Bowl Mania: Finding a Cure

When I was a freshman in high school, I had one goal for my winter break. I wanted to watch at least one quarter of each bowl game played that season. The games meant something to me and I was making a commitment to make sure I was able to watch at least a portion of each one. Making the task somewhat easier than it would be today was the fact that there weren’t 35 bowl games in 1993. However, New Year’s Day was still the official end of Bowl Season so there were quite a few games on that day. That and I was fighting with two younger brothers who didn’t necessarily share my goal and had other things they wanted to watch.

 No, I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, why do you ask?

The games were meaningful. They were larger-than-life in the way that things your passionate about in high school take on added significance. I loved the bowl games and the pageantry that went along with them. Seeing teams from different conferences and different styles clash on a neutral field to see who was better was the highlight of my sports year. At least, I thought they were meaningful.

In reality they were probably just as meaningless as they are today. And make no mistake, they are meaningless exhibitions played to line the pockets of the men and women who run the bowl games. Sure, teams (and as a result, their conferences) get a payout for playing in a bowl. But after you subtract mandatory ticket sales, expensive hotel rooms and other expenses associated with reaching a bowl, there’s rarely, if ever, any actual financial benefit to playing in the game.

Aside from tradition, there’s literally no point in the current postseason associated with “big time” college football. It’s the only sport sponsored by the NCAA that turns its postseason over to outside entities that have no interest in determining a champion, but instead have nothing but a profit motive for the games. Aside from the BCS Championship game, teams aren’t selected for bowls based on their records or how deserving they are. No, they’re selected based on how many tickets they can sell and how much cold hard cash those fans can bring in. If your team “travels well,” you may get picked to go to a more prestigious game even if your record isn’t as good as that of another team in your conference that has a smaller fan base.

Even coaches, who spend their careers getting kids to buy in to their program with words like “unity” or “family” know bowl games are a charade. Otherwise, so many of them wouldn’t leave their team for a better job before the end of their season. Fans rightly rip Bobby Petrino for leaving the Atlanta Falcons with three games left in their regular season to take a college job and should rip Bobby Knight for retiring mid-season from Texas Tech for no other reason than to have his son take over the job. Players who quit on their team are derided. Coaches who quit on their team after the regular season but before the bowl games are greeted with a “meh, whatever.”

Take Western Kentucky’s Willie Taggart. After leading the team to its first bowl spot in team history, did he stick around to finish out the season? Nope. Less than a week after leading his alma mater to the Little Caesar’s Bowl (joke all you want, a bowl’s a bowl), he’s jumping ship for the University of South Florida that went 3-9 this season. I’m sure the job comes with a significant pay raise and I certainly don’t begrudge anyone for wanting to change jobs. But don’t spend all season telling your players that they’re family and you’re there for them and then leave before the biggest game in the schools FBS history. If the game were truly important, Taggart would still be at WKU to finish out his now-former team’s season. (I’ll leave it to WKU fans to debate if the Little Caesar’s Bowl is more or less meaningful than the three 1-AA National Championship games the Hilltoppers have played in.)

I’ll still probably watch some of the bowl games (though this year’s slate is decidedly uninspiring, even if the teams actually had an incentive to play.) But I won’t make the mistake of believing there’s any importance beyond ratings and tickets sold. For actual meaningful football, there’s the playoffs in the FCS (formerly, and still to me, 1-AA), Division II and Division III playoffs. 

Hatred trying to hide your fears

There are few things that really, truly offend me. Rarely do I find a joke “too soon,” foul language, while it really bothers my wife, doesn’t really faze me. I very seldom use it, but don’t really care if other people do. And I really don’t care what the outrage of the day is on cable news. If anything, the manner in which cable news operates offends me.

But if there’s one thing that I truly can’t tolerate is racism. Abraham Heschel said “racism is man’s gravest threat to man – the maximum of hated for the minimum of reason.” The idea that you can spend your life feeling superior to a fellow human being simply because of the pigmentation of their skin is a viewpoint I truly can’t comprehend.  I don't know what causes a person to become so fearful of other races that their fear turns to hate. Life’s too short to fill it with prejudice and scorn. 

 I’m not naïve enough to believe that in 2012 we’ve eliminated racism from our society. While we’ve made great strides from the overt racism of previous generations that were socially acceptable, there are still hurdles to overcome. The racism of today is much more subtle. How often do you hear a Caucasian described as “well spoken” as compared to the number of times an African-American is described in that way. In the sports arena, Caucasians are more likely to be described as “intelligent” or “scrappy” while African-Americans have words like “athletic” attached to them. It may not have the vitriol of what Jackie Robinson faced, but the underlying assumptions and beliefs are no different.

So when I checked facebook the morning after the election, I expected to see people lamenting the end of the nation and how we’re facing 1,000 years of darkness, which I did. I also saw enough people proving they only get their news from FOX or right-wing pundits based on the talking points they were posting. That’s fine. We can’t, and shouldn’t, all agree on political issues and while I’d have preferred a little more reasoned discourse, I understand people wanting to blow off some steam after losing the election. (Clearly they didn’t read Nate Silver or they would have seen it coming.)

But what I did not expect was to see someone I went to high school with* using the “N-Word,” not just once, but twice. First in reference to President Obama winning and then, when someone called her on it, she called that person a “N----- lover.”

*Full disclosure: I have no recollection of this girl. Based on the number of facebook friends who are friends with her, we must have been in school at the same time.

And as bad as her post was (and it was horrible), the fact 11 people “liked” it is equally sickening. Why someone would want to publicly endorse such a mind-numbingly stupid comment is beyond comprehension.

A friend took the screen shot posted here and by 8:30 Wednesday night, it had been shared more than 1,000 times, which is fantastic. I’m all for publicly shaming anyone who wants to spread that kind of hatred. As I’ve said, I don’t understand how a person lives with that kind of pent up anger against a class of people based entirely on small genetic differences, but some do.

I’m only slightly less bothered by the fact that this person took down her facebook account early this afternoon as the screenshot spread. If you’re going to be a racist bigot, don’t hide from it. Own it. It’s yours. You posted it. You wanted people to see it.  Simply because people outside your pathetic little bubble don’t agree with you is no reason to conceal who you really are.

If there’s any positive to come out of this, it’s that this woman lost her job. Someone found out where she worked and posted that information. Eventually, a nearby media outlet called her employer and was informed she no longer works there.

Philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing." I may not be doing much, but by trying to bring this to light in my very small corner of the internet, I’m trying to do something. 

What Luke's Listening to

Here's my unofficial, completely subjective, likely to change list of my five favorite podcasts as of today:

5. Smart People Podcast - One I recently started listening to. It's shorter (about 30 minutes) and is two guys who, admittedly, are not smart. However, they interview smart people. Really smart people. Like people who make smart people feel like they're not smart. I particularly enjoyed their most recent episode in which they talked to Mark Malkoff, who has done such (notable?) things as watch 252 movies on Netflix in one month because he wanted to see how he could maximize his value of the $7.99 he was spending for the service. (It came out to between 12 and 17 hours a day watching movies). He also visited and purchased something from each of the 171 Starbucks in Manhattan, just because he could.

4. The Baseball Show with Rany and Joe - This is exactly what it sounds like. A guy named Rany and a guy named Joe talking about baseball. However, these two guys were among the founders of Baseball Prospectus, a website that examines (and in many cases, creates) advanced statistics to better understand baseball. I can't say this is a podcast I'd recommend for a casual baseball fan, but for someone who wants to understand finer points of the game and how it's evaluated, it's certainly a must listen. This one tends to run an hour or more, with their recent playoff and World Series episodes going more than 90 minutes. Sometimes they delve a bit too much into the minutia of the game (I really didn't need a 10 minute tangent on the value of David Eckstein to the St. Louis Cardinals in 2007), but any time you can get two smart people debating a topic, you're bound to learn something.

3. Baseball Today (Tues-Thurs. editions) - While The Baseball Show with Rany and Joe take the time to dig deep into the game, Baseball Today just just what you'd expect a podcast with that name to do. It looks at the game on a day-to-day basis, recapping games from the night before, previewing that day's slate of games and analyzing/interpreting what we've seen so far in the season. I specify the Tuesday-Thursday editions because that's when Keith Law is on. He's among the best at making advanced statistical analysis make sense to someone who doesn't understand all the math that goes in to some of the equations. Host Eric Karabell's enthusiasm is evident and he really seems to enjoy doing the show. It's usually about 40-50 minutes long.

2. Fantasy Focus (Baseball and, to a lesser extent, football) -  The 12th most popular popular fantasy podcast (according to their theme song), the three-time award winning podcast is a blend of fantasy analysis and nonsense. The show has spawned both nateisaweasel.com and the counterwebsite nateisnotaweasel.com It runs anywhere from 25 minutes (when they do both football and baseball podcast, typically mid-August through September) to a little more than an hour (Mondays and Fridays during football season.) Host Nate Ravitz (he of the is or is not a weasel website fame) and analyst Matthew Berry have excellent chemistry and seem to genuinely like each other. There are enough inside jokes that a glossary was created for new fans who want to get in on the inside jokes.

1. Slate's Hang Up and Listen - Every Monday night, I look forward to a tweet letting me know the latest episode has posted. Every Tuesday morning, I look forward to an hour of smart commentary that looks at everything from doping in cycling to the hockey lockout to how media narratives in sports color our view of what we watching. The show's format is fairly simple. Three guys talk about three different topics each week, each for between 15-20 minutes, and an "afterball" segment where each guy gets about 3 minutes to opine on whatever tickles their fancy at the moment. Typically there's at least one and sometimes two guests, usually due to the fact they need an expert on a certain topic before discussing it.

So there you have it. Not that you asked for it, but there it is.

Lost: Mortgage Lending Unit

I’ve never seen “Lost.” I need to. I want to. I hear nothing but good things about most of it, even the weird middle seasons where they kind of lost their way and were essentially killing time as the ratings continued to be high. It’s in my Netflix queue and once baseball season’s over and I have more free television time, I plan on finally seeing what all the fuss was about.

I am disappointed they never spun off the franchise like CSI or Law & Order, so in my futile effort to break in to the television business, allow me to suggest “Lost: Mortgage Lending Unit” for ABC’s next big television show. Below is the rough plot for the pilot, which may or may not be based on real life events.

The scene: a small, south Georgia college town where a husband, wife and young son recently moved back to after living in North Carolina. Rather than rent an apartment for a few months before buying a house, they are offered and accept a proposal to live with his parents. Sure, it’s not ideal, but it won’t last that long as they should be able to find a good deal on a house in the struggling housing market.

These people are not good
 at their jobs. Some would say
 they're incompetent

After a few months of looking, the couple finds a house they really like at a price that’s right in their price range. The only problem is it’s a short sale, meaning the sellers want to sell it at a small loss rather than enter into foreclosure. Sure it’ll ding the seller’s credit, but not as much as a foreclosure. Unfortunately, these kinds of sales take a while, so our couple is forced to live with his parents for a little longer than anticipated. It’s not ideal, but for the house they want, it’s probably worth a little more frustration.

The Plot Twist: The couple submits an offer in April, knowing it takes a few months for the file to make its way through the short sale process. April turns to May, which turns to June which turns… why am I telling you this, you know the order of the months of the year. Anyway, in August, with the couple and the realtors both the couple and the bank getting frustrated with the lack of movement on the sale, some slightly good news appears. By September 21, everything should be done and a signed contract accepting the offer should be ready. Again, longer than the couple wanted, but for the house they want, they’re willing to endure their living situation for a bit longer. After all, it’s the house they plan on spending the next 30 years living in.

On September 19, two days before everything was expected to be complete, the evil bank central to the ongoing conflict (named: SunTrust…. Wait, that may pose some copyright issues, how about SunRust, we’ll go with that so there’s no confusion), calls to say they’ve lost the file and if the couple wants to resubmit the paperwork, the entire process would need to start over.

Here’s where we’re asking the audience to suspend their disbelief. We have to assume that a multi-billion dollar corporation has no copy machines, no scanners and no electronic record keeping system to keep track of important stuff like, you know, social security numbers, private financial data or other sensitive information. Instead, there’s just a Manila folder somewhere in their evil lair with all that information floating around. We have to believe that despite being told that everything was good just a week ago, the file magically disappears during the day the guy/girl working on it was off. We have to believe that an institution entrusted with keeping the money of thousands (millions?) of customers can’t keep track of a file.

On second thought, maybe this is just too far-fetched of an idea to be made into a series. It’s not like something like this would ever happen, would it?

God issues statement on Tebow

HEAVEN – God held a rare press conference Sunday night to respond to complaints that the New York  Jets were unable to rally from behind to beat the Pittsburgh Steelers despite the presence of Timothy (Tim) Tebow on the Jets roster.

“Look, last year was a fluke in regards to Tebow,” said the Almighty. “I kind of got swept up in everything and decided to let it go on for longer than I should have.”

The Creator of Heaven and Earth emphasized that the Broncos, Tebow’s team last year, primarily won games due to their defense and His twisted sense of humor.

“What can I say, I liked the reactions,” God said. “On one hand, you had Tebow fans who truly believed I was on their side and wanted Denver to win. On the other hand, you had people who couldn't stand Tebow and seeing him get credit for having his only decent drive of the game come on the last one. I couldn’t lose watching you people get all worked up about it.”

Despite leading the Broncos to an overtime playoff win last season, Tebow was traded to the Jets in the offseason to make way for Peyton Manning, who many believe to be significantly better to Tebow, mostly because Manning tends to throw to his receivers rather than open patches of grass.

Tebow led the Jets to a 48-28 win in their first game behind his 11 yards rushing on five carries. However, despite 22 total yards rushing in Sunday’s game against the Steelers, the Jets fell 27-10.

“Guys, you had a fun run last year, but let’s be serious for a minute. Tebow just isn’t very good at the football,” God said. “Don’t get me wrong, his skill set was great for the college game, but that isn’t going to cut it in the NFL.”

The Lord wouldn’t get in to what was in store for Tebow and the Jets for the rest of the season, but reminded fans who may be calling for starting quarterback Mark Sanchez to be benched that Sanchez is 4-2 in the playoffs over his career, while Tebow is 1-1.

“I’m not a betting man, but if you can get odds on the Jets not winning the Super Bowl, I’d take them,” God said.