Category Archives: Sports

Has the rise of football harmed male educational attainment?

Posted on by

With data in recent years suggesting that men are falling behind at the college level, Gregg Easterbrook suggests this may be due to football:

Women are taking more of the available slots in college at the same time boys are spending more time playing football. Are these two facts related?

The main force must be that girls as a group are doing very well in high school, making them attractive candidates for college. But perhaps the rising popularity of football is at the same time decreasing boys’ chances of college admission.

Having ever-more boys being bashed on the head in football, while more play full-pads tackle at young ages, may be causing brain trauma that makes boys as a group somewhat less likely to succeed as students. In the highly competitive race for college admissions, even a small overall medical disadvantage for boys could matter. More important, the increasing amount of time high school boys devote to football may be preventing them from having the GPA and extracurriculars that will earn them regular admission to college when recruiters don’t come calling…

Neurology aside, most likely the largest factor in the possible relationship of rising football popularity to declining male college attendance is that teen boys who play the sport spend too much time on football and not enough time on schoolwork. When they don’t get recruited, many may lack the grades, board scores and extracurriculars for regular college admission.

Easterbrook is suggesting a correlation between two pieces of data: the declining performance of men in school compared to women and a rising interest in football. (To really get at whether this is the case, we would need to undertake an analysis where we can control for other factors.)  He suggests two possible ways in which football might be having an impact: neurological damage and time spent playing and practicing the sport. Out of these, the second sounds more plausible to me.

But I wonder if there isn’t a lot more we could say about this second possible explanation. Why would high school and college males want to spend so much time playing football? Why is it such an attractive option? Perhaps this attraction to football suggests that society doesn’t present too many other attractive options to young males. Perhaps younger males lack good role models in their personal lives or in society who do other things, respectable males who would say that getting an education is an important step in order to participate in today’s society. Do we have cool scientists or academics or do we usually highlight celebrities (particularly those who are famous for being famous) and athletes? Perhaps “manliness” is now defined by football: across the positions, it requires speed (running), violence (hitting), decision-making, and competition. Plus, everyone has been playing this on Madden for years so how hard could this be?

I’m guessing it wouldn’t be too difficult to find some data regarding high school students to see who plays football and perhaps even indicates why they play.

A reminder that all politics is local (and cultural): avoid the barbecue third rail in North Carolina

Posted on by

National political candidates or officials often have to make sure that they can adapt to many different cultural contexts. Witness this example of Rick Perry and North Carolina barbecue:

And now Perry’s in hot water in North Carolina for a remark he made all the way back in 1992, when he was Texas agriculture commissioner and Houston was hosting the Republican National Convention.

Last week, in the Raleigh News & Observer’s “Under the Dome” politics blog, staffers Rob Christensen and Craig Jarvis wrote:

According to “Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue,” in 1992 when Perry was a promising Texas politician but not yet governor, he tried some Eastern North Carolina barbecue from King’s of Kinston, which was served at the Republican National Convention in Houston.  “I’ve had road kill that tasted better than that,” Perry was quoted as saying…

“Holy Smoke” co-author John Shelton Reed, a retired University of North Carolina sociology professor, said Monday that people in his state do not mess around with this form of cooking. “Barbecue,” he said, “is the third rail of North Carolina politics.”

I don’t envy the task of politicians who have to continually switch gears on the campaign trail to keep up with all of the local cultural quirks. However, I wonder if these politicians have some sort of database or chart that alerts them to these local “third-rail” issues to avoid. What would an outsider have to avoid in coming to Chicago or the Chicago suburbs?

If anything, this story illustrates some basic sociological concepts. Residents of North Carolina rally around barbecue, among other things, and see it as a critical part of their state identity. When an outsider comes along and makes the comment that their prized food tastes worse than roadkill, they band together to defend their barbecue, reassert their group identity, and reestablish the symbolic boundaries that separate the group from other groups. It is not that different from sports fans reacting to perceived attacks from the outside, such as the reaction of a number of Chicago Bears fans to a new biography of Walter Payton that reveals his more human side. Even an outsider who might be telling the truth (though I’m willing to bet the barbecue was better than roadkill) still will have difficulty “attacking” one of the sacred features of the group.

The civil rights argument against NCAA Division I football and men’s basketball

Posted on by

The cover story of the latest Atlantic, “The Shame of College Sports,” is provocative and fascinating. The article is mainly about a series of court cases involving the civil rights of “student-athletes” and procuring a share of the NCAA’s football and men’s basketball profits for these “student-athletes.” After reading the full argument, it is difficult to feel much goodwill toward the NCAA.

“The Sociology of the Offensive Line”?

Posted on by

ESPN’s Ivan Maisel tries to provide a sociological take on one of the key units on a football team:

Our topic is the Sociology of the Offensive Line. Our guest lecturer is Barrett Jones, the Alabama redshirt junior, a two-time Academic All-American and an All-SEC right guard in 2010. Jones is uniquely qualified to address this topic. In the No. 3 Crimson Tide’s 48-7 victory over Kent State to open the season, Jones started at left tackle and moved to left guard. That’s unusual but not unheard of.

However, Jones then moved to center for several series in the second half. He played all three positions on the offensive line in one game, none of them on the side of the ball he played for the last two seasons. For offensive linemen, this is the equivalent of playing all nine positions on the baseball field, something only four players have done in the history of major league baseball…

And now, as promised, the sociology: Now that Jones has played all three positions, he can explain what each position thinks of the other.

“Tackles just think their position is by far the hardest,” Jones said. “All the other positions are relatively easy. That’s the mindset they have, just because it is very challenging in the passing game, more so than the other two [positions]. The tackles sometimes think they are the most important people on the line. You kind of have to keep an eye on them, keep them humble. I think it all stems from the NFL. The tackles get paid the big bucks. I think that’s where it all comes from.

“Centers think they are definitely the smartest. If you ever question one of their calls, they get a little uptight. They take great pride in their calls. They think they know it better than anybody else.”

A quick translation into sociological-ese: Jones knows what it means to step into multiple social roles. While he was primarily trained to play one position (right guard?), he became a “portfolio lineman,” filling different roles in order to compete in the tough economy of the Alabama offensive line. One wrong step in any of these social roles might mean the end of his working career under the capitalistic Nick Saban, a “weasel coach,” a manager who cares more about money and winning than the flourishing of his proletariat offensive linemen. Along the way, Jones uncovered the status hierarchy of the offensive line: tackles think they are at the top of physical prowess while centers bristle at their low prestige (linked to the pay segregation they experience in the NFL – how many Hollywood movies have they made about centers?) and try to exalt the thinking they have to do. When asked by reporters, Jones is able to thoughtfully describe the social processes at work after extensive participant observation (perhaps even “going native”?). On the whole, being an offensive lineman requires more than just physical skill – one needs social capital in order to participate in a cohesive, effective group that can protect the real status leader of the offense: the quarterback.

College athletes clustering in a few majors, including sociology

Posted on by

I’ve written before about sociology being considered an “easy major” by athletes. A new report looks at some notable schools and considers how clustered male athletes are within majors:

Since the NCAA invented the APR [Academic Progress Rate] in 2003, critics have worried that it would discourage athletes from choosing difficult majors or from changing course once they started down a given track. Some have anticipated a “clustering” of athletes in certain majors, such as sociology or communication, and others have expressed concern about the creation of broad programs such as general studies with athletes in mind.

A 2008 analysis by USA Today found that clustering happens at most institutions, and of the three sports programs Shalala compares, Miami football is most questionable, with 62.5 percent of the team studying one of two majors. While clustering on a small scale isn’t necessarily unusual, researchers who study the phenomenon say the 25-percent mark is where things start getting fishy.

A full 37.5 percent of Miami’s junior and senior football players were majoring in liberal arts in 2008, and 25 percent in sports administration. The same 37.5 percent of Stanford’s junior and senior softball players were in one major — but it was human biology — and 36.8 percent of baseball players majored in sociology. Notre Dame athletes didn’t cluster at all, according to USA Today’s analysis.

While this report by Donna Shalala, president of Miami, seems tied to troubles their football program has with violating NCAA regulations, the USA Today 2008 analysis offers more insights. While sociology is lumped within the social sciences, you can mouse over the graphics and while the most clustering seems to happen in the social sciences, the sociology clusters are numerous.

Alas, this collected data is still limited:

Assisted by sports information and other school offices, USA TODAY obtained the majors for about 85% of the athletes in the study. For most of the rest, no major was listed. Primary or first-listed majors were used in the cases of students with multiple majors.

Initially, part of the intent was to compare the percentages of athletes in a major with those of the student body as a whole. That is, if 30% of baseball players are in sociology, is 30% of the entire student body enrolled in sociology? However, short of getting athletes’ private records and the federal reporting code of each athlete’s major, large-scale comparisons are unreliable because some schools have multiple versions of some majors.

The NCAA collects similar information, but does not release it and has no current plans to study it.

Hmmm…I wonder why the NCAA has no interest in analyzing this data.

Author explains writing “If Michael Vick were white”

Posted on by

An ESPN piece (and picture) that considered what might have happened if Michael Vick was white has received a lot of attention. The author explains his thought process here:

Tonight somewhere in America two men will be arrested for DUI. Many people get arrested for this every day. Surely some will be black and some will be white. Does the fact that people of both races will be arrested for this prove that it’s not a racial situation? No. Does the ratio of those arrests as compared to the population perhaps prove that it is in fact a racial situation? Sure, but almost every situation is racialized.

One black driver may be arrested because the police who notice him are hypersensitive to black drivers in BMWs, so he’s the victim of Driving While Black even though it turns out that he also had a little too much to drink. Meanwhile maybe another black driver is swerving and it’s obvious he’s a problem before the officers can clearly see his face. The point is race is too nuanced to be looked at in a simplistic way. And this “switch test” should be discredited and thrown out…

Am I saying that we’re in a post-racial society and race no longer matters? Absolutely not. “Post-racial” is a meaningless term that people who have a sophisticated understanding of race do not use without an ironic smirk. I hate that dumb term and am dismayed at the number of people who think it’s indicative of modern America. It is not. Race still matters. But I think nowadays it often matters, or comes into play, in ways that are more subtle or nuanced than we care to admit.

The key points here:

1. Race still matters.

2. Race is complicated.

Both of these points should be remembered when talking about this article or about other matters that involve race.

This reminds of one reason that I am a sociologist: we don’t rely on singular situations like this. Thinking about Michael Vick can be a helpful exercise but ultimately, it is just one case. Had a number of factors been different, Vick’s skin color, background, football performance, etc., the outcome would likely be very different. But if we look at the more complete picture, whether it is all NFL players or all of American society, we can see how race still matters. Take NFL players: there has been some interesting research about the quarterback position and how race plays into conceptions of who is able to take on that role. Take American society: there is plenty of evidence that the criminal justice system heavily penalizes certain kinds of crimes more than others, certain groups have much higher incarceration rates, and certain groups are treated differently by the authorities.

Another question we could ask: how does the Michael Vick situation illustrate different approaches of justice? I’ve suggested before that it seems like some will never be happy that Vick has tasted success again and this raises questions about whether Americans should pursue retribution or rehabilitation through the criminal justice system.

How technology may lessen a team’s chemistry

Posted on by

Technology receives a lot of attention but I haven’t seen this brought up before: technology may be making it more difficult to athletic teams to bond.

Ask many coaches, general managers and older players and you’ll hear a common gripe: chemistry on teams has been altered because of modern technology, and not for the better. The rise of smartphones, with all their instant-communication and entertainment options, have created insular worlds into which distracted players too often retreat instead of bonding with teammates.

Coaches and managers are particularly frustrated at the paradox of players fraternizing less with their own teammates, and more with the “enemy.” Players from opposing teams, they say, too often get each other’s cellphone numbers and start calling or texting back and forth, often griping about playing time and occassionally giving up little secrets about their teams…

Major League Baseball is one sport where the chemistry effects of smartphones, iPads, iPods and other handheld devices might be thought to be minimal, because of the longer workdays and more enclosed environs (dugouts, bullpens, clubhouses). Not necessarily so, according to Colorado Rockies manager Jim Tracy. When the game is over, he says, players quickly rejoin their private, smartphone worlds…

Some NFL teams are said to be contemplating outright bans on smartphones during any “team time” activities, and some coaches have spoken with exasperation at competing with phones for players’ attention. Redskins defensive coordinator Jim Haslett, for instance, told ESPN 101 radio in St. Louis the difficulties of dealing with phone-obsessed players such as former Washington tackle Albert Haynesworth.

I’m tempted to argue that this is simply the outcome of having multiple generations in the clubhouse or locker room: an older generation, particularly coaches and managers, had a particular experience in the past and younger players have a different way of going about things. Perhaps it would be more interesting to talk to younger coaches who are more into technology themselves and ask how they try to build team chemistry. Of course, the topic of team chemistry is open for debate. To me, it seems like it is only really an issue when a team is losing and people are looking for reasons why.

The article does suggest that at least a few veteran athletes have adopted informal/player-directed guidelines for technology use in the clubhouse. I wonder if they have encountered some resistance or whether the spirit of such actions, to “help the team,” is reason enough for other players to comply.

Two other quick thoughts:

1. This could also be interpreted as an indicator of the professionalization of athletes. While athletes in the past might have enjoyed the camaraderie of interacting before and after games, today’s athletes have more personal leeway as most work all-year round and make big money. What matters most (or at all) is their performance on the field/court/ice.

2. The article also hints at how technology has changed how players prepare for games. It is now easy and common for athletes to be able to watch lots of video on their own, theoretically giving them some advantages.

The problem with using averages as illustrated by the average salaries of NBA players

Posted on by

In negotiations between NBA owners and players, the topic of the “average player salary” has come up. This discussion illustrates some of the issues involved with  using averages and medians:

Here is the “average player salary” for each of the major U.S. professional team sports, based on a variety of sources using the most recent data available:

NBA: $5.15 million (2010-11)

MLB: $3.34 million (2010)

NHL: $2.4 million (2010-11)

NFL: $1.9 million (2010)

From the public’s view, these numbers are high in all four sports. But players and agents argue that these averages obscure important distinctions including the value of certain positions over others (the quarterback in the NFL versus the punter) and the size of the roster (fewer NBA players, more NFL players).

One common solution to problems with averages is to instead use a median. Here is how this might change the discussion in the NBA:

“It’s the median salary that’s more important,” NBA agent Bill Duffy said. “Look at the Miami Heat as an analogy here: You’ve got three guys making $17 million and probably six guys making $1.2 [million]. So that’s a little misguided, that average salary.”…

It is not unlike, Duffy said, news stories that cite the “average” U.S. household income as opposed to the median. The latter figure, according to the most recent U.S. census, was $50,233. If you were to average in the dollar amounts pulled down by Wall Street bankers, Ivy League lawyers, certain public-union employees and yes, professional athletes, that number would jump considerably.

Curiously, neither the NBA nor the NBPA seems to make much use of a median player salary.

“We use [average] because it’s the most commonly used measure and best reflects the amount of compensation that the NBA provides to players across the league,” an NBA spokesman said this week. “In addition, it’s the measure that both we and the union agreed upon in the CBA.”

In the NFL, the median salary is approximately $770,000 — about 40 percent of the average.

In the NBA, using USA Today salary figures for the 2009-10 season, the estimated median salary was about $2.33 million. That’s still about 46 times what the median U.S. household earns, but it is less than half what the max-salary-bloated “average” is.

What happens in these sports is this: a small number of star athletes make huge amounts of money, pulling the average for all athletes up. If you use the median instead, where 50% of the players make more and 50% more make less, it suggests that more of the athletes in each sport make less. Particularly in the NFL which has bigger rosters, the difference between the average and the median shows that many players make very little.

It is interesting that the NBA spokesman said the two sides had agreed in their Collective Bargaining Agreement that they would use the average salary figure. Was this really a point of contention negotiations or did no one really think about the consequences? What was the thinking behind this for the players? If the union was focused on helping all of their members, perhaps they would focus on the median, suggesting that they are strongest when all of their members are well taken care of. This lower figure might also look more palatable to the public though it is unclear whether public perceptions have any influence on such negotiations. However, if the union was more interested in making sure that individual athletes could receive the biggest possible payouts because of their athletic exploits, then perhaps the average is better.

Two takeaway points:

1. Averages and medians are both measures of central tendency but they are open to different interpretations. People need to be clear about which they are using and which interpretation their number interprets.

2. It will be interesting to see if the new CBA is based on average or median salaries.

Evidence of sociology being viewed as an easy major for athletes

Posted on by

It is about that time of year when broadcasters and fans start poring football media guides. One enterprising fan of the University of Arkansas posted some tidbits from this year’s guide and one involved sociology:

Do you know what Greg Childs, Knile Davis, Cobi Hamilton, and Joe Adams all have in common? Well, besides being stars on the offense. They are all majoring in sociology. Arkansas actually has twenty players who are majoring in sociology with sports and recreation management being the second most popular choice. I can assure you that all those players didn’t come to the UofA with a desire to learn more about sociology. No doubt, someone in the athletic department has told them that sociology is a “football friendly” major.

I wonder how the sociology department at the University of Arkansas might respond.

On the whole, I don’t think having the reputation as an “easy major” helps the broader discipline of sociology.

Seeing sociology in the US men’s national soccer team coaching change

Posted on by

A number of articles have noted the new approach of the new coach of the US men’s national soccer team, Jurgen Klinsman. But this is the first one I’ve seen that suggests Klinsman’s outlook is sociological in nature:

What Klinsmann’s hiring is really about is the big picture, about where soccer is going in the United States, how it will be played and by whom?

It is a grand experiment that is as much about sociology and psychology as it is soccer, and one that promises to be — even to Klinsmann — at least as interesting as whatever happens on the field.

“I deeply believe that soccer, in a certain way, reflects the culture of a country,” Klinsmann, who since 1988 has lived in Huntington Beach, Calif., said at his introductory news conference. “You have such a melting pot in this country with so many different opinions and ideas floating around there. One of my challenges will be to find a way to define how a U.S. team should represent its country. What should be the style of play? It is important over the next three years, especially in the beginning, that I have a lot of conversations with people engulfed in the game here to find a way to define style. What suits us best?”

The question of style posed by Klinsmann — one of the few people with the gravitas and wherewithal to carry such a debate from his perch — isn’t simply about aesthetics. It is about empowerment.

Some Americans might think that having a “national soccer style” might seem odd (is there a “national football style”?) but other countries have such approaches. How exactly cultural values match up with soccer play would be interesting to look at in more depth. Are the explanations that the team fits the values simply post-hoc explanations? (A similar argument: the Chicago Bears and Pittsburgh Steelers play a particular style of football – tough, good defense, hard running, etc. – because of the industrial cities in which they started.) I suspect a “national style” works because it is meaningful and traditional (and perhaps successful), rather than necessarily more true than other possible styles.

Part of the issue raised by Klinsman (and hinted at in this article) is the culture of US soccer that seems to privilege a particular path related to race and social class: going to expensive sports academies as teenagers and then going to college. Few, if any, other countries follow this route. This is a structural issue: how could the path to playing for the USMNT be altered to open it up to more players, particularly those who can’t afford or don’t want to pursue the “typical” route? As Malcolm Gladwell suggests in Outliers, these certain structural advantages help some and not others.

A lot is being asked of Klinsman and cultural changes are difficult to make. But it sounds like Klinsman has some ideas about what to do and US soccer seems to be at a point where people realize it needs to take “the next step.” It will be interesting to watch how the Klinsman sociological experiment goes.