The Sports Curmudgeon®

Last weekend was another good one for Mythical Picks. I made four picks in the playoff games and went 3-1 in those picks. That would have produced a Mythical Profit of $190. For the season, the cumulative record stands at 152-131-4 with a Mythical Profit of $1180.

Did you notice that each and every visiting team covered last weekend and two won outright?

I want to take this opportunity to preach a “mythical sermonette” here. For NFL games this season, I am theoretically ahead by $1180 and there are only three games left to play in the season. So, what’s the harm in doubling or tripling my normal wagers to try to make a killing for the year? Here’s the harm…

An overwhelmingly important ingredient in sports wagering is money management and the reason so many folks don’t succeed over the long run in this area is that money management – at its core – is self-discipline. I set the rules for Mythical Picks back in August/September; I said then that the rules were silly in that I would wager $110 on each game and that I would make a pick in every game. I fully expected to lose for the season given those restraints. But I did this for entertainment value and not as a betting service – and I think I’ve made that clear all during the season.

Therefore, even though this is fictional – or mythical – wagering, it would be a horrible example for me to “up the ante” at this point. If you are betting real money on NFL games – or college football games or basketball games or competitive eating events – you have to set limits on the amount of your wagers and the number of wagers you will make; then you have to stick to those limits. When you fall behind, it is wrong to play catch-up by upping the ante. When you are ahead, the best way to lose your advantage is to press your bets.

Let me relay a story about a visit to Las Vegas during the first weekend of March Madness about 8 years ago. The first day of college action was over and a friend and I were looking over the NBA games to see if there was a line that looked interesting. The Clippers where on the road against the Kings that night; at the time the Clippers were awful and the Kings were pretty good. Those two teams had played the night before in LA and the Kings had clobbered the Clips. The line on this game was Kings – 9 and it looked to me like a mortal lock for the Kings to cover. I convinced my friend of this wisdom and got in line to make a wager for both of us.

Behind me in a long line were four guys who were commiserating about how badly they had lost on the college games that day. They said they needed to find a bet to “get even” so they would have money to play tomorrow’s games. One of them noticed that the Clippers were +400 on the money-line that night and said they would need to bet on that proposition to get their money back. His three compatriots agreed and then they gathered up $800 amongst themselves to bet on the Clippers. That would “get them even” so they were probably down somewhere in the neighborhood of three-grand after the first day of the weekend.

After I made my wager, I stepped to the side and pretended to scan my ticket for errors because I didn’t believe they would go through with that wager. But they told the guy behind the counter they wanted #1234 on the money-line for $800. The guy taking the bets actually said to them, “Are you sure? You want the Clippers on the money-line for $800?” They said yes; he took the money and gave them the ticket.

With about 9 minutes to play in the 2nd quarter of that game, the Clips led the Kings 41-14. My friend said that we could kiss our wager good-bye; I told him to keep the faith because, after all, these were the Clippers. He was skeptical. On the other side of the room, the four “losers” were whooping it up and were already yelling about how they would be kicking ass and taking names tomorrow in each and every one of the wagering propositions.

At halftime, the score was Clippers 49 – Kings 42; in less than 10 minutes, the Kings had closed a 27-point gap to 7 points. The “get-even guys” were still boisterous; my friend was beginning to think we had a chance; I still had faith in the Clippers finding a way to get blown out.

By the time there were only five minutes to play in the game, the Kings led by 15 and were pulling away; they won the game by 21. We covered our modest bet; the four guys had left the sportsbook long before the final whistle. They hadn’t “gotten even”; they were now down approximately four-grand instead of three-grand.

The moral of the story is simple. A bad bet is a bad bet no matter if you are ahead or behind. Chasing after losses by taking long shots to win is not a sensible strategy. Money management is just as important as analysis and handicapping when you are doing sports wagering. So, I’m not doubling or tripling my wagers this weekend because that’s not a smart thing to do.

Now with that lesson in hand, let me be sure to remind you that no one should be stupid enough to take anything here as the basis for making a real wager involving actual money. If you do so, you may need a license to be so stupid; you should check with your local authorities on that.

General Comments:
I suspect that the suits at CBS – the network with the Super Bowl this year – are pulling for a Chicago/New England game. I believe that both Chicago and Boston are in the top five TV markets in the country and more TV sets in the city of the participating teams tend to produce higher ratings. This is not to minimize the ardor of the fans in New Orleans or Indy; it’s just that my guess is that neither of them is in the top 25 TV markets in the country.

From a personal perspective, all I really want to see a good game – translation a game where the outcome is still in doubt in the fourth quarter. But I must confess that I will not be rooting for the Saints to win this weekend. That is not because I have anything against the Saints or because I have any particular fondness for the Bears ever since the retirement of Walter Payton.

No, the reason I will hope for a Bears’ victory is because I know that two weeks of never-ending feelgood emoting about the resurrection of New Orleans after the horror of Katrina will be unbearable. There’ll even be a Weather Channel retrospective on the storm itself, I’m sure. I’ll tire of that nonsense after about the first three stories on it but it won’t go away. By the end of the first week, I’ll probably be in a state where I’d rather watch videotapes of The View and Cold Pizza over and over again for 48 straight hours instead of yet one more sob story about New Orleans. And you know, it’s gonna happen if the Saints win this weekend. The damned storyboards are already up and the camera crews are already assigned…

New Orleans at Chicago – 2.5 (43): If I counted correctly, the Saints have been the underdog in nine games this year and they’ve won seven of those nine games outright. If you believe in trends, you’d look no further than that and check out the money line odds on this game. I don’t think that’s the way to go. The story line here is “top offense against top defense.” The problem is that the Bears’ “top defense” is not what it was before injuries to DT, Tommie Harris, and SS, Mike Brown. Either Ian Scott or Alfonso Boone will have to play much better this weekend on the DL than they have or the Saints will establish the run and make life very difficult for the Bears. Chicago cannot win if they have to play catch-up or if they only have the ball for only 23-25 minutes of the game. On the other hand, if the Bears can play solid run defense and get the ball to the offense in advantageous time and distance situations, the Bears ought to be able to run on the Saints defense with its undersized linebackers. The Bears’ running game isn’t speed and finesse. People say Reggie Bush will be “the X-Factor” in this game. Maybe so. I think the other player who could be “the X-Factor” is Bears’ special teams’ phenom, Devin Hester. He could return a kick or a punt for a TD; he can also muff a couple of punts and give the ball away at just the wrong moment. Hester has six TDs on returns this year; he also muffed three punts last weekend. So if Hester is “the X-Factor”, I’m not sure who the beneficiary of his “X-factordom” might be on Sunday. The Saints put 27 points up on the Eagles last weekend; I think they can put up 20 or more this weekend. The question therefore is this: Can the Bears put up at least 24 points to cover here? Well to do that they’ll need a TD from the defense or special teams and some short fields to work with. I think they’ll get it; I’ll take the Bears and lay the points.

New England at Indy – 3.5 (47): Before everyone falls all over himself declaring that the Colts’ rushing defense has found itself and is now a force majeure, let’s do a bit of analysis here. I don’t have the top-level video for the last several Colts’ games that coaches do, but it is pretty clear to me that one of their “secrets” to stopping the run is to commit lots of bodies to the running area at or near the line of scrimmage; that leaves room to hit pass receivers. The last two opponents didn’t do that; Trent Green could not find water had he been on the deck of the Titanic two weeks ago; Steve McNair didn’t establish a running game he could fake off last week. In fact, the Ravens only ran the ball six times in the second half last week and they were not behind by double digits at any time in the game. I don’t understand why that happened, but it sure made the Colts’ run defense numbers look pretty gaudy. I don’t think that happens again this week against the Pats. Peyton Manning needs to win here to exorcise his worst playoff demons; Tony Dungy needs to win here to bring his career playoff record up to .500. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick need to win here because that’s what they expect to do in this situation. I think all the focus on the Colts’ newly emerged defense and the Pats’ historical defensive dominance of Peyton Manning is wrong. I think there will be points galore in this game; the loser might even score 30. So I want this game OVER. And because there’s more than a field goal’s worth of points here, I’ll also take the Pats with the points – but no parlay. Shop this line if you like Indy; it’s 3 in lots of places.

Good luck.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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With the college football season finished in terms of games, fans that have that sport at the pinnacle of their enthusiasm turn their attention to recruiting activities and the destinations of high school players. The level of detail and emotion that goes into the tracking of these activities and attention paid to the decisions of these adolescents may offer a clue about why many top-shelf athletes turn out to have a significant antisocial streak in them. Let me use a kid who has shown no such antisocial tendencies so far as an example of what I’m talking about so that there isn’t any distraction by his extant police blotter appearances.

Jimmy Claussen is considered the top HS QB graduating this year. I don’t know who makes that determination, but it sure seems as if that is the consensus. According to reports, he’s been on the radar of all the top football schools in the US for at least the last two years and probably three. He’s been visited, scouted, praised and treated to the perks of “recruitment”. And maybe, the fawning attention of recruitment he receives coupled with the publicity he gets for receiving the fawning attention of recruitment is a major factor in what might turn him into an antisocial animal – if he were ever to make that transition.

Consider that when Jimmy Claussen verbally committed to attend Notre Dame next year, he did so in Indiana at a news conference. That’s fine; Notre Dame is in Indiana. But Jimmy Claussen attended high school in Westlake Village, California. He went 1500 miles – give or take a few – to hold a news conference to say where he planned to attend college even though that commitment was not binding. Nonetheless, it was a big time news event that got reported in a thousand places. Claussen arrived in a “white stretch Hummer limo, complete with a police escort.” I wasn’t there, but I know this from the coverage of the event. Claussen even has his own PR firm working for him thanks to an NFL agent who is a friend of the family and that agent made the arrangements for him.

Remember, Jimmy Claussen still could have changed his mind at the point of all these happenings. Remember, Jimmy Claussen hasn’t played a single down in college football yet. Remember, when a previous Notre Dame QB recruit was touted as the guy to win three Heisman Trophies and didn’t; his name was Ron Powlus in case you forgot.

I don’t say this to criticize Jimmy Claussen in any way. But if he has even the slightest tendencies toward an oversized sense of entitlement, maybe the publicity surrounding all of these fawning events is what would push him over the top. I don’t want that to happen to him or to any other kid; but if it does, maybe the folks who fall all over themselves to cover news conferences of high school kids making their college selection known should look in the mirror to find part of the problem?

Recall a few years ago when a linebacker in Florida kept a diary of his recruitment activities and it was a feature item in the Miami Herald. Willie Williams was arrested on a recruiting trip to Florida bringing to light that he had double-digit “police involvements”. I said at the time that if he couldn’t recite the “Miranda warning” verbatim and without hesitation, he wasn’t smart enough to go to college. He went to Miami; didn’t play all that much or all that well; left school and last I heard he had enrolled in junior college in the Los Angeles area. But while he was on the recruitment circuit all you ever read was that he was the best high school football prospect ever to come out of the state of Florida. Maybe he believed that too…

The two lessons everyone should learn from Willie Williams’ case are that not every highly touted high school star turns into a star at the next level and the publicity associated with recruitment of high school kids doesn’t always help them to go on and succeed in their collegiate careers. Maybe another lesson is that the excessive press coverage of these not-yet-nearly-sophisticated adolescents contributes to their sense of entitlement.

One other activity that college football addicts can focus on at this time of year is the game of musical chairs that goes on with regard to coaches. Most of the jobs are filled now and it’s time to assess how things will be going at one’s favorite school with the new coach on board. Since there hasn’t even been a practice session yet – at least not one that the NCAA should find out about – the picture looks rosy just about everywhere.

In Minnesota, the new coach is Tim Brewster who used to be the tight ends coach for the Denver Broncos. He arrives with the reputation of being animated and an “in-your-face” kind of coach. He also arrives to find a situation where he has six bunnies on his schedule for next year – unless some of those schools have a dramatic turn-around in terms of fortunes. Minnesota plays in alphabetical order Florida Atlantic, Illinois, Indiana, Miami (Ohio), North Dakota State and Northwestern next year. They still have an open slot on the schedule; but given the Minnesota philosophy of scheduling out-of-conference games, the “TBD opponent” is more likely to resemble Temple than to resemble USC.

So, Tim Brewster and the Minnesota faithful are looking at a bowl eligible season next year neither because of the talent on the team nor because of the new leadership on the sidelines. They’ll go to a bowl because of their schedule - - unless of course the trip over their own shoe laces. So, at this time of year, things are happy-happy in Golden Gopher Land.

In baseball, we have news that Sammy Sosa will try to make the Texas Rangers’ roster this spring. He’s back and he’s rested after a year in the Dominican Republic. A cynic would say he might have spent the year there in isolation getting back on the juice leaving just enough time for it to cycle out of his system so he can pass the new steroid tests. Pollyanna would say that he really does want to reach the 600-homerun level because he has a true love and appreciation for the game of baseball. I don’t read minds and I don’t know what he was doing last year but here is what I do know.

In 2005, he hit .221 with only 14 homeruns for the Orioles and was overmatched at the plate more times than not. In 2003-04, when he was not at the peak of his power numbers, he homered every 13.3 at-bats; in 2005, that sank to one homer in every 27.1 at-bats. His homerun proficiency decreased by half.

Now, at age 38, the expectation is that he will turn things around just because he took a year off and relaxed and got his head right? I think that the Rangers really shouldn’t sign him. That’s not because I have anything against Sammy Sosa or think he’s a pariah of any kind. I just don’t believe he can play anymore.

Finally, David Thomas of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had a less gracious – but perhaps more accurate – view of the Sammy Sosa comeback than I do:

“Sammy has had a year off to get thoughts of retirement out of his system. Plus anything else he needed to get out of his system.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Let me start with a couple of baseball items this morning… With the latest revelation that Barry Bonds flunked a drug test for amphetamines last year, can we now assume that he will not be a first ballot Hall of Fame inductee? If Mark McGwire didn’t make it this time, how can Bonds? The steroid cloud of suspicion around Bonds can’t be any less than the one around McGwire; and now, Bonds has indeed failed a drug test, which is something McGwire never did. Don’t send me snarky notes telling me that McGwire was never tested; I know that. But the simple and unalterable fact is that Bonds failed a test and McGwire never did. So, if precedence matters even a little bit… I know that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind; Ralph Waldo Emerson made that clear, but I’m not so sure this would be a “foolish consistency”.

Interestingly, that huge one-year contract offered to Bonds by the Giants remains unsigned supposedly hung up over what remedies the club might have if Bonds were to be indicted or suspended or something like that. Now, purely coincidently, Bonds’ name gets into the public domain as a “drug-test flunkee” but no other name(s) surfaces. Surely, he is not the only MLB player who tested positive for amphetamines all last year, right? Paging Mr. Stone, Mr. Oliver Stone. Please pick up the white courtesy phone…

Analogously, Gerry Fraley mentioned back in December that no player in baseball had manipulated the baseball salary system better than JD Drew. At the time Drew, was supposed to sign a 5-year deal with the Red Sox worth $70M and that would have brought his baseball earnings to “$108.92M for what has been a workaday career”. Go and check the stats and you’ll find that Drew has never been on an All-Star team, has only hit 30 homeruns once and has driven in 100 runs only once. Well, it seems as if the negotiations are done but it’s been more than a month and the contract isn’t signed yet and there are some “problems” with Drew’s shoulder according to the Sox medicos.

Memo to Sox Medical Staff: Drew sits out a lot of time with injuries and/or “injuries”. If you think his shoulder is “suspect”, you just gave him another set of maladies as the foundation for his inability to play on any random Wednesday. Beware!

The Florida Marlins have not had a great winter. First, they fired the NL Manager of the Year because he had the audacity to tell the owner who it was that managed the team and the way it was going to be run. Obviously, the meddlesome owner had the final say in who would manage the team next year, but that was a PR fiasco.

Then, with season ticket renewals sinking from their below their horribly low levels in the first place, the Marlins recently decided to stick it to those fans who wanted to come to individual games. In 2007, if you walk up to the window on game day to buy one of the thousands of unsold tickets to a Marlins’ game, the price will be higher than it was last year and higher than if you bought those tickets prior to the start of the season. I didn’t major in economics, but can someone explain to me how that strategy aligns with the law of supply and demand? Also, isn’t a ticket for a game to be played on Monday a wasting asset in the sense that it has value only until the game is over on Monday and is then worth nothing? So, why the price increase as the value of the ticket is diminishing?

What’s next for the Marlins in terms of price gouging? Maybe people who walk up to buy tickets on game day will only be allowed to buy those seats if they join the Marlins version of the “Record of the Month Club” where fans will have to pay $30 a month to get two albums a month from the club. That membership will entitle them to walk up and buy the game-day tix at their inflated prices. I’m sure the fans in South Florida will be looking forward to those CDs with remastered songs from Abba, Yoko Ono and Sha Na Na…

One more Marlins happening… The team markets its rookies and its prospects; those are the only real assets for the club. Well, their top draft selection from a couple of years ago, Jeffrey Allison, has spent most of his first two seasons in drug rehab for addiction to OxyContin and heroin and now is facing felony charges in North Carolina for drug possession, stealing a van and driving yet another stolen vehicle. Somehow, I don’t think he’ll be one of the staff aces next year.

I know that the Tennessee Titans were not playoff participants this year, but they came awfully close to making it for a team that was 0-5 to start the season. Interestingly, the stats don’t indicate how they made a push toward the playoffs. The Titans gave up 400 points this year; that was the worst in the AFC. Their offense ranked 28th in the league and rookie Vince Young’s QB Rating was only the 30th best in the league. But all Young did was win games; the Titans beat three of the teams in the playoffs (Philly, Indy and the Giants) in the middle of the year. According to reports, the Titans are out from under their salary cap problems and have 10 draft picks in this year’s draft (extra picks in the fourth, sixth and seventh rounds) giving them the flexibility to trade up is they want or to amass more young players at reasonable cap costs. The Titans have a good coach in Jeff Fisher. It’s not clear how the Titans did what they did this year; but for the moment, they seem to embody the old Al Davis/Raider philosophy of:

“Just win, baby.”

In one way, it’s a good thing the Chargers got bounced from the playoffs. Remember back to the 2004 draft when Eli Manning and his family forced the Chargers to trade Eli’s rights to the Giants for the rights to Phillip Rivers. That trade gave the Chargers sufficient quarterbacking depth that they allowed Drew Brees to take a hike. Now, just imagine the Chargers playing the Saints in the Super Bowl. That would mean that Eli Manning would be watching two former Chargers’ QBs play for a championship ring and Peyton Manning would be out of the playoffs once again. That would not be “happy times” in the NFL’s “First Family”…

Well, it surely looks as if Title IX has begun to have its desired social effect; women athletes on campus are beginning to achieve the same stature/status as their male counterparts. Four women on the Colorado State basketball team got misdemeanor citations after they allegedly set off a “homemade explosive device” just outside a teammate’s apartment. No one was injured; the device was made from a soda bottle and household chemicals; it was a prank. However, the gap between the antisocial nature of male athlete behavior and female athlete behavior on campus seems to be shrinking.

Finally, leave it to Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle to put the Barry Bonds amphetamine business into perspective:

“Apparently Bonds thought they were green Tic-Tacs. He wanted minty-fresh breath for the post-game interviews. Seriously, if that was Bonds on amphetamines, the Giants are going to have to allow an extra five minutes per inning this season for Barry to amble to and from his outfield position.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Last week, ESPN cancelled Quite Frankly with Stephen A. Smith. Because of his boisterous delivery and some of his highly pompous turns of phrase, Smith is a target for a lot of criticism and – quite frankly – jealousy. Say what you will about his style and his on-air demeanor, Stephen A. Smith conducted more than a couple of very good interviews on that program. He asked the kinds of tough questions that most TV journalists avoid like six day old rotten meat. As you hear/read some of the snarky comments by folks about how ESPN announced that the show was ending on Thursday and then put on the final episode on Friday, recall that Quite Frankly had some – not many but some – excellent interview segments in its repertoire.

ESPN also announced that Tony Kornheiser will be back on MNF next year and that probably means the whole crew will be back for another season. The MNF telecasts on ESPN this year were disappointing to me and my fix for the situation would be to find a replacement for Joe Theismann and to stop bringing C-List celebrities into the booth for most of the second quarter. But that’s just me…

Going into the Seahawks/Bears game in Chicago last weekend, there were two powerful and opposing trends at work. The Seahawks had not won a road playoff game since 1983; the Bears had not won a home playoff game since 1991. So, which trend would prevail? Well, in case you didn’t notice, the game was tied at the end of regulation and needed sudden death overtime to put the Bears into the conference championship round.

The story continues that the Chargers may fire Marty Schottenheimer. Look, everybody and his mother knows by now that his playoff record is 5-13, but blaming Marty Schottenheimer for the loss to John Elway 20 years ago in the game that featured “The Drive” or blaming him for losing the game in which Earnest Byner committed “The Fumble” is ridiculous. And it is just as ridiculous to blame him for losing Sunday’s game. Marty Schottenheimer didn’t intercept a pass and then have the ball stripped from his hands creating a fumble to give the Pats a first down. That game did not turn on one coaching staff “out-geniusing” the other one; that game turned on the fact that Tom Brady threw the ball a lot more than normal and made some very accurate throws when he needed to. Oh, and the Pats defense didn’t make a lot of mistakes either.

Here’s something all of Schottenheimer’s critics need to think about. He’s been coaching for 21 years and he has 200 wins. That means he wins an average of just over 9.5 games per year and that’s a pretty amazing accomplishment. That is more wins per season than Bill Belichick has amassed; that is more wins per season than Bill Parcells has amassed. If Schottenheimer is fired, chalk it up to one of two situations in San Diego:

The Spanos family who owns the team chose to cast their lot with their GM and there is no love lost between the coach and GM there.

The Spanos family has decided to fire both of these guys and have already gotten a preliminary agreement with the agent of one of the “boutique coaches” out there that everyone covets - - such as Pete Carroll or Charlie Weis or Bill Cowher or …

One more Chargers’ item if I may… Did the Pats sort of figure out how to neutralize Shawne Merriman on Sunday or did he forget to turn his lights on so he could show everyone how to turn them out? Shawne Merriman – the nandrolone kid – was AWOL for a playoff game. And he’s the one who sent Jason Taylor some popcorn so Taylor could watch him in the playoffs since Taylor said Merriman should not be eligible for league honors after testing positive for nandrolone.

Memo to Merriman: When you pull a grandstand play like that, you have to play like Batman. On Sunday, you played like bat sh*t. Now please just shut up for the next year or so.

You can send your sympathy cards to Ken Whisenhunt care of the Arizona Cardinals. Whisenhunt took the job as head coach of the Cardinals last weekend and becomes the eighth head coach in Arizona in the last 18 years. He signed a four year contract with a club option for a fifth year; by the end of three years he’s likely to look at a contract termination the way a death row inmate looks at a pardon from the governor. Whisenhunt and Russ Grimm were both assistants with the Steelers and both were considered as prime candidates to replace Bill Cower in Pittsburgh. If Grimm gets the Steelers’ job, he comes out the winner here.

Whisenhunt takes over a team that is supposedly loaded with talent at the skill positions but hasn’t won more than six games in a season for a while now. He has a very big job ahead of him to turn this group into a contending team. The last “coach” who had a similarly big job was the swimming instructor on the Titanic.

Bill Parcells has not indicated yet whether or not he will return to coach the Cowboys next season. Here are two reasons for Cowboys’ fans to hope that he does:

1. If Parcells is there, T.O. is probably gone. Despite Owens’ prodigious on-field abilities, I think it’s pretty clear by now that he’s a less than ideal team player. With Owens gone, the team might take some of the money it saves and spend it on a couple of offensive linemen who can actually play at the NFL level.

2. If Parcells is there, that protects the franchise from Jerry Jones going out and screwing up the hiring of the next coach. And if a Cowboys’ fan gets all huffy at that suggestion, the two important words to whisper to him would be - - Dave … Campo.

Finally, here’s an observation from former Alabama football coach, Bill Curry, on the way for new Alabama football coach, Nick Saban, to succeed in his job:

“The Alabama job is a great job, as long as you win every game. And if you can figure out a way to beat Auburn twice a year, all the better.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Last week, I proposed a few changes to make the NFL a better product for the fans in the stands and the viewing public. I haven’t been bombarded by messages and phone calls from the NFL Pooh-Bahs as they fall all over themselves to implement my suggestions. However, I have heard from more than a dozen readers who have said that they liked all or most of my suggestions and thought they would make the NFL product better. And that’s the whole idea here. Here is a sample comment from a frequent reader and correspondent:

“Your improvements are so logical and well-meaning. That means they will never happen.”

Let me reset the parameters here. I am not trying to imply that the NFL product as it exists now is low quality nor am I hinting that the NFL needs to do anything along the lines of my suggestions to survive. I just think my ideas will make the games better for the fans.

Having just finished watching the divisional playoff games for this weekend, I want to suggest a new rule – actually it’s a rule with two parts – that can’t help but make most of the games more enjoyable. The basic rule is this:

There shall be no on-field celebrations by any player for any reason except for scoring a TD or a field goal or a safety. Any demonstrative celebrations to celebrate a first down or a catch or a sack or a tackle or anything that does not involve scoring points or winning the game will result in the immediate disqualification of the celebrating player for the balance of the game on the field. Any repeat offenders will be disqualified for the game in which the celebration occurs plus the next two games.

The corollary to this rule is:

Notwithstanding the rule that allows celebrations of TDs and field goals and safeties, no player on a team that entered a game with a record at or below .500 for the season may celebrate anything other than a victory at the end of the game when the clock has run out. Players on losing teams who celebrate anything will be disqualified immediately and suspended for the next game. If you have a losing record for the season, you have no reason to be celebrating.

I know that these two rules have exactly no chance of passing the “Competition Committee” but tell the truth: What goes through your mind when you see a team that is 5-10 going into the final game of the season and one of their players does a demonstrative celebration of a first down in the first quarter of Game 16? What goes through my mind is that the player is a [bodily orifice that rhymes with “glass bowl”]. The world can go on without this nonsense. And in case anyone thinks the suspensions/disqualifications identified here are too draconian, I suggest that this is the only kind of punishment that many of these self-absorbed, overly-entitled, locked-in-adolescence athletes might understand.

I’d also extend the 5-yard zone where defensive players can make contact with pass receivers. The defensive backs have to be given a reasonable chance to succeed and the 5-yard zone is too restrictive. And while I’m on that general subject, how about making it a “point of emphasis” for officials that they call the intended pass receiver for offensive pass interference when the intended pass receiver initiates the “downfield hand-fighting”? The receiver initiates the contact about 50% of the time and draws the penalty flag about 2% of the time.

On a more serious note, the NFL is beginning to look as if it is complacent with or tolerant of the felonious off-field behavior of its players and coaches. Taken to an extreme, this cannot make the league more marketable or its products more valuable. So, the owners and the union need to come together to agree on a way to punish felons and players/coaches who do things that are socially unacceptable such as DUI or domestic violence or child abuse. The league penalties need to be swift and fixed in terms of a negotiated schedule, and there needs to be a provision for the permanent banishment of a player who is a repeat offender in terms of serious violations. The NFL spends a lot of time and energy and money to protect its public image; their tolerance of these kinds of behaviors undermines most if not all of those expenditures.

In terms of putting momentum and flow in the game, the NFL needs to find a better way to get its TV commercials on the air instead of having a team score a TD followed by a series of commercials followed by a kickoff/return followed by another series of commercials. No offense, but that’s not compelling TV for the folks at home and it’s brutally boring for the folks in the stands. There has to be a better way…

I’ve said before that the Pro Bowl should be placed in the dust bin of bad ideas. The game is stupid and meaningless. However, if the NFL absolutely and positively must have a Pro Bowl game can it de minimis pretend that the selection of the players for the teams matters even a little bit by putting off the final voting for the teams until after the regular season is over? At the moment, the teams are decided before Christmas and players have two or three more games in front of them to demonstrate their worthiness for selection to the team. In case the suits in NFL HQs haven’t noticed, it’s those games in December that are usually critically important for lots of teams and games in which the truly elite players really tend to show themselves. As it stands now, the NFL sort of admits that the make-up of the two squads doesn’t matter all that much – which is true since 30-50% of the players selected will find some kind of excuse not to go and actually play in the game.

Normally, I am opposed to too many teams being involved in playoffs in sports leagues. However, in the NFL I think the field needs to be expanded to 16 teams simply because the first round bye-week in the playoffs is such a huge advantage. I know that both of the AFC teams with bye-weeks this year just got bounced from the playoffs, but that does not deny the fact that a week of rest in January is too big an advantage for a regular season record that does not consider the strength of schedule. Alternatively, the league could cut back the playoffs to 8 teams meaning no bye-weeks but that would cost them four games of TV revenues and that’s just not gonna happen…

And while I’m suggesting changes to the playoffs how about making it a rule that no team can be in the playoffs without a winning record? If that means that the brackets in one conference have to be filled out by teams from the other conference, so be it. Here’s the concept:

If a team has been playing NFL football from Labor Day weekend forward and has not been able to show more wins than losses, why do we need to see that team in January against other teams who actually win more often than they lose?

And finally, I want the league to eliminate the “one-day contract” so that Joe Flabeetz can “come home” and retire as a member of a team that he left some time back to go and collect more money elsewhere. Those news conferences and events have become almost as annoying as a case of the crabs – or the “walking freckles” as they are lovingly known. Here’s the deal; if Joe Flabeetz felt all that choked up about the team he’s going back to, he shouldn’t have left in the first place. And if the team essentially kicked him to the curb by low-balling him on a contract offer so he had to move on to “save face”, then neither party deserves a feelgood moment in front of the TV cameras. Ban this practice now!

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Pardon me for my skepticism, but I’m not buying all the hype around David Beckham signing with the LA Galaxy in MLS. I’ll be happy to admit I was wrong to be a non-believer if events prove me to have been wrong, but I’m from Missouri on this one.

I do not believe for even a moment that his contract with the LA Galaxy means that he will pull down an average of $50M over the next 5 years from the club and/or MLS. The whole league isn’t worth $250M; the league could sign all of its assets over to Beckham and have him pay them the $250M in his contract and the league would come out ahead – by a whole lot. If you add in a whole lot of non-soccer activities that he will be paid for, maybe – I said maybe – he’ll actually see much of that money, but it won’t be for playing soccer in LA and Salt Lake City and DC and wherever.

In the wire reports on all of this, they call this “…a deal MLS hopes will boost the sport in the US in a manner similar to Pele’s arrival with the Cosmos in 1975.” It will indeed boost it in terms of the number of fluffy articles written about Beckham and the league and soccer in general. However, MLS better watch out what it wishes for. The Cosmos were part of the NASL; the NASL signed about a half-dozen foreign soccer legends well past the time when they were in their prime; the NASL got a short term shot in the arm in terms of attendance and publicity; the NASL then proceeded to go bankrupt. So, when/if you see an announcement that Zidane is coming out of retirement to play for some other team in MLS, don’t immediately think this is the dawn of a new era for soccer in the US. We’ve been down that path before and it leads to a toxic waste dump.

I asked my soccer guru about Beckham’s skills – since I wouldn’t pretend to be able to evaluate them. Here’s what he said in a note to me:

“…he’s a finesse player and one who sets up others to score more than he scores himself… He is a better player today than anyone in MLS today but his skills are no longer at the elite level in Europe. He only starts once in a while for Real Madrid anymore.”

Enough soccer, there’s football news to talk about. In Chicago, the owner of a place called Vienna Beef has created a “Monster Playoff Polish Sausage Sandwich”; for every sandwich sold, he’ll donate a dollar to a local charity dedicated to feeding poor folks. The sandwich is a polish sausage on a poppy seed bun garnished with chili, chopped onion, cheddar cheese sauce and blue corn chips on the side. The blue chips and the orange cheddar cheese represent the Bears’ uniform colors. This is a good marketing move by this establishment and donations to charities of this sort are never a bad idea. However, looking at the ingredients of the sandwich, maybe he could get a “corporate partner” here. A local cardiologist could give away coupons for $100 off on your next angioplasty when you buy two of these sandwiches…

Jax assistant coach, Mike Tice, was quoted in the St. Paul Pioneer Press to the effect that he would “have great interest” in the vacant University of Minnesota coaching position. However, one of the qualifications for the job as advertised is a college degree, and Tice is still “17 – 20” credits away from a degree. Remember the old ads that said, “To get a good job, you have to have a good education”? Here’s one example. Oh, and if they’re looking for a college grad, it might also help if your nickname around the NFL wasn’t “Meathead”.

I’ve been thinking about the Giants’ extending Tom Coughlin’s contract for one year and the more I think about it the more I think it was a bad idea. He’s been there 3 years and the team is 25-25 during that time including two cameo appearances in the playoffs. That’s better than the situation he inherited by a long shot but the Giants hardly looked like a team on the rise. Most importantly, Eli Manning didn’t look significantly better at the end of the 2006 season than he did at the end of the 2005 season; if he does not progress as the franchise QB there, the Giants are in deep yogurt. Jared Lorenzen can do a QB sneak when it’s third and short, but if the Giants had to go with him for a four game stretch or for half a season, it would get really ugly very quickly. The owners said that they believe that Coughlin has the right vision for the team. If so, why did they only extend the contract for one year? A man with the right vision and the right set of abilities is someone you’d hope to hang onto for a long while, no?

This is the time of the year when certain NFL owners get wrong ideas in their head and act on them. Danny Boy Snyder is famous for this and just last year he looked at his team that was coming off a playoff appearance despite having a passing offense ranked 21st in the league. Danny Boy and the Redskins’ braintrust saw what needed to be done and they went and did it:

They hired Al Saunders at $2M per year to be the offensive coordinator/play caller.

They signed Antwaan Randle-El for six years and $30M with $10 guaranteed in the first year even though Randle-El caught all of 35 passes in 2005.

They shipped two mid-round draft picks to SF to acquire Brandon Lloyd; then they tore up his existing contract and gave him $10M guaranteed in the first year and six years at $30M. Lloyd had only caught 48 passes in 1995.

So how did all that work out? Saunders play calling was suspect at best. Randle-El caught only 32 passes in 2006 and Lloyd caught all of 25 passes and was inactive for a game for “disciplinary reasons”. Oh, and the Redskins had a passing offense ranked 21st in the league again in 2006. But they didn’t make the playoffs this year; they finished 5-11 in 2006. But not to worry, Joe Gibbs is proud of his guys because they “fought their guts out” in each and every game. Whatever Danny Boy has in store for everyone this off-season, it will have to go a long way to equal the futility of last year’s “stategery”…

Oh, one more thing about the Redskins in 2006… They set a record for the fewest turnovers created by a defense since the stat was invented; the Redskins defense took the ball away only 12 times all year long. Back in the spring, the Redskins released Walt Harris who has been a “good but not great” cornerback in the NFL. Harris signed on with the 49ers and Harris had 8 INTs and 4 forced fumbles in 2006. That’s what the entire Skins’ defense accomplished. If Danny Boy had an employee working for him at Six Flags who was so consistently wrong about what needed to be done to improve the product, Danny Boy would have fired the guy years ago. But he can’t fire himself and he won’t fire Vinnie Cerrato. Cue Sonny and Cher please: “And the beat goes on…and the beat goes on…

Finally, a comment from Elliot Harris in the Chicago Sun-Times:

“Not sure what to make of Boomer Esiason’s observation on CBS’s The NFL Today that Rex Grossman ‘is the Paris Hilton of NFL quarterbacks.’ No way the Bears’ QB has been sacked that much.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Last weekend was profitable for Mythical Picks – even though the first game of the weekend was the one that I got so horribly wrong. My premise was that Indy would have to use at least eight men in the box to stop the Chiefs from running and with that, Trent Green could beat them through the air. Trent Green couldn’t beat an egg last weekend and with as many as nine guys in the box in “run situations”, Larry Johnson was like a sports car with an empty gas tank, a flat tire and the keys locked inside it – not going anywhere.

Anyhow, I went 3-1 against the spread in the four games last weekend. That would have generated a Mythical Profit of $190. However, I also lost a mythical $50 on the money line taking KC. So the net Mythical Profit for the week was $140.

Combining that with the regular season totals, the tally is 149-130-4 for all mythical wagers and a net Mythical Profit of $990.

Despite that record of success, no one should take any information here as the basis for making a wager involving real money. Only dumb folks would do that – folks dumb enough to try to kill a bird by throwing it over a cliff.

General Comments:

This weekend and next weekend represent the best viewing opportunities of the NFL season. The eight teams left in the playoffs are not all great teams that may someday invite comparison to Lombardi’s Packers of the 60s; they all have their flaws. But usually, the semi-final games and the conference championship games are more exciting than the Super Bowl games, many of which have been deadly dull to watch. In addition, there’s only one game on Super Bowl weekend; this weekend you have four games to watch and next weekend you have two. So, if you are a football fan, this is the weekend to make sure that your activities include a TV and a remote and a couch and some kind of snacks that involve salt or cheese or both.

When the Eagles beat the Giants with no time left on the clock Sunday night, it meant that all four of the home teams – the higher seeded teams – won in the first round of the playoffs. From this point on in the playoffs, only division champions are involved; there won’t be a wild-card team making some kind of “Cinderella run” this year. All four of the home teams were favored of course; the two in the AFC (Indy and New England) covered the spread comfortably; the two NFC favorites did not cover. Once again this weekend, all of the home teams – the higher seeded ones – are favored…

There’s been some minor brouhaha this week about the Chargers and the Bears restricting sales of tickets to people who live in zip codes near their respective cities in order to keep the crowd solidly in favor of the home team. Naturally, the folks who are charter members of the “Society Of People Spring Loaded To Be Pissed Off About Nearly Everything” [SOPSLTBPOANE], have wailed about the unfairness of all this. To them I say – with great empathy:

Get over it!

Last I checked on TicketsNow.com, you can still get tix for the game in San Diego and Chicago but they’re not exactly cheap. I didn’t check every offering, but the prices seem to range from $225 per seat to $2750 per seat. Think about it; for $2750 you could alternatively buy a nice High-Def TV set and watch loads of NFL games from now into the future. Or you could go to a single game. Put those cheese covered snacks over hear near the couch, please.

(Sat) Indy at Baltimore – 4.5 (40.5): The Colts started off this season by winning their first nine games. Here they are in the playoffs and they didn’t even get a bye in the first round. My guess is that no one in Indy foresaw that situation in early November. This is a classic match-up. The Colts win with their offense; the Ravens win by holding the opponent to a low score and finding a way to manufacture points. I seriously doubt that either team will ever lead in this game by 10 points or more; every possession will be important. The two biggest differences in the stats for these teams relate to defense. The Colts gave up 360 points this year; the Ravens only gave up 201. The Colts sacked opposing QBs 25 times (less than 2 per game); the Ravens sacked the QB 60 times. The Colts were schizophrenic on the road this year; they traveled well when they beat New England, Denver, the Giants and the Jets away from home; then they stunk out the joint losing road games in Houston and Tennessee. I think this is a venue call in terms of the winner but I see a low scoring game and want the points. I’ll take Indy with the points here. If you prefer the Ravens, shop the line; it’s at 4 in a lot of places.

(Sat) Philly at New Orleans – 6 (47.5): New Orleans is the feelgood story of the year; Philly is the hottest team in the NFC at the moment. There’s no hidden message in there; that’s just the facts, ma’am. Facing a passer who went over 4,000 yards in the regular season, the last thing the Eagles needed was to lose a starting cornerback to injury last week; but it happened. I think this game comes down to rushing defense. If the Eagles can run the way they did against the Giants last weekend – say for 150 yards – and if they can hold the Saints to 100 yards rushing, the Eagles can win the game outright. The first situation is much more likely to happen than the second. Interestingly, the Saints were a better road team this year than they were at home; they went 6-2 on the road and 4-4 at home. However, they didn’t offer to play the game in Philly… Both teams live on the big play. They tied for the league lead in plays longer than 25 yards this year; both teams did that 43 times during the season. I can’t come to a firm conclusion about the matchups here but I do think that the game will be high scoring. I’ll take the game OVER.

(Sun) Seattle at Chicago – 9 (37): Seattle was the shakiest winner on last weekend’s card. Sure, the Seahawks may still have won the game in OT had Tony Romo not lost all of his Ro-Mo-Mentum at one instant in time. But still… The Seahawks have played 17 games this year; they have allowed five more points than they have scored yet they are 10-7. Three of their losses were by double digits the worst coming to the Bears early in the season – with Shaun Alexander out of the line-up to be sure – by a score of 37-6. That won’t happen again this weekend. Alexander is back; and even though he hasn’t been nearly as effective as he was last year, his presence forces the Bears to play the run a lot more seriously than they had to last time these teams met. The Seahawks defense had a chance to win the Cowboys game on their own; they merely needed a defensive stop at the end but couldn’t get the job done. I think that unit gets a breather here because the Bears’ offense is not nearly as good as the Cowboys’ offense was - - unless of course the Bears’ defense treats the offense to great field position all day long and a defensive score or two. I think this game will turn on the “screw-up factor”. If Seattle makes mistakes on offense and gives the ball to the Bears with a short field a couple of times or lets Devin Hester return a kick for a TD, they will lose. If the Bears get the feckless version of Rex Grossman instead of the steady version, he’ll screw up and the Bears will lose. I think the guys who made the line on this game have the Total Score just about right; and in a game that low scoring, I have to take 9 points. But I’m not even tempted to take the Seahawks on the money-line even at +350. I’ll just take Seattle with the points here.

(Sun) New England at San Diego – 5 (46.5): The Pats and Chargers have only one playoff confrontation ever. That was back in the AFL days and the Chargers won that game 51-10. It was the Chargers’ only championship win. Somehow, I don’t think you can draw any conclusions about this weekend from that history. Bill Belichick has a reputation for getting into Peyton Manning’s head with his defensive machinations and late in the season the Pats defense also confabulated rookie QB, Vince Young. Now comes a very balanced Chargers’ offensive unit but with a rookie QB in terms of actual time under center in the NFL. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ball, the Pats have a QB who has been in a few playoff situations and has a track record of very steady performance under that pressure; Tom Brady just doesn’t give the ball away all that often in important games. People don’t give the Pats all that much credit for creativity on offense but I think they surprised the Jets and the “Mangenius” last weekend when Jabaar Gaffney caught 8 passes and was an offensive focus; in the 16-game regular season, Gaffney caught all of 11 passes – less than three every four games. I think the turning point of the game will be LaDanian Tomlinson; if the Pats can keep him from running amok (say hold him to 120 yards), that will put a big burden on Phillip Rivers to win the game through the air. In that situation, I’d side with the Pats’ defense. And here’s a stat for you. In the 12 playoff games in the Belichick/Brady Era for the Pats, they have never allowed a back to gain 100 yards rushing. But if Tomlinson can light up the Pats’ defense … I’m going to take this game OVER despite the excellent defenses on both teams. Here’s the situation I’m afraid of in terms of that selection. If the Chargers get out to a 13-0 lead, Marty Schottenheimer might revert to his old form in KC and try to sit on that lead and milk the clock – even starting in the second quarter. That will suck all the offensive momentum out of the game and it will go under the total by a lot. I just want someone on the Chargers’ coaching staff with an offensive mind-set to do a Vulcan Mind Meld with Marty just for this one game.

Good luck.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Let’s get something straight from the beginning. The NFL is a very successful business and entertainment entity. It enjoys immense popularity among loyal and passionate fans. It is “the alpha male” of all sporting endeavors in the US. The owners and the players union have come to a sufficiently harmonious modus operandi/modus vivendi to find a way to share about $8B a year. I’m not trying to say here that the NFL is in trouble and needs to make changes to put itself into a healthy situation; the NFL is not the WNBA.

What I plan to outline in this rant and a follow-on rant soon are some things that will make a very good product a bit better. Just as I am willing to stipulate that the NFL is very good at what it does, I would hope that the folks running the NFL would stipulate that it isn’t perfect and might find ways to improve.

The first thing the NFL needs to look at very closely is the administration of the replay challenges. I am in favor of instant replay; I think that getting the call right is extremely important to augment the integrity of the games. I do not believe that the league should get rid of instant replay. At the same time, the league has made timing changes to the game in order to keep the majority of games inside a time frame that is compatible with TV schedules. And the way the instant replay is handled now, it consumes time. Some stat geek can go and look at all the game films and put a stopwatch on how much time is consumed by the pre-challenge confabs and the referee jogging off the field to get “under the hood” and all that stuff. My estimate would be 8-10 minutes per game on average. I think that someone “upstairs” can look at all the replay angles on a high def screen – assuming the game is televised in hi-def – and render a decision much more quickly. I’d leave the rules alone about what can be challenged and how many challenges a team gets per game, but I would suggest a change in the way that challenges are reviewed and administered.

The thing that the NFL needs to address in more ways than anything else is its scheduling. I think that the NFL needs to stop with the Thursday night games except for the opening game of the year and Thanksgiving Day. It should play all of its games on Sunday and/or Monday night until college football goes into its bowl season and then it can put on Saturday games too.

The in-season bye week needs to be reconsidered; it can provide an advantage for teams during the season and that doesn’t seem right. One solution might be to eliminate the bye week entirely and shorten the season by a week. You could concoct an argument for that by appealing to the toughness of the football players and pointing out that they don’t need no damned sabbatical in the middle of the season. However, that’s not going to get a lot of traction because that would reduce the number of time slots for networks to fill with NFL programming and NFL ad revenues by 1/17th. So, in lieu of eliminating the bye week for each team, why doesn’t the league assure that when a team comes off a bye it is playing an opponent who is also coming off a bye? In a 32-team league, there always has to be an even number of teams taking a bye week; so, schedule them to play each other in the game following the bye. How hard is that?

I would also suggest that the NFL review the schedule to assure that teams never have any 3-game road trips or home stands. In fact, I think the ideal would be for every team to play home and away games on alternating weeks throughout the season. Where that is impossible from some other scheduling constraint, the league should be sure that no team is home or away for more than two consecutive weekends. I got this idea from my friend “The Stat Monster” who pointed out to me that the Eagles had to play three divisional road games in a row in December of this year. After the Eagles won all three games, he sent me a note giving me this info, which I take to be correct because he is a “Stat Monster” and I’m not willing to do the work to verify it:

In the last 15 years, there have been 97 “3-game road trips” and the Eagles are only the seventh team to come off such a trip with a sweep. They are the only team to do so against three divisional opponents.

I’d suggest that the NFL make sure no future teams need to do this. Even more outrageous was the schedule quirk handed to the Houston Texans this season. From October 29 through December 3, the Texans played six games. Five of them were on the road. Why is that a good idea?

One other scheduling issue that the league needs to consider is flex scheduling. The idea is a good one on the surface; it gives the network involved (NBC) and the league the ability to put a meaningful game before a national audience late in the year. There’s nothing as boring in early December as having a Sunday night or Monday night game involving two teams with a combined record of 6-18. And flex scheduling pretty much prevents that from happening. However, flex scheduling comes at the expense of the fans in the stadium and the league ought to pay a bit more homage to those folks.

The game that made me sour on flex scheduling was the Seattle/Denver game. This game was supposed to start at 2:30 PM in Denver; it was cold in Denver that day but the sun was out. The game actually started at 6:30 PM; that night according to the broadcasters, the temperature was 16 degrees with a wind-chill down near zero. There was no sun to provide even a minor respite from the cold. Like all NFL games, this one took about 3 hours and the fans in the stands had to be uncomfortable – if not miserable – for at least half of that time. If the network execs who think this is a wonderful idea and a way for them to generate additional ad revenues to their coffers and the NFL owners/executives had to sit outside in the stands for the entirety of every flexed game, I suspect there’d be changes made in flex scheduling.

My last scheduling suggestion would be to eliminate the “dead weekend” between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl. I’m trying to think of any benefit that I receive as a fan for that “dead weekend”; I can’t come up with one. I can’t believe that the league and the networks need two weeks to set up the coverage for the game or that all the silly “feature stories” for the games can’t be done in time for the 4 hour pre-game extravaganza. So, cut out the “dead weekend” and play the game that fans want to see more than any other game of the season.

I’ll have more suggestions for the NFL in another rant in the near future.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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In my Topical Rant about people I wanted to “Just Go Away”, I listed Kim Etheredge – the publicist who fronted for Terrell Owens. Now there are wire reports saying that Owens fired her. Of course, now that he is without a publicist, he hasn’t had the opportunity to get his message out; so these reports are unconfirmed at the moment. Earlier, Owens said that there were “snitches” in the Cowboys’ locker room who spread bad stories about him falling asleep in meetings and not practicing hard and stuff like that. He said he’d “deal with” the snitches when the time was right. Could she have been a snitch?

I was certainly not surprised to see that Mark McGwire did not make it into the Hall of Fame this year. I was surprised to see that he only got 23% of the votes cast. Since one needs 75% of the votes cast to be elected to the HoF, I’d say that McGwire is not a shoo-in next year; I don’t think this was merely a one-time gesture by the baseball writers to show that they are “steroid suspicious”. Remember, these are the same writers who covered McGwire and Sosa and Bonds and whomever all during those booming home-run years and never managed to tell us then what was going on. For the record, I would not vote for Mark McGwire to be in the Hall of Fame, but some of the moralistic posturing by baseball writers on this issue now is more than a bit disingenuous.

Have you noticed that the NHL season is half over? No, neither had I, but it’s true. NHL games are on “Versus” network – a cable entity that used to be the Outdoor Life Network – in case you go looking for them. Versus just announced that it has added another sport to its stable of broadcast properties, professional bull riding. I wonder if the NHL can outdraw the bull riders…

FIFA recently issued a “Final Report” on the World Cup. I’m not sure why they do that; but evidently, this is something that they always do for such a big event. According to reports, FIFA mentioned nothing about Zidane’s head-butt or his ejection from the World Cup Finals other than to say that he played in that game and that France lost to Italy in that game. Remember, FIFA was the organization that suspended Zidane for a couple of games as a result of the incident with the full knowledge that he had already retired from soccer. Talk about an organization dedicated to form as opposed to substance.

FIFA honcho, Sepp Blatter, issued an apology in Rome recently for his failure to award the World Cup trophy to the Italian team right after the match. Blatter said it was not a slight to the team; he had planned to avoid the postgame award ceremony before the match started because there were indications that the German fans “would whistle at the word FIFA”. All I can say is this:

That game was played six months ago yesterday. If you can’t come up with a better excuse/explanation for why you didn’t award a champion’s trophy right after the championship game in the world’s biggest tournament, then maybe you have publicists less competent than Kim Etheredge.

Baseball fans in Baltimore staged a protest by walking out of an Orioles game. They wanted Peter Angelos to know they didn’t like the way he was running the team. An estimated 1000 people participated in this. Detroit football fans held the Millen Man March to protest the fact that Matt Millen was still the GM for the Lions. Again, about 1000 fans participated. They don’t hold fan protests for WNBA teams because there aren’t 1000 fans of those teams who would care enough to organize/participate in one. Last week, the Charlotte Sting ceased to exist. That announcement came only a couple of weeks after the Charlotte Bobcats said they would no longer run that WNBA franchise and no buyers stepped forward. Last year, the Sting attendance was reported to be 5700 per game – but you have to remember that the WNBA counts attendance in ways other than “paying customers who actually show up and move through the turnstiles”.

David Stern is a staunch supporter of the WNBA. Since I don’t read minds, I have no idea if this support is based on some mental construct of equal opportunity or if he thinks this is a long-term investment in a business that will blossom one of these days or any of a dozen other possible foundations. Here are a couple of facts. The WNBA has been around for a decade and it has never come close to breaking even. Because the costs are tightly controlled, the losses have remained acceptable to most of the WNBA owners and the NBA owners who pony up to keep the WNBA afloat. But things are not looking all that good for the WNBA in terms of growth and the hope of breaking even anytime soon. So, here’s an interesting proposition:

After David Stern retires/resigns/leaves the job as NBA Commissioner, the WNBA continues to exist for 18 months. Over or Under?

Speaking of the business end of sports, I read that MLB’s 20 corporate partners spent a record $300M last year in terms of marketing and promotional plans. That’s a stunning amount of money - - until you know that the NFL has 21 corporate partners and those NFL corporate partners spent $1B last year in terms of marketing and promotional plans. On average an NFL partner spends about $50M on its marketing ties to the league (for baseball, it’s $15M) and I don’t know how anyone verifies that those tie-ins generate profits to cover the $50M in expenditures. Let me explain.

FedEx has the air and ground Player of the Week and Player of the Year Awards. So, I assume that FedEx is one of the NFL corporate partners. How does someone at FedEx calculate the amount of business that FedEx would not have gotten if it were not for that corporate partnership with the NFL that costs them $50M plus whatever they pay to the NFL for the privilege of being a corporate partner? I don’t think that any of the companies who have these relationships with the NFL are teetering on the brink of insolvency, but I don’t understand how anyone knows that this is a good expenditure of assets.

A couple of years ago, Urban Meyer was rumored to be leaving Utah for Notre Dame but he took a right turn at South Bend and wound up in Gainesville. The Notre Dame folks pompously announced that they had gotten a better coach than Meyer when Charlie Weis came to South Bend. To hear them tell it, they were glad Meyer went elsewhere because they came out ahead on the deal. I’m not surprised that the Notre Dame folks haven’t retracted any of those boasts in light of this year’s national championship game. And Urban Meyer hasn’t come out and said that all of his detractors up in South Bend ought to pound sand up their butts. Because Meyer has shown the restraint and dignity to avoid statements of that type, I’d suspect that he will not be hiring Kim Etheredge to handle his public relations any time soon.

Finally, a comment from Mike Bianchi in the Orlando Sentinel:

“If Mark McGwire does get inducted into the Hall of Fame, will he go in wearing a Cardinals’ hat, an A’s hat, or a pharmacist’s lab coat?”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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I’ve been a racing fan for almost 50 years. I’ve spent many a happy day at the racetrack. But I’m coming to the conclusion that the people who run the sport aren’t all that much smarter than the horses that run the races. I’ve written before on some of the ills of the sport; all of them remain and some have become worse.

The fan base for horseracing is very old and the people who run the sport have not succeeded in attracting younger fans. All you have to do to see the veracity of that statement is to go to any racetrack or any off-track betting establishment on any racing day other than Triple Crown race days and look at the folks in attendance. Or, you could go to any of the major Las Vegas sports books on a random football weekend, observe the age of the folks watching and wagering on the football games and compare them to the ones watching and wagering on the horse races. I have not come to some grand conclusion here that would attract the attention of a Nobel Prize Committee; this is as obvious as can be.

When I hear the people who run racing say that there is a growing young fan base and they support that conclusion by pointing to the huge crowds that show up in the infields for Triple Crown races in Kentucky and Baltimore, I know they are deep into self-delusion. Those young folks are not there to watch racing or wager on racing; they are there for partying, drinking and debauchery. If all those folks loved racing so much, they’d be at the track every six weeks or so and that’s simply not the case.

Folks who own and operate racetracks seem not to understand the law of supply and demand. They earn revenue by taking a portion of the handle and paying out the rest of the wagers to the people with winning tickets. It does not take a genius to realize that this business model only works if the customers continue to bring new money to the game. Think for a moment. If you put 100 bettors in a locked room each with $1000 to wager and kept them there for a week doing nothing but betting, the racetrack would wind up with almost $100,000. Eventually, no one would have enough money left to make a minimum wager. So, the business challenge for a racetrack is to continually find ways to bring new money to the track so it can find its way through the betting windows.

So what usually happens when revenues decline? First thing a track will do is to cut services at the track. There will be fewer mutual windows open and less attention to “amenities” such as coats of paint and clean restrooms. Miraculously, those kinds of actions don’t attract new fans. Who woulda thunk that? So, the racetrack operators move on to step two and increase the take-out from the betting handle. That solves the problem in the very short term but remember, the more the track takes out from the handle the sooner those 100 bettors locked in a room with nothing to do but bet on races will go broke.

A few racetrack operators have tried to keep the take-out percentages the same but offer more races as a way to increase the handle. That doesn’t work for several reasons including the fact that it does not bring new money to the track. In addition, more races usually mean shorter fields which mean lower odds which mean diminished betting interest which means lower handles. More of the races added in this scenario are usually at the very bottom of the racing quality spectrum because those races offer the smallest purses. Low quality racing does not attract new money to the track and low quality racing turns off the fans who come to the track regularly. In short, it doesn’t work.

This is all based on the law of supply and demand. If you want more people to come to the track, you have to offer them a product they want to come and see. That does not mean adding a picnic grounds with a Ferris wheel for kids; if parents want to do that, they can take their rug rats to Danny Boy Snyder’s Six Flags Amusement Park. What it does mean is that the track has to put on races involving good horses that people can begin to identify with and follow. That is just not happening. Oh, and it might be a good idea for the racetrack operators to reduce the take-out from the handle for the short term as they put on fewer races at higher quality levels to entice more fans to come back regularly. That’s what other businesses do successfully to stimulate revenues; they put things on sale.

The latest bad idea in racing is to expand the Breeders’ Cup to 11 races and to make this a two-day event. You can read for yourself the blather about why this expansion is such a wonderful idea from the Breeders’ Cup Ltd folks. But the one explanation that is really stupid was that there were some horses who just didn’t have a race suited for them in the Breeders’ Cup. So they added things like “fillies and mares going 7 furlongs” and a “juvenile turf race”. No one has been sitting around since the inception of the Breeders’ Cup questioning why they didn’t have those races carded; even now, they still have holes in the racing opportunities. Where is the two-mile race for horses that love to run really slowly forever and ever? Where is the 4-furlong dash?

There are already too many juvenile races. The purpose of the Breeders’ Cup was to keep horses racing longer; paying out huge purses to two year olds only encourages owners to take the syndication money offered to them to send the horses to the breeding shed early. If the Breeders’ Cup folks want to keep horses in training longer, they ought to consider cutting out the races for two year olds and making it more expensive for any foals of animals who went to the breeding shed under the age of four or five to be eligible for Breeders’ Cup races.

If these folks thought like that, they’d have more good horses racing instead of breeding and that would allow racetrack operators to card more high quality races which would attract larger handles … But that’s not the way these people think. In fact, what they’ve done with these new races is to render a Grade II race at Aqueduct moot. The $150,000 First Flight Handicap is a filly/mare race at seven furlongs; it is run on the last weekend of October. Now there is a filly/mare race in the Breeders’ Cup run that same weekend with a purse of $1M. Look for the quality of the field in the First Flight Handicap to take a nosedive. The NYRA is already in financial trouble; how this kind of predatory scheduling is supposed to help that situation is mysterious to me.

Maybe things would be better if the horses ran the track and the people ran the races?

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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