Jan 27

Anonymous Genius: Fighting elitism with sexism and racism

By Beau Dure genius, sports culture 1 Comment »

I went to Duke, but I get it. The country is tired of hearing about how great it is. Ever since the back-to-back titles in ’91 and ’92, they’ve been overexposed and at times overrated. Plenty of reasons to get a little irritated.

Then there’s this from “RealTalkIowa,” the latest nominee in our “Anonymous Genius” series:

Must be the fat chicks and little Asian kids are spending too much time at the library.

Maybe this is why the Duke atmosphere is thought to be fading. Dukies used to be mean! I mean — they threw Twinkies on the court when Dennis Scott was introduced! Coach K went scrambling over to apologize to Bobby Cremins.

But when it comes to sheer obnoxious hostility, Duke simply can’t compete with the Anonymous Geniuses of the Web. Those days are gone.

For the record — Duke is just getting harder and harder to get into, and out of an undergrad population of 6,000 or so, it’s no longer realistic to expect 20% of them to find the time to camp out.

Fabled Cameron Crazies succumbing to Cameron monotony at Duke – NCAA Division I Mens Basketball – CBSSports.com News, Scores, Stats, Schedule and RPI Rankings.

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Jan 24

Questioning the place of sports in college: Drop football, save academics?

By Beau Dure sports culture 2 Comments »

A Chicago-area junior college has dropped its football program. Sad day for student-athletes? A tale of Title IX excess? No, says the Chicago Tribune‘s John Keilman (listed as “reporter” though this is clearly an op-ed).

I think a lot of bigger schools would be well-advised to study Harper’s sensible example. What would they discover if they put their athletic departments under a similar microscope? Do their teams really add to the educational experience? Or have they drifted into isolated orbits, estranged from their schools’ true purpose?

I have a feeling that if other colleges and universities had the courage to act on what they found, America would have a lot more empty football fields.

So on one hand, we’re being told that sports — particularly women’s sports — cultivate a sense of belonging and empowerment that go hand in hand with learning and developing our full potential. And yet a football team at a junior college somehow ruins that school’s educational mission?

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Jan 22

How education helps athletes

By Beau Dure soccer, sports culture No Comments »

Monica Gonzalez wasn’t writing specifically about high school and college soccer here, but she makes an argument here that bolsters the notion of keeping the USA’s “school and soccer” combination alive:

Education affects sports performance. Think of it as a gym for the mind. Sitting through classes hones concentration. Incorporating studies into life trains discipline and focus. And studying for finals prepares one for stress and pressure. Every player on Canada and the U.S. has either finished college or will soon. I can say the same for only half of the Mexican womens team. Even fewer on the Mexican mens team, but dont get me started on them. Boys are forced to quit school to enter fuerzas basicas, which is the pro system. It is a flaw on the Mexican mens side, but thats another article for another day.

via Monica Gonzalez: CONCACAF must close the disparity gap – espnW.

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Jan 19

The war on nonrevenue sports, ctd

By Beau Dure sports culture 1 Comment »

The argument as laid out in Sports Illustrated:

1. There’s a lot of money flowing into big-time college sports.

2. They should give some of that money away toward charitable causes.

3. But wait, many athletic departments are actually losing money. So …

“The first obligation is to restore fiscal sanity by using [the savings in salary] to plug that hole,” says Zimbalist, who also proposes reducing the number of football scholarships, having FBS schools cut spending on nonrevenue sports and instituting an NCAA football playoff.

The Zimbalist here is Andrew Zimbalist, a Smith College professor who has done pretty much all there is to do in sports economics, from research on Ken Burns’s odes to baseball to a Title IX analysis with advocate Nancy Hogshead-Makar.

(I do have to mention that Zimbalist appears in Long-Range Goals, testifying on behalf of MLS players in their lawsuit against the league, much to the bemusement of Soccer America columnist Paul Gardner:

The players called sports economist Andrew Zimbalist to show how Division I competition could have driven up salaries. (Rhett) Harty’s 1996 salary, to give one example, would’ve been $115,275 instead of $41,356. Gardner was unimpressed: “For an entire session, this totally fictitious exercise dragged on, as the good Professor Zimbalist revealed charts and calculations to ‘prove’ what must have happened had a whole series of improbable conditions existed. They never did exist.”)

In the case of college sports, Zimbalist certainly understands the issue. It’s just curious to see him and SI‘s Alexander Wolff tossing aside nonrevenue sports as collateral damage.

But that’s not the first time we’ve seen such a suggestion from SI. Or elsewhere.

So if you believe in college soccer, swimming, track, volleyball, wrestling, lacrosse, tennis, golf, etc., you might want to start speaking up.

(The first “war on nonrevenue sports” post is here. I’ll start tagging them from now on. Not that I’m hoping for more.)

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Jan 16

Questioning the place of sports in college: Character

By Beau Dure sports culture No Comments »

Forget about the BCS for a moment. Forget Title IX. Forget conference re-alignment. In the post-Penn State scandal world, we’re seeing something that runs far deeper: People who aren’t sure colleges should be in the sports business at all.

They’re popping up a bit more at the Washington Post’s education page, where Jay Mathews bemoans the greater attention paid to the BCS than to a study showing a lack of analytical skills among college students. (Frankly, he should take that issue up with his editors rather than his readers.)

And The Chronicle of Higher Education has taken up the topic, today with a lengthy take on whether sports build character:

Do Sports Build Character or Damage It? – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The piece hints at something I had drilled in my head by my father, a philosophy major and high school QB who went on to become a biochemist: Ancient Greeks believed strongly in developing mind and body. But the writer has a different take here, calling on Plato to bolster the argument that sports help warriors find an outlet for their aggression when they’re not at war.

In a civilization that doesn’t send many people to war (no disrepect to Iraq and Afghanistan vets — their numbers are simply far smaller than the entire generation sent to WWII), that argument suggest that we don’t need quite as many athletes. Maybe we should all be re-training our brains for gentler pursuits like deconstructing 19th century’s women’s literature through the lens of 17th century patriarchal hegemonic archetypes for a post-structuralist buzzwordist obscure-termist discourse, or whatever English departments are doing now while the entire country forgets how to speak English. But I digress.

It’s a funny coincidence — some might call it “ironic” — that people are questioning the idea of sports as character development while Title IX enforcers give a hard sell on the notion that sports are good for women. But it’s not such a bad idea to stop and take stock while the sports landscape is rapidly changing.

And while most questions on sports lead back to football, the most violent and warlike (but also the most complex) of our sports, we can’t forget how much these questions apply across the board. Grantland had a story this week about concussions in football, saying the risk in football was far more than the second-placed sport. But that second most dangerous sport was one that may surprise parents. It’s girls’ soccer.

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Jan 12

Title IX: Would it ever collapse under its own weight?

By Beau Dure sports culture 1 Comment »

Many thanks to the folks organizing the NCAA convention for streaming today’s session on Title IX.

If only it weren’t so depressing.

Sure, this wasn’t some rah-rah session to cheer about how much progress women have made in American sports, progress that shouldn’t be taken for granted. The target audience was athletic department types who have to make sure their schools are compliant.

And the middle segment was a topic that’s not going to be pleasant under any circumstances — sexual violence and what universities need to do not just to prevent it but help victims. Hearing some of the examples of what victims can face is just heart-rending.

The more mundane details were just overwhelming. If I were a compliance officer, I would have walked out of that meeting with an overriding sense of hopelessness. (Granted, I might have walked into that meeting with the same feeling.)

We know the basic issues — as colleges skew more female, it’ll be tougher for schools to meet strict proportionality. North Carolina has one of the best women’s sports programs in the country, but the student body is more than majority female, so it’s not likely to meet proportionality as long as it keeps up a football team. The next two tests are more nebulous.

So what did we learn in this session? Well, for one thing, “lack of facilities is not a defense.” They didn’t go into detail on that point, but I’m wondering where the line would be drawn. If you have enough people who want to play tennis, do you need a tennis facility? A competition-quality pool if you have a demand for swimming? Maybe a velodrome for track cyclists?

Well, maybe not. The one thing that I learned from the session that made me think athletic departments are going to survive is that sports don’t need to be added unless they have enough students who are not only interested but reasonably capable of competing at a varsity level.

And yet we have enough giant rowing teams with marginally interested athletes that they actually joked about them in the presentation.

So it seems like something’s gotta give. That, they didn’t talk about.

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Nov 13

When a shocking event hits you at home

By Beau Dure sports culture No Comments »

Terrific read here: A Penn State alumna on a community’s heartbreak – espnW

I’ve had a few misgivings about the reactions in all directions on the Penn State saga. Those who actually rioted — a small percentage of Penn State students and community members but still a substantial group — are going to regret it. (Imagine a job interview in which an employer recognizes the dude who celebrated on top of the toppled news van.) But I’m equally skeptical of the piling-on against Penn State as an institution.

Two reasons for the misgivings:

1. I distrust howling mobs in general.One reason I love The Simpsons is that the show has done such a good job in so many situations skewering our tendency to get irrational at the drop of a hat.

Even if many people have good intentions, they end up fueling those who don’t. And you simply cannot have a rational conversation with someone who is caught up in it.

2. I’ve been through this. You know my school? Duke? Right. First, we were the evil Southern country-club school that looked the other way while our lacrosse team did everything up to and including rape. Then, when it turned out the rape story was fabricated, we were the bastion of political correctness that threw everyone under the bus so the African-American Studies department wouldn’t get offended. A couple of writers turned the latter into a nice little cottage industry.

But you don’t have to go through such a thing to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Picture the most admirable person in your community or someone you admire in the world at large, perhaps even a member of your family. Now suppose you’ve just learned about that person what we’ve learned in the past couple of weeks about Joe Paterno. You may be angry, yes. But you’ll also be shocked. And saddened. In some cases, you may not even want to believe the worst, clinging to any shred of exonerating evidence. (In the Penn State case, that would be the notion that Paterno only heard part of the story and didn’t realize how serious it was.)

When you walk that mile in someone else’s shoes, you still won’t be ready to forgive a decade of inaction among a handful of people. You’ll still scoff at Mr. Celebrating On Overturned News Van Guy.

But you’ll also be a little less inclined to pile on everyone at Penn State. The players. The fans who wore blue to yesterday’s game. The alumni who are more than 60% of the way to an ambitious goal of raising $500,000 for sex abuse-survior support group RAINN.

And you might even remember that coming to terms with what happened at Penn State will require a calm, patient investigation. Engaging in a contest to see how loudly you can denounce everything at Penn State won’t help a single abuse victim.

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Nov 11

Student-athletes: Going on the endangered list?

By Beau Dure sports culture 1 Comment »

So BYU is flirting with the Big East, Boise State may go anywhere, the SEC is adding teams that aren’t “Southeast” in any sense, and the Pac-12 is looking farther and farther inland. I’m still waiting for the University of Heidelberg to join the ACC.

The driving forces here are: football, TV, football, money, football, men’s basketball, money and football.

Then there’s Topic B in college sports: Whether to pay players a stipend or a little extra.

Not considered in these discussions: The existence of sports beyond football or men’s basketball. Even men’s basketball is hardly considered — it’s a factor in the ACC’s raids on the Big East but not much else. The current ESPN magazine has a stark claim on its cover: Superconferences will be very bad for college basketball. (Disclaimer: I do a good bit of freelance work for espnW.)

Football is unique among college sports, of course. For one thing, it’s difficult to have the marching band do a halftime show at a water polo game. (Surely Stanford’s band has tried.)

The two biggest considerations with football: It’s college sports’ biggest revenue-generator AND biggest expense sink. Check the numbers on college sports, and you’ll see that football is a gamble. From a financial point of view, schools can win big … or lose.

The “superconference” movement raises that stakes. Yes, there’s a lot of TV money on the table. But the expenses will creep up as well.

What the media have not noticed is that those expenses will be much worse for the nonrevenue sports. It’s one thing for Boise State to take its football team to South Florida for a Saturday football game. It’s another thing for Boise State to plan its conference travel for volleyball or softball. Midweek cross-country travel every week? That’ll be great for “student-athletes,” right? Especially the ones playing sports that don’t have professional futures.

ESPN’s story mentions the problem:

So it may be great for Syracuse’s football team to leave the poorly monetized Big East, but now its men’s basketball team has to fly once a week, if not more, to Miami and various spots in North Carolina to play. Its travel budget will balloon. Syracuse, like many schools in large conferences, will come to rely even more on football to provide for its other sports. The more money football doles out, the more power it wields.

Now suppose the “pay the players” movement gains momentum. Again, everything becomes more expensive.

Now suppose we have a downturn in a superconference’s TV revenue. It could happen. Bubbles burst.

We’d have athletic departments looking at red ink. What do you suppose will get cut?  Probably not the football teams.

The great blog tracksuperfan.com has rounded up a few of the reasons for alarm, including George Dohrman’s thoughtful, thoroughly researched SI piece this week exploring a few options to pay players while making the whole operation viable. One option in that SI piece: Make a lot of the nonrevenue sports “club” rather than varsity.

In a way, the “club” idea brings sports back into the realm of normal college activity, and getting out from the NCAA’s umbrella is tempting. In another way, it’s brutally unfair to nonrevenue sports, particularly when other options are saner. And it means you’ll have Olympic athletes holding bake sales so they can take one flight to a national championship.

Already, nonrevenue sports’ spring seasons – a small attempt to give soccer players and company something beyond their absurdly short fall season — are under attack. For soccer players, this is particularly galling. They could lose their poorly publicized spring games, but they’re expected to leave their summer amateur teams in early August to get back to “school” before the dorms even open? That’s more cost-effective? Better for the players? How?

SI’s piece has a rather chilling quote in bold type: COLLEGE SPORTS IS FULL OF TEAMS THE MARKET DOESN’T SUPPORT, YET THEY GET FUNDED.

Before we leap into Ayn Rand’s America, let me make this counterargument: The value of college sports to a school goes far beyond tangible revenue. If we reduce college sports to NFL and NBA development leagues with everything else puttering around at the “club” level, what’s the point?

(Technically, because of Title IX and the SI piece’s suggestion that schools should just focus on strict proportionality so they’d be able to cut sports without violating Prongs 2 and 3, we’d have football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and a 65-member women’s rowing team. But let’s not digress down that road just yet.)

Take a look at the 2010-11 standings for the Directors’ Cup (long associated with my former employer and frequent freelance client, USA TODAY) and the newer Capital One Cup. Look at these schools. Stanford. Cal. Notre Dame. Duke. North Carolina. Virginia. Northwestern. Michigan. Lots of good schools. (Yes, Duke gave me two degrees, but it’s still a good school.) Even a non-scholarship Ivy League school such as Princeton can check into the top 40 ahead of a lot of the schools that can fill their swimming pools with football money.

From the Greek academy to the Bay Area, sports have been part of student life. It’s a big selling point for a lot of schools. Hyperachievers like to hang out with hyperachievers.

Does “the market” support that? No more so or less so than it supports the marching band, the art museum, the library’s updated card catalog system or the people who clean up the statue of John Q. Schoolfounder when he’s TP’d after homecoming.

So let’s toss out a few ideas:

- Football conferences are simply different entities than basketball conferences, lacrosse conferences, soccer conferences and so forth. Let football conferences go national while the other sports stay regional.

- Figure out a way to trim a few athletes off those giant rowing teams without falling out of compliance with Title IX. Maybe put a few more of those athletes on the teams in, say, swimming, track and other sports that actually have millions of high school athletes from whom to choose.

- If football is going to be the rainmaker for the rest of the athletic department, fine. Beef up the minimum support given to other sports. Let it be the rainmaker.

- Ease up on additional financial aid for needy athletes. But don’t pretend it’s some problem that’s unique to athletes. I knew plenty of people who had trouble paying for a holiday flight home in school. The fourth-string tight end shares some problems with the band’s second-chair tuba player.

Whatever the solutions, the sports that don’t rake in money should be part of the discussion. And part of the schools.

Sep 15

The Atlantic, the NCAA and the wrong discussion

By Beau Dure sports culture 1 Comment »

By now, you’ve probably seen at least three of your friends Tweet or share The Atlantic’s sprawling expose, The Shame of College Sports.

My question: Was anyone else disappointed? Is anyone else worried that the wrong issues are emphasized?

A lot of effort went into reporting this story, and it touches on several issues that rarely see the light of day. The NCAA comes across as a petty organization, consumed with power, that aims to destroy the careers of anyone who dares to question nonsensical rules. The cases are shocking and should be fodder for follow-up discussion.

But reporter Taylor Branch digresses from this damning expose to pontificate about amateurism and offer simplistic solutions for paying players. And in doing so, he doesn’t address the fact that most schools with football programs actually are NOT making money on sports, and many of them are losing money on football alone. See for yourself. And it doesn’t help that the bowl system is a gravy train for all the wrong people.

So most schools’ athletic departments are accomplishing two things. First, they’re enhancing the prestige of the school, giving students more reason to attend and alumni more reason to donate. My alma mater’s rise to national prominence came partly through a slow-moving movement to enhance and advertise its academic stature, but the 1986 Final Four team of Dawkins, Bilas, Alarie and company turned that slow growth into an outright boom.

Second, they’re fulfilling that Greek ideal of developing mind and body. Or, more simply, offering students activities through which they can be well-rounded. A swim team is like an orchestra — it won’t generate much direct revenue, but it’s a part of the school’s student life. And the occasional rare talent may go on to make a living at it.

So before we can call football players slaves — a suggestion Branch dismisses and then uses anyway — we have to bear in mind a couple of things. The money from jersey sales (as an aside: I was told in my college days that schools couldn’t sell jerseys that *named* a player — is that no longer true) does more than fill coaches’ and administrators’ pockets. And while those coaches may be overpaid, their work enhances a player’s earning ability down the road. If they’re excelling on a college playing field so much so that they’re selling merchandise by the ton, they’re likely in that 1-2 percent of people who’ll reap pro benefits down the road.

All that said, Ed O’Bannon’s suit is interesting. Once a player has completed college eligibility, shouldn’t he be allowed to trade his fame for modest fortune? Perhaps so.

And paying college players, frankly, would be less of an issue if other people paid them. What is the harm to the game if Lauren Cheney takes her bonus money from winning the 2008 Olympics and returns to the UCLA soccer team? If a collegiate golfer wins the U.S. Open, what’s the point of returning the money?

Sponsorships are trickier. If Nike and adidas start sponsoring college players, the divide between “Nike schools” and “adidas schools” will just get wider. But if the school doesn’t gain a recruiting edge from, say, a basketball player endorsing Starbucks, then why not allow it?

Those are the real issues of “shamateurism.” The NCAA is full of counterproductive rules, and woe be to the college tutor or student-athlete who questions them. Might be nice to see a follow-up that focuses more on that aspect and less on questions of slavery.

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Jul 28

MLS All-Stars, overreaction and reaction

By Beau Dure soccer, sports culture No Comments »

Hysterical overreaction is as much a part of the Internet as inappropriate photos and conspiracy theories.

Given that, I’m a little surprised I haven’t heard today from the dude who kept Tweeting at me last week about MLS “fixing” games by playing reserves in the second half … of friendlies. Oh no, it couldn’t be a prudent decision to rest starters and give reserves some experience in a game that won’t count in the standings. It’s a crime.

The Internet is noisy. After any event that draws hype, many people will sound off. And just as the UFC survives to fight another day when a main event is disappointing, so too will MLS survive a round of friendlies in which European elites have basically wiped the field with indifferent, inexperienced or inferior teams.

All that said, MLS fans and the blogopundits are well within their rights to look at last night’s game and ask whether the league has any players capable of hitting the broad side of a barn from the penalty spot.

The league has already set a record for scoreless ties, and it’s not even August, as Steve Davis laments in a sound analysis. Then last night, the MLS All-Stars laid a goose egg.

Yes, Manchester United is one of the world’s best teams, and yes, they’re clearly taking this U.S. tour more seriously than many teams have taken it in the past. Their attacking flair was brilliant last night, and it’s hard to begrudge an All-Star team that never practices together the four goals it conceded to Rooney, Berbatov et al.

Yet United gave the All-Stars plenty of space, appropriately enough for a friendly. No one’s getting “stuck in” on a challenge in a game like this. (Jamison Olave left with an injury, but it wasn’t caused by contact.) The All-Stars, though unfamiliar with each other, completed 86% of their passes and managed 13 shots, two more than a well-oiled Man U machine. Goals? Zero. And it’s not as if Man U’s two keepers had to dig deep to keep the All-Stars at bay.

Can we prove anything from one game? No. Is it one more sad piece of evidence to the well-supported theory that MLS players can knock the ball around all day, just as they do in those ubiquitous possession drills, but can’t put the ball in the net? Certainly looks that way.

And fans have every right to say, while supporting the league in near-record numbers, that GMs should be looking for goal-scorers and coaches should be devoting a bit more time to finishing drills rather than possession exercises.

That’s not an overreaction to one game. The All-Star Game isn’t even the last straw. It’s just a well-publicized example of a legitimate problem. The result – Manchester United winning — doesn’t matter. Overreacting to the game is silly. Reacting is not.

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