Category Archives: Sports

Thursday Night Football logo takes over Philadelphia skyline

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While watching a bit of the match-up last night featuring the Cincinnati Bengals at the Philadelphia Eagles, I saw this image where the Thursday Night Football takes over the Philadelphia skyline:

Sports broadcasts have been using this technique for at least a few years now. I first noticed it on Fox NFL broadcasts. They will often put fake video boards at different points around the stadium and then show the Fox logo or advertisements on this fake board before panning back to the field and game action. The NBA on TNT also uses this quite a bit though I’ve noticed they tend to use the same settings when in certain cities. For example, when they do Bulls home games, the same location is used: the camera, probably mounted on a tall building, looks southeast from Wolf Point with the fake video board mounted on the first bridge, Lake Street, on the South Branch of the Chicago River. Imagine if the board in Chicago moved around a bit: there it is popping out of the trees in Grant Park. There it is on the top of the John Hancock building. There it is on Navy Pier blocking the view of the Ferris Wheel.

However, these examples feature fake video screens built on existing structures while this Thursday Night Football segue involved a giant logo attached to two buildings on the Philadelphia skyline. In my opinion, this stretches the idea a little too far. It doesn’t look very realistic and even among big buildings it looks disproportionately large. At the same time, perhaps it is meant to be commentary about the power of the NFL: it is so big that it dominates the skyline of a major American city!

NCAA Scholarly Colloquium: ideology versus “In God we trust; everyone else should bring data”

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The Chronicle of Higher Education examines how much criticism of the NCAA will be allowed at its upcoming annual Scholarly Colloquium and includes a fascinating quote about how data should be used:

The colloquium was the brainchild of Myles Brand, a former NCAA president and philosopher who saw a need for more serious research on college sports. He and others believed that such an event could foster more open dialogue between the scholars who study sport issues and the people who work in the game.

Mr. Brand emphasized that the colloquium should be data-based and should avoid ideology. “Myles always used to joke: ‘In God we trust; everyone else should bring data,'” said Mr. Renfro, a former top adviser to Mr. Brand.

But as Mr. Renfro watched presentations at last year’s colloquium, which focused on changes the NCAA has made in its academic policies in recent years, he did not see a variety of perspectives.

“I was hearing virtually one voice being sung by a number of people … and it was relatively critical of the NCAA’s academic-reform effort,” he said. “I don’t care whether it was critical or not, but I care about whether there are different perspectives presented.”

This is a classic argument: data versus ideology, facts versus opinions. This short bit about Myles Brand makes it sound like Brand thought bringing more data to the table when discussing the NCAA would be a good thing. Data might blunt opinions and arguments and push people with an agenda to back up their arguments. It could lead to more constructive conversations. But, data is not completely divorced from ideology. Researchers choose what kind of topics to study. Data has to be collected in a good manner. Interpreting data is still an important skill; people can use data incorrectly. And it sounds like an issue here is that people might be able to use data to continue to criticize the NCAA – and this does not make the NCAA happy.

Generally, I’m in favor of bringing more data to the table when discussing issues. However, having data doesn’t necessarily solve problems. As I tell my statistics classes, I don’t want them to be people who blindly believe all data or statistics because it is data and I also don’t want them to be people who dismiss all data or statistics because they can be misused and twisted. It sounds like some of this still needs to be sorted out with the NCAA Scholarly Colloquium.

What does Naperville gain by scheduling its first marathon?

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Naperville is a decorated suburb: it is unusually large and wealthy compared to most suburbs, has been recognized by a number of publications for its better traits, and has a lively downtown. Now the suburb is adding another feature: it has scheduled its first marathon for November 10, 2013.

“Naperville has a great running community but they’ve never had a marathon, for whatever reason,” said Bob Hackett, who has organized the Fox Valley Marathon in St. Charles for the past three years. “We realized that as great of a city as Naperville is, it’s lost without one, so we’re making it happen.”Hackett said organizers first approached the city two years ago but found the special events planning calendar already booked solid.

The 26.2-mile course has yet to be finalized, but Hackett said it will start near 95th Street and Book Road and wander south into Plainfield and unincorporated Will County before heading back north into Naperville. The course will take runners along a variety of streets and through forest preserve property…

“The course should be somewhat flat and fast, but it will have its rolling hills and challenges,” Hackett said. “It will be a Boston-qualifying race, so there’s an opportunity for runners to put together a fast race if they’re looking to head to Boston.”…

Hackett said the Fox Valley run has drawn as many as 7,500 runners, but the first Naperville event will be capped at 4,000. He doesn’t think they’ll have any trouble hitting that mark.

There are several ways this race could help boost the prestige of Naperville;

1. This could bring in more people and attention to Naperville. All this could translate into more tax revenue and status.

2. This suburban marathon is connected to the Boston Marathon, a prestigious race. Additionally, there are a limited number of Boston-qualifying races. Check out this list of 2012 marathons and the number of qualifiers for Boston each race produced: many of these races are city races, not suburban races.

3. It will be interesting to see how Naperville tries to tie this to existing recreational and outdoor activities in Naperville. While it is a relatively flat Midwestern town, Naperville has a popular Riverwalk along the DuPage River and numerous parks and Forest Preserves (particularly the 1,867 acre Springbrook Prairie).

This seems like a win-win of the community: runners get a local race, the city of Naperville gets a marquee event to add to the schedule, and the event is on a Sunday morning so shouldn’t disrupt too much of normal suburban life.

Discussing why a professional sports team would adopt the name the Pelicans

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It appears the New Orleans Hornets will adopt a new name: the Pelicans. Here is some discussion on TrueHoop about the meaning of the name and other names that were in the running:

And yet, if you put a gun to my head and said: Come up with a funny name for a minor league baseball team I’d say “Pelicans” and I’d worry that it wasn’t realistic. Like, what owner would name his team for an unathletic bird noted for how much marine life it can carry in its big mouth?

In terms of specifically dissecting the Pelican and noting its awkwardness, I think that is fair, but I think the qualities of the bird do not necessarily translate into the perception of the team. Magic is not the “sportiest” of names. It’s either weak in some sense or cheating (is there a rule against sorcery?), right?

Not to pick on the Magic, of course. The Celtics aren’t meant to be pagans. The Knickerbockers don’t have people’s unsundry parts in them. Those names are “made” by their legacies. It is the duty of every franchise to build that legacy to overcome all of these, at first, imperfect names. And upon the fanbase. They have to “own it,” to use the parlance of our time.

People in New Orleans dislike change, but they love New Orleans. There’s nothing like some hate from north of I-10 to get some New Orleanians to love what those “Yankees” hate.

It’ll work.

And a quick look at three other possible names:

The colors were purple, red and black primarily, they had the voodoo dolls, the graveyard, bones and mojo for mascots, and more. It was fantastic, local, recognizable, edgy. Voodoo is currently owned by the new AFL, as Benson folded his team prior the older AFL folding. The Shreveport-Bossier City Battlewings (north Louisiana for those playing the home game) moved here, donning Voodoo garb. This was at least one obstruction to this…

Krewe was another good choice. “Krewe of X” is used to describe the people in parades in many cases (I was Krewe of Endymion after the Super Bowl, for instance). This has clear cultural relevance and built-in mascots, branding, etc. It would be a beacon for those three people who’ve never heard of Mardi Gras. Krewe of New Orleans … the party has arrived.

Brass was another good name. It’s evocative of Jazz, and was the name of an ECHL team (minor league hockey) here in New Orleans (yes, really) that folded shortly after the Hornets relocation. You can write the branding for it quite easily.

I suspect this analysis is right: local fans could get used to all sorts of names over time. I would assume that winning more would make a sports team name more permanent. While there may have been other reasons for these switches, think of the Charlotte Bobcats and the Washington Wizards. Perhaps some cities are even better suited than others to adopt stranger or more local names. And yes, a number of professional pro sports team names don’t make a lot of sense given their current context and era. For people who like local color, it is almost too bad sports teams aren’t required to have names that match their current community. Finding the best local names could be a fascinating exercise…

But I wonder if this is part of a larger shift in the names of sports teams away from fierce animals or creatures. Just as first names in the United States can change (here is a sociologist talking about the decline of the name Mary but the resurgence of the name Emma), the names of sports teams can change. Think of the new team names in the four major sports in the last two decades and it is an odd collection of old-style and new names. This may have to do with branding: new kinds of names offer new opportunities. Take the Oklahoma City Thunder. Their name is not shared by another team in the four major sports and is not found too frequently elsewhere. It could lead to all sorts of new marketing opportunities though it might be difficult to come up with appropriate mascots and train copy editors to use the name correctly.

Of course, one innovation of the future could be that more American sports team adopt corporate names. This could be a lucrative revenue stream.

Shopping the real favorite sport of Americans?

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At the bottom of yet another article about Black Friday, I found this interesting quote from a Sears executive about how Americans view shopping:

Sears, like many retailers, will make many Black Friday deals available online. At Sears, they’re available to the store’s Shop Your Way members (there’s no fee to join, and it can be done online).

“Shopping is a sport to many people, and this is the Super Bowl,” Hanover added.

Americans tend to like their sports so could shopping really supplant football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and other activities? Here are some reasons this could happen:

1. The average American probably gets a lot more opportunities to shop than to play sports. It is different to observe a sport versus participating in shopping.

2. Shopping can now take place in many different places. As brick and mortar retailers have noticed, online shopping makes it possible to look at, think through, and make purchases from virtually anywhere.

3. Shopping is a fairly frequent activity. Even if someone spends very little disposable income, that person still has to shop for groceries and essentials.

4. Shopping incorporates some of the same features as watching sports or cheering for sports teams. Shoppers are fans of particular brands. Shopping can be done with other people, building and cementing group bonds. Shopping can be ritualistic. In other words, the same sort of social benefits of group activity suggested by Durkheim that could apply to sports could also apply to shopping.

5. Shopping is a critical part of our economy. While people do need to purchase certain goods regularly, new products like the latest smartphones, cars, video games, and other things are important for corporations, the stock market, and thus, stockholders which includes a wide range of Americans.

6. Shopping in America is often tied to holidays like Christmas, Thankgiving, and Halloween. Spending can be easier to justify because it is for the holidays plus it is related to social interactions that take place those days.

7. Compared to most of human history, more people now have the time and income to devote to shopping beyond subsistence.

Shopping itself deserves more attention from sociologists. While plenty of sociologists in recent decades have looked at consumption patterns (often focused on the products or objects acquired through consumption), this isn’t quite the same as looking at the process of shopping. I have enjoyed reading Sharon Zukin’s work on shopping; for example, see Chapter 6 “While the City Shops” in The Cultures of Cities.

Marlins’ publicly-funded stadium not the exception among Major League Baseball teams

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There is a lot of conversation today about the trade/fire sale undertaken by the Miami Marlins and how this relates to the team’s opening of a new stadium for the 2012 season that was largely funded by public money.Yet, this is a larger trend: 20 of the last 21 baseball stadiums built have been partly funded by public money.

And like nobody else, he hoarded massive checks from MLB while passing along the bill for the stadium to the taxpayers.

The Marlins can claim the money comes from tourism-tax dollars. Truth is, Miami-Dade County moved general-use monies from property taxes to free up the tourist cash. This is the dirtiest secret of Selig’s two decades as commissioner: The “golden era” of which he so often brags came off the taxpayer’s teat.

Of the 21 stadiums built since Camden Yards started the boom in 1992, the San Francisco Giants’ AT&T Park is the only one privately funded. Baseball’s business plan depended on new stadiums with sweetheart deals filling the coffers of ownership groups lucky enough to leverage politicians or voters into signing off on them. Cities signed deal after dreadful deal, few worse than the Marlins’, who paid for less than 20 percent of the stadium, received a $35 million interest-free loan to help and used $2.5 million more of public money to fund seizures.

Despite Loria and Samson’s protestations otherwise, this was always the endgame of their stadium gambit. Selig saw the Marlins’ audited finances every year. He knew they were lying. He went along with it anyway. That’s how he does business. He protects his friends. It’s why Fred Wilpon still owns the Mets. It’s why Frank McCourt doesn’t own the Dodgers.

As I’ve written about before (see here and here), studies show the construction of sports stadiums tends to benefit team owners and not the public. Teams are often able to hold a city hostage because no political leader wants to be the one who lets the favorite team go. Yet, the economic data would suggest it wouldn’t really hurt a city to do just that.

This leads me to a thought: what city would be most willing to let a team leave town for another locale? Even if pro sports teams don’t necessarily bring in money, they are also status symbols to show a city is “major league.” What will be the next team to go? One way to think about this is to look at cities that lack major teams. We could look at Los Angeles and the NFL; even though the metropolitan area has two baseball teams, two basketball teams, and two hockey teams, the city has not had a NFL team since 1994. Despite all the conversation about teams possible moving there (the Vikings were one of the recent teams though they got a publicly-funded stadium in a close vote last year), no one has moved yet. Seattle and the NBA is another interesting case; the city lost the Supersonics, now the Oklahoma City Thunder, after the 2007-2008 season and there have been recent conversations about a new stadium and team.

My guess is that the Marlins won’t be leaving Miami anytime soon though it would be appropriate if the city did renounce them. What an odd franchise overall: they were an expansion team that started play in 1993 presumably to take advantage of the growing city (the 8th largest metropolitan area in the United States) and its Latin American population (in recent years, 27-28% of baseball players were Latino), they have won two World Series titles (1997 and 2003, the year of Bartman), and held multiple fire sales.

Correlation and not causation: Redskins games predict results of presidential election

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Big events like presidential elections tend to bring out some crazy data patterns. Here is my nomination for the oddest one of this election season: how the Washington Redskins do in their final game before the election predicts the presidential election.

Since 1940 — when the Redskins moved to D.C. — the team’s outcome in its final game before the presidential election has predicted which party would win the White House each time but once.

When the Redskins win their game before the election, the incumbent party wins the presidential vote. If the Redskins lose, the non-incumbent wins.

The only exception was in 2004, when Washington fell to Green Bay, but George W. Bush still went on to win the election over John Kerry.

This is simply a quirk of data: how the Redskins do should have little to no effect on voting in other states. This is exactly what correlation without causation is about; there may be a clear pattern ut it doesn’t necessarily mean the two related facts cause each other. There may be some spurious association here, some variable that predicts both outcomes, but even that is hard to imagine. Yet, the Redskins Rule has garnered a lot of attention in recent days. Why? A few possible reasons:

1. It connects two American obsessions: presidential elections and the NFL. A sidelight: both may involve a lot of betting.

2. So much reporting has been done on the 2012 elections that this adds a more whimsical and mysterious element.

3. Humans like to find patterns, even if these patterns don’t make much sense.

What’s next, an American octopus who can predict presidential elections?

Century 21 says winning NFL teams boost housing prices

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A new study from Century 21suggests housing values rise when NFL teams win:

The question was this: What is the impact on a city when the hometown team does well or doesn’t do well? Century 21 looked at teams’ successes, population growth from census numbers, home value appreciation and attendance rates. And the correlation between on-the-field success and real estate prices was evident:Four of the five cities with teams that went from a losing record in 2010 to a winning record in 2011 saw average home sales prices increase between 2010 and 2011.

After winning the Super Bowl, Green Bay, Wis., saw a population growth of 1.7 percent in 2011, compared with runner-up Pittsburgh’s 0.6 percent growth.

Going from a record of 10-6 in 2010 to 2-14 in 2011, Indianapolis, the home of the Colts, saw a 19.8 percent decrease in home sales.

Eight of the nine cities with a team that had attendance rates of 100 percent or more in 2011 saw average home sales prices rise that year.

Here is the original Century 21 blog post with this information.

The NFL is a powerful entity but does it have this much power? Is this due to a small sample size (this article mentions only one year of data)? Are there other factors behind this correlation? If I had to guess at what is going on here, I suspect this is too small of a sample and that 2011 prices in certain cities happened to coincide with NFL results. Why not look at the housing crisis years and see the relationship between records and housing values?

I’m generally skeptical of sports fans and others that claim sports are important for the civic pride of a community or that new stadiums need to be funded by taxpayers because the loss of a team will hurt the local economy. However, this could be pure genius from Century 21. What better way to boost business than to hook your services to the popular NFL? Hey, there was even a Century 21 2012 Super Bowl ad!

Do real sports fans live in the big cities like Philadelphia and not in the suburbs?

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A columnist suggests true Philadelphia sports fans live in the city, not the suburbs:

With all due respect to my McMansion-dwelling friends in the bucolic suburbs, there are no Abington Eagles. No Bryn Mawr Flyers. No Drexel Hill Phillies. No Tinecum Township Sixers. These teams all belong to Philadelphia, because we’ve got the grit to handle it…

That’s why, my suburban friend, your blues ain’t like mine.

Sure, you might eat the cheesesteaks and scrapple while rooting for the Sixers and Flyers. But when the Phillies flame out with top-flight pitching or the Eagles lose their fourth NFC Championship, you get to go home and wash your hands of it all. You get to name some quaint suburb when people ask where you live. Me? I have to say I live in Philadelphia, and deal with the laughter of our rivals...

Today, however, it’s not about city versus suburbs, because this week, we’re all Philadelphians. Sure, the Phillies of old have returned; they’re eliminated from playoff contention. But with one quarter of the season over, the Eagles sit atop their division with a 3-1 record. That gives all of us hope … for now.

Don’t worry, though. They’ll do something silly and embarrass us again before long. When they do, my suburban friends, you can do something I just can’t. You can put down your cheesesteak, take off your jersey and tell everyone you’re from Abington.

On one hand, give me a break: aren’t there plenty of suburbanites who are crazy fans? Would the major teams in Philadelphia even be there if there weren’t the suburban fans who also buy tickets and merchandise?

On the other hand, perhaps there is something to this. Perhaps sports teams really are just a hobby for those who live in nicer suburbs. If their teams don’t do well, life isn’t too bad as they likely still have a decent job, a place to live, and a family. (Remember, we are dealing with broad stereotypes here.) In comparison, those in the city may not have as much to fall back on.

On the whole, I’m inclined to dismiss this argument as more unnecessary city versus suburbs, grit versus facade, posturing. Unfortunately, sports fans are often known for such posturing…

Painting the lawn has adverse effects on photosynthesis

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Painting the lawn or the playing field could have some adverse effects on the grass itself:

Yep, the September-October issue of Crop Science highlights a study out of North Carolina State University that shows conclusively — brace yourself — that “grasses coated with latex paints show a notable reduction in photosynthesis.” They’re talking about playing fields, of course, and the lines, stripes and logos regularly affixed atop them.

That’s all well and good, but it completely ignores an aspect of turf painting that has nothing to do with lines or logos. Sports, it seems, has a long tradition of painting grass simply to make it look more like grass.

  • When the clear panels in the roof of the Astrodome had to be painted over in 1965 because the resulting glare was blinding fielders, the turf beneath them died, and was subsequently painted green…
  • Groundskeepers at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium didn’t even bother with grass — for many years they painted the dirt green. (Pat Summerall wrote that when he played for the New York Giants, the Yankee Stadium Grounds crew took to painting the dirt, as well.)…

The practice even carries over to movies, where they painted the stadium grass twice for Bull Durham, yet it still, said writer/director Ron Shelton, “looks yellow on film.”

Painting the grass and using artificial turf has a long history in sports. A number of teams and facilities have gone to the field turf primarily for monetary reasons as it is cheaper to maintain.

This brings me to an idea: how long until homeowners go for artificial turf? I’m not talking about the Astroturf featured in the Brady Bunch yard but field turf that looks and feels more like grass. Perhaps the rubberized turf could even be sold as safer for children. For builders and developers, putting down good turf may be more expensive upfront than laying down sod but perhaps the costs could be passed along to homebuyers, particularly if it were guaranteed for a number of years.