Category Archives: Sports

Sports talk as a space for bad amateur sociology

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Sports talk is a popular genre yet it often involves broad statements about society grounded in very little evidence. Here, Colin Cowherd is singled out for his particular brand of amateur sociology:

It is Cowherd’s job, his peculiar burden and gift, to generate outrage, using only recycled news items and his own slapdash sociology, every weekday morning. But the myopia of his July 29 diatribe, in particular, was monumental. Without meaning to, it crystallized the cognitive dissonance that haunts America’s vast Football Industrial Complex (FIC) at this historic moment.

Which is to say: Those who pose as the industry’s critics have to pretend awfully hard that they hate violence and misogyny and greed and homophobia while at the same time promoting a game that is, objectively speaking, violent, misogynistic, mercenary, and homophobic.

The top-tier talkers manage to sound utterly convincing, even as they craft arguments of dazzling fraudulence and obdurate illogic. It appears never to have occurred to Cowherd that football might be a culprit in America’s cult of violence. No, that crisis can be pinned on brutes from the lower castes hopped up on sadistic fictions. It is the feral inclinations of such men — and not, say, the fact that football is vicious enough to cause brain damage among its players — that keeps Cowherd from taking his son to a game. The poor lad might be subjected to a brawl in the stands.

What marks Cowherd as a true pro is his ability to tap into the meta-narrative of grievance that undergirds all punditry. It turns out the Rice case really isn’t about football at all — it’s about governmental negligence and corporate greed! Fortunately, there are intrepid voices inside the FIC willing to speak truth to power.

Cowherd may have his own style but this sort of explanation could apply to lots of sports talk hosts (as well as many other talk radio hosts). The genre works because people like arguments and opinions as well as the ability to be a part of the endless conversation about sports. Yet, the arguments tend to involve little evidence and a lot of opinion and anecdotes. Some of this can be quite engaging but it often requires making broad statements about individuals, teams, fans, cities, and society that are not always thought through. Granted, erudite conversations about sports don’t exactly fit this genre yet it is too much to ask that sports talk hosts think a little bit more about the big picture in addition to their personal opinions?

Taxpayers pay 70% of NFL stadium costs, owners pocket 95% of the revenue

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Gregg Easterbrook summarizes the research on who pays for and benefits from the construction of new NFL stadiums:

Judith Grant Long, an urban planning professor at Harvard, has shown that about 70 percent of the cost of building and operating NFL stadia has been paid by taxpayers — many not even sports fans. About 95 percent of the revenue the stadia generate is kept by team owners. It’s a deeply disturbing arrangement. Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College, has shown that NFL investments never generate the promised job totals or local economic activity. If there’s public money to spend in Buffalo, investments in infrastructure — schools, transportation, a replacement for the dilapidated Peace Bridge, improving Delaware Park — would have more of an economic multiplier effect than an NFL field.

This said, if there is one city where public investment in an NFL stadium might be justified, it’s Buffalo. Should Atlanta or Miami lose its NFL team, that would be a shame, but these cities would still have strong economies. Should Buffalo lose the Bills, this could be perceived as the “last one turns out the lights” moment, reducing the odds of a Buffalo urban recovery.

Public investment in an NFL stadium might be justified only if the facility is located downtown. The Buffalo News reports that 15 sites are under consideration for a new stadium. Two are in Toronto. Several are suburban, including an abandoned shopping mall property an hour’s drive from the city. One is near Niagara Falls, where the tourist activity is on the Canadian side, not the American side. One is on the Buffalo Outer Harbor, which is cut off from downtown by a freeway and doesn’t contribute to the pulse of urban life. Only downtown locations should be considered if public funds are spent.

Nobody would have believed 20 years ago that Pittsburgh and Cleveland could bounce back and have trendy downtowns. And nobody believes that about Buffalo now. But already underway on the north side of the city is a complex of a teaching hospital and medical research center that will be among the world’s largest and best equipped. Thousands of professionals will move to the city to staff the center. Add the NFL to downtown, and Buffalo might acquire the cachet it needs to rebound.

In other words, the research from recent years is consistent: building a publicly-funded stadium is not really a good deal for taxpayers. Major league teams will appreciate it and the owners certainly benefit but the money does not flow back to taxpayers. Yet, since the political calculus is such that no major leader wants to be the one that let the favorite team get away plus there are still sites that existing teams can threaten to move to (in the NFL, Los Angeles is perhaps more important as a potential city rather than an actual home for a team), taxpayers are likely to continue to help foot the bills for new stadiums.

John Starks’ 1993 dunk and New York exceptionalism

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John Starks had a memorable dunk against the Chicago Bulls in the 1993 NBA Playoffs and one writer argues this illustrates the city’s belief in its own exceptionalism:

New York exceptionalism — the belief that, as Joey Litman once wrote at FreeDarko, “everything must be the best because it is of New York, and, naturally, it is of New York because it is the best” — isn’t just something people here feel; it is literally the name of an e-seminar produced by Columbia University, one where “Professor Kenneth Jackson establishes the ways in which New York City is unique,” and argues that “when we look at New York, we are not just looking at another place. We are looking at a very special place.” (Columbia sits at 116th Street and Broadway in Manhattan. Naturally.)

This exceptionalism extends to local sports fandom. There’s long been a sense among New Yorkers that New York’s teams are just supposed to be good because they’re New York’s teams. And when they’re not, which is often, the anger gets as big as the payrolls: “How can a team that makes that much, that spends that much, that charges that much, and that is from New York be that bad?” (The answer is typically “mismanagement.” New York sports teams, especially the one that employed Starks, often have that in spades.)…

Yes, Starks would eventually become an All-Star and Sixth Man of the Year, but he was never a Jordan- or Reggie Miller-esque star; he always had to punch up when it mattered. And yes, he was a gunner making six (and eventually seven) figures to jack jumpers and occasionally boil over, but he always seemed to be doing stuff like kissing the Knicks logo at center court or saying “someone would have to tear the No. 3 jersey from his chest before he was traded to another team.” Starks treated New York like the exceptional thing New Yorkers believe it to be, and in so doing gave the forever-bigging-itself-up big city a little-guy underdog to rally behind.

As the article goes on to note, this memorable moment came at the end of Game 2 of a series that the Bulls won by beating the Knicks in the next four games. So, even though New York City can lay claim to being the number one global city, the sports teams can’t exactly make that claim. It takes a scrappy player like John Starks to rally the fans even as the teams themselves fall short. Yet, in the 1994 NBA Finals, Starks was blocked at the buzzer of Game 6 as the Knicks lost and then Starks shot 2-16 in Game 7 as the Knicks lost to the Houston Rockets.

It would be interesting to ask residents of the top global cities about whether they consider their city to be the best. Is this a unique property of New York, a city that can back up its claims with a powerful finance sector, lots of celebrity, and a big population? Going back to the e-seminar mentioned above, here is the course description for New York Exceptionalism:

Professor Kenneth Jackson establishes the ways in which New York City is unique, laying down the essential arguments for what one might call “New York exceptionalism.” His thesis for the e-seminar, indeed for the whole series of e-seminars, is that “when we look at New York, we are not just looking at another place. We are looking at a very special place, and in some ways [New York City] is certainly unique in the United States and in many ways [New York City] is unique around the world.” How is it unique? Professor Jackson begins with geography, discussing how New York City is a good port and a natural transportation break, in other words, a place where you switch modes of transport. He describes the founding of the city by the Dutch West India Company and explains how the commercial focus of the company, and of the Dutch in general, made New Amsterdam different from Puritan Boston or Quaker Philadelphia. People came to New York to succeed. Finally, Professor Jackson discusses how all these factors (commerce, geography, and religion) produced a greater willingness to accept those who are different, a tolerance for diversity that makes New York exceptional.

It is one thing to say a city is unique – which all cities are –  and another to say it is exceptional.

Hypothesis: violence among sports fans related to other social divisions

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One sociologist suggests sports violence may not just be about the games but rather other social divisions:

According to a hypothesis put forth by sociologist Eric Dunning in his book Sports Matters, athletic events are realms in which other major issues in society, often related to class, religion, ethnicity, politics, regionalism, historic rivalries, etc. can play out among supporters. Violence, rather than just being about the sport, can be interpreted as an expression of contrasts between populations. That means the conflicts are best studied within the societies where they occur.

“Dunning’s hypothesis is that you can’t separate soccer violence from the wider situation—instead it manifests itself along the fault line in a particular society,” Frosdick said.

And, according to Frosdick, the hypothesis fits when we look at recurring incidents of violence. In Spain, regional tensions help intensify soccer rivalries, hence the divide between Barcelona and Real Madrid. In Italy, where the historic split is between the industrial north and the agricultural rural south, tensions arise when Juventus FC plays SSC Napoli.

“In Scotland, religious sectarianism between Protestants and Catholics represents the biggest fault line in society,” Frosdick said. “The manifestation of football violence therefore is when the Catholic Celtics play the Protestant Rangers in the Old Firm Derby.” In 1980, after the Celtics defeated the Rangers 1-0 at the Scottish Cup final, hundreds of fans rioted on the pitch. The incident led to the banning of alcohol at all Scottish stadiums.

This shouldn’t be too surprising given the importance of factors like social class and race in society. Yet, it would also be interesting to then look at how the sports violence is explained by broadcasters and other media. Based on the sports I’ve watched in my life, I would guess sports broadcasts tend to shy away from conversations about social issues or suggest sports bring healing rather than exacerbate existing conditions. While sports may indeed be “just a game,” it is important to many, interwoven throughout social life, and is big business.

Stereotypical NASCAR wives live in McMansions, consume a lot

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At least one NASCAR wife may not fit the mold of a McMansion owner:https://legallysociable.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=14555&action=edit

THE PERCEPTION some racing fans have of drivers’ wives is they live in McMansions, buy expensive clothes, drive luxury cars and travel to races in private planes. Krissie Newman insists this perception isn’t entirely true.

“Some [wives] are glamorous, but most of us are ordinary people,” she said during a recent interview…

Krissie, 36, seems comfortable with her life. No regrets about not practicing law?

“No, I’ve shifted my focus,” she said. “I’ve seen the benefits from what we’re doing. I think this is what I’m meant to do. You need to find balance in life; you need to know yourself.”

It might be interesting to look further at these perceptions. How many drivers live in McMansions and how does this differ from other athletes and celebrities? And why exactly is this tied to the wives and not also to the drivers who must have some say in whether they end up living in a McMansion and how their family spends money? It sounds like gender stereotypes are being linked to McMansions which are seen by critics as symbols of excessive consumption. It is harder to imagine a famous driver being criticized for having a big house as opposed to linking it to their wife. Additionally, NASCAR is often viewed as a more Southern sport and critics of McMansions could link that to suburban sprawl in the Sunbelt.

Soccer won’t make it big in the US because it doesn’t have enough time for commercials?

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Forget cultural differences; perhaps soccer won’t make it big in the United States because there is not enough money to be made.

“Soccer is the least profitable sport on the planet,” says Stefan Szymanski, professor of sports management at the University of Michigan and co-author of Soccernomics. “The whole structure of soccer is totally at variance with the America model.”…

In America, TV contracts have a lot to do with a sport’s profitability. MLS recently took a step toward the big leagues with new contracts that will generate around $90 million in revenue per year, the most ever for the league. But that’s puny compared with leagues such as the NFL, which takes in about $5 billion per year from TV rights. The visibility generated by saturation TV coverage helps the NFL earn even more revenue from sponsorships, ticket fees and licensing deals.

It might be unfair to compare the MLS with the NFL, which is the world’s most profitable sports league and an almost unexplainable phenomenon. But pro soccer in the U.S. may face a chicken-and-egg problem that prevents it from ever following in the NFL’s cleats. Most NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL teams manage to be profitable whether they win or lose. That’s because of revenue-sharing deals, salary caps and other equalizers meant to keep leagues competitive and owners satisfied…

“The MLS is pursuing the America business model, which means it’s not pouring billions into making it successful but is actually limiting player spending,” Szymanski says. “There are probably 30 soccer leagues that spend more on wages per team than the MLS — including the Romanian soccer league.”

I wonder how American sports fans would react to the idea that sports “work” in the US because owners can make lots of money. Sure, the sports may be interesting and the athletes impressive but the owners have to make money and there have to be lots of commercials. The average football game has about 11 minutes of gameplay. It’s more like the sports play around the commercial breaks.

Does this mean American sports don’t really follow a free market model? It sounds more like team owners work together to guarantee their profitability and then others on the outside, like various corporations and television networks, can try to make money.

Soccer and the World Cup as the upcoming functional religion

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Soccer may be just a game but some academics see it having the properties of a global religion:

A growing body of scholars see football playing an under-appreciated role as keeper of society’s well-being – providing a sense of identity with an almost religious role…”It provides you with an opportunity to side with your country without being violent to another. So in that way it does replace war,” said David Ranc, a French sociologist who specialises in group identity in football.

“It is a non-violent way of resolving conflict … and taking sides where there is not that much at stake.”…

“Identification with a sports team can provide people with an important identity prop, … a sense of belonging in what would otherwise be an isolated existence,” according to Eric Dunning, a sports sociologist with the University of Leicester…

“The fans of a football team form a community of believers that is characterised by distinctively religious forms of behaviour,” sports sociologist Gunter Gebauer of the Free University of Berlin told AFP…

Football allows people from different social and economic spheres to meet and bond around a common passion, experts said.

 

 

Paging all sociologists of sport – the World Cup is nearly underway. This is a classic “functional religion” argument (a la Durkheim). If you set aside the supernatural aspect of religion, it has several components: rituals (pomp of the World Cup every four years, going to or watching a game), building solidarity (based on a club or national team, gathering with other fans), what is sacred versus profane (the importance of the games versus other aspects of life, elevating certain players). Given the number of people who will be paying attention to the World Cup, this argument makes sense: even religions would have a hard time rallying this many people with such fervor for 32 days.

A video goes viral with 320,000+ views in one week?

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This silent newsreel of the 1919 Black Sox World Series is a great find. A news story about the video suggests it went viral with over 320,000 views in its first week online. Is this enough views to go viral?

This is an ongoing issue for stories and reports regarding online behavior. When does something go from being an online object of interest to some people to being a trend? Reporters often find Facebook groups or a few blog posts and turn that into a trend. Perhaps this is better than interviewing a few people on the street – also still done – but there are plenty of online groups, tweets, and posts.

We need some sort of metric or guidelines for making such proclamations. Unfortunately, there is little agreement about this for websites: should we count page views, unique visitors, click-throughs or something else? Should we just count the number of Twitter followers even though they can be purchased? Other mediums have agreed-upon metrics like Nielsen ratings or book sales or digital downloads.

In the meantime, I would suggest 342,000 viewers is not quite going viral.

Are NFL fans now better off with all the draft knowledge they can access?

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The NFL draft process has been drawn out even further this year and it leads to an interesting question: is a better-informed fan a more-in-control fan?

For many Americans, football fandom is a knowledge contest, an anxious dedication to information gathering that drives us to consume the NFL’s human-resources wing as entertainment. Last year, more than 7.9 million of us watched the draft and another 7.3 million viewed some portion of the scouting combine. This year, the draft moved from April to May, a transition attributed to a scheduling glitch: Radio City Music Hall, the draft’s venue in recent years, booked a Rockettes Easter special during the NFL’s big weekend. But it’s a favor, really: We need more time for recreational panic, more time for our 11-year-olds to prognosticate with radio hosts…

When Mayock started his work, most information about prospects was relegated to team officials and media members. But now, anyone could develop informed opinions about someone like Landry. Anyone who wants to can study six of his games and learn about his perceived value on mock draft sites. Walter Cherepinsky, the founder of one such site, tells me it gets 40 million visits per month. (One of his recent mocks has Landry going to the Carolina Panthers with the 92nd selection.) For the most committed students, there are draft guides such as Matt Waldman’s Rookie Scouting Portfolio, more than 1,200 pages about offensive prospects. Waldman writes that Landry blocks and runs routes like a reserve player, but he catches passes like an NFL star.

While the adage tells us knowledge is power, though, it’s less clear how all of this information empowers draft-obsessed fans. That 11-year-old from the sports talk show wanted his team to select a receiver, but wanting that or having an argument in favor of it won’t make it so. What erudition of this sort provides is a sense of autonomy, in terms of identity, a guard against power abused. NFL insiders tend to whisper the same general stat: that one-third of the league’s general managers have no business overseeing personnel decisions—they’re either misguided in the way they evaluate players or they don’t bother to put in the requisite research. Draft savvy, then, lets fans separate their outcomes (the success of their favored college prospects) from those of their favorite teams (the players chosen by their teams and the team’s outcome on the field); fans can timestamp their opinions and later say, “I told you so.”

But does this kind of autonomy relieve fans’ helplessness, or does it make them feel more like pawns beholden to the real draft-day outcomes they want to control but can’t? Let’s say you’re sure, after months of research, your team should use its third-round pick on a quarterback, but the team instead drafts a punter—a punter—and the quarterback selected five slots later goes on to win a Super Bowl within two seasons. Besides a conniption, this could also give you a grudge to unleash on team executives, message board commenters, and media members who disagree with your football opinions.

The evidence seems clear: the draft is popular and the NFL can afford to drag it out when people keep watching. But, do people really enjoy it? More broadly in sports, if fans know even more about potential players (college, minor leagues, developmental leagues, overseas prospects, etc.), does this lead to feeling more in control?

Having more information is generally seen as a good thing in today’s world. The more input you can gather, the better. Yet, this doesn’t necessarily lead to better outcomes or more perceived control. (Read The Paradox of Choice for a good introduction.) I would argue that much of the appeal of sports is the unpredictably, the odd things that can happen on a playing surface at any point. All the information in the world can’t easily explain some of these events – and would we want it to or would we rather see unpredictable things happen in games?

The draft is a good example of this unpredictability and how we might perceive information as a way to limit this. Think about all of the mock drafts. All of the talking heads. Stretching out the draft even longer. Yet, there are still things that happen on draft day that are hard to predict, even for all the experts. (I’m particularly intrigued by recent mock drafts that incorporate more complicated draft-day trades.) Assessing the results of drafts can take years or even decades. Sports Illustrated had a recent story about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers making a disastrous pick in the 1980s that led to 10+ years of ineptitude – but this wasn’t visible for years.

All together, football players make choices, teams make choices, fans respond to all of this with more or less information, and it all collides in a “sports experience.” I suspect sports fans don’t really want to know everything (stronger predictive abilities would reduce the uncertainty about outcomes) even if they often want to immerse themselves in the sports experience. At some point, the return on having more and more sports knowledge likely decreases enjoyment though this curve could easily differ by person.

High-powered lawyer to help sell the Milwaukee Bucks wants public money even as he lives in a McMansion

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Here is an example of how looking at the personal McMansion of a wealthy individual can be pulled into commentary regarding that person’s public actions:

Marotta will certainly not be on the sidelines as a new arena is sought and fought over. He will be faced with the task of assembling a suitable building parcel as well as financing its purchase and the construction of a new facility. The $200 million promised by the seller and the new owners will not be enough to foot the bill.

Mayor Barrett and others have called for a regional tax to help pay for the stadium. If Marotta has to help this pass, he will get a taste of the struggle ahead by reading the Resolution Opposing a Tax to Fund a New Sports Arena in Downtown Milwaukee that was passed by the Executive Committee of the Ozaukee County Board of Supervisors in September 2013. Ozaukee County contributes to the 0.1 per cent Miller Park tax, and wants no part of another…

The first task is probably to find them in this cavernous dwelling, built in 2010. It has 17 rooms, of which 7 are bedrooms. There are 6 full baths and 3 half-baths in the home, along with “5 add’l fixtures”

Oh, we’ll find them later — off to the 5,605 square foot basement, of which 4,926 square feet is a finished rec room. That is a lot of recreating. Above is a first floor with 4,623 square feet of living space, surmounted by a more modestly sized 3,821 square foot second floor. Maybe it’s time to search around the 982 square foot attached garage with lake views and see if the kids are there, transfixed by the waves below…

By contrast, the visitor is encouraged to look at the orange structure to the south of the Marotta home. It could easily be overlooked, but upon closer inspection you can see a modern full-sized home dwarfed by the giant shadow cast by its neighboring McMansion.

This argument appears similar to the critique of McMansions offered by Thomas Frank several weeks ago: how can someone who has done well in life even think of asking for public money for a sports stadium? On top of this, studies suggest public tax dollars used for stadiums tend to benefit owners, not taxpayers. The McMansion discussed here (and it could be a mansion at over 10,000 square feet with the basement) is held up as an emblem of excess: it is very large, it is a teardown, it is an expensive house (in a nice location), and it is architecturally compromised. But, this analysis goes beyond speaking in generalities and links the negative qualities of the home to a particular person.