brain trauma; (b) helping concerned parents feel less anxious about allowing their sons to be part of ~~the pro game's fan and participant feeder system~~ an estimated three million youth football players nationwide.

Both efforts are undoubtedly well intentioned. So are others like them, including steeper fines for intentional helmet-to-helmet hits, altering kickoffs and the re-imagining of head-banging, sub-concussive line play as Jujitsu-based slap-fighting. Taken together, they reflect an optimistic, can-do mindset, and a core belief that the problem with football isn't football itself, but rather reckless, ignorant or untrained individual players who are essentially doing it wrong. University of North Carolina researcher Kevin Guskiewicz was awarded a 2011 MacArthur genius grant for his work on football head trauma. He is a member of the NFL's Head, Neck and Spine Committee. He lets his young sons play the sport. He's a public proponent of "behavior modification" -- that is, teaching players to tackle while protecting their heads. Goodell blows the same trumpet in a Heads Up video, endorsing "the proper way to play the game." USA Football executive director Scott Hallenbeck takes the comforting, confident talk one step further, asserting that "there is no question that the game can be played safely and is safe, as long as it is taught properly and the players execute it properly."

In other words: There is no existential crisis. This can be fixed. A game that revolves around hitting other people as hard as you can is as safe as driving to work in the morning, provided you obey traffic signals, speed limits and stop signs. All of which sounds pretty great, as reassuring and nifty as safe cigarettes, except for one thing.

Like safe cigarettes, safe football is a myth.

* * *

Full disclosure: I'm a football skeptic. A naysayer, even. So don't take my word on this. Ask an expert. Someone like NFL linebacker Scott Fujita, an uncommonly thoughtful man who makes his living, well, tackling. Go ahead, he says. Change the rules. Teach different techniques. Concussive helmet-to-helmet hits are still going to happen. So are concussive knee-to-helmet hits. And concussive helmet-to-face mask hits. And countless other subconcussive blows to the head, which research suggests are also dangerous. "There's increased emphasis on trying to clean up the game, you know, coaching guys up in 'proper technique' and all these catch phrases, and paying lip-service to everything," Fujita told author Matt Chaney. "It's just a brutal game, and I don't think you can technique -- using 'technique' as a verb here -- you can't technique the game into becoming safer. You can't even fine [players in] the game into becoming safer. And that's just the reality."

The head is connected to the shoulders. The shoulders are connected to the arms. The latter two are essential for hitting and tackling; the former cannot be unscrewed like a bottlecap and left on the sidelines. That's just the reality, no matter what Goodell claims the NFL is demonstrating.

Consider the league's new head-lowering penalty. Hall of Fame running back Emmitt Smith thinks it's ridiculous. So does Chicago Bears runner Matt Forte. Hall of Fame runner Marshall Faulk called the rule "stupid," and did so on NFL Network. Now, football players can be macho. They're paid to take and give physical punishment, not to worry about their long-term health and well-being. Over at Deadspin, Isaac Rauch argues that objections to the head-lowering penalty are a sign the NFL must be doing something right. Seeking answers, I called former Denver Broncos tight end Nate Jackson.

Griping aside, I asked, does this rule make football safer?

Jackson sighed.

"Dude," he said, "it's all [public relations]."

But shouldn't players be discouraged from leading with their heads?

"You can't control these movements," he said. "These guys are going too fast. They're reacting instinctively. Carrying the ball is very instinctive, the one thing you can't coach or legislate. The most effective way to continue to go forward when someone is trying to stop you is to lower your helmet and keep going. And when you lower your head, you're reacting to leverage, to what defenders are doing, to how they are going to tackle you."

Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio notes that instead of being a game changer, the new rule is actually quite limited. Players are still allowed to use their facemasks and the hairlines of their helmets -- that is, the fronts of their heads -- to initiate contact. They are still allowed to drop their pads and dip their helmets for protection and leverage. Blows delivered with the crown of the helmet can only be penalized if they are judged to be "forcible," a fuzzy term that describes … just about every type of contact that occurs on a football field.

According to the NFL, 11 hits during a 32-game span of the 2012 season would have drawn flags. But former Baltimore Ravens safety Bernard Pollard's frightening helmet-to-helmet collision with New England running back Stevan Ridley in the AFC title game would not have resulted in a penalty -- because while both players were dropping their heads, neither made contact with the top of his helmet.

"Even when a receiver in space gets the ball, we have to lower our head sometimes," Jackson says. "[Defensive backs] tackle extremely low. Go for your knees and ankles. When they do that, you either have to jump over them -- which is frowned upon -- or you meet them low. It's a natural reaction. So this rule is really silly."

Stevan Ridley's frightening collision with Bernard Pollard would have been legal even under the NFL's new rules. (Getty Images)
* * *

Sillier still is the Heads Up program, which promises "better, safer" tackles. According to a USA TODAY Sports report, tackling maxims like "biting the ball" (ramming your face into the ball when hitting a runner) and "ear-holing" (smacking your helmet into an opponent's earhole) are out; keeping your head to the side while launching up and into ballcarriers with a chest-first, double-uppercut motion is in. The goal? Making contact with your shoulder pads, not your helmet.

The hang-ups? Physics and biology.

During his rookie season with the Kansas City Chiefs, Hall of Fame linebacker Willie Lanier dove to make a tackle and was kneed in the head. He suffered a concussion and was later diagnosed with a brain bleed. He says that from that point on, he never dropped his head in order to tackle; now a member of the NFL's Player Safety Advisory Committee, he also says that today's players can and should follow suit, and that doing so is simply a matter of changing "long-held habits." As Chaney points out, however, a quick YouTube search reveals that Lanier did plenty of helmet-ramming during his career. (The current safety advocate also favored clothesline tackling, a dangerous, bannable behavior that has, in fact, been banned.) According to Jackson, it's impossible not to hit with your helmet in football, in part because the head is connected to the shoulders, in part because the whole point of the game -- knocking another guy on his ass before he has a chance to return the favor -- requires players to create as much force and leverage as possible.

And how do you do that?

"The lowest man wins," Jackson says. "They always tell you that. How do you get low? You f-ing drop your head. I played free safety in high school, and I wasn't very good because I wasn't good at getting low and delivering a blow to somebody."

That changed when Jackson, a Division III All-American wide receiver, signed with the Broncos. The club moved him to tight end. He found himself having to block opponents who outweighed him by 50 pounds or more. Opponents who were fighting for their professional lives, just like him. So Jackson got low. Led with his head. Did what he had to do. "When you are trying to knock a big man down, you have to turn yourself into a missile," he says. "And that means hitting them with your face."

In USA Football's tutorial videos, players practice their safer, better tackles against empty air, foam pads and stationary opponents who seem to be imitating scarecrows. The double-uppercut movement is broken down into five distinct stages. There's plenty of time and space to take the right angle, launch into a tackle, maintain perfect form, keep one's head from getting bashed by tucking it under an opponent's armpit. Football becomes an exercise in aggressive, studied chest-bumping. The actual sport is completely different: players running at full speed, knees pumping, arms swinging, tripping and shoving and hitting and falling; players of varying sizes and strength, pin-balling around at ever-changing heights and angles; players not passively waiting to receive blows, but actively seeking to deliver them. Chaos. A football tackle is not like a tennis serve or a basketball free throw, static and repeatable. It's a violent, desperate physical snowflake, shaped by its equally violent, desperate environment.

When a USA Football regional manager tweeted out a photo of two coaches practicing Heads Up tackling, longtime Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist and former All-Big Ten defensive back Rick Telander assumed it was a joke. Imagine Adrian Peterson seeing that. Or any decent high school running back. Like Fujita, Telander isn't a spigot of reckless machismo. He can be critical of football, and has written extensively about the sport's costs. Still, he once had to bring opponents to the ground. He played the game to win. As such, he has one question about the safer, better way to tackle:

Does the ball carrier cooperate with you?

"You watch those videos and teaching sessions, and it's an obsessively controlled environment," Jackson says. "But maybe once a game would you find yourself in a situation like that. Nobody presents themselves like a perfect tackling form dummy. At all levels, tackling is really just by any means necessary. You don't get to stop and think about how you are going to do this thing you are about to do. You have to just do it. The ones who are good move up the ladder and make it to the NFL. It's not like you need amazing technique. Sometimes you just do this thing and it defies technique."

* * *

Six years ago, a team of researchers outfitted an Illinois high school football team with special helmets that measured the location and magnitude of head impacts sustained during practices and games. They found that the prep players sustained greater head accelerations after impact during play than their college counterparts and wrote that their results highlighted "the need for coaching proper tackling techniques, such that the athlete keeps his head up and avoids contact with the top of the helmet." University of Michigan professor Steven Broglio was one of the study's co-authors. He still studies football brain trauma. Like North Carolina's Guskiewicz, he's a proponent of behavior modification. "We have data showing the impacts at the top of the head are the most significant impacts," Broglio says. "So we need to teach kids to hit and keep their heads up -- and now we're moving toward getting your head out of the tackling process altogether, which should reduce the risk of injury."

Telander has seen this before. During the 1970 season, Northwestern middle linebacker John Voorhees wore what his teammates dubbed "the electric hat," a helmet outfitted with electrodes and a bulky transmitter than sent g-force readings to the press box. The helmet was the brainchild of Dr. Stephen E. Reid Sr., a former Wildcats football player who was conducting a study of football head trauma; a first-of-its-kind device, it was built with the help of NASA engineers.

"One time we were playing UCLA out at the Coliseum in [Los Angeles]," Telander says. "We were leading at halftime. They stopped the game and wouldn't start the second half until the referees made John take that helmet off and wear another one. They thought he was receiving signals from the press box.

"The players all thought [the helmet] was nonsensical. Technology was not something we believed much in. It was still grunt and hit 'em as hard as you can football. [Reid] was so far ahead of his time it was beyond belief."

Even then, Telander recalls, tacklers were taught to keep their heads up. To "see what you hit." The reason? In 1966, head and neck injuries resulted in nearly two dozen deaths in high school and college football, leading an alarmed American Medical Association to call for an end to "spearing," the use of the helmet as a battering ram. Football authorities responded the same way they always do: by calling on coaches to teach "correct, head-up blocking and tackling," and demanding that officials strictly enforce rules prohibiting helmet contact. By 1976, "butt-blocking" (blows delivered with the face mask or front and top of the helmet to an opponent in close line play) and "face tackling" (driving the face mask or front and top of the helmet into a runner) were banned. The game itself was not the problem. The game itself is never the problem. Notre Dame coach Ara Parseghian spoke for the football establishment: "I can't begin to tell of the number of clinics where I have lectured on the (spearing) problem. We don't teach this at Notre Dame; and over the years, I have done everything within my power to influence others to coach against it."

Parseghian said this in 1967.

Last season, more than 160 NFL players reportedly suffered concussions. No one even bothers to tally the number of subconcussive impacts that occur each week, possibly because calculating Pi would be less tedious. Enhanced tackling techniques are not enough. Rules tweaks are insufficient. By design, football is a collision sport; the only way to eliminate hits to the head is to eliminate hitting outright. Otherwise, safe football is as real as the Loch Ness Monster.

Sal Marinello has coached youth football for 15 years. He recently coached his son's junior high squad. He played the sport. He loves the sport. But he harbors no illusions. Football, he says, is not for everyone. Or even most people. It's inherently, irreducibly dangerous. "One of my buddies I coach with is also a police officer," says Marinello, a New York City-based athletic trainer and Manhattan College strength coach. "He always used to use the analogy that there's no nice way to put handcuffs on someone. Well, there's no nice way to tackle someone, either."

Why does Goodell pretend otherwise? Why is Hallenbeck pushing a revolutionary new tackling philosophy that's at least 45 years old? Perhaps because the NFL is being sued by more than 4,000 former players who allege the league lied about and covered up evidence that football can cause long-term cognitive damage. Perhaps because the number of children ages 6 to 12 playing the sport dropped 35 percent from 2007 to 2011. Perhaps because current and former players ranging from Peterson to Terry Bradshaw have said they will never let their sons participate. Perhaps because concussion expert Robert Cantu has written an entire book arguing that children under the age of 14 shouldn't play tackle football, and because Hall of Famer Ron Mix thinks the same prohibition should extend to age 15. In one of the Heads Up promotional videos, a USA Football coach is shown teaching safe -- ahem -- tackling technique to a group of football mothers. This is not a coincidence. In an article about the new helmet crown rule, ESPN.com's Kevin Seifert peeked behind the game's Oz-like curtain. Player safety rule changes, he wrote, are as important to the outside perception of the league as they are to actually increasing player safety.

Speaking of perception, remember this: When Goodell and others frame football safety as a matter of proper individual technique -- like slowing down for yield signs -- they also are suggesting whom to blame when something goes horribly wrong.

"To me, this is them admitting that this game is really, really bad for you and it's going to cause awful concussions and shorten your life and cause brain issues," Jackson says. "It's them admitting it and then absolving themselves of the guilt. Like, 'Hey, we tried to protect you. We changed the rule. We penalized and fined you. If you hit with your head and get a concussion, it's your f-ing fault.'

"But that's not true. How do you think that running full speed at someone and throwing your body at someone can be made safe? It can't and it's not. It's like driving a car. There's going to be car accidents no matter what."

During a 1970 game between Northwestern and Indiana at Memorial Stadium in Bloomington, Ind., Telander recalls, Voorhees spun away from two blockers to meet an opposing running back. Head up. A textbook tackle. The same safe way he had been taught. Nevertheless, the runner's left knee smashed into the side of Voorhees' helmet; in the press box, a sensor measured the force of the blow at 188 times the force of gravity. One of the biggest hits Dr. Reid ever measured. "I saw John go down," Telander says. "He actually was never out cold. But he couldn't get up for a while. He was looking for his mouth guard, and he wasn't even wearing one that game. That's how we knew he was messed up."

Jackson is only half-right. Football isn't like driving a car. It's like driving a car in a demolition derby. The collisions aren't accidents.

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

The National Free Riding League

2013-03-25T08:08:00.002-04:00

Pro football's latest - and shameless - taxpayer ripoff

So you have this friend. Fun guy, life of the party, knows a ton about fantasy football. Rich, too. Trust fund or something. He doesn’t like to talk about it.

Anyway, there’s a problem. Your friend never pays his share. For anything. Buy a round and he doesn’t return the favor. Order pizza and he’s totally out of cash. Go out for a group dinner? He habitually orders the best wine and the biggest steak — and habitually disappears before the check comes.

Your rich friend is the National Football League.

The NFL is a confederacy of wealthy moochers. Welfare Kings, really, a gang of grifters perpetually crying poor while suckling from the public teat. Build us a stadium or we’ll move to Los Angeles! Like Wall Street, the league is dedicated to a two-step business model that’s both foolproof and infuriating:

1. Socialize risk.

2. Privatize profit.

Of course, I’ve already discussed this, and at great length. Still, the point bears repeating. It bears repeating because the Miami Herald reported last week that among the standard demands from the league for communities hosting a Super Bowl is that the league employees be exempt from all local taxes.

Taxes, of course, are the price we collectively agree to pay for having a society with nice things — like roads and schools and police — as opposed to a society that looks like something out of “Doomsday Preppers.” Only don’t tell that to the NFL. Thanks an IRS loophole, sports team owners already are allowed to deduct player salaries two different ways, effectively creating a tax shelter. Stadium construction bonds are exempt from federal income tax, costing our cash-strapped government billions. The league that paid commissioner Roger Goodell a $29.5 million salary in 2011 qualifies as a tax-exempt non-profit, just like the United Way.

Now this. According to the Herald, the NFL’s Super Bowl bid package contains specific language specifying a broad range of taxes the league does not want its employees to have to pay: “income, gross receipt, franchise, payroll, sales, use, admission, or occupancy taxes as a result of holding the Game at the site.” Other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how was your 1040? The NFL also wants rebates on any taxes passed through to the league from local vendors, and for all of the requested exemptions to cover site visits for up to a year before the game.

Oh, and the NFL doesn’t want to pay parking costs for Super Bowl events, either. Talk about life imitating art.

Still, that’s not the most Scrooge McDuck-ian aspect of the NFL’s demands. No, the truly evil genius part is as follows: the taxes the league wants special legislative dispensation to evade reportedly would include a one percent hotel tax hike that the Miami Dolphins are asking Miami-Dade County to enact in order to pay for renovations to Sun Life Stadium — a new $3 million public subsidy for facility upgrades the team argues are necessary for the city to host the Super Bowl in 2016.

Pay us now, the NFL is effectively saying to South Florida, and then maybe we’ll let you pay us later. If you’re nice.

Look, I understand that professional football is a business, always and forever obsessed with the bottom line, driven to reduce costs and maximize revenue. That’s capitalism! Greed is good! The profit motive makes the market go ’round! I also understand that tax dodging is a proud, time-honored American tradition, from the Boston Tea Party to our most recent presidential election.

That said, there’s a line between acting out of enlightened self-interest and seeming, well, borderline sociopathic. Or just acting like the cheapskate guy who never, ever pays. An aluminum company moving to Fort Wayne, Indiana asks for a tax break on its new building; the NFL asks for tax breaks and for the public to construct its buildings. Most nonprofits exist to promote a social good; the NFL exists to promote a brain-mushing, body-destroying activity that increases our collective health care costs. If the league was in the business of farming corn, it would probably ask Congress for: a) increased ethanol subsidies; b) a federal law specifically exempting its employees from paying sales tax on Fritos purchases.

To be fair, the Herald states that “exempting league employees from Miami-Dade’s hotel tax would amount to a tiny amount of money the county collects from hotels during Super Bowl.” Then again, that’s pretty much the point. If it’s not a massive amount of money, why can’t the NFL just quietly pay its fair share? Why can’t the league — an organization that swaddles itself in the American flag, benefits from taxpayer-funded military flyovers and once all but made morning eggs for the Declaration of Independence before the Super Bowl — do the right thing, the communal thing, and chip in to the same public kitty they so often loot? Why can’t the guy who never pays his share of the restaurant bill at least cover the tip?

Oh, and speaking of said Declaration: the Founding Fathers were against taxation without representation. Not against paying taxes, period. They were patriots. Not moochers.

The good news? According to the Herald, an NFL spokesman said that Miami-Dade rejected the league’s request for extra tax breaks when the Super Bowl was played at Sun Life Stadium in 2012. The bad news? The Herald also reports that Miami’s rival for the 2016 Super Bowl, Santa Clara, recently announced it would waive hotel taxes for NFL executives — which in turn “raises the stakes as the Dolphins lobbying team races to obtain state and county approval of the tax-funded renovation” of Sun Life Stadium by late May, when the league will “pick a winner.”

A winner. That’s rich. Er, richer. Assuming you’re the NFL.

Read the original article at Sports on Earth

What College Basketball Needs is More Zubaz

2013-03-22T13:49:00.000-04:00

A completely sincere open letter

Dear college basketball teams wearing Zubaz-inspired uniforms,

With the NCAA tournament getting underway, I just want to say: love the new look. Love it. Dare I say it’s hot? Or even cool? How about fresh? Tight? The bomb-diggity?

Anyway, the point is that I’m down. On the down low. The low down. Down with the cause. Whatever you kids are saying these days. Do you even talk to each other anymore? Do you just text? Are you Instagramming? Is rap battling still a thing? I can’t keep up. Can’t keep up because I’m old. Like, old enough to be your non-cool uncle. I’m 36. I have a wife, a dog and a mortgage. Just the idea of “Spring Breakers” makes me feel creepy. On Friday nights, I like to get to bed early so I can clean my condo in the morning. And then maybe enjoy a cup of tea while I watch golf. I mean, if there’s time.

Just kidding. I actually hate golf. But I adore your new uniforms. Especially the long sleeves!

Speaking of your unis: I hear that not everyone is a fan. Over at The Big Lead, Ty Duffy called them horrifiying. Outlandish. Part of Adidas’ “not-so-subtle campaign to ruin college athletics.” Deadspin’s Emma Carmichael expressed the same sentiment. USA TODAY Sports’ Chris Chase mocked the sleeves as baby doll T-shirt-esque, and the shorts for bringing to mind the ”‘Life of Pi’ tiger going swimming in an ocean full of Kool-Aid.” CBSSports.com’s entire Inside College Basketball crew got in on the act, which means you were being dissed by Alaa Abdelnaby. Do you even know who that is?

Here’s a hint: he’s older than I am. And he played at Duke. Classy, by-the-book, armed-for-life, do-it-the-right-way Duke.

Your dad’s other favorite team, probably.

So, the uniforms. They’re great. The neon socks and shoes, too. The whole ensemble. Makes all of you look like fine, upstanding young men. Heck, if I had a daughter, it’s what I’d want you to wear to come pick her up. For a nice date. Maybe you could see The Notebook. And get coffee afterwards. But back on topic. Don’t listen to the naysayers. Keep on keepin’ on. You have my approval. You’re making me proud. You look just the way a college basketball player should.

Come to think of it, I can remember the exact moment I realized that your new uniforms were safe, inoffensive and un-rebellious. That there wasn’t a single edgy thing about them. I was watching “Pardon the Interruption.” Mike Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser were grumbling about the look. Boy, did they sound out of touch. So crotchety. Like Stadler and Waldorf. Like a pair of grumpy grandpas, shooing someone off their lawn. Like a mom telling her daughter there’s no way she’s leaving the house in that outfit. Truth be told, they sounded like the establishment, like the voice of adult authority, and I thought to myself: wow, if I was a teenage boy and heard this, the first thing I would do is buy a pair of Zubaz basketball shorts with a baby doll-sleeved jersey. If these geezers don’t like it, it must be alright.

And then I started thinking about reverse psychology.

Look, I’ve probably said enough. I don’t want to bore you. I’m sure you have Tumblr-ing to do. Rock on with your bad selves. Zubaz 4 lyfe, yo! Heck, I’m thinking about getting a pair of those shorts myself. For working out. Three days a week, 20 minutes on the elliptical machine, just like my proctologist recommended. I don’t play ball much anymore. My knees hurt too much. But I love the doctor’s office. Great magazines. And the local real estate guide! Really makes time fly.

Oh, and I guess I could wear my new shorts to the mall. Hey, maybe I’ll see you there. We could share a fist pound. It’ll be dope!

Cheers,

Patrick Hruby

Read the original article at Sports on Earth