It’s been a long time since I’ve written in this space and for those of you who have opened my blog and come away disappointed in the past few months, I sincerely apologize. However, there are aspects of my life that take precedence over a blog that, while I love writing in it, I don’t get paid to write in it.
My goal here is simply to touch base on the events of the past few months and give my perspective, a task that looks almost Herculean. In the past three months, we have had the highest profile free agent in the history of the NFL, we’ve had a team with a subpar record win four games against teams with better records to claim the Super Bowl, we’ve had a relatively unexpected team claim that aforementioned free agent, we’ve had a commissioner flex his incredible muscle in ways never seen before, and we’ve seen Tim Tebow lead his team to a playoff win. The most exciting part? That was only the headlines from the last three months in the NFL.
Because I am going to be writing about a lot of different things, I thought I’d give you a little list of the topics I’m going to touch on so you know what you’re getting into:
- Bounties
- Peyton Manning
- The Denver Broncos
- The New York Giants and Tournaments
- Tim Tebow
- March Madness
- Opening Day is Almost Here!
BOUNTIES
Unfortunately, I have to start with quite possibly the ugliest story of the winter. In what I gather is an incredibly extensive report compiled by the NFL, the New Orleans Saints defensive players (at least 22-27 of them) under the direction of defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, ran a bounty system where cash bonuses were given out for big hits and additional payouts were made for “knock-out” hits or “cart-off” hits where the player that was hit had to be carted off the field. He has been suspended indefinitely and he will not have the possibility of getting his job back for a year.
Head Coach Sean Payton either knew about it and did nothing or should have known about it. General Manager Mickey Loomis also falls into that category. Payton was suspended for a year (effective April 1st) and Loomis was suspended for 8 games (starting after the conclusion of the last preseason game). The severity of their suspensions is unprecedented but before you wonder why it was so harsh, you have to remember a few key factors. First, as I said before, they either knew or they should have known. Second, they were specifically told by the NFL to cease and desist this bounty program several years ago and all evidence points to the fact that they both did nothing about it. That level of arrogance is something that leagues always despise and leagues (either professional or amateur) feel the need to remind coaches, players, and teams that nobody is above the sport. Lastly, this commissioner is serious about making the sport safer for its players. When you add all of that together, you get fines and suspensions the like of which the NFL (or any other professional league, for that matter) has never seen.
In my opinion, this is what Roger Goodell had to do. According to ESPN legal analyst Lester Munson, the NFL has been named in more than 650 lawsuits by former players who are claiming (essentially) that the league did not do enough to protect them from the dangers of playing football. Truthfully, if you look at the incidence of severe brain damage amongst former players, you realize that some of these lawsuits might have a point. One of the largest issues with regards to the lawsuits that are specifically talking about head injuries is until recently we as a society haven’t known that much about concussions. How much did the NFL really know about head injuries back in the 60’s and 70’s? That is a question that these lawsuits will have to try to answer.
In the meantime, there is nothing that the NFL and Commissioner Goodell can do about what the NFL said or did forty years ago. All they can do is control the present and the future of the league and with these penalties, Goodell has sent a powerful message. The days of the NFL being a gladiatorial league are nearing an end and the more finesse type players are succeeding more than ever.
The last step that remains to be seen in this saga is what happens to the two dozen players that were involved in this program. They will be punished but Goodell is very wisely seeking counsel from the union with regards to their punishments. If the union balks at penalties, Goodell can use that to say that he is more serious about player safety than the union is. If the union thinks the penalties are too light, then Goodell has free reign to enact even harsher punishments. His job is to protect this league and he is wielding that power and wielding it well.
PEYTON MANNING
Never in the history of the NFL has a player with as sparkling a resume as Manning’s become a free agent. The NFL’s collective bargaining agreement is set up to restrict player movement and help keep players like Manning in cities like Indianapolis (the 21st largest TV market in the country). The entire concept of the franchise tag was to give teams an extra year to negotiate a long-term contract with a star player. That’s not exactly how it’s been used and now many players view it as an insult to be tagged in the first place and yet, when a new collective bargaining agreement was being negotiated, never did the player’s union try to do away with the franchise tag. The problem is that the franchise tag isn’t a bad idea; the player gets a one year contract that is guaranteed to be the average of the top five contracts at that position and the team gets another year to work out a long term deal.
Nonetheless, the five year contract that the Colts signed with Peyton Manning a year ago caused this situation to come to a head far sooner than it usually does. Rather than pay Manning a roster bonus of $28 million, the Colts decided to cut him. As cold and ruthless and heartless as it sounds, it was the best decision for both sides. Now the Colts can move on and rebuild their franchise from the ground up starting with a new general manager, coach, and quarterback. Meanwhile, Manning is free to chase down a second Super Bowl ring with another team. After a lengthy process in which he spoke to representatives from several teams, Manning signed a five year contract with the Denver Broncos potentially worth $96 million and the obvious question that follows is whether or not he is worth that much coming off of four neck surgeries.
First and foremost, with regards to the actual surgery, his neck is not in any more jeopardy than anyone else who plays professional football. The issue is that a nerve that controls his right triceps muscles needs to regenerate so he can regain strength in that muscle group. Without that strength, he won’t be able to throw a football consistently. All I have to say is this: if he wasn’t on the right track to be able to start and play effectively in September, the Broncos would not have tied the next five years of their franchise to Manning’s wagon.
So what can he bring to the Broncos? He brings a level of football genius that few have ever brought to the field. The Broncos have a talented young core of receivers and a terrific offensive line and both will instantly become much better with Manning under center. If you remember, the Broncos are coming off of a year where they went 8-8 with a defense that was solid and at times brilliant; their offense was the problem last year and even if you figure that Manning won’t add more than 7 points a game versus Tim Tebow (and I believe he’s worth much more than that) their record last year would have been 12-4.
Peyton Manning is the greatest player ever to play the position of quarterback. I know that I wrote otherwise in this space some time ago but nobody has ever brought more to the position. Other quarterbacks have thrown for more yards, others have won more games, and others have won more Super Bowls but none have combined the physical skills with the ridiculous level of intellect that Manning has brought to the position. I am simply glad that his career didn’t end on an injury and now he has the opportunity to go out on whatever terms he wants. I’d also be lying if I said that I’m also glad that he has the chance to supplant Brett Favre in the record books.
THE DENVER BRONCOS
The Broncos? You mean that team with the college quarterback? Yep, that was the team that Manning chose and I believe that it comes down to one thing; John Elway. I gather that the two of them are friends and that they play golf occasionally but that’s not why he was a big factor. John Elway was a great quarterback, won two Super Bowls and was a lock for the Hall of Fame when he became eligible back in 2004. Most importantly, he followed that brilliant playing career with a so far successful career in the front office of an NFL franchise and I think that’s what Manning wants to do after he’s done playing. I think he wants to learn from a guy who has had success at that level because it’s far from a given. If you want an example of how former players don’t necessarily do well in the front office, look no further than Matt Millen. In the seven full seasons that he was the CEO and general manager of the Detroit Lions, they went 31-81 and made many of the worst draft picks of the decade.
The last thing that you have to remember about Elway is that he was not only an amazing athlete who probably could have gone to the Hall of Fame as a baseball player had he not chosen football (he hit .361 with 9 home runs and 50 RBI as a senior at Stanford). He is also a very smart person and he received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford. Likewise, Peyton Manning is a very smart person who finished his degree in three years at Tennessee but decided to come back for his senior season.
For anyone out there who thought he might have gone somewhere else, played for a few years and then moved straight up to the front office, I don’t think that was in Manning’s mind. Besides, who says that he has to move to the front office of whatever team he signed with? I have no doubt that he will not be a part of the Broncos front office largely because of John Elway. He’ll play in Denver for a few years and then he’ll get a job running someone else’s team after (or more likely before) he gets enshrined in Canton.
THE NEW YORK GIANTS AND TOURNAMENTS
For the second time in four years, the New York Giants came into the Super Bowl with a record significantly worse than the Patriots (four games this year versus six games worse in 2008). I could go on and on talking about the similarities between Super Bowl XLII and XLVI but there is a different point I would like to talk about. In the last five years, the Super Bowl has featured two 9 wins teams and two 10 win teams and the last two years the NFL’s biggest game has been won by a 10-6 team (Packers) and a 9-7 team (Giants). It is time to stop saying that the best team wins the Super Bowl. The best teams make the playoffs and that’s it.
The same thing can be said about the NCAA tournament; the best teams make the tournament but the best teams rarely win it anymore. I know that series are impractical when it comes to college basketball and the NFL but the fact of the matter is that if two teams play once, anything can happen but if two teams played a seven game series, it is extremely difficult for the lesser team to win.
This is one of the beauties of the BCS. In the short history of the BCS, many arguments can be made about which teams belong in the national championship game but you will never be able to say that 29% of teams had a better won-loss record than the BCS champion (9 of the other 31 teams had more wins than the Giants’ 9).
TIM TEBOW
This is one of the issues I have with the average sports fan and let me know if you’ve ever heard anything like this before: “I am a huge Tim Tebow fan so there’s nothing the Broncos can do at QB that will be better than that.”
That statement is ludicrous. There is no circumstance in which the Broncos are better off with Tebow at quarterback instead of Peyton Manning. If you watched the last few games of the season last year (as I did) you would see that defenses were starting to figure out how to play against Tim Tebow. Smother the receivers and make Tebow throw into small windows. In the last four regular season games (in which they went 1-3) the Broncos scored 13, 23, 14, and 3 points and that 23 point outburst against the Patriots would have been less had it been a closer game.
“But what about the playoff game against the Steelers?! He was 10-21 for 316 yards and two touchdowns!”
Yes, he was. And half the starting quarterbacks in the league would have been able to put up better numbers against that defense. On the final play of the game, an 80 yard strike to Demaryius Thomas, the deepest Steelers defender was less than ten yards off the line of scrimmage. Tebow simply had to lay the ball out in front of Thomas and then let him sprint the final 60 yards into history. He did play well against the Steelers but it was because the Steelers defense dared him to beat them and then NEVER ADJUSTED. Tebow burned them in the second quarter and in the second half, the Steelers didn’t change their defensive attack, a true failure on the part of the Steelers coaches.
Here’s the interesting thing; I like Tim Tebow. I’ve liked him since he was jumping in the air and throwing horrible passes as an 18 year old freshman on Florida’s national title winning team. I liked him even more the next year when he played with a reckless abandon and an enthusiasm that was very refreshing (and still is). The fact of the matter is that he is a great football player and a bad quarterback. He never should have been drafted in the first round. He should have been a third round pick who would get into the game for 5-10 snaps a game and when he’s in the game, nobody knows what is going to happen. Putting him alongside a Tom Brady (Bill Belichick was interested in Tebow) would be very interesting; much the way he was the change-of-pace QB as a freshman behind Chris Leak at Florida.
I hope that he does well with the New York Jets but I also think that the Jets’ brass underestimates the phenomenon that is Tebow-mania. While I don’t claim to be an expert, I live in the Denver metro area and experienced it first-hand last year. The fact of the matter is that John Elway and John Fox were hired after Tim Tebow was drafted and he wasn’t the type of QB that the Johns wanted. It’s unfortunate but it’s the fact of the matter and Elway and Fox have been around the NFL for a long time and have seen what wins and what doesn’t. Traditionally, quarterbacks like Tebow don’t win in the NFL.
MARCH MADNESS
There are things going on in the world of sports that have nothing to do with the NFL. 9 days ago, something happened that has never happened since the tournament expanded to 64 teams; two teams seeded 15th beat two teams seeded 2nd. Despite a scare near the end of the game, number one seed Syracuse survived the first round and did not become the first #1 to lose to a #16 seed but at this point I believe it is becoming more a psychological problem. Since the tournament expanded to 64 teams, #1 seeds have a record of 112-0 in the first round and for a team coming off of a small conference tournament championship, that is a huge hill to climb before you ever step on the floor.
Someday a #16 will beat a #1 and at that point the spell will be broken. I’m not saying that a #1 seed will lose every year but right now there is a mystique about the 1-16 game and it has so far been impossible for the lower seeds to break. In the 3-14 games, the lower seeds do not have a very good chance of winning and rarely do but every coach of every #14 seeded team can point to the 16 teams seeded #14 that have won a first round game for inspiration.
This year, the basketball has been great and, as always, extremely hard (for me) to predict. I tried something new this year and went with the Blindfolded Bracket feature on the website of the Wall Street Journal. While my picks this year have not been terrible, I would have been much better off simply picking the higher seeded teams.
Heading into the first games of the Elite Eight (later today) Kentucky is looking like the team to beat. Nobody else has been able to match their level of domination in their first three games and the single biggest threat to them just lost one of their biggest playmakers (North Carolina and point guard Kendall Marshall).
My Saturday picks: Florida over Louisville and Ohio State over Syracuse.
My Sunday Picks: Kentucky over Baylor and Kansas over North Carolina.
Final Four: Kentucky over Florida and Kansas over Ohio State.
For the title game, I picked Kansas in my bracket to go all the way but right now if I had to do it all over again, I’d pick Kentucky. Wildcats over Jayhawks.
OPENING DAY IS ALMOST HERE!
To me the theme of the free agency period for Major League Baseball was, if you have a player at position who can’t play another position, go get another player who plays the same position!
The three biggest free agent acquisitions (amongst position players) were Prince Fielder, Albert Pujols, and Jose Reyes (in alphabetical order). The issue is the teams that got them already had Miguel Cabrera, Kendrys Morales, and Hanley Ramirez. Now, if all six of those players were outfielders, this really wouldn’t be all that big an issue and for two of the three teams, there is a built-in apparatus to have these pairings work (the DH). The problem is that four of them are first basemen and the other two are shortstops.
The incumbents (Hanley Ramirez and Miguel Cabrera) are doing the right thing and are moving to third base but the problem is that third base is not where you put a guy to hide his glove. Third base is a very important defensive position and a substandard defender can be a serious problem if the guy playing there isn’t completely committee to his glove.
The Tigers and Angels have a serious leg up on the Marlins in these scenarios because of the designated hitter. The Tigers can play an octopus with seven gloves and a wicked throwing arm at third base and it won’t hurt them offensively because Cabrera and Fielder can split time and first base and DH.
I see the biggest problem in Miami with the Marlins (man, saying Miami Marlins sounds weird). Hanley Ramirez is a supreme talent who is two years removed from a slash line of .342/.410/.543. He did miss time with injuries last year but his slash line was a horrendous .243/.333/.379 and on top of that he has shown a serious lack in maturity in the past few years. He has said that he is willing to move to third base to accommodate Jose Reyes but how long will that last if Reyes struggles or if Ramirez struggles at third base?
So what does this mean for the upcoming season? The Angels have thrust themselves into the World Series discussion with the signing of both Pujols and CJ Wilson. Not only did they make their good rotation deeper, but they also hurt a key rival in Texas (Wilson’s team from a year ago). The Yankees and Red Sox will be there again but no team in the AL combines the lineup depth with the rotation depth that the Angels have. Having said that, I still have to say that the Rangers are the favorites to go back to the World Series since they have won the last two AL championships.
In the NL, the race is wide open. I don’t think the Marlins added enough to win the NL East this year. The Phillies are still going to be a favorite because of their rotation and the Nationals could be a dark horse contender if they stay healthy. In the central, the Cardinals lost a lot in Pujols but they get Adam Wainwright back from Tommy John surgery so they will again be favored to win the weak NL Central.
My way-too-early prediction: Albert Pujols will haunt the Cardinals as the Angels beat St. Louis in the World Series.
…
If you’ve managed to make it to the end of this, I applaud and I thank you. It’s been a busy few months for me and I haven’t been able to write in this space nearly as much as I would like and I’m going to try to write much more in the coming weeks and months. I plan to write more about the Broncos and Peyton Manning (since they plan their home games less than 10 miles from my house), I plan to write more about the Saints and why I as a former athlete hate the thought of the bounty program that they ran. I also plan to write more about the differing business models between the major sports, why they are different, and what the owners want their business models to be.
Until next time, enjoy the March Madness while it lasts!
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Sunday, December 18, 2011
The BCS
The debates have already started all across America and in fact, they happened from the moment Iowa State finished off their improbable comeback against undefeated and highly ranked Oklahoma State to win 37-31 in double overtime. Up until that point, it appeared that Oklahoma State and LSU would meet in the BCS National Championship game and if you had to put money on which might have a loss in that game, the smart money would have been on LSU.
However, LSU negotiated their ridiculously brutal schedule without a hiccup and has put themselves in a position to add their name to the list of best college football teams ever. They have defeated 8 ranked teams this year, 3 of which were ranked either #2 (Alabama) or #3 (Oregon and Arkansas) at the time.
There is no question that LSU is the best team in the country is and they will be favored in the national championship game next month no matter what. The only question on the mind of pretty much everyone is who deserves the chance to knock the Tigers off of their pedestal.
Oklahoma State has a more impressive body of work. They beat five teams that are currently in the BCS top 25; Alabama has only defeated two. Unfortunately for the Cowboys, there’s really only one other thing that they have going for them; they haven’t played LSU yet.
Alabama ranks 16th in scoring offense (behind Oklahoma State’s 2nd ranked juggernaut) but they lead the nation in scoring defense at just 8.8 points per game (while the Cowboys are 61st allowing 25.8 points per game). Alabama’s sole loss was at home… to the team mentioned above that is thrusting itself into the conversation for best team ever… by 3… in overtime. Oklahoma State’s only loss was on the road to an unranked team that barely made it to bowl eligibility… and they were 27 point favorites. Alabama’s best win was a 38-14 demolition of Arkansas who was ranked 6th in the final BCS standings and has been shut out of a BCS bowl. Oklahoma State’s best win was their 44-10 destruction of then #10 Oklahoma who dropped to 14th in the final edition of the BCS.
Despite the fact that Alabama has already played LSU, they are widely considered the second best team in the country and there is no logical reason that, if they are the second best team in the nation, they should not play LSU again for the national championship.
THE SEC
Many people around the country are getting tired of hearing about the dominance of the SEC and for much of last year, I was among those people. Now, however, I am changing my tune. Yes, the SEC is dominant and yes, I was born and raised in Pac-10 country (way back when it was the Pac-10). Yes, I miss the glory days of USC’s incredible run through all comers (before we found out that none of that counts anymore).
The fact of the matter is this is a historic run that the SEC is on and if you can’t appreciate that, you can’t appreciate college football through the blinders of your home colors. When USC was dominant in that several year stretch, nobody else in the Pac-10 was making much noise. Cal had a good year and that was more or less it. Starting with 2003 and running through 2008, the Trojans won all 6 Pac-10 championships and no other Pac-10 team made it to a BCS bowl. What is truly remarkable is in the last five years, four different teams have won the national title from the SEC.
For a conference to produce one program that is that dominant is very unusual but not half as unusual as producing five national champions that hail from four different campuses in consecutive years. It is a feat that might never be duplicated. All of this has led to an aura about any team that comes from the SEC. If you finished 7-5, 5-3 in the SEC, there are ego building whispers that you would have finished 12-0 in the Big East and maybe 11-1 in the ACC. If you finish 12-0 in the SEC you’ll be playing for the national title and if you finish 11-1, you’re better by default than any champion from outside the BCS conferences and it’s a toss-up between your team and an undefeated team from the Big East or the ACC.
The major question that needs to be asked is whether or not that is the way it should be and the logical answer is that you shouldn’t make assumptions like that when you are trying to figure out who the best team in the country is. The problem is that, as far as the BCS bowls have been concerned, those assumptions have been put to the test and have been shown to have some validity to them.
In both 2006 and 2007 there was a consensus number one team in the country, the Buckeyes of Ohio State. I watched several games from that team and followed the rest of the country and I was in agreement; they were the best team on paper and they passed the “eye” test. Both times they went to the BCS National Championship Game and both times they were blown out by SEC teams. Florida beat them 41-14 and then LSU beat them the next year 38-24 in a game that wasn’t nearly that close. Clearly the Big Ten was overrated and Ohio State wasn’t as good as their record indicated.
What about the Big XII? In 2008 Oklahoma was the number one team in the final BCS standings (wiith ridiculous amounts of controversy because when people start clamoring that Texas beat them head-to-head, they always seem to forget that Texas was beaten by Texas Tech and they finished 7th in the BCS). The Sooners had an offense for the ages with the future number one overall pick at quarterback in Sam Bradford. Everyone knew that you could put that offense up against any defense and they would just pick it apart. So what happened? A team that scored 702 points (54.0 per game) and had scored 35 points in their only loss was held to 14.
The next year they had another shot with Texas trying to dethrone Alabama. The Longhorns actually had a good defense that year, allowing just 15.2 points per game while they scored 40.7 per game. Just as before, an SEC team held them to far fewer points and scored far more than the Longhorns had averaged in the regular season; Alabama 37, Texas 21.
In 2010, the Pac-10 had its first crack at the SEC in the title game with the blur offense of Oregon. I will never really understand why the Ducks abandoned (largely) their frenetically paced offense. While watching their first few drives in the first half, there was a definite methodical nature to their offensive cadence. When I watched them get behind big to Stanford and then blow the doors off of the stadium, they were at their breakneck pace for the entire game when they had the ball, not just one or two plays per drive. Anyways, I digress. The result was again the same when an SEC defense held a very powerful offense (49.3 points per game) to a fraction of their previous potency in a 22-19 win.
For those of you who hate the SEC so much, the past five SEC champions have taken on teams from the Big Ten (Ohio State twice), the Big XII (Oklahoma and Texas) and the Pac-10 (Oregon) who had a combined 60-2 record and were averaging 42.6 points per game and allowing 16.0 points per game and have defeated them all by an average score of 32.4-18.4.
Give me one good reason why the SEC is NOT the best conference and they shouldn’t have two teams in the title game this year and I might listen. The fact of the matter is, there isn’t one.
WHAT’S IN A CHAMPIONSHIP?
What is a champion? Is it a team that has had the best season or the best postseason?
For the rest of you clamoring about the injustice that the teams ranked numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9 are not going to be playing in a BCS bowl we must remember that the BCS has just two purposes and the first and more important one is to rake in a boatload of money. The second is to provide a match-up between the teams most widely regarded as the #1 and #2 teams in the nation.
The job of the BCS is not to ensure that the Fiesta Bowl has a good match-up; that’s the job of the Fiesta Bowl. If the Sugar Bowl thinks that Virginia Tech and Michigan will sell more tickets and entice more advertising dollars than Boise State and Kansas State, that is their prerogative and it is not at all the fault of the BCS. All the BCS does for the other bowls is they determine the schools that are eligible. After that, the bowls themselves pick the match-ups. It should also be noted that two of the four teams mentioned that are in the top ten but didn’t make it to a BCS bowl were also from the SEC (#6 Arkansas and #9 South Carolina) so consider that before you say the BCS was overrated.
Let’s get back to the question posed at the beginning of this section; what is a champion? Ideally, it is a team that satisfies both of the requirements I set forth; they were the best team in the regular season and they were the best team in the postseason. The problem is that very few teams have ever satisfied both of those requirements.
The 1998 Yankees went 114-48 and then ripped through the postseason to win the World Series easily.
The 1985 Bears were 15-1 before destroying their three playoff opponents to win the Super Bowl.
The 1996-97 Bulls were 72-10 and easily won the NBA title that year.
Those are off the top of my head and with time, I could come up with several more examples but I can think of several that don’t fit that mold and are in fact the opposite.
The 2006 St Louis Cardinals were 83-78 before they won the World Series.
The 2009 Arizona Cardinals were 9-7 before they very nearly won the Super Bowl.
In the last four years, two teams have won the Super Bowl from the #5 seed (2007 New York Giants) and the #6 seed (2010 Green Bay Packers).
Last year, Connecticut’s Men’s Basketball team was 21-9 and ranked 21st in the country. They then won 11 games in a row to claim the national championship.
What do all eight of the previous examples have in common? They were all very exciting and they were all crowned champions by a playoff. We can very easily see (and possibly remember) that the 96-97 Bulls, the 85 Bears, and the 98 Yankees were the best teams in their respective sports that year but what about the other five I mentioned? They were far from the best teams that year and were some of the worst teams ever to compete for a championship (in the case of the Arizona Cardinals) or win one.
This is something that never happens in the BCS and we have to give them credit for that. This year, you don’t have to worry about #21 Southern Miss getting hot and knocking off #1 LSU. The regular season matters and if you don’t take care of business (like against a 27 point underdog who finished 6-6) you don’t play for the national title.
The top two teams rarely play in the Super Bowl or in the World Series or the NBA Finals or the Final Four but for each and every one of the last thirteen years, the top two teams in the country (by at least one definition) have met on the field to determine the national champion. If you can’t at very least stipulate that then you have an illogical dislike (or hatred) of the BCS.
NATURE OF THE BEAST
What is the best way to determine a champion? A playoff or a ratings system that boils down every play to a series of 1’s and 0’s and spits out two team names? This is where I have to take myself out of the dream world and come back to reality. The best way to determine a champion is through a playoff bracket but not with individual winner-take-all games but with series.
In February of 2008, the New York Giants entered the Super Bowl with a record of 13-6 while the New England Patriots entered the contest with a record of 18-0. They had played just a few weeks before with the Patriots winning 38-35 to finish off their 16-0 regular season. If they had played 100 times, who would have won more? In my opinion, the answer is the Patriots because they were the better team. On that Sunday evening in February, the Giants were better but overall they were the inferior team.
This is the beauty of series in playoff brackets. Any team in any league can beat any other team. Under normal circumstances, the 0-13 Colts could potentially beat the 13-0 Packers (although this might be the exception to the rule) but could they do it more than once when they had to? Could they win 2 of 3, 3 of 5, or 4 of 7? The answer for the most part is no. When two teams line up against each other 7 times, it is rare that the truly inferior team wins. If the teams are evenly matched, of course, all bets are off but the cases are rare where there has been a disparity of talent and performance and the lesser team wins.
That is a fair way to determine a champion. You have to achieve success and then maintain it and that idea works for basketball (at least on the professional side), baseball, and hockey. It does not work for football.
Football cannot be played in series unless you want one season to take three years. It is, as the heading suggests, the nature of the beast that is football.
IS IT TIME FOR A PLAYOFF?
What is the answer when it comes to college football? Personally, I like the bowl system (even though it is becoming a reward for mediocrity) and I like the BCS. It needs to be tweaked and it needs to be revamped but its essence is still pure. Every week matters and if you lose, you have to hope that everyone else does as well. Alabama is not getting a mulligan this year; they negotiated a difficult schedule with one small blemish against one of the best teams of the BCS era. They were better than every other team with one loss according to the combination of computer and human polls.
The formula for playing for a national title has always been simple; win. In the fourteen years of the BCS system, 30 teams have gone undefeated prior to the bowls and more than half (17) have played in the national championship game. While many people would say that it’s unfair that thirteen teams went undefeated and didn’t play for the national title, I disagree. I believe that the number of undefeated teams that had a legitimate claim to the national title are very few (Auburn in 2004 and then Cincinnati and TCU in 2009 and TCU in 2010).
The truth of the matter is that there will always be controversy until the NCAA does away with half of the regular season games and institutes a 128 team playoff bracket. I know that it sounds ridiculous but how else can you appease all of the people complaining about how unfair the BCS is? That way, every team has a chance to win it all. While we’re at it, maybe March Madness should expand to include all 300 Division 1 teams.
If you want to do away with the Coach’s Poll, fine. If you want to revamp the computer formulae to include every possible statistic and measure of a football team, fine. If you want to eliminate the automatic qualifying spots for conference champions, fine. However, the essence of the BCS is pure:
#1 vs. #2… just the way it should be.
However, LSU negotiated their ridiculously brutal schedule without a hiccup and has put themselves in a position to add their name to the list of best college football teams ever. They have defeated 8 ranked teams this year, 3 of which were ranked either #2 (Alabama) or #3 (Oregon and Arkansas) at the time.
There is no question that LSU is the best team in the country is and they will be favored in the national championship game next month no matter what. The only question on the mind of pretty much everyone is who deserves the chance to knock the Tigers off of their pedestal.
Oklahoma State has a more impressive body of work. They beat five teams that are currently in the BCS top 25; Alabama has only defeated two. Unfortunately for the Cowboys, there’s really only one other thing that they have going for them; they haven’t played LSU yet.
Alabama ranks 16th in scoring offense (behind Oklahoma State’s 2nd ranked juggernaut) but they lead the nation in scoring defense at just 8.8 points per game (while the Cowboys are 61st allowing 25.8 points per game). Alabama’s sole loss was at home… to the team mentioned above that is thrusting itself into the conversation for best team ever… by 3… in overtime. Oklahoma State’s only loss was on the road to an unranked team that barely made it to bowl eligibility… and they were 27 point favorites. Alabama’s best win was a 38-14 demolition of Arkansas who was ranked 6th in the final BCS standings and has been shut out of a BCS bowl. Oklahoma State’s best win was their 44-10 destruction of then #10 Oklahoma who dropped to 14th in the final edition of the BCS.
Despite the fact that Alabama has already played LSU, they are widely considered the second best team in the country and there is no logical reason that, if they are the second best team in the nation, they should not play LSU again for the national championship.
THE SEC
Many people around the country are getting tired of hearing about the dominance of the SEC and for much of last year, I was among those people. Now, however, I am changing my tune. Yes, the SEC is dominant and yes, I was born and raised in Pac-10 country (way back when it was the Pac-10). Yes, I miss the glory days of USC’s incredible run through all comers (before we found out that none of that counts anymore).
The fact of the matter is this is a historic run that the SEC is on and if you can’t appreciate that, you can’t appreciate college football through the blinders of your home colors. When USC was dominant in that several year stretch, nobody else in the Pac-10 was making much noise. Cal had a good year and that was more or less it. Starting with 2003 and running through 2008, the Trojans won all 6 Pac-10 championships and no other Pac-10 team made it to a BCS bowl. What is truly remarkable is in the last five years, four different teams have won the national title from the SEC.
For a conference to produce one program that is that dominant is very unusual but not half as unusual as producing five national champions that hail from four different campuses in consecutive years. It is a feat that might never be duplicated. All of this has led to an aura about any team that comes from the SEC. If you finished 7-5, 5-3 in the SEC, there are ego building whispers that you would have finished 12-0 in the Big East and maybe 11-1 in the ACC. If you finish 12-0 in the SEC you’ll be playing for the national title and if you finish 11-1, you’re better by default than any champion from outside the BCS conferences and it’s a toss-up between your team and an undefeated team from the Big East or the ACC.
The major question that needs to be asked is whether or not that is the way it should be and the logical answer is that you shouldn’t make assumptions like that when you are trying to figure out who the best team in the country is. The problem is that, as far as the BCS bowls have been concerned, those assumptions have been put to the test and have been shown to have some validity to them.
In both 2006 and 2007 there was a consensus number one team in the country, the Buckeyes of Ohio State. I watched several games from that team and followed the rest of the country and I was in agreement; they were the best team on paper and they passed the “eye” test. Both times they went to the BCS National Championship Game and both times they were blown out by SEC teams. Florida beat them 41-14 and then LSU beat them the next year 38-24 in a game that wasn’t nearly that close. Clearly the Big Ten was overrated and Ohio State wasn’t as good as their record indicated.
What about the Big XII? In 2008 Oklahoma was the number one team in the final BCS standings (wiith ridiculous amounts of controversy because when people start clamoring that Texas beat them head-to-head, they always seem to forget that Texas was beaten by Texas Tech and they finished 7th in the BCS). The Sooners had an offense for the ages with the future number one overall pick at quarterback in Sam Bradford. Everyone knew that you could put that offense up against any defense and they would just pick it apart. So what happened? A team that scored 702 points (54.0 per game) and had scored 35 points in their only loss was held to 14.
The next year they had another shot with Texas trying to dethrone Alabama. The Longhorns actually had a good defense that year, allowing just 15.2 points per game while they scored 40.7 per game. Just as before, an SEC team held them to far fewer points and scored far more than the Longhorns had averaged in the regular season; Alabama 37, Texas 21.
In 2010, the Pac-10 had its first crack at the SEC in the title game with the blur offense of Oregon. I will never really understand why the Ducks abandoned (largely) their frenetically paced offense. While watching their first few drives in the first half, there was a definite methodical nature to their offensive cadence. When I watched them get behind big to Stanford and then blow the doors off of the stadium, they were at their breakneck pace for the entire game when they had the ball, not just one or two plays per drive. Anyways, I digress. The result was again the same when an SEC defense held a very powerful offense (49.3 points per game) to a fraction of their previous potency in a 22-19 win.
For those of you who hate the SEC so much, the past five SEC champions have taken on teams from the Big Ten (Ohio State twice), the Big XII (Oklahoma and Texas) and the Pac-10 (Oregon) who had a combined 60-2 record and were averaging 42.6 points per game and allowing 16.0 points per game and have defeated them all by an average score of 32.4-18.4.
Give me one good reason why the SEC is NOT the best conference and they shouldn’t have two teams in the title game this year and I might listen. The fact of the matter is, there isn’t one.
WHAT’S IN A CHAMPIONSHIP?
What is a champion? Is it a team that has had the best season or the best postseason?
For the rest of you clamoring about the injustice that the teams ranked numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9 are not going to be playing in a BCS bowl we must remember that the BCS has just two purposes and the first and more important one is to rake in a boatload of money. The second is to provide a match-up between the teams most widely regarded as the #1 and #2 teams in the nation.
The job of the BCS is not to ensure that the Fiesta Bowl has a good match-up; that’s the job of the Fiesta Bowl. If the Sugar Bowl thinks that Virginia Tech and Michigan will sell more tickets and entice more advertising dollars than Boise State and Kansas State, that is their prerogative and it is not at all the fault of the BCS. All the BCS does for the other bowls is they determine the schools that are eligible. After that, the bowls themselves pick the match-ups. It should also be noted that two of the four teams mentioned that are in the top ten but didn’t make it to a BCS bowl were also from the SEC (#6 Arkansas and #9 South Carolina) so consider that before you say the BCS was overrated.
Let’s get back to the question posed at the beginning of this section; what is a champion? Ideally, it is a team that satisfies both of the requirements I set forth; they were the best team in the regular season and they were the best team in the postseason. The problem is that very few teams have ever satisfied both of those requirements.
The 1998 Yankees went 114-48 and then ripped through the postseason to win the World Series easily.
The 1985 Bears were 15-1 before destroying their three playoff opponents to win the Super Bowl.
The 1996-97 Bulls were 72-10 and easily won the NBA title that year.
Those are off the top of my head and with time, I could come up with several more examples but I can think of several that don’t fit that mold and are in fact the opposite.
The 2006 St Louis Cardinals were 83-78 before they won the World Series.
The 2009 Arizona Cardinals were 9-7 before they very nearly won the Super Bowl.
In the last four years, two teams have won the Super Bowl from the #5 seed (2007 New York Giants) and the #6 seed (2010 Green Bay Packers).
Last year, Connecticut’s Men’s Basketball team was 21-9 and ranked 21st in the country. They then won 11 games in a row to claim the national championship.
What do all eight of the previous examples have in common? They were all very exciting and they were all crowned champions by a playoff. We can very easily see (and possibly remember) that the 96-97 Bulls, the 85 Bears, and the 98 Yankees were the best teams in their respective sports that year but what about the other five I mentioned? They were far from the best teams that year and were some of the worst teams ever to compete for a championship (in the case of the Arizona Cardinals) or win one.
This is something that never happens in the BCS and we have to give them credit for that. This year, you don’t have to worry about #21 Southern Miss getting hot and knocking off #1 LSU. The regular season matters and if you don’t take care of business (like against a 27 point underdog who finished 6-6) you don’t play for the national title.
The top two teams rarely play in the Super Bowl or in the World Series or the NBA Finals or the Final Four but for each and every one of the last thirteen years, the top two teams in the country (by at least one definition) have met on the field to determine the national champion. If you can’t at very least stipulate that then you have an illogical dislike (or hatred) of the BCS.
NATURE OF THE BEAST
What is the best way to determine a champion? A playoff or a ratings system that boils down every play to a series of 1’s and 0’s and spits out two team names? This is where I have to take myself out of the dream world and come back to reality. The best way to determine a champion is through a playoff bracket but not with individual winner-take-all games but with series.
In February of 2008, the New York Giants entered the Super Bowl with a record of 13-6 while the New England Patriots entered the contest with a record of 18-0. They had played just a few weeks before with the Patriots winning 38-35 to finish off their 16-0 regular season. If they had played 100 times, who would have won more? In my opinion, the answer is the Patriots because they were the better team. On that Sunday evening in February, the Giants were better but overall they were the inferior team.
This is the beauty of series in playoff brackets. Any team in any league can beat any other team. Under normal circumstances, the 0-13 Colts could potentially beat the 13-0 Packers (although this might be the exception to the rule) but could they do it more than once when they had to? Could they win 2 of 3, 3 of 5, or 4 of 7? The answer for the most part is no. When two teams line up against each other 7 times, it is rare that the truly inferior team wins. If the teams are evenly matched, of course, all bets are off but the cases are rare where there has been a disparity of talent and performance and the lesser team wins.
That is a fair way to determine a champion. You have to achieve success and then maintain it and that idea works for basketball (at least on the professional side), baseball, and hockey. It does not work for football.
Football cannot be played in series unless you want one season to take three years. It is, as the heading suggests, the nature of the beast that is football.
IS IT TIME FOR A PLAYOFF?
What is the answer when it comes to college football? Personally, I like the bowl system (even though it is becoming a reward for mediocrity) and I like the BCS. It needs to be tweaked and it needs to be revamped but its essence is still pure. Every week matters and if you lose, you have to hope that everyone else does as well. Alabama is not getting a mulligan this year; they negotiated a difficult schedule with one small blemish against one of the best teams of the BCS era. They were better than every other team with one loss according to the combination of computer and human polls.
The formula for playing for a national title has always been simple; win. In the fourteen years of the BCS system, 30 teams have gone undefeated prior to the bowls and more than half (17) have played in the national championship game. While many people would say that it’s unfair that thirteen teams went undefeated and didn’t play for the national title, I disagree. I believe that the number of undefeated teams that had a legitimate claim to the national title are very few (Auburn in 2004 and then Cincinnati and TCU in 2009 and TCU in 2010).
The truth of the matter is that there will always be controversy until the NCAA does away with half of the regular season games and institutes a 128 team playoff bracket. I know that it sounds ridiculous but how else can you appease all of the people complaining about how unfair the BCS is? That way, every team has a chance to win it all. While we’re at it, maybe March Madness should expand to include all 300 Division 1 teams.
If you want to do away with the Coach’s Poll, fine. If you want to revamp the computer formulae to include every possible statistic and measure of a football team, fine. If you want to eliminate the automatic qualifying spots for conference champions, fine. However, the essence of the BCS is pure:
#1 vs. #2… just the way it should be.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
The Super Committee and an American Aristocracy
The Super Committee has failed. Given several months and the task of eliminating $1.2 trillion of the federal budget deficit over the next decade (when we are projected to spend over $44 trillion), they failed. So the question on the mind of many people across the country with regards to the deficit and the national debt is; what’s next?
Unfortunately, nobody has a crystal ball. Perhaps China’s recent meteoric rise will cool off considering that their manufacturing levels just hit a 32 month low. Perhaps Europe will pull itself out of its own debt crisis and will restore a little bit of hope to the economic markets around the world. Perhaps the United States will experience a resurgence or a development of a new market or industry that will propel our economy back to the status that it had ten years ago. Perhaps OPEC will just open the spigots and the price of oil will plummet back to where it was in the 90’s (around $22 a barrel) and the global economy will leap forward on the strength of cheap energy.
Nobody knows what will happen to any of those issues. China is somewhat likely to experience some sort of a slowdown but that is natural given the nature of their rise over the past few years (incredibly fast) and what is going on around the rest of the developed world. It’s possible that Europe can pull itself out of this crisis although with every report that comes out of that continent, the prognosis looks bleaker every single day. There are always new market and new industries to explore but the only question is whether or not they can survive on the open market and whether or not the United States can get their first. Lastly, the chances that OPEC opens the spigot when America has gotten used to oil prices between $75 and $95 per barrel are just on the other side of zero.
So when you throw all that in the hopper, what does that mean for the United States? To be brutally honest and in need of some serious sugarcoating, it means that the US economy is in for some rough times and it’s somewhat likely that it will be a period of years until we’re well and truly out of it.
How did we get here? Well, it’s a combination of factors (as it always is). In 2001, the federal government had a surplus of $128.2 billion and the national debt was $5.8 trillion. Inevitably, after the boom of the 90’s, the early part of the 00’s was significantly slower. After posting growth rates (in real GDP) of better than 4% each year from 1997 to 2000, the growth in real GDP fell to 1.08% in 2001 and then 1.81% in 2002. While real GDP grew 26.6% from 1994 to 2000, from 2001 to 2010, it grew by just 16.8%. I know that I’m throwing a lot of numbers at you but to give you a frame of reference, most economists consider 3% growth in real GDP to be a healthy economy. While 1% growth may not be “unhealthy”, it is considered poor and usually does not coincide with job creation.
Even worse than the actual downturn has been the wild swings our economy has undergone. In the period of time from 1994 to 2000, the average increase in real GDP was 3.92% per year with the lower and upper limits being 2.51% and 4.83%, respectively. From 2000 to 2010, the average was 1.66% but that set swung wildly between gaining 3.57% (in 2004) and losing 2.63% (in 2009). If you have the option of growing your economy 20% in the next decade by either growing 1.8% each year or gaining 10% one year and losing 8% the next, you should always take the slow and steady approach.
So now we know that the economy has been a bit of a roller coaster in the past ten years. This isn’t exactly news. What is news is that despite the unstable economy, the government has very infamously increased our national debt from roughly $5.8 trillion ten years ago to $14.5 trillion today. Can we continue to rack up a larger and larger debt and pass it on to future generations without taking any steps to actually pay if off? That question strikes at the heart of what I’d like to address in this post; a sense of complacency and affinity for the status quo amongst American citizens and the formation of an aristocratic class in modern America.
COMPLACENCY
The recession that hit our economy in 2008 and 2009 was arguably the worst economic climate since the Great Depression and we are still recovering from it. While the majority of the wrong-doing was simply the result of a skewed moral compass, there are rumors everywhere that some of the wrong-doing was actually illegal as well. This, among other things, helped to shape my opinion of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Why would the banking industry change any of the things they do because there are a few hundred people camped (oops, not anymore) outside their offices? The answer is they wouldn’t. The only reason they would change the way they do business is if Congress enacted more laws to govern they way they lend money or if the US Attorney started an investigation into their lending practices over the past several years.
This led me to say that if the Occupy Wall Street movement ever gets serious about getting things done and not just making a lot of noise, they need to be protesting in Washington, D.C., at the Capitol building. Why haven’t they? Why isn’t the country in an absolute uproar over the banking industry, Congress’ near inability to avoid a debt crisis, and Congress’ inability to reach a deal that would involve modifications that amount to somewhere between 2% and 3% over the next ten years? The short answer is we’re complacent but there’s more to it than that.
The other part of the reason is for as bad as things are, they really aren’t that bad. It is true that in 2009, our inflation adjusted GDP actually decreased for the first time since 1991 but it dropped by only 2.63%. Since then, our economy has posted economic growth in nine consecutive quarters. Between 1929 and 1933, the United States lost 46.2% of its wealth or 26.7% when it is adjusted for inflation. We currently sit at 9% unemployment but that is nothing when you think about one in four Americans being out of work at the height of the Great Depression.
The reason that there aren’t more Americans in the streets calling for drastic reforms is simply because it isn’t that bad right now. The vast majority of Americans are still working, they are still getting paid, and they are still paying their bills. For the citizenry to mobilize and march on our government and demand changes, it will have to get a whole lot worse than it is now.
AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY
A simple internet search on the definition of aristocracy reveals five primary results (at least that’s what you get on dictionary.com). The definition that I think is most appropriate in the case I’m going to present is the second one; a government or state ruled by an aristocracy, elite, or privileged upper class. Historically, when the term aristocracy is thrown around, the line between the aristocracy and everyone else is drawn along monetary lines. Also, historically speaking, the wealthy were also the ones who governed the country or had the most influence over those who did.
The United States Congress is a different sort of aristocracy. They are not among the highest paid people in the country and if you compared their salaries to even professional athletes, the difference is staggering. A salary of $400,000 as a government employee means that you are more than likely calling the White House home these days whereas that same salary in Major League Baseball or in the NFL means you are struggling to hold onto a job. Before you start feeling sorry for our elected officials, many of them do come from family money and at the end of the day, their salary is much higher than most of the rest of us.
If not money, then what is the divide between the aristocracy and the rest of us? Is that even an accurate term to use? I believe it is and the divide is power. Representatives and Senators wield a truly tremendous amount of power and will do many things to hold onto that power. Many of them say that they are acting in the best interests of the country and their constituents but how true is that?
Let’s examine the case of the Super Committee and the entire debate surrounding the deficit and debt situation in this country. Republicans want to cut federal spending to reduce the deficit and Democrats want to increase taxes before any spending cuts take place.
For any concerned citizen, that should be the first red flag. Nobody is talking about eliminating the deficit; they are simply talking about reducing it. They are basically admitting that the national debt will continue to grow regardless of what the long-term effects of that might be.
In a perfect world, the two parties would come to some sort of agreement where they meet in the middle and everyone has to give a little of something. That is compromise and children learn that at a very young age. It is the only way our country can function with such large philosophical divides between the two dominant parties. Federal spending should be less and taxes should be increased to help cover the costs of Congress’ mistakes. In the long run, I can talk for hours and hours about the benefits or detriments of government influence in the economy but this conversation is not occurring in a vacuum. It is happening in a country with a $14 trillion debt, a $1.6 trillion budget deficit, and absolutely no plan to change either problem.
Clearly, we do not live in a perfect world and compromise has not happened and is not likely to happen. Why not? Put yourself in the shoes of a Representative or a Senator. If you are a Democrat, you can point to all the good that is being done by federal programs and you can point to how many people’s lives are better because of aid from everyone’s friendly Uncle Sam. If you are a Republican, you can point to the fact that taxes are quite low right now. You can say that lower taxes lead to a freer marketplace and the market can direct the economy instead of the government. Let us set aside for one moment that that is exactly how we get such a massive budget deficit. If you are that Republican, you won your election by promising to never raise taxes. If you are that Democrat, you won your election by saying that government benefits would never be cut.
What you have is a system in which nobody is willing to budge. Despite what they say, it is not in the best interest of the voters, it’s in their own best interests. A Republican who is willing to raise taxes and a Democrat who is willing to cut benefits are the same thing; unemployed. In the system we currently have, Democrats and Republicans can hold their party line and not move a single inch towards center and two things happen; they keep their jobs and the government spends far more money than they have to spend.
I’m not here to debate the merits of their respective positions. There are many federal programs that Americans would not be able to function well without in the short term. It is entirely possible that lower taxes could potentially spark economic growth and that would in turn create more tax revenue and get our government back on its feet. All of those theories look great on the drawing board but the fact of the matter is that nobody has ever seen an economic climate like we have now. Much like John Maynard Keynes after the Great Depression, economists will be breaking new ground and creating new theories in the wake of this global economic cycle.
Given all of this and given the budgetary process of the United States government, a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is one of the most reasonable steps that Congress could take at this point in time. I’ve read the text of the proposed amendment that was put to a vote just over a week ago and the language is not inflammatory at all (you can read the full text at this site http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.J.RES.2:). To paraphrase, it simply says that except for in a time of war, the budget must be balanced. There are other provisions but that’s the guts of it. There were no amendments and nothing that had anything to do with hot button issues such as religion or abortion. The amendment was defeated well short of the required number of votes for passage for two main reasons; Congress likes to spend money and they have no incentive not to and our deficit crisis is much like the common flu – it must get worse before it gets better.
Drastic spending cuts and drastic tax increases, both of which I view as necessary for the long-term viability of our nation’s economy, will hurt in the short run. Reduced spending will cause certain services to be reduced and that will make some people’s quality of life less. Increased taxes will perhaps mean that some small businesses will be irreparably harmed to the point that they have to close their business. This will spiral downward until we reach a bottom of sorts and then, things will start to get better. How long it will last and how bad it will get are questions that nobody can answer but I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty. It will last through the next election cycle and that is the single biggest reason why nothing is getting done with regards to these problems. The elections.
It is far easier to go into a conference room and face many of your constituents (some of whom are down on their luck and unemployed) and tell them that the big bad party is responsible for this mess and if people had just listened to you, things would have gotten done.
It is nearly impossible to go into that same conference room and say, yes, I sacrificed some of your livelihood. I’m sorry. At this point in time, Congress has spent us into a corner and if we don’t act now, it will get far worse very quickly. I acted in what I believe are the best interests of the country as a whole. When was the last time you heard an elected official say that? Hmm, interesting, you have heard it before from the White House. So what’s the difference between the White House and Congress?
TERM LIMITS
The President is limited to two terms. The vice-president can spend far longer in the White House but always playing second fiddle. If he ever wants that chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, the clock starts on his two terms.
Congress has no such limits. 7% of currently serving members of Congress (37 out of 534, the 1st Congressional District of Oregon is currently vacant) have been in their seats longer than I have been alive (27 years and change). Roughly 44% of both houses (44 of 100 in the Senate and 192 of 434) have been in their current positions for longer than 10 years.
If you examine the tenure of all of the current members of Congress, a disturbing trend emerges. The overwhelming majority of Congress (64.4%) has either been in place for more than 10 years or has been on the job less than 1 year. To me, this says that the American public is not taking the time to do their duty as voters. When faced with the choice of somebody new or someone who was elected last time and didn’t make things happen immediately, they are choosing someone new. When asked to choose between someone new and someone who has served their district for 20 years, they are going with the one they know. In a foundering economy, it should be the ones who have been there the longest that have the most to fear, not the least. Why are John McCain (25 years in the Senate) or John Kerry (27 years) so much better equipped to handle this problem than a 30 year old Ivy League graduate with a BA, MA, and PhD in economics? When we are examining the credentials of these Representatives and Senators, the fact that they were serving when there was last a budget surplus should not be a point in their favor, it should be a point against them.
You say that you were in the Senate from 1998-2001 when there was a surplus every year and our net budget surplus was $559 billion. That’s great, where were you the last ten years when there was a net budget deficit of $6.48 trillion? Were you just taking those years off?
This strikes at the heart of my underlying opinion. People should not go to Congress thinking that it will be a career. They should be willing to sacrifice their heart, mind, body, and soul for a period of a few years to make the country as good a place as they can and after that, they can go on the lecture circuit. I believe that I can speak for many Americans when I say that I don’t want Representatives and Senators making decisions based upon keeping their jobs. I can’t say they do categorically in their first terms, but in their second terms, presidents have relatively little pressure upon them and they can step back and see the bigger picture. This is what we need desperately out of Congress.
THE ONLY PROBLEM THAT MATTERS
There are many problems with my utopia but as the above heading might indicate, there is only one that matters; the system we live in.
235 years ago, we set out on a grand experiment in republican democracy. We have had our rough moments but overall, the experiment has gone very well. When the framework of our nation was first put down on paper, there was an overwhelming fear of a single monarchy-like figure. Thus, the executive branch was made the weakest, constitutionally speaking, and the legislative branch was made the strongest. Overall, again, I would say this has served us well but in this case, it has helped cause the illness that afflicts our great nation.
A balanced budget amendment would be wonderful. The only problem is that by far the most commonly used method to amend the constitution is for both houses to vote on it. Now we’re asking them to curtail the money that they get to play with on a daily basis… it’s not likely that that will ever happen.
In order to put term limits in place, the Constitution would have to be amended. As unlikely as it might be that Congress would pass a law putting limits on how much money they can spend, it is infinitely more likely than Congress willingly putting in place a law that limits how long they can wield the enormous amount of power they have.
The onus to keep a rein on Congress falls to you and me, citizens of the United States of America. If Congress is to blame for the current economic crisis that we are in, we are responsible because we enabled this activity. At the end of the day, we have the true power in this government. No matter how much money a special interest group gives to a particular candidate, if everyone pulls the lever for the other guy, the other guy wins.
We have a sacred duty. If we don’t like what is happening in Congress, we have to tell them. If they don’t listen, we have to tell them in a language they understand; do this or you’ll lose my vote. Don’t just vote for a candidate or a party because that’s what you’ve always done. Demand answers from the candidates or your Representative or your Senator and when they give you an answer, verify it, don’t just accept it.
Above all else, when you are choosing a Representative, or a Senator, or a President, try to think beyond yourself. The best interests of the country are not always in line with your own best interests. Put your ego aside and I beg you “…my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
Unfortunately, nobody has a crystal ball. Perhaps China’s recent meteoric rise will cool off considering that their manufacturing levels just hit a 32 month low. Perhaps Europe will pull itself out of its own debt crisis and will restore a little bit of hope to the economic markets around the world. Perhaps the United States will experience a resurgence or a development of a new market or industry that will propel our economy back to the status that it had ten years ago. Perhaps OPEC will just open the spigots and the price of oil will plummet back to where it was in the 90’s (around $22 a barrel) and the global economy will leap forward on the strength of cheap energy.
Nobody knows what will happen to any of those issues. China is somewhat likely to experience some sort of a slowdown but that is natural given the nature of their rise over the past few years (incredibly fast) and what is going on around the rest of the developed world. It’s possible that Europe can pull itself out of this crisis although with every report that comes out of that continent, the prognosis looks bleaker every single day. There are always new market and new industries to explore but the only question is whether or not they can survive on the open market and whether or not the United States can get their first. Lastly, the chances that OPEC opens the spigot when America has gotten used to oil prices between $75 and $95 per barrel are just on the other side of zero.
So when you throw all that in the hopper, what does that mean for the United States? To be brutally honest and in need of some serious sugarcoating, it means that the US economy is in for some rough times and it’s somewhat likely that it will be a period of years until we’re well and truly out of it.
How did we get here? Well, it’s a combination of factors (as it always is). In 2001, the federal government had a surplus of $128.2 billion and the national debt was $5.8 trillion. Inevitably, after the boom of the 90’s, the early part of the 00’s was significantly slower. After posting growth rates (in real GDP) of better than 4% each year from 1997 to 2000, the growth in real GDP fell to 1.08% in 2001 and then 1.81% in 2002. While real GDP grew 26.6% from 1994 to 2000, from 2001 to 2010, it grew by just 16.8%. I know that I’m throwing a lot of numbers at you but to give you a frame of reference, most economists consider 3% growth in real GDP to be a healthy economy. While 1% growth may not be “unhealthy”, it is considered poor and usually does not coincide with job creation.
Even worse than the actual downturn has been the wild swings our economy has undergone. In the period of time from 1994 to 2000, the average increase in real GDP was 3.92% per year with the lower and upper limits being 2.51% and 4.83%, respectively. From 2000 to 2010, the average was 1.66% but that set swung wildly between gaining 3.57% (in 2004) and losing 2.63% (in 2009). If you have the option of growing your economy 20% in the next decade by either growing 1.8% each year or gaining 10% one year and losing 8% the next, you should always take the slow and steady approach.
So now we know that the economy has been a bit of a roller coaster in the past ten years. This isn’t exactly news. What is news is that despite the unstable economy, the government has very infamously increased our national debt from roughly $5.8 trillion ten years ago to $14.5 trillion today. Can we continue to rack up a larger and larger debt and pass it on to future generations without taking any steps to actually pay if off? That question strikes at the heart of what I’d like to address in this post; a sense of complacency and affinity for the status quo amongst American citizens and the formation of an aristocratic class in modern America.
COMPLACENCY
The recession that hit our economy in 2008 and 2009 was arguably the worst economic climate since the Great Depression and we are still recovering from it. While the majority of the wrong-doing was simply the result of a skewed moral compass, there are rumors everywhere that some of the wrong-doing was actually illegal as well. This, among other things, helped to shape my opinion of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Why would the banking industry change any of the things they do because there are a few hundred people camped (oops, not anymore) outside their offices? The answer is they wouldn’t. The only reason they would change the way they do business is if Congress enacted more laws to govern they way they lend money or if the US Attorney started an investigation into their lending practices over the past several years.
This led me to say that if the Occupy Wall Street movement ever gets serious about getting things done and not just making a lot of noise, they need to be protesting in Washington, D.C., at the Capitol building. Why haven’t they? Why isn’t the country in an absolute uproar over the banking industry, Congress’ near inability to avoid a debt crisis, and Congress’ inability to reach a deal that would involve modifications that amount to somewhere between 2% and 3% over the next ten years? The short answer is we’re complacent but there’s more to it than that.
The other part of the reason is for as bad as things are, they really aren’t that bad. It is true that in 2009, our inflation adjusted GDP actually decreased for the first time since 1991 but it dropped by only 2.63%. Since then, our economy has posted economic growth in nine consecutive quarters. Between 1929 and 1933, the United States lost 46.2% of its wealth or 26.7% when it is adjusted for inflation. We currently sit at 9% unemployment but that is nothing when you think about one in four Americans being out of work at the height of the Great Depression.
The reason that there aren’t more Americans in the streets calling for drastic reforms is simply because it isn’t that bad right now. The vast majority of Americans are still working, they are still getting paid, and they are still paying their bills. For the citizenry to mobilize and march on our government and demand changes, it will have to get a whole lot worse than it is now.
AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY
A simple internet search on the definition of aristocracy reveals five primary results (at least that’s what you get on dictionary.com). The definition that I think is most appropriate in the case I’m going to present is the second one; a government or state ruled by an aristocracy, elite, or privileged upper class. Historically, when the term aristocracy is thrown around, the line between the aristocracy and everyone else is drawn along monetary lines. Also, historically speaking, the wealthy were also the ones who governed the country or had the most influence over those who did.
The United States Congress is a different sort of aristocracy. They are not among the highest paid people in the country and if you compared their salaries to even professional athletes, the difference is staggering. A salary of $400,000 as a government employee means that you are more than likely calling the White House home these days whereas that same salary in Major League Baseball or in the NFL means you are struggling to hold onto a job. Before you start feeling sorry for our elected officials, many of them do come from family money and at the end of the day, their salary is much higher than most of the rest of us.
If not money, then what is the divide between the aristocracy and the rest of us? Is that even an accurate term to use? I believe it is and the divide is power. Representatives and Senators wield a truly tremendous amount of power and will do many things to hold onto that power. Many of them say that they are acting in the best interests of the country and their constituents but how true is that?
Let’s examine the case of the Super Committee and the entire debate surrounding the deficit and debt situation in this country. Republicans want to cut federal spending to reduce the deficit and Democrats want to increase taxes before any spending cuts take place.
For any concerned citizen, that should be the first red flag. Nobody is talking about eliminating the deficit; they are simply talking about reducing it. They are basically admitting that the national debt will continue to grow regardless of what the long-term effects of that might be.
In a perfect world, the two parties would come to some sort of agreement where they meet in the middle and everyone has to give a little of something. That is compromise and children learn that at a very young age. It is the only way our country can function with such large philosophical divides between the two dominant parties. Federal spending should be less and taxes should be increased to help cover the costs of Congress’ mistakes. In the long run, I can talk for hours and hours about the benefits or detriments of government influence in the economy but this conversation is not occurring in a vacuum. It is happening in a country with a $14 trillion debt, a $1.6 trillion budget deficit, and absolutely no plan to change either problem.
Clearly, we do not live in a perfect world and compromise has not happened and is not likely to happen. Why not? Put yourself in the shoes of a Representative or a Senator. If you are a Democrat, you can point to all the good that is being done by federal programs and you can point to how many people’s lives are better because of aid from everyone’s friendly Uncle Sam. If you are a Republican, you can point to the fact that taxes are quite low right now. You can say that lower taxes lead to a freer marketplace and the market can direct the economy instead of the government. Let us set aside for one moment that that is exactly how we get such a massive budget deficit. If you are that Republican, you won your election by promising to never raise taxes. If you are that Democrat, you won your election by saying that government benefits would never be cut.
What you have is a system in which nobody is willing to budge. Despite what they say, it is not in the best interest of the voters, it’s in their own best interests. A Republican who is willing to raise taxes and a Democrat who is willing to cut benefits are the same thing; unemployed. In the system we currently have, Democrats and Republicans can hold their party line and not move a single inch towards center and two things happen; they keep their jobs and the government spends far more money than they have to spend.
I’m not here to debate the merits of their respective positions. There are many federal programs that Americans would not be able to function well without in the short term. It is entirely possible that lower taxes could potentially spark economic growth and that would in turn create more tax revenue and get our government back on its feet. All of those theories look great on the drawing board but the fact of the matter is that nobody has ever seen an economic climate like we have now. Much like John Maynard Keynes after the Great Depression, economists will be breaking new ground and creating new theories in the wake of this global economic cycle.
Given all of this and given the budgetary process of the United States government, a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is one of the most reasonable steps that Congress could take at this point in time. I’ve read the text of the proposed amendment that was put to a vote just over a week ago and the language is not inflammatory at all (you can read the full text at this site http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.J.RES.2:). To paraphrase, it simply says that except for in a time of war, the budget must be balanced. There are other provisions but that’s the guts of it. There were no amendments and nothing that had anything to do with hot button issues such as religion or abortion. The amendment was defeated well short of the required number of votes for passage for two main reasons; Congress likes to spend money and they have no incentive not to and our deficit crisis is much like the common flu – it must get worse before it gets better.
Drastic spending cuts and drastic tax increases, both of which I view as necessary for the long-term viability of our nation’s economy, will hurt in the short run. Reduced spending will cause certain services to be reduced and that will make some people’s quality of life less. Increased taxes will perhaps mean that some small businesses will be irreparably harmed to the point that they have to close their business. This will spiral downward until we reach a bottom of sorts and then, things will start to get better. How long it will last and how bad it will get are questions that nobody can answer but I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty. It will last through the next election cycle and that is the single biggest reason why nothing is getting done with regards to these problems. The elections.
It is far easier to go into a conference room and face many of your constituents (some of whom are down on their luck and unemployed) and tell them that the big bad
It is nearly impossible to go into that same conference room and say, yes, I sacrificed some of your livelihood. I’m sorry. At this point in time, Congress has spent us into a corner and if we don’t act now, it will get far worse very quickly. I acted in what I believe are the best interests of the country as a whole. When was the last time you heard an elected official say that? Hmm, interesting, you have heard it before from the White House. So what’s the difference between the White House and Congress?
TERM LIMITS
The President is limited to two terms. The vice-president can spend far longer in the White House but always playing second fiddle. If he ever wants that chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, the clock starts on his two terms.
Congress has no such limits. 7% of currently serving members of Congress (37 out of 534, the 1st Congressional District of Oregon is currently vacant) have been in their seats longer than I have been alive (27 years and change). Roughly 44% of both houses (44 of 100 in the Senate and 192 of 434) have been in their current positions for longer than 10 years.
If you examine the tenure of all of the current members of Congress, a disturbing trend emerges. The overwhelming majority of Congress (64.4%) has either been in place for more than 10 years or has been on the job less than 1 year. To me, this says that the American public is not taking the time to do their duty as voters. When faced with the choice of somebody new or someone who was elected last time and didn’t make things happen immediately, they are choosing someone new. When asked to choose between someone new and someone who has served their district for 20 years, they are going with the one they know. In a foundering economy, it should be the ones who have been there the longest that have the most to fear, not the least. Why are John McCain (25 years in the Senate) or John Kerry (27 years) so much better equipped to handle this problem than a 30 year old Ivy League graduate with a BA, MA, and PhD in economics? When we are examining the credentials of these Representatives and Senators, the fact that they were serving when there was last a budget surplus should not be a point in their favor, it should be a point against them.
You say that you were in the Senate from 1998-2001 when there was a surplus every year and our net budget surplus was $559 billion. That’s great, where were you the last ten years when there was a net budget deficit of $6.48 trillion? Were you just taking those years off?
This strikes at the heart of my underlying opinion. People should not go to Congress thinking that it will be a career. They should be willing to sacrifice their heart, mind, body, and soul for a period of a few years to make the country as good a place as they can and after that, they can go on the lecture circuit. I believe that I can speak for many Americans when I say that I don’t want Representatives and Senators making decisions based upon keeping their jobs. I can’t say they do categorically in their first terms, but in their second terms, presidents have relatively little pressure upon them and they can step back and see the bigger picture. This is what we need desperately out of Congress.
THE ONLY PROBLEM THAT MATTERS
There are many problems with my utopia but as the above heading might indicate, there is only one that matters; the system we live in.
235 years ago, we set out on a grand experiment in republican democracy. We have had our rough moments but overall, the experiment has gone very well. When the framework of our nation was first put down on paper, there was an overwhelming fear of a single monarchy-like figure. Thus, the executive branch was made the weakest, constitutionally speaking, and the legislative branch was made the strongest. Overall, again, I would say this has served us well but in this case, it has helped cause the illness that afflicts our great nation.
A balanced budget amendment would be wonderful. The only problem is that by far the most commonly used method to amend the constitution is for both houses to vote on it. Now we’re asking them to curtail the money that they get to play with on a daily basis… it’s not likely that that will ever happen.
In order to put term limits in place, the Constitution would have to be amended. As unlikely as it might be that Congress would pass a law putting limits on how much money they can spend, it is infinitely more likely than Congress willingly putting in place a law that limits how long they can wield the enormous amount of power they have.
The onus to keep a rein on Congress falls to you and me, citizens of the United States of America. If Congress is to blame for the current economic crisis that we are in, we are responsible because we enabled this activity. At the end of the day, we have the true power in this government. No matter how much money a special interest group gives to a particular candidate, if everyone pulls the lever for the other guy, the other guy wins.
We have a sacred duty. If we don’t like what is happening in Congress, we have to tell them. If they don’t listen, we have to tell them in a language they understand; do this or you’ll lose my vote. Don’t just vote for a candidate or a party because that’s what you’ve always done. Demand answers from the candidates or your Representative or your Senator and when they give you an answer, verify it, don’t just accept it.
Above all else, when you are choosing a Representative, or a Senator, or a President, try to think beyond yourself. The best interests of the country are not always in line with your own best interests. Put your ego aside and I beg you “…my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
I Am Thankful
Holidays always mean different things to different people. For some families, Christmas is the time of year that the entire family comes together and celebrates the season. For others, holidays aren’t as important as those family get-togethers in the middle of April or August that have nothing to do with anything.
For me, the best holiday of the year is Thanksgiving. Every year, the family would get up early (or the kids would get up early) and then my mom and my sister would spend hours preparing the hors d’oeuvres for the meal later that day. We would then go over to the house of our best family friends sometime early in the afternoon. What would follow was always a little different but so similar it’s not even worth discussing the differences. The kitchen would be alive with activity, the living room alive with football. For what felt like an eternity, food would go into the oven and then come out, filling the house with smells so good that you are reminded why you only have this holiday once a year. The smells would be so good that if you had to endure that for more than an hour or so without eating, rioting would have broken out and the non-cooking half of the family would have gone on strike. In their infinite wisdom, the cooks prepared the hors d’oeuvres first so we would have something that was delicious to stuff in our faces while the rest of the food was cooking.
Late in the afternoon or early in the evening (or as Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory would say, the “prevening”) word would filter through the house that the turkey was nearly ready. Everyone would start to converge on the kitchen and would look out over the sea of side dishes and wonder how we could possibly eat this much food. Usually there was a football game still on and for as big a fan as I am, I don’t think I’ve ever watched the end of the game in that time slot.
At long last the turkey would come out and what would follow is quite possibly the most excruciating period of time of the entire day. All the cooking is done and all that remains is the most important part; the carving. By now everyone is hungry and all the food is cooked; it’s a miracle that we actually make it to the dinner table every year.
When the feast is finally ready to be consumed, it is time for one of the traditions that (for me at least) has never gotten old; the serving order. We have done:
Youngest to oldest
Oldest to youngest
Shortest to tallest
Tallest to shortest (my personal favorite)
First birthdays to last (within the calendar year) and vice versa
Alphabetical by first name and the opposite
Those are just a few of the more common themes that we’ve used over the years. In the last few years in the quest for something original, they have gotten very interesting (take your birth month, add one month, then line up in alphabetical order by month… ties are broken by birth date in ascending order) but sure enough, no person has ever gotten to serve themselves first or last two years in a row.
The food has always been great but I can honestly say that it could have been Spam and I still would have enjoyed it just as much. Spending time with that splendid group of people has provided me with some of the fondest memories that I have and some that I’m sure will be some of the best I’ll ever have. I look forward to starting new traditions of my own when I have a family of my own but they will always be trying to live up to a nearly impossible standard.
To all of you out there that made those memories what they are for me (you know who you are), thank you.
WHAT AM I THANKFUL FOR?
I am grateful for many things in my life and I just wanted to take this opportunity to mention a few of them. It is a truly impossible task for me to say each and every thing that I am thankful for and if I happen to leave you out, I am truly sorry.
I am thankful for my girlfriend. She has been an enormous part of the last four (and a little bit) years of my life and has never asked me to change who I was and has loved me for who I am.
I am thankful for Captain. This painfully cute little mutt has taught me many things about responsibility and has given me an ever so shallow look into what it’s like to be a parent. I still maintain that he is the cutest dog in the world and I beam whenever other people tell me how cute he is or how nice he is.
I am thankful for my friends. Over the years, you have been there for anything I’ve needed to get through issues that run the gamut from serious to all between my ears. You’ve provided the shoulder to cry on and the smack upside the head, right when they were needed the most.
I am thankful to have a roof over my head and food on my plate. Far too many people have to struggle for these basic needs.
I am thankful to have a job. I work hard every day afraid that it might be my last. I am thankful for all the people who have taken a chance on me and I’d like to think that if they had to do it over again, they would make the same decision.
I am thankful to live in a country where I can have a blog that is akin to an online extension of my brain. I can put every little thought I have on here and I do not have to worry about government censorship or oversight.
I am thankful that I live in a country where I am free. I’m not going to quibble about the definition of free and I’m not going to go into the limits of those freedoms (as relatively few of them are truly unlimited); I’m going to simply say that I am free and I’m glad.
I am thankful for my failures. I know that it sounds strange but I would not be the person I am today if it were not for my failures. I have fallen and I have learned to get back up again. This has led to a feeling of absolute empowerment; I believe that the world is mine for the taking in a way that I haven’t believed since I was a small child and knew everything. This feeling has helped me leave my comfort zone and has expanded my horizons in ways I’ve never dreamed of. It has helped me embody a couplet which came to me from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe via my dad:
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it
boldness has genius, power, and magic in it”
Above all else, I am thankful for my family. To my mom, my dad, and my sister; I can’t possibly thank you adequately for everything you have done for me in my life. Instead, I will say a small phrase that sounds and feels grossly inadequate but I will say it and mean it with every shred of my heart and soul:
Thank you for being you.
All of my best wishes to you and yours this Thanksgiving.
For me, the best holiday of the year is Thanksgiving. Every year, the family would get up early (or the kids would get up early) and then my mom and my sister would spend hours preparing the hors d’oeuvres for the meal later that day. We would then go over to the house of our best family friends sometime early in the afternoon. What would follow was always a little different but so similar it’s not even worth discussing the differences. The kitchen would be alive with activity, the living room alive with football. For what felt like an eternity, food would go into the oven and then come out, filling the house with smells so good that you are reminded why you only have this holiday once a year. The smells would be so good that if you had to endure that for more than an hour or so without eating, rioting would have broken out and the non-cooking half of the family would have gone on strike. In their infinite wisdom, the cooks prepared the hors d’oeuvres first so we would have something that was delicious to stuff in our faces while the rest of the food was cooking.
Late in the afternoon or early in the evening (or as Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory would say, the “prevening”) word would filter through the house that the turkey was nearly ready. Everyone would start to converge on the kitchen and would look out over the sea of side dishes and wonder how we could possibly eat this much food. Usually there was a football game still on and for as big a fan as I am, I don’t think I’ve ever watched the end of the game in that time slot.
At long last the turkey would come out and what would follow is quite possibly the most excruciating period of time of the entire day. All the cooking is done and all that remains is the most important part; the carving. By now everyone is hungry and all the food is cooked; it’s a miracle that we actually make it to the dinner table every year.
When the feast is finally ready to be consumed, it is time for one of the traditions that (for me at least) has never gotten old; the serving order. We have done:
Youngest to oldest
Oldest to youngest
Shortest to tallest
Tallest to shortest (my personal favorite)
First birthdays to last (within the calendar year) and vice versa
Alphabetical by first name and the opposite
Those are just a few of the more common themes that we’ve used over the years. In the last few years in the quest for something original, they have gotten very interesting (take your birth month, add one month, then line up in alphabetical order by month… ties are broken by birth date in ascending order) but sure enough, no person has ever gotten to serve themselves first or last two years in a row.
The food has always been great but I can honestly say that it could have been Spam and I still would have enjoyed it just as much. Spending time with that splendid group of people has provided me with some of the fondest memories that I have and some that I’m sure will be some of the best I’ll ever have. I look forward to starting new traditions of my own when I have a family of my own but they will always be trying to live up to a nearly impossible standard.
To all of you out there that made those memories what they are for me (you know who you are), thank you.
WHAT AM I THANKFUL FOR?
I am grateful for many things in my life and I just wanted to take this opportunity to mention a few of them. It is a truly impossible task for me to say each and every thing that I am thankful for and if I happen to leave you out, I am truly sorry.
I am thankful for my girlfriend. She has been an enormous part of the last four (and a little bit) years of my life and has never asked me to change who I was and has loved me for who I am.
I am thankful for Captain. This painfully cute little mutt has taught me many things about responsibility and has given me an ever so shallow look into what it’s like to be a parent. I still maintain that he is the cutest dog in the world and I beam whenever other people tell me how cute he is or how nice he is.
I am thankful for my friends. Over the years, you have been there for anything I’ve needed to get through issues that run the gamut from serious to all between my ears. You’ve provided the shoulder to cry on and the smack upside the head, right when they were needed the most.
I am thankful to have a roof over my head and food on my plate. Far too many people have to struggle for these basic needs.
I am thankful to have a job. I work hard every day afraid that it might be my last. I am thankful for all the people who have taken a chance on me and I’d like to think that if they had to do it over again, they would make the same decision.
I am thankful to live in a country where I can have a blog that is akin to an online extension of my brain. I can put every little thought I have on here and I do not have to worry about government censorship or oversight.
I am thankful that I live in a country where I am free. I’m not going to quibble about the definition of free and I’m not going to go into the limits of those freedoms (as relatively few of them are truly unlimited); I’m going to simply say that I am free and I’m glad.
I am thankful for my failures. I know that it sounds strange but I would not be the person I am today if it were not for my failures. I have fallen and I have learned to get back up again. This has led to a feeling of absolute empowerment; I believe that the world is mine for the taking in a way that I haven’t believed since I was a small child and knew everything. This feeling has helped me leave my comfort zone and has expanded my horizons in ways I’ve never dreamed of. It has helped me embody a couplet which came to me from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe via my dad:
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it
boldness has genius, power, and magic in it”
Above all else, I am thankful for my family. To my mom, my dad, and my sister; I can’t possibly thank you adequately for everything you have done for me in my life. Instead, I will say a small phrase that sounds and feels grossly inadequate but I will say it and mean it with every shred of my heart and soul:
Thank you for being you.
All of my best wishes to you and yours this Thanksgiving.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Football 2011
Before I delve into the bulk of this post, which will be about the NFL, I feel compelled to say a few words about the now annual chaos that is the BCS. From a fan’s perspective, I love the chaos. #2 Oklahoma State, #4 Oregon, and #5 Oklahoma all lost this weekend with only one of them (OSU) losing to a ranked team. Now, it very much looks like when everyone wakes up Monday morning, SEC teams will be ranked #1 (LSU), #2 (Alabama), and #3 (Arkansas). Still on the far outside looking in is undefeated Houston, now 11-0 and ranked #11 before this weekend’s action. Note to Cougars fans – you cannot play for the BCS championship when your signature win is over UCLA.
Chaos is good and bad for the BCS. It makes it far more difficult to determine who the two best teams in the country are. However, when it comes to the actual BCS bowl games, you have far more quality teams and therefore the potential for better match-ups and more viewership. The nightmare scenario right now for the BCS would be if Arkansas can beat LSU next weekend. Then the only undefeated team would be one that hasn’t played anyone significant and while it might be easy to eliminate them from the national title conversation, how do you eliminate… umm, anyone else?
The BCS is overdue for a restructuring and the rumor is that it’s coming in the next couple of years. The most interesting scenario which I’d personally love to see is the BCS would be responsible for the national championship game only. Their formula would determine the top two teams in the country and they could then receive bids for stadiums to host that game (Jerry Jones and a (almost) record BCS crowd at Cowboys Stadium anyone?). The advantage to this idea is that gone would be some of the most unpopular aspects of the BCS. There would be no automatic qualifying conferences so Connecticut would not be forced to get hammered by a top ten Oklahoma team. There would no longer be a two team limit, which is going to completely screw the SEC this year (under current rules, if Georgia were to beat LSU in the SEC Championship Game, the SEC would potentially have teams at 12-1, 11-1, 11-2, and 10-2 and they could all be ranked in the top ten and deserving of a trip to a BCS bowl… and only two of them can go.
Lastly (for the NCAA section), do I think there will be a playoff someday in big-time college football? Absolutely not. Do I think there should be one? No, I don’t and the reason is simple. Under the current format, you have to play perfectly to make it to the title game and win it all. Last March was one of the more exciting NCAA Men’s Basketball Championships that I’ve ever seen but does anyone out there (outside of Indianapolis and Storrs, Connecticut) think that Butler and Connecticut were the two best basketball teams in the country? Of course they weren’t. They played the best over that month-long tournament; they got to the final not because they were the best team but because they were the hottest team. If you change the FBS system to a playoff, the same thing will start to happen. When I look at the list of NCAA Division-I FBS champions, I know that they were one of the best teams in the country. You can rarely say that anymore with March Madness.
NFL
The seasons is just past the halfway mark and while some playoff races have shaped up and are all but determined (I’m talking to you Seahawks, Cardinals, and Rams) others remain intriguing and most likely will until Week 17. This season has had it all but as far as this blogger is concerned, some stories stood out amongst the rest.
PHILADELPHIA EAGLES
Today, the one who dubbed the Eagles the “Dream Team” will actually get to start for the first time. Due to Michael Vick’s broken ribs, Vince Young will get the start today for an Eagles team that is all but out at 3-6.
What went wrong? So many people thought they were going to win the NFC if not the Super Bowl. How did things go off the rails so quickly? Well, as is usually the case with teams not living up to expectations, it has been a combination of things but to me, one stands out above the rest; quarterback play.
Last year, everyone thought Vick had turned the corner and had finally learned how to be a pocket quarterback in the NFL. If he did, he somehow forgot nearly everything he learned. This year he is the quarterback that he was in Atlanta. He is still a supreme physical talent and a dynamic playmaker but anymore, that is not the most important part of being an NFL quarterback. If you look at four of the best quarterbacks in the NFL (in no particular order; Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Aaron Rodgers) they are at their best when they are surrounded by the playmakers. Their job is more one of distribution and leadership than leading by example. Michael Vick was very good in Atlanta when they had a great running attack and they just needed him to make a couple big plays every game. In Philadelphia, they need him to make numerous big plays every week and he isn’t the type of player who can do that consistently.
Other than that, your guess is as good as mine. The defense has needed some time to gel and not having a training camp hurt them greatly but their offense is a far greater concern. DeSean Jackson’s antics have been a distraction and he might not be back next season and this strikes a deeper chord than Vick’s passing. On a different team, Jackson would be kept in line by his fellow players. The teams I can think of off the top of my head are the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Baltimore Ravens, and the New England Patriots. In those places, veterans who have dominant personalities control those locker rooms and nothing goes on without them allowing it to happen. Where is that type of presence in Philadelphia? The short answer is that is doesn’t exist.
PLEASANT SURPRISES (LIONS AND 49ER’S)
One year ago, the Lions and 49ers were 6-10. The main difference is that there was no expectation for the Lions to compete with the likes of the Bears (11-5) or the Packers (10-6). The 49ers were picked to win the NFC West and nearly did, finishing just a game behind the Rams and Seahawks (7-9). The Lions were on the upswing at the end of the year, winning their last four games while the 49ers were just bad with a rookie holdout and then a head coach getting fired.
This year, they are both in line to make the playoffs. The Lions are 6-3 and while they have taken a couple of rough beatings in the last few weeks, they still control their own playoff fate and should make it to the playoffs. They are a case of having numerous high draft picks and actually getting a couple of them right. Matthew Stafford, Ndomukong Suh, and Calvin Johnson have all been playing at a very high level this year. However, I think one of their more important players has been Jahvid Best, the diminutive running back that has been out with an injury since their first loss to San Francisco. They started 5-1 with him and have lost two out of three since he went out. His home run ability out of the backfield as either a runner or a receiver has been sorely missed.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the Lions being a dirty team and I wanted to address that briefly. First of all, I have no problem with guys playing hard and playing rough. Of everything I saw (which I’ll freely admit is far from everything) in the first several weeks of the season, I didn’t see anything outside of the unwritten code of conduct on a football field. I saw a bunch of guys with a hard edge looking to make their opponents pay – that’s not dirty, that’s football. Despite the lack of visual evidence, the rumors persist. Last Sunday against the Bears, it was out in the open for everyone to see. Suh ripping the helmet off of Jay Cutler should have gotten him thrown out of the game. If you aren’t allowed to grab a guy’s facemask and you’re not allowed to grab his back collar and pull him backwards, why are you allowed to tackle a guy BY THE HELMET?
Unfortunately, this wasn’t even the worst transgression of the evening for the Bears – that dishonor belongs to Matthew Stafford. I understand that throwing interceptions is frustrating but nothing, I repeat nothing, gives Stafford the right to drag down a defensive player by the head, similar to what Suh did to Cutler. If it had been the ball carrier, I might have been able to give him a pass but it wasn’t, it was a blocker. Every quarterback should know that if you throw an interception and become a defensive player, you are not protected in any special way; if you go for the ball carrier, you are fair game to be blocked. What makes it even worse is the ball carrier had just passed Stafford and he still threw DJ Moore to the ground.
DJ Moore should have been ejected for his reaction; Stafford should have been ejected for starting the whole thing.
NOW THE 49ERS…
The 49ers, so bad a year ago (far worse than their 6-10 record) are now 8-1 and are sitting atop the league’s worst division (hotly contested by the AFC West). If they win today and the Seahawks also lose, they will clinch at worst a tie for the NFC West’s best record… with almost 40% of the season to go. This would be akin to a baseball team clinching their division in early August – it just doesn’t happen. So how has this turnaround happened?
A lot of people point to the influence that Jim Harbaugh has had on that team and it certainly can’t be overlooked. He has brought an edge to that team that it was missing and I think he will have success in the NFL. I think the most important thing he’s done this year is express his confidence in Alex Smith. The oft-maligned seventh year pro from Utah has never had a completion percentage better than 60.5% or a passer rating higher than 82.1 until this year. Right now those two marks stand at 64.0% and 95.8, respectively. Just to prove that he isn’t the game manager that everyone says he is, last week against the 6-2 Giants with Frank Gore proving less than effective, Smith threw the ball 30 times for 242 yards and led the 49ers to victory.
It’s beginning to show now that perhaps all he really needed was someone to believe in him. Now it looks like he’ll be quarterbacking either the #1 or the #2 seed in the NFC and with Frank Gore behind him, it’ll be very hard to bet against them come January.
INDIANAPOLIS COLTS
Everyone knew that this team was in decline. Last year they started 6-6 and had to win their last four just to win the AFC Colts division and Peyton Manning posted his lowest passer rating since 2002 (91.9 – which still ranked 10th in the league). Then the lockout happened and Manning couldn’t consult with one of the therapists he trusts the most who happened to be on the Colts’ training staff.
Then he missed the first game of the season and once his consecutive games streak was over, the team and Manning decided that he shouldn’t rush back and should come back when he is 100%. Without Manning, everyone knew this team would miss the playoffs and would struggle to finish 8-8.
With 6 games remaining, the Colts have a solid grip on the #1 overall pick in next year’s draft and have a decent chance to become the third team ever to not win a game in a season and the second to go 0-16. This is yet another illustration of just how much Manning means to the Colts. Not only is he the offensive coordinator in everything but name, the entire roster is built around him, even on the defensive side. One of the reasons they have been so bad against the run the past several years (including during their Super Bowl run) is if you have a big lead, the other team can’t afford to run as much. Those were the types of leads that Manning would give them and virtually no other quarterback in the league could. This team is a house of cards and Manning is the glue that holds them solidly together; without him, they couldn’t win the Big Ten and would struggle to win the Big East.
I don’t believe in conspiracy theories with regards to the NFL draft. I don’t believe that it’s more than coincidence that Manning misses most of the season when there is a guy in the draft pool (potentially) who might be able to replace him. This team was built around #18 and without him, they are just downright terrible.
GREEN BAY PACKERS – AARON RODGERS
On the other end of the winning spectrum are the Packers, who enter today’s game with the Buccaneers 9-0 and playing some of the best offensive football that has ever been played and so far their success starts with Aaron Rodgers. His worst game of the season (by passer rating) was in their 27-17 win over the Bears when Rodgers was 28-38 for 297 yards with 3 touchdowns and one of his three interceptions for a rating of 111.4. Just four times this year has Rodgers rating been under 120 while the last three weeks, he’s posted a rating over 140 each time.
Since 1970, there have been 1,252 instances of a quarterback throwing at least 196 passes (to qualify for the rate statistics, you have to average at least 14 pass attempts per team game and the season used to be 14 games long so 14 x 14 = 196). Amongst those, in the four main components that form the NFL’s passer rating formula, Aaron Rodgers ranks:
1st in completion percentage
2nd in touchdown percentage
6th in interception percentage
2nd in yards per attempt
This is where things get a little skewed in my opinion. Coming into this year, the greatest single season performance by a quarterback did not come from Dan Marino or John Elway or Roger Staubach or Drew Brees or Tom Brady. It came from Peyton Manning.
People remember the high flying Patriots offense led by Brady’s 50 touchdown, 8 interception season but many forget that just three years before that, Peyton Manning had an even better season. The difference? Manning’s Colts never went 16-0.
Yes, Tom Brady threw one more touchdown pass and threw for 249 more yards than Manning. Brady also had 81 more attempts than Manning. This is the best way to normalize things; this is what the seasons for Manning and Brady would look like if each threw the ball 500 times.
Name – Completions-Attempts-Yards-TD-INT
Manning – 338-500-4,585-49-10
Brady – 344-500-4,157-43-7
Manning’s season was better as evidenced by the fact that his passer rating was better. Aaron Rodger’s isn’t trying to best Brady’s 2007 but Manning’s 2004. So what would Rodgers numbers look like if normalized to 500 pass attempts? In a word, ridiculous.
Rodgers – 364-500-4,863-47-5
IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE! NO, IT’S…
(Paraphrasing Kung Fu Panda)
LEGEND TELLS OF A LEGENDARY QUARTERBACK, WHOSE QUARTERBACKING SKILLS WERE THE STUFF OF LEGEND!
The most polarizing player in the league right now and perhaps ever is Tim Tebow. His delivery is slow, his reads are slower, but he has boatloads of “intangibles”. Currently, the Broncos are 5-5, just a half game behind the Raiders in the AFC West, a division which could have four 5-5 teams at the end of play today. When Tebow took over as the starting quarterback, the team was a lifeless 1-4 with Kyle Orton at QB. Since then, Tebow has looked good at times (last five minutes of games) and horrid at others (entire 60 minutes against the Lions). However, in a division with a team that just lost is starting QB (Kansas City), a team who last win was against Denver in Week 5 (San Diego Chargers), and a team that just picked up a new quarterback after a strange sort of hold out (Oakland Raiders), they are far from out of it and in some way could be considered the favorites.
Before we go further into the Tebow-mania, let’s take a quick look at the schedules upcoming for the Raiders and Broncos…
The Raiders have four games left that they should win; today against the Vikings, Week 13 in Miami, Week 16 in Kansas City, and Week 17 against San Diego. At this point I’m writing off San Diego because they made a huge mistake when they let Darren Sproles go and now New Orleans has one of the most dynamic offenses in the league. On top of that, they finally started quickly and didn’t dig themselves a hole and since their 4-1 start, they’ve lost 4 straight and now have to play the Bears to right the ship. Anyways, those four wins would make the Raiders 9-4 with games left against Chicago, Green Bay, and Detroit. I don’t see them winning any of those three and finishing 9-7.
The Broncos make or break game is next week against the Chargers. It will likely pit 5-5 Denver against 4-6 San Diego trailing 6-4 Oakland. If Denver wins, they can keep pace with the Raiders and keep pressure on them. If San Diego wins, they are back in the hunt since 9 or 10 wins will likely take this division. Let’s just say the Broncos win to get to 6-5 (and Tebow-mania finds a new high); after that they have Minnesota and Chicago followed by New England and Buffalo before finishing with Kansas City. Unless Tebow finds some more magic, I would see 8-8 as a realistic record for them.
The problem with that is this Broncos team has won three straight to get back to 5-5 in a manner that completely defies logic. Can they beat New England? Of course not. Can they beat a team that has been to the AFC title game each of the last two years? Absolutely not… oh wait, they just did.
You have to throw everything out the window when it comes to this team and they will go as far as their defense (led by remarkable rookie Von Miller) and Tim Tebow’s legs can carry them. Can they make it to the playoffs? Yes, I believe they can. In the glance ahead at their upcoming schedules, the only stretch I saw was Denver beating San Diego and if the Chargers lose today, that might not be that much of a stretch. What if Denver beats Buffalo and Oakland loses to Miami or San Diego?
I am a fan of Tim Tebow and it has nothing to do with his religion, his politics, or his ability as a quarterback. I think that he is a nice and humble young man and in this era of professional sports, I cannot possibly ask for anything more.
Kickoffs are just under an hour away so I’m sure some of what I’ve said here will be rendered moot by the end of the day but that’s just one of the many great things about sports; no matter how long you follow a sport or how much you know about it, on any given day, something can happen that completely defies logic.
Packers; 16-0? No
Colts; 0-16? Yes
Broncos; playoffs? No (just barely)
Manning; MVP votes? Absolutely
Rodgers; MVP? I’m not even going to answer that one…
Packers; back-to-back Super Bowl wins? Yes
Chaos is good and bad for the BCS. It makes it far more difficult to determine who the two best teams in the country are. However, when it comes to the actual BCS bowl games, you have far more quality teams and therefore the potential for better match-ups and more viewership. The nightmare scenario right now for the BCS would be if Arkansas can beat LSU next weekend. Then the only undefeated team would be one that hasn’t played anyone significant and while it might be easy to eliminate them from the national title conversation, how do you eliminate… umm, anyone else?
The BCS is overdue for a restructuring and the rumor is that it’s coming in the next couple of years. The most interesting scenario which I’d personally love to see is the BCS would be responsible for the national championship game only. Their formula would determine the top two teams in the country and they could then receive bids for stadiums to host that game (Jerry Jones and a (almost) record BCS crowd at Cowboys Stadium anyone?). The advantage to this idea is that gone would be some of the most unpopular aspects of the BCS. There would be no automatic qualifying conferences so Connecticut would not be forced to get hammered by a top ten Oklahoma team. There would no longer be a two team limit, which is going to completely screw the SEC this year (under current rules, if Georgia were to beat LSU in the SEC Championship Game, the SEC would potentially have teams at 12-1, 11-1, 11-2, and 10-2 and they could all be ranked in the top ten and deserving of a trip to a BCS bowl… and only two of them can go.
Lastly (for the NCAA section), do I think there will be a playoff someday in big-time college football? Absolutely not. Do I think there should be one? No, I don’t and the reason is simple. Under the current format, you have to play perfectly to make it to the title game and win it all. Last March was one of the more exciting NCAA Men’s Basketball Championships that I’ve ever seen but does anyone out there (outside of Indianapolis and Storrs, Connecticut) think that Butler and Connecticut were the two best basketball teams in the country? Of course they weren’t. They played the best over that month-long tournament; they got to the final not because they were the best team but because they were the hottest team. If you change the FBS system to a playoff, the same thing will start to happen. When I look at the list of NCAA Division-I FBS champions, I know that they were one of the best teams in the country. You can rarely say that anymore with March Madness.
NFL
The seasons is just past the halfway mark and while some playoff races have shaped up and are all but determined (I’m talking to you Seahawks, Cardinals, and Rams) others remain intriguing and most likely will until Week 17. This season has had it all but as far as this blogger is concerned, some stories stood out amongst the rest.
PHILADELPHIA EAGLES
Today, the one who dubbed the Eagles the “Dream Team” will actually get to start for the first time. Due to Michael Vick’s broken ribs, Vince Young will get the start today for an Eagles team that is all but out at 3-6.
What went wrong? So many people thought they were going to win the NFC if not the Super Bowl. How did things go off the rails so quickly? Well, as is usually the case with teams not living up to expectations, it has been a combination of things but to me, one stands out above the rest; quarterback play.
Last year, everyone thought Vick had turned the corner and had finally learned how to be a pocket quarterback in the NFL. If he did, he somehow forgot nearly everything he learned. This year he is the quarterback that he was in Atlanta. He is still a supreme physical talent and a dynamic playmaker but anymore, that is not the most important part of being an NFL quarterback. If you look at four of the best quarterbacks in the NFL (in no particular order; Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and Aaron Rodgers) they are at their best when they are surrounded by the playmakers. Their job is more one of distribution and leadership than leading by example. Michael Vick was very good in Atlanta when they had a great running attack and they just needed him to make a couple big plays every game. In Philadelphia, they need him to make numerous big plays every week and he isn’t the type of player who can do that consistently.
Other than that, your guess is as good as mine. The defense has needed some time to gel and not having a training camp hurt them greatly but their offense is a far greater concern. DeSean Jackson’s antics have been a distraction and he might not be back next season and this strikes a deeper chord than Vick’s passing. On a different team, Jackson would be kept in line by his fellow players. The teams I can think of off the top of my head are the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Baltimore Ravens, and the New England Patriots. In those places, veterans who have dominant personalities control those locker rooms and nothing goes on without them allowing it to happen. Where is that type of presence in Philadelphia? The short answer is that is doesn’t exist.
PLEASANT SURPRISES (LIONS AND 49ER’S)
One year ago, the Lions and 49ers were 6-10. The main difference is that there was no expectation for the Lions to compete with the likes of the Bears (11-5) or the Packers (10-6). The 49ers were picked to win the NFC West and nearly did, finishing just a game behind the Rams and Seahawks (7-9). The Lions were on the upswing at the end of the year, winning their last four games while the 49ers were just bad with a rookie holdout and then a head coach getting fired.
This year, they are both in line to make the playoffs. The Lions are 6-3 and while they have taken a couple of rough beatings in the last few weeks, they still control their own playoff fate and should make it to the playoffs. They are a case of having numerous high draft picks and actually getting a couple of them right. Matthew Stafford, Ndomukong Suh, and Calvin Johnson have all been playing at a very high level this year. However, I think one of their more important players has been Jahvid Best, the diminutive running back that has been out with an injury since their first loss to San Francisco. They started 5-1 with him and have lost two out of three since he went out. His home run ability out of the backfield as either a runner or a receiver has been sorely missed.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the Lions being a dirty team and I wanted to address that briefly. First of all, I have no problem with guys playing hard and playing rough. Of everything I saw (which I’ll freely admit is far from everything) in the first several weeks of the season, I didn’t see anything outside of the unwritten code of conduct on a football field. I saw a bunch of guys with a hard edge looking to make their opponents pay – that’s not dirty, that’s football. Despite the lack of visual evidence, the rumors persist. Last Sunday against the Bears, it was out in the open for everyone to see. Suh ripping the helmet off of Jay Cutler should have gotten him thrown out of the game. If you aren’t allowed to grab a guy’s facemask and you’re not allowed to grab his back collar and pull him backwards, why are you allowed to tackle a guy BY THE HELMET?
Unfortunately, this wasn’t even the worst transgression of the evening for the Bears – that dishonor belongs to Matthew Stafford. I understand that throwing interceptions is frustrating but nothing, I repeat nothing, gives Stafford the right to drag down a defensive player by the head, similar to what Suh did to Cutler. If it had been the ball carrier, I might have been able to give him a pass but it wasn’t, it was a blocker. Every quarterback should know that if you throw an interception and become a defensive player, you are not protected in any special way; if you go for the ball carrier, you are fair game to be blocked. What makes it even worse is the ball carrier had just passed Stafford and he still threw DJ Moore to the ground.
DJ Moore should have been ejected for his reaction; Stafford should have been ejected for starting the whole thing.
NOW THE 49ERS…
The 49ers, so bad a year ago (far worse than their 6-10 record) are now 8-1 and are sitting atop the league’s worst division (hotly contested by the AFC West). If they win today and the Seahawks also lose, they will clinch at worst a tie for the NFC West’s best record… with almost 40% of the season to go. This would be akin to a baseball team clinching their division in early August – it just doesn’t happen. So how has this turnaround happened?
A lot of people point to the influence that Jim Harbaugh has had on that team and it certainly can’t be overlooked. He has brought an edge to that team that it was missing and I think he will have success in the NFL. I think the most important thing he’s done this year is express his confidence in Alex Smith. The oft-maligned seventh year pro from Utah has never had a completion percentage better than 60.5% or a passer rating higher than 82.1 until this year. Right now those two marks stand at 64.0% and 95.8, respectively. Just to prove that he isn’t the game manager that everyone says he is, last week against the 6-2 Giants with Frank Gore proving less than effective, Smith threw the ball 30 times for 242 yards and led the 49ers to victory.
It’s beginning to show now that perhaps all he really needed was someone to believe in him. Now it looks like he’ll be quarterbacking either the #1 or the #2 seed in the NFC and with Frank Gore behind him, it’ll be very hard to bet against them come January.
INDIANAPOLIS COLTS
Everyone knew that this team was in decline. Last year they started 6-6 and had to win their last four just to win the AFC Colts division and Peyton Manning posted his lowest passer rating since 2002 (91.9 – which still ranked 10th in the league). Then the lockout happened and Manning couldn’t consult with one of the therapists he trusts the most who happened to be on the Colts’ training staff.
Then he missed the first game of the season and once his consecutive games streak was over, the team and Manning decided that he shouldn’t rush back and should come back when he is 100%. Without Manning, everyone knew this team would miss the playoffs and would struggle to finish 8-8.
With 6 games remaining, the Colts have a solid grip on the #1 overall pick in next year’s draft and have a decent chance to become the third team ever to not win a game in a season and the second to go 0-16. This is yet another illustration of just how much Manning means to the Colts. Not only is he the offensive coordinator in everything but name, the entire roster is built around him, even on the defensive side. One of the reasons they have been so bad against the run the past several years (including during their Super Bowl run) is if you have a big lead, the other team can’t afford to run as much. Those were the types of leads that Manning would give them and virtually no other quarterback in the league could. This team is a house of cards and Manning is the glue that holds them solidly together; without him, they couldn’t win the Big Ten and would struggle to win the Big East.
I don’t believe in conspiracy theories with regards to the NFL draft. I don’t believe that it’s more than coincidence that Manning misses most of the season when there is a guy in the draft pool (potentially) who might be able to replace him. This team was built around #18 and without him, they are just downright terrible.
GREEN BAY PACKERS – AARON RODGERS
On the other end of the winning spectrum are the Packers, who enter today’s game with the Buccaneers 9-0 and playing some of the best offensive football that has ever been played and so far their success starts with Aaron Rodgers. His worst game of the season (by passer rating) was in their 27-17 win over the Bears when Rodgers was 28-38 for 297 yards with 3 touchdowns and one of his three interceptions for a rating of 111.4. Just four times this year has Rodgers rating been under 120 while the last three weeks, he’s posted a rating over 140 each time.
Since 1970, there have been 1,252 instances of a quarterback throwing at least 196 passes (to qualify for the rate statistics, you have to average at least 14 pass attempts per team game and the season used to be 14 games long so 14 x 14 = 196). Amongst those, in the four main components that form the NFL’s passer rating formula, Aaron Rodgers ranks:
1st in completion percentage
2nd in touchdown percentage
6th in interception percentage
2nd in yards per attempt
This is where things get a little skewed in my opinion. Coming into this year, the greatest single season performance by a quarterback did not come from Dan Marino or John Elway or Roger Staubach or Drew Brees or Tom Brady. It came from Peyton Manning.
People remember the high flying Patriots offense led by Brady’s 50 touchdown, 8 interception season but many forget that just three years before that, Peyton Manning had an even better season. The difference? Manning’s Colts never went 16-0.
Yes, Tom Brady threw one more touchdown pass and threw for 249 more yards than Manning. Brady also had 81 more attempts than Manning. This is the best way to normalize things; this is what the seasons for Manning and Brady would look like if each threw the ball 500 times.
Name – Completions-Attempts-Yards-TD-INT
Manning – 338-500-4,585-49-10
Brady – 344-500-4,157-43-7
Manning’s season was better as evidenced by the fact that his passer rating was better. Aaron Rodger’s isn’t trying to best Brady’s 2007 but Manning’s 2004. So what would Rodgers numbers look like if normalized to 500 pass attempts? In a word, ridiculous.
Rodgers – 364-500-4,863-47-5
IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE! NO, IT’S…
(Paraphrasing Kung Fu Panda)
LEGEND TELLS OF A LEGENDARY QUARTERBACK, WHOSE QUARTERBACKING SKILLS WERE THE STUFF OF LEGEND!
The most polarizing player in the league right now and perhaps ever is Tim Tebow. His delivery is slow, his reads are slower, but he has boatloads of “intangibles”. Currently, the Broncos are 5-5, just a half game behind the Raiders in the AFC West, a division which could have four 5-5 teams at the end of play today. When Tebow took over as the starting quarterback, the team was a lifeless 1-4 with Kyle Orton at QB. Since then, Tebow has looked good at times (last five minutes of games) and horrid at others (entire 60 minutes against the Lions). However, in a division with a team that just lost is starting QB (Kansas City), a team who last win was against Denver in Week 5 (San Diego Chargers), and a team that just picked up a new quarterback after a strange sort of hold out (Oakland Raiders), they are far from out of it and in some way could be considered the favorites.
Before we go further into the Tebow-mania, let’s take a quick look at the schedules upcoming for the Raiders and Broncos…
The Raiders have four games left that they should win; today against the Vikings, Week 13 in Miami, Week 16 in Kansas City, and Week 17 against San Diego. At this point I’m writing off San Diego because they made a huge mistake when they let Darren Sproles go and now New Orleans has one of the most dynamic offenses in the league. On top of that, they finally started quickly and didn’t dig themselves a hole and since their 4-1 start, they’ve lost 4 straight and now have to play the Bears to right the ship. Anyways, those four wins would make the Raiders 9-4 with games left against Chicago, Green Bay, and Detroit. I don’t see them winning any of those three and finishing 9-7.
The Broncos make or break game is next week against the Chargers. It will likely pit 5-5 Denver against 4-6 San Diego trailing 6-4 Oakland. If Denver wins, they can keep pace with the Raiders and keep pressure on them. If San Diego wins, they are back in the hunt since 9 or 10 wins will likely take this division. Let’s just say the Broncos win to get to 6-5 (and Tebow-mania finds a new high); after that they have Minnesota and Chicago followed by New England and Buffalo before finishing with Kansas City. Unless Tebow finds some more magic, I would see 8-8 as a realistic record for them.
The problem with that is this Broncos team has won three straight to get back to 5-5 in a manner that completely defies logic. Can they beat New England? Of course not. Can they beat a team that has been to the AFC title game each of the last two years? Absolutely not… oh wait, they just did.
You have to throw everything out the window when it comes to this team and they will go as far as their defense (led by remarkable rookie Von Miller) and Tim Tebow’s legs can carry them. Can they make it to the playoffs? Yes, I believe they can. In the glance ahead at their upcoming schedules, the only stretch I saw was Denver beating San Diego and if the Chargers lose today, that might not be that much of a stretch. What if Denver beats Buffalo and Oakland loses to Miami or San Diego?
I am a fan of Tim Tebow and it has nothing to do with his religion, his politics, or his ability as a quarterback. I think that he is a nice and humble young man and in this era of professional sports, I cannot possibly ask for anything more.
Kickoffs are just under an hour away so I’m sure some of what I’ve said here will be rendered moot by the end of the day but that’s just one of the many great things about sports; no matter how long you follow a sport or how much you know about it, on any given day, something can happen that completely defies logic.
Packers; 16-0? No
Colts; 0-16? Yes
Broncos; playoffs? No (just barely)
Manning; MVP votes? Absolutely
Rodgers; MVP? I’m not even going to answer that one…
Packers; back-to-back Super Bowl wins? Yes
Friday, November 18, 2011
The $1.6 Trillion Monkey on our Backs and the $14 Trillion Gorilla in the Room
Status quo (noun) – the existing state or condition
The status quo is comfortable. It’s peaceful, predictable, and overall not-too-bad… it’s also leading us straight to a disaster of potentially epic proportions.
THE PROBLEM
Three months ago, members of Congress came startlingly close to allowing the United States government to default on our national debt of over $14 trillion. Congressmen and women stood up in front of the assembled legislators and railed against the system that we have and said that something needed to be done. In their wisdom, they formed a small committee, dubbed the “Super Committee” (I now suspect by themselves). This small group of people, half Democrat and half Republican, was given the task of reducing the government’s budget deficit. They were also given a deadline; November 23rd. If they failed to come up with a certain amount of deficit reducing stuff (spending cuts, revenue enhancements, or a combination thereof) then budget cuts of $1.2 trillion would automatically kick in starting in 2013. Apparently these budget cuts are so drastic that we absolutely can’t allow that to happen. Unfortunately, if you believe the reports and the rumors coming from Washington these days, that’s exactly what is going to happen. If the so-called “Super” Committee cannot come up with some sort of compromise in the three and a half months that they had for this job, I personally view this as an epic failure to do the job that they were sent to Washington to do.
Don’t talk to me about the economic repercussions of raising taxes. I know what they are.
Don’t talk to me about the sob stories of all the people that will be worse off if the government has to roll back its benefits. I’ve heard many of those sob stories.
The fact of the matter is that We, the People of the United State of America, sent those 537 people to the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House to make the decisions that us mere mortals can’t even conceive of making. Someone has to make the hard decisions about what is more important in the country today, tomorrow, and ten years from now. Unfortunately, both sides of the aisle seem far more interested in holding the party line at best and moving the party line farther from center at worst than they do in compromising.
In my sometimes-not-so-humble opinion, it is despicable that the federal government has accumulated a debt in excess of $14 trillion. Say what you want about how our economy is still strong (it is) or how much better our prospects look in the short run compared to Europe (much better), I don’t care. In May of 2010, the average American who worked year round full time earned an average of $44,416.18. At that rate, it would take one person 315,200,452 years to pay off the nation’s debt. Put differently, it would require 315,200,452 people to dedicate an entire year’s wages to this effort and they wouldn’t be able to spend any money on such luxuries as food and shelter. That is more than double the workforce of the United States. What’s even more amazing is how the steps taken by Congress to curtail the truly incredible level of federal spending are laughable.
“Wait a minute!” you exclaim. “$1.2 trillion is no laughing matter!”
This would be true if those budget cuts were going to be focused in one year. However, they are going to be spread out over the next decade. If I am not mistaken, the way these cuts are laid out is such that they are far deeper in year eight of the plan than year two. However, it does not change the fact that it isn’t enough.
It is estimated by the US Census Bureau that in the fiscal year 2011 (10/1/10 through 9/30/11), the US government took in $2.1737 trillion and spent $3.8188 trillion for a budget deficit in one year of $1.6451 trillion.
The average annual budget cuts proposed by Congress would be $120 billion.
Cuts - $120 billion
Deficit (FY ’11) – $1,645.1 billion
Desperate times call for desperate measures. The government, Democrat and Republican alike, have spent us into a corner and there are very few things that will get us out of it. As much as it will pain everyone in Congress and everyone in the nation, it will require drastic spending cuts AND increases in taxes.
THE SOLUTION
Do I have a solution? Yes.
Is it overly simplistic? Absolutely.
Is there any other way? I’d love to hear something better.
In 2011, as I mentioned above, the federal government took in $2.17 trillion in revenue and spent $3.82 trillion for a deficit of $1.65 trillion. Please forgive discrepancies due to rounding - two decimal places are much better to deal with than four or five. This gap is just too big to bridge with one side or the other doing all the compromising which leads me to my solution.
The federal deficit is $1.65 trillion. Republicans are responsible for half and Democrats are responsible for half. If we assume that Republicans will look to cut spending and Democrats will look to enhance revenues in the form of new taxes, then we can very easily see what the scope of the federal government will look like.
The government spent $3.82 trillion last year. If they were tasked with trimming $825 billion worth of fat from that budget, that would be a 21.6% decrease in spending. Several candidates for the GOP nomination have even floated sound-bites with regards to specific spending cuts that they would make happen if they were voted into the White House. Rick Perry very famously wanted to cut the departments of Commerce, Education, and Energy and he was hoping that people out there in the real world wouldn’t look it up to see what that would mean. Forget for a moment the implications of actually eliminating those departments and focus just on the money. Last year those three departments spent a combined $135.9 billion. So my question for Governor Perry and the rest of the GOP candidates is quite simple; after you get rid of the “luxuries” that were brought about by Democrats that we can no longer afford, what are you going to cut next?
Those three departments represent a paltry 3.6% federal spending in a year where our expenses outpaced our income by 75.7%. This problem is far more serious than legislators in Washington are acting like it is.
The simple answer on the spending cuts side also has the advantage of being the most fair; cut 20% off the top of each department. Yes, vital services will be cut. Yes, these are beyond drastic measures but let me ask you this; what happens if the debt ceiling doesn’t get raised the next time around?
Now, to the Democratic side of the house…
Federal income last year was $2.17 trillion and they need to find a way to add that same figure; $825 billion. Income taxes comprised $956 billion, corporate taxes provided $198 billion, and “Social Insurance and Retirement Receipts” provided $807 billion. Clearly these three don’t add up to that full number but they did provide just over 90% of the government’s income so that is where the action needs to happen. A little bit more math says that in order to meet their needs, they would have to increase those three areas by 42%.
To sum up, the budget for the federal government has been reduced by 21% and the tax revenue brought in by the government increases by 42% and that could balance the budget. If that doesn’t give you an idea of how far our government has gotten out of whack, my guess is that nothing will.
WHY?
So why am I ranting and raving about this all of a sudden? Because of a proposed constitutional amendment that (according to a CNN poll) slightly less than 75% of Americans want enacted; a balanced budget amendment.
Why do we need it? The answer to that is simple; Congress needs to change their ways and never come back to the way things are being done right now. The only thing I see that can stop them from relapsing is a constitutional amendment.
The automatic cuts as a fallback in case the “Super” Committee couldn’t agree was a good idea… until several prominent lawmakers (principally among them Senator John McCain) said that the cuts are too drastic and, paraphrasing now, since Congress came up with this plan, Congress can amend it or eliminate it. On top of that, we have a candidate for the Republican nomination (Governor Perry again) say that if the automatic cuts hit his desk as president, he would not allow them to go into effect.
Essentially, the situation we have is that one of the more important pieces of economic legislation was passed in August and now, three and a half months later, we have very powerful people saying that we can and should ignore large portions of those laws they helped shape.
We’re all in this together. Republican, Democrat, Independent, Left, Right, Up, Down, Charm, and Strange. We need a group of people to serve in Congress that don’t care about a second term. We need people to make the tough decisions and think of ALL Americans in times like these. We need our lawmakers to stop assigning blame to those who they think are responsible for our circumstances (which comes across as “everyone but me and my friends”) and start working together to find solutions for our problems. We need 537 people pulling on the same end of the same rope because there’s a $14 trillion gorilla on the other end. Instead we have some people on each end of the rope and the gorilla has the middle; dangling it in the air like a puppet master or an amused child.
I believe in America and I believe in her economy. I believe that American workers are the best and smartest in the world.
I don’t believe in our elected officials. If I could speak directly to Congress, my message would be simple;
Restore my faith.
The status quo is comfortable. It’s peaceful, predictable, and overall not-too-bad… it’s also leading us straight to a disaster of potentially epic proportions.
THE PROBLEM
Three months ago, members of Congress came startlingly close to allowing the United States government to default on our national debt of over $14 trillion. Congressmen and women stood up in front of the assembled legislators and railed against the system that we have and said that something needed to be done. In their wisdom, they formed a small committee, dubbed the “Super Committee” (I now suspect by themselves). This small group of people, half Democrat and half Republican, was given the task of reducing the government’s budget deficit. They were also given a deadline; November 23rd. If they failed to come up with a certain amount of deficit reducing stuff (spending cuts, revenue enhancements, or a combination thereof) then budget cuts of $1.2 trillion would automatically kick in starting in 2013. Apparently these budget cuts are so drastic that we absolutely can’t allow that to happen. Unfortunately, if you believe the reports and the rumors coming from Washington these days, that’s exactly what is going to happen. If the so-called “Super” Committee cannot come up with some sort of compromise in the three and a half months that they had for this job, I personally view this as an epic failure to do the job that they were sent to Washington to do.
Don’t talk to me about the economic repercussions of raising taxes. I know what they are.
Don’t talk to me about the sob stories of all the people that will be worse off if the government has to roll back its benefits. I’ve heard many of those sob stories.
The fact of the matter is that We, the People of the United State of America, sent those 537 people to the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House to make the decisions that us mere mortals can’t even conceive of making. Someone has to make the hard decisions about what is more important in the country today, tomorrow, and ten years from now. Unfortunately, both sides of the aisle seem far more interested in holding the party line at best and moving the party line farther from center at worst than they do in compromising.
In my sometimes-not-so-humble opinion, it is despicable that the federal government has accumulated a debt in excess of $14 trillion. Say what you want about how our economy is still strong (it is) or how much better our prospects look in the short run compared to Europe (much better), I don’t care. In May of 2010, the average American who worked year round full time earned an average of $44,416.18. At that rate, it would take one person 315,200,452 years to pay off the nation’s debt. Put differently, it would require 315,200,452 people to dedicate an entire year’s wages to this effort and they wouldn’t be able to spend any money on such luxuries as food and shelter. That is more than double the workforce of the United States. What’s even more amazing is how the steps taken by Congress to curtail the truly incredible level of federal spending are laughable.
“Wait a minute!” you exclaim. “$1.2 trillion is no laughing matter!”
This would be true if those budget cuts were going to be focused in one year. However, they are going to be spread out over the next decade. If I am not mistaken, the way these cuts are laid out is such that they are far deeper in year eight of the plan than year two. However, it does not change the fact that it isn’t enough.
It is estimated by the US Census Bureau that in the fiscal year 2011 (10/1/10 through 9/30/11), the US government took in $2.1737 trillion and spent $3.8188 trillion for a budget deficit in one year of $1.6451 trillion.
The average annual budget cuts proposed by Congress would be $120 billion.
Cuts - $120 billion
Deficit (FY ’11) – $1,645.1 billion
Desperate times call for desperate measures. The government, Democrat and Republican alike, have spent us into a corner and there are very few things that will get us out of it. As much as it will pain everyone in Congress and everyone in the nation, it will require drastic spending cuts AND increases in taxes.
THE SOLUTION
Do I have a solution? Yes.
Is it overly simplistic? Absolutely.
Is there any other way? I’d love to hear something better.
In 2011, as I mentioned above, the federal government took in $2.17 trillion in revenue and spent $3.82 trillion for a deficit of $1.65 trillion. Please forgive discrepancies due to rounding - two decimal places are much better to deal with than four or five. This gap is just too big to bridge with one side or the other doing all the compromising which leads me to my solution.
The federal deficit is $1.65 trillion. Republicans are responsible for half and Democrats are responsible for half. If we assume that Republicans will look to cut spending and Democrats will look to enhance revenues in the form of new taxes, then we can very easily see what the scope of the federal government will look like.
The government spent $3.82 trillion last year. If they were tasked with trimming $825 billion worth of fat from that budget, that would be a 21.6% decrease in spending. Several candidates for the GOP nomination have even floated sound-bites with regards to specific spending cuts that they would make happen if they were voted into the White House. Rick Perry very famously wanted to cut the departments of Commerce, Education, and Energy and he was hoping that people out there in the real world wouldn’t look it up to see what that would mean. Forget for a moment the implications of actually eliminating those departments and focus just on the money. Last year those three departments spent a combined $135.9 billion. So my question for Governor Perry and the rest of the GOP candidates is quite simple; after you get rid of the “luxuries” that were brought about by Democrats that we can no longer afford, what are you going to cut next?
Those three departments represent a paltry 3.6% federal spending in a year where our expenses outpaced our income by 75.7%. This problem is far more serious than legislators in Washington are acting like it is.
The simple answer on the spending cuts side also has the advantage of being the most fair; cut 20% off the top of each department. Yes, vital services will be cut. Yes, these are beyond drastic measures but let me ask you this; what happens if the debt ceiling doesn’t get raised the next time around?
Now, to the Democratic side of the house…
Federal income last year was $2.17 trillion and they need to find a way to add that same figure; $825 billion. Income taxes comprised $956 billion, corporate taxes provided $198 billion, and “Social Insurance and Retirement Receipts” provided $807 billion. Clearly these three don’t add up to that full number but they did provide just over 90% of the government’s income so that is where the action needs to happen. A little bit more math says that in order to meet their needs, they would have to increase those three areas by 42%.
To sum up, the budget for the federal government has been reduced by 21% and the tax revenue brought in by the government increases by 42% and that could balance the budget. If that doesn’t give you an idea of how far our government has gotten out of whack, my guess is that nothing will.
WHY?
So why am I ranting and raving about this all of a sudden? Because of a proposed constitutional amendment that (according to a CNN poll) slightly less than 75% of Americans want enacted; a balanced budget amendment.
Why do we need it? The answer to that is simple; Congress needs to change their ways and never come back to the way things are being done right now. The only thing I see that can stop them from relapsing is a constitutional amendment.
The automatic cuts as a fallback in case the “Super” Committee couldn’t agree was a good idea… until several prominent lawmakers (principally among them Senator John McCain) said that the cuts are too drastic and, paraphrasing now, since Congress came up with this plan, Congress can amend it or eliminate it. On top of that, we have a candidate for the Republican nomination (Governor Perry again) say that if the automatic cuts hit his desk as president, he would not allow them to go into effect.
Essentially, the situation we have is that one of the more important pieces of economic legislation was passed in August and now, three and a half months later, we have very powerful people saying that we can and should ignore large portions of those laws they helped shape.
We’re all in this together. Republican, Democrat, Independent, Left, Right, Up, Down, Charm, and Strange. We need a group of people to serve in Congress that don’t care about a second term. We need people to make the tough decisions and think of ALL Americans in times like these. We need our lawmakers to stop assigning blame to those who they think are responsible for our circumstances (which comes across as “everyone but me and my friends”) and start working together to find solutions for our problems. We need 537 people pulling on the same end of the same rope because there’s a $14 trillion gorilla on the other end. Instead we have some people on each end of the rope and the gorilla has the middle; dangling it in the air like a puppet master or an amused child.
I believe in America and I believe in her economy. I believe that American workers are the best and smartest in the world.
I don’t believe in our elected officials. If I could speak directly to Congress, my message would be simple;
Restore my faith.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
On the Long Road to Acceptance...
Imagine that you are a fly on the wall somewhere in the vast NBC complex and you overhear this conversation.
Producer: Alright, who has an idea for next week’s show?
Writer: I think I have something. We have a true living legend of a football coach – the guy’s been coaching for more than half a century. The suspect is one of his assistant coaches and he’s also a former player. He uses his position to set up a foundation for kids and he runs youth football camps and that’s where he selects his victims.
Producer: Not bad, not bad. Do we open with a murder? Is he killing these kids too?
Writer: No, I had a better idea. A graduate student who is an assistant to the team walks in on the coach having sex with a young boy in the locker room shower.
Next week on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit…
It’s not a bad episode is it? The coach comes out and tries to deny and eventually tries to defend himself and all the while, Detective Elliot Stabler (played magnificently by Christopher Meloni) does his very best to not beat the snot out of the suspect with his bare hands. Do me a favor and keep this scenario in mind for a few minutes.
There’s only one problem…
GRIEF
Everyone in the country knows that one of the bigger jokes is the NCAA. On one hand they trumpet the virtues of the student-athlete who cares about getting his degree and is learning valuable lessons on his way through college by playing sports. On the other hand, there is Division I (Bowl Subdivision) football and Division I Men’s Basketball. When I look at water polo or field hockey or rugby or underwater basket-weaving (a very competitive sport, so they say) I can think about the student-athlete without gagging.
When I look at Division I Football (Bowl Subdivision) and Men’s Basketball, I can’t help but think that I can add up the GPA’s of the entire teams on both hands. There are always exceptions – for instance, if I remember my facts correctly, the presumptive top pick in next year’s NFL draft has a GPA over 3.5… from Stanford. So what exactly am I getting at with all of this?
When it comes to big-time college football and basketball, the players are not there to get a degree or to spend four years in college. They are there to enhance their draft stock and hopefully play professionally in their sport. The sad truth of the matter is that everyone exploits these kids for their freakish ability to jump high or to throw a football fifty yards downfield while four three hundred pound behemoths try to rip his head off. Yes, I said EVERYONE.
Fans exploit the players to the extent that they want to watch the event.
Universities exploit them by selling tickets to said events.
The NCAA exploits them by negotiating ridiculously lucrative television contracts to air the biggest events.
The coaches exploit them (perhaps worst of all) because they are the coach’s meal ticket. If a coach recruits good players, the team does well. If the team does well, the coach either gets a raise or gets offered a job at another university with greater pay and responsibility.
So again, I’ll ask, where is this heading? It’s heading towards recruiting violations and the illusion of the amateur athlete and how the former is making a complete mockery out of the latter. I can think of four huge programs that are either under investigation or were recently for awful recruiting violations in the last ten years and all of them have either played for or won a BCS National Championship… and I thought about it for about thirty seconds.
I don’t think that college athletes should be paid. A number of them get some form of scholarship and if you went down to the college students on Wall Street, I’ll bet that they would value that a bit higher than the players who receive them do. I don’t like recruiting rules but they are the rules and if you break them, you should be punished. When it comes to texting a player too much, I can live with that. You lose a scholarship this year, don’t do it again. When it comes to supposedly offering a guy’s family $180,000 to convince him to come and play for your university, that’s way too far. I don’t think college titles should be bought (at least not in that fashion). They should be earned by the coach taking the time to go out around the country and meet the guys and convince them to come to State University. Alas, it goes on despite the efforts of the NCAA’s enforcement staff.
Years ago, when I was young and naïve, I denied that anything like this could possibly happen.
As I got older and watched the news of it happening on Sportscenter, I got angry at the coaches that so flagrantly broke the rules.
As I saw the unfathomable proliferation of these practices throughout college athletics, I softened my stance on paying players (maybe it would reduce a lot of these problems after all).
When I heard people actually articulate the details of paying players, I got depressed when I realized that it could and would never happen.
And finally, at some point last season, when the presumptive (and eventual) Heisman Trophy winner was leading a team towards the BCS National Championship Game (which he won) I gave up and accepted that this was the way big time college sports was always going to be. There were always going to be rule breakers and people would always put up with them. After all, if it actually happened, why should Auburn University care about the $180,000 they supposedly paid the Newton family when they went 14-0 and won the national title? How much extra money did they make during that season?
As you can see, when it comes to the awful corruption that is rampant in college sports, I went through the five stages of grief. I firmly believe that I went through all the stages and came out the other side and accepted it so easily because after all, these players are making million upon millions of dollars for the universities and the NCAA so why should they not get a little on the side for themselves? After all, it’s not like they’re hurting anyone…
JERRY SANDUSKY
As much as it pains me to write this, the idea for an episode of NBC’s Law & Order: SVU about a serial child molester is not fiction. At this point I must point out that nothing has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt yet so there is not yet a perpetrator, just a defendant.
Jerry Sandusky played football at Penn State under coach Joe Paterno and later returned to the team and was an assistant coach there for just over three decades. During that time he founded an organization that that reached underprivileged children through different programs and camps and it is here, prosecutors allege, that he selected his victims.
In paperwork filed with the Centre County District Magistrate Judge’s office at the end of last week, Jerry Sandusky is accused of 40 counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse of someone under 16, aggravated indecent assault, indecent assault of someone under 16, indecent assault of someone under 13, and corruption of minors. These crimes were allegedly committed against eight different boys from 1996 to 2005. The details are still coming in but if you’re wondering what some of the details of the alleged offenses are, you can find the Grand Jury Report here – http://assets.espn.go.com/photo/2011/1107/espn_e_Sandusky-Grand-Jury-Presentment.pdf
In this report you will find that a graduate assistant testifies that he walked into the locker room and witnessed Sandusky having sex with a boy he described as being about ten years old in the showers. According to testimony, he called his father and asked what he should do. The next day he went to head coach Joe Paterno and told him what he witnessed. Paterno then contacted his boss, athletic director Tim Curley, and told him of what the graduate assistant had told him.
This is where the waters get a bit muddied. If you read the testimony presented by Mike McQueary (the graduate assistant), Joe Paterno, Tim Curley, Gary Schultz (Vice President for Finance and Business at Penn State), and Graham Spanier (President of Penn State University), it appears at best that the three men in the middle of this chain of communication (Paterno, Curley, and Schultz) were guilty of simple misrepresentation or misunderstand of the story being presented to them. At worst, it was an attempt to sweep the whole incident under the rug and cover the whole thing up to protect a man that had given 36 years of his life to the football team.
President Spanier testified that he was told a story of “Jerry Sandusky… and a younger child and that they were horsing around in the shower”. How we got there from McQueary saying he thought anal sex was involved is more than a mystery; it’s potentially criminal. I should note at this point that both Curley and Schultz are now facing perjury charges because of what they said to the Grand Jury.
So what is the point of my telling you this sordid tale and what is the tie to recruiting violations? It’s the culture of “we can do whatever we want”. This particular event involving McQueary allegedly took place nine years ago. NINE YEARS! Sandusky was more or less given an emeritus position with the football team since his retirement in 1999 and has had virtually unfettered access to Penn State athletic facilities since then. Can anyone explain why?
So now, my feelings on the entire corrupt system have gone into reverse big time – all the way from acceptance to blinding rage. Even if we put aside the Pennsylvania state law that requires all instances of possible child abuse to be reported to certain state agencies, how were the police never contacted? How and why did “anal sex” become “horsing around” when the matter came before the university president?
One potentially devastating answer to those questions swings back to what I was talking about earlier: college football is a huge business and when you look at these events through the lens of what the PR hit will do to your bottom line, all of a sudden there is a tremendous motive to make sure this never sees the light of day. Every time the Nittany Lions play at home, they fill their stadium (which seats an estimated 107,000) to capacity and those people all buy their fill of concessions and beer. Now imagine that number goes down 5% because of this news. Now imagine they are eligible for a BCS at-large bid but no BCS bowl wants to select them because they don’t want the bad publicity. Now they are playing in the Gator Bowl instead of the Orange Bowl with its $15 million payout. I hope that this isn’t the reason why this issue was never given the due attention is required but it is simply too big of a motive to just dismiss.
FALLOUT
The last thing to be determined in this case is what is the fallout going to look like for all parties involved? Given the charges levied against Sandusky, if he is found guilty on half of them, it’s entirely possible that he won’t ever be a free man again and if he did indeed violate the trust of these children, he deserves far worse than he will get.
According to the Grand Jury Report, McQueary was found credible and Curley and Schultz were not. If they are found guilty, they should go to prison. I don’t know what the penalties are for perjury in the state of Pennsylvania but I know that they should be severe.
McQueary is a wildcard and he has already inspired some conspiracy theories of his own. For instance, why did he go from a graduate assistant to a position coach within the Penn State football community? Did it have anything to do with the fact that he called his father and then Joe Paterno instead of the far more natural instinct to dial 9-1-1? I know that that is a serious accusation and I have no evidence whatsoever of his any wrongdoing on McQueary’s part. I simply find it strange that a grown man (he was 28 at the time) would call his father and then the head coach instead of the police when he sees a 58 year old molesting a 10 year old. Whether it was happening or not is beside the point; according to his testimony, that’s what he thought was happening.
Lastly, we come to Joe Paterno. He coached his first game for Penn State in 1966 and if I had my way, he coached his last game for them three days ago. The district attorney has already said that Paterno has not been indicted and everyone attached to Paterno has been quick to say that he fulfilled his legal requirement by notifying his superior, the athletic director. Morally, I find his behavior in this matter to be reprehensible. What he should have done is call the athletic director and notify him of the report that Paterno had just received and that he was calling the police to report the alleged offense. The fact that he took no steps that have come to light as of yet other than to notify his boss and he also allowed Sandusky to keep his access to Penn State’s athletic facilities (he was reportedly in the football facilities as recently as last week) is nothing short of absurd and for his whole role in this, Joe Paterno should be ashamed.
So what do I think should happen? I think the university should clean house and make an example of the man that has won more than 400 games, three Big Ten titles, and two national championships. The university needs to come out with the message that this behavior was unacceptable and the fact that it took nine years for this issue to be properly dealt with is worse. It’s despicable how one of the “good guys” could let this go on right underneath his nose.
COACHES AND POWER
The last issue I’d like to address is an issue that has reared its ugly head twice in the last year. When it came to light that Ohio State coach Jim Tressel had indeed known about the violations long before the NCAA found out about them and had lied about his knowledge, the obvious question posed to university president E Gordon Gee was if he would be firing Jim Tressel. His response?
“No, are you kidding me? Let me be very clear. I’m just hoping the coach doesn’t dismiss me.”
When this scandal at Penn State started to take off, the same implication was made by journalists and analysts alike; Joe Paterno wouldn’t be fired because he’s Joe Paterno and he’s bigger than anyone else at Penn State.
I understand that I just compared a situation where players got tattoos in exchange for memorabilia and one where an assistant coach molested young boys on university property but the problem I’m bringing up is the same in both cases. The coach has so much power that it is explicitly stated that he can do the firing if he wants to. Universities are so desperate for a good football team that they are more willing to appease a coach with questionable morals rather than upset the fan base that pays the bills.
At least when Woody Hayes assaulted a player on the field of play, he was fired within 24 hours. Joe Paterno was supposedly privy to knowledge about something far, far worse.
Nine years later, he’s still employed.
Producer: Alright, who has an idea for next week’s show?
Writer: I think I have something. We have a true living legend of a football coach – the guy’s been coaching for more than half a century. The suspect is one of his assistant coaches and he’s also a former player. He uses his position to set up a foundation for kids and he runs youth football camps and that’s where he selects his victims.
Producer: Not bad, not bad. Do we open with a murder? Is he killing these kids too?
Writer: No, I had a better idea. A graduate student who is an assistant to the team walks in on the coach having sex with a young boy in the locker room shower.
Next week on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit…
It’s not a bad episode is it? The coach comes out and tries to deny and eventually tries to defend himself and all the while, Detective Elliot Stabler (played magnificently by Christopher Meloni) does his very best to not beat the snot out of the suspect with his bare hands. Do me a favor and keep this scenario in mind for a few minutes.
There’s only one problem…
GRIEF
Everyone in the country knows that one of the bigger jokes is the NCAA. On one hand they trumpet the virtues of the student-athlete who cares about getting his degree and is learning valuable lessons on his way through college by playing sports. On the other hand, there is Division I (Bowl Subdivision) football and Division I Men’s Basketball. When I look at water polo or field hockey or rugby or underwater basket-weaving (a very competitive sport, so they say) I can think about the student-athlete without gagging.
When I look at Division I Football (Bowl Subdivision) and Men’s Basketball, I can’t help but think that I can add up the GPA’s of the entire teams on both hands. There are always exceptions – for instance, if I remember my facts correctly, the presumptive top pick in next year’s NFL draft has a GPA over 3.5… from Stanford. So what exactly am I getting at with all of this?
When it comes to big-time college football and basketball, the players are not there to get a degree or to spend four years in college. They are there to enhance their draft stock and hopefully play professionally in their sport. The sad truth of the matter is that everyone exploits these kids for their freakish ability to jump high or to throw a football fifty yards downfield while four three hundred pound behemoths try to rip his head off. Yes, I said EVERYONE.
Fans exploit the players to the extent that they want to watch the event.
Universities exploit them by selling tickets to said events.
The NCAA exploits them by negotiating ridiculously lucrative television contracts to air the biggest events.
The coaches exploit them (perhaps worst of all) because they are the coach’s meal ticket. If a coach recruits good players, the team does well. If the team does well, the coach either gets a raise or gets offered a job at another university with greater pay and responsibility.
So again, I’ll ask, where is this heading? It’s heading towards recruiting violations and the illusion of the amateur athlete and how the former is making a complete mockery out of the latter. I can think of four huge programs that are either under investigation or were recently for awful recruiting violations in the last ten years and all of them have either played for or won a BCS National Championship… and I thought about it for about thirty seconds.
I don’t think that college athletes should be paid. A number of them get some form of scholarship and if you went down to the college students on Wall Street, I’ll bet that they would value that a bit higher than the players who receive them do. I don’t like recruiting rules but they are the rules and if you break them, you should be punished. When it comes to texting a player too much, I can live with that. You lose a scholarship this year, don’t do it again. When it comes to supposedly offering a guy’s family $180,000 to convince him to come and play for your university, that’s way too far. I don’t think college titles should be bought (at least not in that fashion). They should be earned by the coach taking the time to go out around the country and meet the guys and convince them to come to State University. Alas, it goes on despite the efforts of the NCAA’s enforcement staff.
Years ago, when I was young and naïve, I denied that anything like this could possibly happen.
As I got older and watched the news of it happening on Sportscenter, I got angry at the coaches that so flagrantly broke the rules.
As I saw the unfathomable proliferation of these practices throughout college athletics, I softened my stance on paying players (maybe it would reduce a lot of these problems after all).
When I heard people actually articulate the details of paying players, I got depressed when I realized that it could and would never happen.
And finally, at some point last season, when the presumptive (and eventual) Heisman Trophy winner was leading a team towards the BCS National Championship Game (which he won) I gave up and accepted that this was the way big time college sports was always going to be. There were always going to be rule breakers and people would always put up with them. After all, if it actually happened, why should Auburn University care about the $180,000 they supposedly paid the Newton family when they went 14-0 and won the national title? How much extra money did they make during that season?
As you can see, when it comes to the awful corruption that is rampant in college sports, I went through the five stages of grief. I firmly believe that I went through all the stages and came out the other side and accepted it so easily because after all, these players are making million upon millions of dollars for the universities and the NCAA so why should they not get a little on the side for themselves? After all, it’s not like they’re hurting anyone…
JERRY SANDUSKY
As much as it pains me to write this, the idea for an episode of NBC’s Law & Order: SVU about a serial child molester is not fiction. At this point I must point out that nothing has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt yet so there is not yet a perpetrator, just a defendant.
Jerry Sandusky played football at Penn State under coach Joe Paterno and later returned to the team and was an assistant coach there for just over three decades. During that time he founded an organization that that reached underprivileged children through different programs and camps and it is here, prosecutors allege, that he selected his victims.
In paperwork filed with the Centre County District Magistrate Judge’s office at the end of last week, Jerry Sandusky is accused of 40 counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse of someone under 16, aggravated indecent assault, indecent assault of someone under 16, indecent assault of someone under 13, and corruption of minors. These crimes were allegedly committed against eight different boys from 1996 to 2005. The details are still coming in but if you’re wondering what some of the details of the alleged offenses are, you can find the Grand Jury Report here – http://assets.espn.go.com/photo/2011/1107/espn_e_Sandusky-Grand-Jury-Presentment.pdf
In this report you will find that a graduate assistant testifies that he walked into the locker room and witnessed Sandusky having sex with a boy he described as being about ten years old in the showers. According to testimony, he called his father and asked what he should do. The next day he went to head coach Joe Paterno and told him what he witnessed. Paterno then contacted his boss, athletic director Tim Curley, and told him of what the graduate assistant had told him.
This is where the waters get a bit muddied. If you read the testimony presented by Mike McQueary (the graduate assistant), Joe Paterno, Tim Curley, Gary Schultz (Vice President for Finance and Business at Penn State), and Graham Spanier (President of Penn State University), it appears at best that the three men in the middle of this chain of communication (Paterno, Curley, and Schultz) were guilty of simple misrepresentation or misunderstand of the story being presented to them. At worst, it was an attempt to sweep the whole incident under the rug and cover the whole thing up to protect a man that had given 36 years of his life to the football team.
President Spanier testified that he was told a story of “Jerry Sandusky… and a younger child and that they were horsing around in the shower”. How we got there from McQueary saying he thought anal sex was involved is more than a mystery; it’s potentially criminal. I should note at this point that both Curley and Schultz are now facing perjury charges because of what they said to the Grand Jury.
So what is the point of my telling you this sordid tale and what is the tie to recruiting violations? It’s the culture of “we can do whatever we want”. This particular event involving McQueary allegedly took place nine years ago. NINE YEARS! Sandusky was more or less given an emeritus position with the football team since his retirement in 1999 and has had virtually unfettered access to Penn State athletic facilities since then. Can anyone explain why?
So now, my feelings on the entire corrupt system have gone into reverse big time – all the way from acceptance to blinding rage. Even if we put aside the Pennsylvania state law that requires all instances of possible child abuse to be reported to certain state agencies, how were the police never contacted? How and why did “anal sex” become “horsing around” when the matter came before the university president?
One potentially devastating answer to those questions swings back to what I was talking about earlier: college football is a huge business and when you look at these events through the lens of what the PR hit will do to your bottom line, all of a sudden there is a tremendous motive to make sure this never sees the light of day. Every time the Nittany Lions play at home, they fill their stadium (which seats an estimated 107,000) to capacity and those people all buy their fill of concessions and beer. Now imagine that number goes down 5% because of this news. Now imagine they are eligible for a BCS at-large bid but no BCS bowl wants to select them because they don’t want the bad publicity. Now they are playing in the Gator Bowl instead of the Orange Bowl with its $15 million payout. I hope that this isn’t the reason why this issue was never given the due attention is required but it is simply too big of a motive to just dismiss.
FALLOUT
The last thing to be determined in this case is what is the fallout going to look like for all parties involved? Given the charges levied against Sandusky, if he is found guilty on half of them, it’s entirely possible that he won’t ever be a free man again and if he did indeed violate the trust of these children, he deserves far worse than he will get.
According to the Grand Jury Report, McQueary was found credible and Curley and Schultz were not. If they are found guilty, they should go to prison. I don’t know what the penalties are for perjury in the state of Pennsylvania but I know that they should be severe.
McQueary is a wildcard and he has already inspired some conspiracy theories of his own. For instance, why did he go from a graduate assistant to a position coach within the Penn State football community? Did it have anything to do with the fact that he called his father and then Joe Paterno instead of the far more natural instinct to dial 9-1-1? I know that that is a serious accusation and I have no evidence whatsoever of his any wrongdoing on McQueary’s part. I simply find it strange that a grown man (he was 28 at the time) would call his father and then the head coach instead of the police when he sees a 58 year old molesting a 10 year old. Whether it was happening or not is beside the point; according to his testimony, that’s what he thought was happening.
Lastly, we come to Joe Paterno. He coached his first game for Penn State in 1966 and if I had my way, he coached his last game for them three days ago. The district attorney has already said that Paterno has not been indicted and everyone attached to Paterno has been quick to say that he fulfilled his legal requirement by notifying his superior, the athletic director. Morally, I find his behavior in this matter to be reprehensible. What he should have done is call the athletic director and notify him of the report that Paterno had just received and that he was calling the police to report the alleged offense. The fact that he took no steps that have come to light as of yet other than to notify his boss and he also allowed Sandusky to keep his access to Penn State’s athletic facilities (he was reportedly in the football facilities as recently as last week) is nothing short of absurd and for his whole role in this, Joe Paterno should be ashamed.
So what do I think should happen? I think the university should clean house and make an example of the man that has won more than 400 games, three Big Ten titles, and two national championships. The university needs to come out with the message that this behavior was unacceptable and the fact that it took nine years for this issue to be properly dealt with is worse. It’s despicable how one of the “good guys” could let this go on right underneath his nose.
COACHES AND POWER
The last issue I’d like to address is an issue that has reared its ugly head twice in the last year. When it came to light that Ohio State coach Jim Tressel had indeed known about the violations long before the NCAA found out about them and had lied about his knowledge, the obvious question posed to university president E Gordon Gee was if he would be firing Jim Tressel. His response?
“No, are you kidding me? Let me be very clear. I’m just hoping the coach doesn’t dismiss me.”
When this scandal at Penn State started to take off, the same implication was made by journalists and analysts alike; Joe Paterno wouldn’t be fired because he’s Joe Paterno and he’s bigger than anyone else at Penn State.
I understand that I just compared a situation where players got tattoos in exchange for memorabilia and one where an assistant coach molested young boys on university property but the problem I’m bringing up is the same in both cases. The coach has so much power that it is explicitly stated that he can do the firing if he wants to. Universities are so desperate for a good football team that they are more willing to appease a coach with questionable morals rather than upset the fan base that pays the bills.
At least when Woody Hayes assaulted a player on the field of play, he was fired within 24 hours. Joe Paterno was supposedly privy to knowledge about something far, far worse.
Nine years later, he’s still employed.
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