Former agent Josh Luchs talks to Sports Illustrated about paying college football players in the hopes that they would select him as their agent.
How many other stories like this are out there to be told? Are Division 1 college football and basketball, with all their various scandals (Reggie Bush being the latest major example), just a complete cesspool? And then the next question: how much do college and universities know about this and try to seriously deal with it?
It was recently reported that English Premier League teams earn about $155 million a year from the sponsorships on their uniforms. How much longer before American sports leagues follow suit and try to benefit from such a ready-made revenue stream?
Comments made by LeBron James several days ago are drawing attention. James suggested in an interview with CNN that race played a role in people’s reaction to his choice to play with the Miami Heat. A commentator at Salon suggests that James is just stating the obvious:
Now, the Aggrieved White Guy funnels rage to the comment boards, as LeBron is shredded for this latest transgression of truth. While many pundits white and black want to pretend that ego alone stoked this bubbling hate cauldron, Henry Abbott, who presides over ESPN’s network of NBA blogs, noticed a unique phenomenon:
“It is literally the strangest thing I have ever seen NBA fans do. If you look at most NBA stories online, there will be some comments on each that are either racist, coded racism, or in line with racist thinking. On the night of LeBron’s decision, those kinds of hateful comments — whether hateful or not — became the dominant narrative, which blew my mind.”
Fans were uniquely angry at James for showing up a mostly white NBA power structure. His race played a role, how could it not? And if you’re still mad at LeBron, if you’re screaming at him for pointing this out, I don’t think his “ego” is what irks you.
It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out. The Q ratings demonstrated that blacks and whites have different opinions about James.
Several things to note about this argument in Salon: it is partly based on evidence from Internet message boards (where people seem willing to say all sorts of things they wouldn’t say in-person) and it provides a typical defense of “the Aggrieved White Guy” who claims he didn’t bring up race at all. On the whole, such discussions need to acknowledge the larger issue: we live in a racialized society where both overt and covert racism take place and have large social consequences.
As I was driving to work the other day, I had a thought about two “rights” that I had recently heard people defend. The first came in a radio discussion about sexist comments made regarding a female sports reporter from Mexico by New York Jets. In the defense of this female reporter, another female reporter said on the air that fans had a “right” to hear comments from players right after the game rather than having to wait for post-game comments in some media area.
The second example comes from the yearly discussions about whether burning leaves is appropriate and the “right” of an individual homeowner. As far as I understand, our community has decided that burning leaves can be done as long as certain guidelines are followed.
Thinking quickly about these two examples, they both strike me as quite American: the right to sports news and the right to remove leaves by burning. But perhaps using the language of “rights” in instances like these makes the conversation about real rights we value in America, typically considered the ones written in the Bill of Rights (and its subsequent amendments), more difficult.
I’ve watched many sporting events in my lifetime. National broadcasts of the major four sports are somewhat different than local broadcasts: because they are for a wider audience and because they are more neutral, they emphasize broader plot lines. I believe these national broadcasters try to cast themselves as keepers of the collective understanding of their particular sports. There are three primary components to retelling and producing this collective memory: an emphasis on history, overcoming hardship, and continuity across networks.
The most obvious way this happens is through the historical overview. The common plot line: “this is not just a single game. This is another match-up in a long and engrossing history. You the viewer should pay more attention because you could be seeing history tonight.” There are often flashbacks to games or championships decades ago like Joe Namath guaranteeing a win in Super Bowl III. This history can be fun, particularly if considering how modern stars would fit in an older era or vice versa or reliving some emotional or breathtaking moments. Of course, these historical overviews and comparisons may have nothing to do with the current team but they imbue the current game with a sense of meaning. This can quickly turn into unnecessary sentimentalizing.
The emphasis is typically on how the teams involved have overcome hardship. These narratives like nothing better than the team that has risen from the pits of the league to be on top. Teams that have received this treatment in recent: the Tampa Bay Rays, the Chicago Blackhawks, the New Orleans Saints, the Boston Celtics. This return to the top is cast in heroic terms as players and coaches successfully battled all the odds. This heroism can be over the top and result in the sportscasters making hyperbolic claims about the power of sports. Returning to the New Orleans Saints: there is no doubt the team overcame difficulties but to suggest the team has been vital in helping to revive the city after Hurricane Katrina is a much more difficult argument to prove.
It is remarkable to see how consistent these messages can be across networks and broadcasters. It is like they have a common storyline vault that they all share and tweak a little bit in each broadcast. If you watch enough national broadcasts, you have heard all the main stories: how remarkable so and so is, how this franchise has survived or has had difficulty winning the big game, how great the hustle of the role player is. Part of the problem with this is it leads to blandness – who has new insights? Why not focus more on the game at hand? They also may be repeating hard to prove stories: is Mariano Rivera really key to the success of the Yankees (even as statistics suggest closers are not as valuable as other position players)
With these tactics, national broadcasts build a collective understanding of each sport. This understanding is difficult to reverse or steer in a new direction.
My wife and I were in attendance at the Cubs final home game yesterday, an 8-7 loss at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals. Some thoughts on watching a fifth place team on a chilly day in late September:
1. It was still fun to be at Wrigley Field. Despite the chilly weather, there was still a good crowd (though nowhere near the 38,000 announced). The baseball game was interesting as the Cubs rallied late to close within one run but the Cardinals escaped.
1a. Even athletic events with bad teams can be entertaining: we saw lots of walks and runs. One thing that keeps me going through a 162-game baseball season is the possibility of seeing something new/extraordinary/odd.
2. And yet there was a wistfulness in the air: another Cubs season has gone by the wayside. The energy of having new owners has worn off. The buzz from the 2007 and 2008 teams making the playoffs has worn off. The rosters for both teams, particularly the Cubs pitching staff, were full of Triple-A players. In contrast to the optimism of Opening Day and April (where it can also be chilly and grey), there was no optimism here.
2a. I admit that I have not kept up with the Cubs in recent months. Part of this is due to being busy at work but it is mostly due to the team being out of contention for a long time. It was good to reconnect for an afternoon and think about what the 2011 Cubs might look like.
2b. If the 2009 season wasn’t enough to convince people that the Cubs are not a consistent contending team (which was the thought after the 2007 and 2008 season), this 2010 should be proof. The 2011 Cubs will be young and they need to start over agin.
3. There were quite a few Cardinals fans in the stands. I think one side effect of websites like StubHub is it means more fans from more places can buy tickets to games rather than having to make a long drive and hope you can get decent tickets. In games that I have been to this year in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Chicago, there has been a decent amount of fans from the opposing team. (This might also be due to the mobility of the American people – there might legitimately be a decent number of Dodgers fans living in Atlanta these days.) Even though there was some back and forth between the fans (like when Albert Pujols was intentionally walked twice or the Cubs were making a comeback), the Cardinals fans weren’t too energetic as well.
After making “The Decision” to join the Miami Heat, LeBron James has suffered a backlash from many fans and pundits. This backlash has led to a lower “Q score,” a rating that compares the public’s favorable versus unfavorable image of a public figure.
However, how much his Q score dropped is dependent on race: overall, whites were moved more to think negatively about LeBron after what happened this summer. Henry Abbott at Truehoop argues that something deeper, fear, might explain why whites reacted as they did. Also at ESPN, Vincent Thomas argues that James’ relatively unchanged Q scores among blacks is the result of “black protectionism.”
The Wall Street Journal decided to examine the majors of “major-college” college football players (though the same story says the sample is “BCS week-one football starters”). The top two majors are business and sociology:
Only six of the 1,104 players whose majors we found were interested in art, music or film, but sociology-related topics (134 majors) and business (155) piqued their interest. An additional 108 students are majoring in a communications-related field, while only two apiece are studying architecture and mathematics. English, one of the more common majors among all college students, drew only four football players—two more than the number of players majoring in zoology. And only one player, Oregon’s Mark Asper, is studying Spanish, the lone foreign language major we found.
Some results were expected—79 players are majoring in athletics and health-related fields—but there were some rarities like fisheries and wildlife (Curtis Hughes, Minnesota) and recreation and leisure studies (Luke Stocker, Tennessee). Some majors seemed extra popular at specific schools, like the 16 starters at Georgia Tech who are majoring in management. (A team spokesman says it’s not easier than other majors, it’s just “really popular.”)
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this count is somewhat representative of college football players. Three questions come to mind:
1. So are the top majors on this list considered easier by many players? I wonder what the colleges would say about this.
2. How many players end up in a career (after they stop playing football) related to/close to their major?
3. Considering some of the concerns about graduation rates at BCS schools, I want to know whether certain majors of football players have a higher proportion of players who don’t complete their degree.
The Toronto Blue Jays may be the forerunners of a new trend: including personal information in the scouting of umpires and officials by sports teams. Here is the rationale behind the gathering of personal information:
It’s not meant to curry favor or influence calls but rather to humanize the umpires. In fact, veteran Toronto catcher John Buck, who says he had already gotten to know most of them during his six seasons with the Royals, says he makes a conscious effort to be personable but professional with the umpires…
Of course, what’s most pertinent is the research on each umpire’s tendencies. One such report included a head shot, a short bio with age, education and hometown, and the strike-zone traits for each umpire working a particular series.
I could see this catching on – as the Blue Jays suggest, this is an information age and it would be easy to compile reports about all officials.
However, baseball umpires have always held positions very distinct from players and coaches. How would they respond to these efforts by teams to humanize them? For officials in all sports, couldn’t this humanization be seen as a threat to their partiality?
Hampton Stevens discusses the frequent dismissal of football by intellectuals (like those who believe “the game is a malevolent force in American life”) and how one might defend the game.
Stevens points out two common objections: the games don’t really matter compared to more important things and that it is violent. In response, Stevens argues that “Sports are a refuge from real-world problems—and a place to release all the angst they cause” and “Football tells us that violence can be beautiful when performed for the sake of a greater good.”
To me, all the four points, two from intellectuals, two from Stevens, sound reasonable. To be a real fan doesn’t mean that one can’t point out some of the issues with football. A dividing line for me would be when fandom moves beyond an occasional escape from the real world and becomes an obstacle to accomplishing important things in life. Similarly, football may be a good outlet for violence but going so far as to glorify this sort of behavior as the only true form of masculinity is shortsighted.
Legally Sociable 