In Defense of a Bad Sports Town

Some relatively on-topic content is in the works, but I hope you'll indulge me a little here, because I grew up in the Atlanta suburbs and I'm a fan of all the Atlanta sports teams—even the ones that are now in Midwestern Canada—so it caught my attention when ESPN's Rob Parker did the journalistic equivalent of poking the entire metro area with a sharp stick:

It's not fair.

And, we know, it really shouldn't matter.

But Atlanta -- the city, not the team -- doesn't deserve a playoff victory over the New York Giants on Sunday.

It has nothing to do with football. It's deeper than that.

Without question, Atlanta is the worst sports town in America.

To be clear, this is some world-class trolling. Parker doesn't expect his article to be taken seriously in any meaningful way—his primary goal is to generate some publicity for himself, and his secondary goal is to get a lot of people riled up, just because it's fun.

All that said, he's absolutely right. Atlanta is a bad sports town. And it's perfectly fine with me if it stays that way, because this, according to Parker, is the alternative:

Giants fans -- even with a fresh Super Bowl in their memories after the 2007 season -- are living and dying with their team. Football is a part of their lifestyle, it's who they are. On Sunday, every single moment of the game will be pure agony until the clock shows all zeroes and the Giants have secured the victory.

My God, that's one of the most miserable things I've ever read. The pure agony of EVERY SINGLE MOMENT. The merciless gloom of a poorly-executed screen pass. The heartwrenching sadness of an untimely holding call. The unyielding woe of a failed replay challenge. The indescribable pain—OH GOD, THE PAIN—of a walk-off punt return.^[1]

Meanwhile, in a bad sports town:

Your typical Atlanta fan -- who is probably from another city since so few are actually from ATL -- will be preoccupied with something else. They might not even be sure what time the game is on.

In fact, at some point, they might ask a friend -- filled with sweet tea -- at a pork-saturated barbeque, "Are the Falcons playing today?"

Pathetic.

Yeah, just imagine those monsters—enjoying a sunny Atlanta day with a multicultural array of friends and neighbors, feasting on the delightful cuisine of their adopted hometown, shamefully unaware that somewhere nearby a local professional sports team is hard at work in pursuit of a trophy or cup or whatever. Unaware that the game is winding down and the exhaustion is taking over and the players are looking to the stands, desperate for the sweet performance-enhancing tonic that is tens of thousands of screaming color-coordinated lunatics. But, as always, there are no lunatics. There is only the cold, indifferent silence of the near-empty arena.^[2]

Anyway, this is where I started to wonder if Parker was secretly on my side, because he just tried to make a picnic sound sinister, and almost invariably that is the act of a person carrying out a scheme several orders of magnitude more elaborate than necessary. But everything else in his article—paragraph after paragraph of unfavorable attendance numbers,^[3] a recap of the Braves' late-season collapse, and a helpful reminder that the Thrashers must now be referred to in the past tense, which may still come as a surprise to a substantial number of Atlantans—points to the conclusion that yeah, he really does think that Giants fans, by virtue of being more "passionate", deserve a win this afternoon, and that Falcons fans deserve a loss.^[4]

Of course, any time a city is called out like that its sports fans lose their collective shit, so in a fit of morbid curiosity I scrolled through the comments on Parker's article for as long as I could tolerate the ESPN commenting community—almost three minutes—and found what appears to be a bona fide, hardcore Atlanta sports fan. Here's what "Skyonex" had to say:

F the transplants in this city. I'm born and raised here AS a FALCONS/HAWKS/BRAVES Fan. I could care less for all these transplants from all over the country and the recent influx of NO Katrina refugees. You know who doesn't deserve a win? Idiots in New York who have no idea how hard it is for ATL hardcore pro sports fans.

Hey Rob, take it from a TRUE FALCONS fan for over 20 years... We've had it tough and we deserve a win. More so than any Ain'ts fan or Giants fan ever will...

Sure, this person comes off as severely unbalanced and possibly racist (really? Katrina refugees?) and by all indications should not be allowed to venture outside alone, but does he not also exhibit the characteristics of the "real fans" Parker is extolling? His devotion to his city is intense to the point of utter disregard for human dignity. He's convinced that Atlanta's sports ineptitude (and there's been a great deal of it, to be sure) is an actual difficulty he's had to deal with in his life. And he believes this combination of blind devotion and imaginary suffering makes him somehow more deserving than fans in New York and New Orleans—as if they'd know anything about devastation and sorrow—of watching a specific group of professional athletes win a specific football game.

Point is, if that's what it would take for Atlanta to turn its reputation around—stadiums and sports bars and message boards full of despondent, entitled assholes (and I think that is what it would take)—then I don't want to see it happen. Rob Parker is merely the latest member of the sports media to chastise Atlanta by rehashing the narrative that being a good sports fan means supporting your team with equal ferver win or lose (instead of behaving rationally by rewarding good management and punishing bad management), and being upset that your neighbor still pulls for the team in whatever city he's from (instead of being proud that he'd rather live in your city than his), and conflating on-field misfortune with real trauma (instead of displaying the emotional maturity of an actual adult).

That's what the sports media wants from you, Atlanta. Don't let them win. They don't deserve it.

1. That's right, Giants fans. Here, click on this one too. Is the agony overwhelming yet?

2. But still the game goes on. The in-bound pass goes to Josh Smith and he surveys the court, looking for an opening, but in that place inside him where there should be strength and hunger and aggression there is only the unshakable feeling that nobody gives a shit—that on this court, in this city, there is no difference between winning and losing—and so he puts up a 28-footer that misses everything.

3. To the extent that there's an actual problem with Atlanta sports fans, I suppose it would be the attendance, but even there it's hardly a crisis. Sure, there's room for improvement across the board, but the Braves and Falcons are in the top half of their leagues, and the Hawks aren't terribly far off. Only the Thrashers truly suffered from poor attendance, and they were a last-place team in a sport nobody cared about—I'm shocked they lasted as long as they did.

4. If my experience is any indication, Parker isn't being hyperbolic with the "are the Falcons playing today?" stuff. And he was wise to put the Falcons there instead of the Hawks—people are generally aware of the Falcons, whereas ill-informed curiosity would be a whole new level of prominence for the Hawks. In 2008 a friend and I went to an Atlanta bar to watch Game 6 against the Celtics—it was the Hawks' first playoff series in almost a decade, and merely by making it competitive they were wildly exceeding expectations. With about a minute left and the outcome still very much in doubt, a dozen people at a nearby table brought out a cake and launched into "Happy Birthday", completely oblivious to the game.
    (My other memory from that night is that after the broadcast ended a Cheers rerun came on, and nobody in the bar cared enough to change the channel. Imagine if this was Boston and the show was The Dukes of Hazzard—Waylon wouldn't make it to "never meanin' no harm" before something violent happened to the TV.)

The New Favre

I'm still holding on to shred of hope for another Brett Favre comeback. In fact, as long as he never throws another pass for the Falcons, I'm all in favor of Brett Favre continuing to retire and un-retire every year until he's dead. Is that an unpopular opinion? I'm guessing so, but I don't care. I like watching him play football, and, more importantly, when he's in the public spotlight there is a veritable planetary system of silliness and hyperbole in constant orbit around him, and I find every bit of it delightful. It's the same reason I like cable news and living in Florida.

But it's been a full year since the last time Favre took the Favre as a professional Favre,^[1] and the chances of another un-retirement (which would be number five, by my count) grow slimmer each day. Someone needed to fill the void, and holy crap, did someone ever do just that, and then some.

To declare so early in his career that Tim Tebow is the new Favre would be an overreaction of Favrian proportions, so I think we should go ahead and do it. The variety and sheer mass of the nonsense drawn in by Tebow's gravitational field is greater than Favre can even dream of (and clearly Favre does dream of such things). There's the small mountain of "what if Tebow were Muslim?" commentary.^[2] The actually-kind-of-plausible theory that the Broncos made Tebow their starter as part of a Major League-esque scheme to lose on purpose. This. And on and on. But my personal favorite so far is an article by Townhall.com's Katie Kieffer, titled "Tebow Sacks Socialism":

Tebow has All-American character. He espouses capitalistic values that are foundational to America: Competitiveness, ownership, responsibility, hard work, optimism, faith and persistence.

That's right. Tebow is a symbol of the virtues of capitalism. This is a person who, as far as I know, has never publicly weighed in on free market economics, or virtually any other political issue for that matter.^[3] So, what does Tebow have to do with capitalism?

In a capitalist society, leaders—whether they are the President of the United States, the CEO of a corporation or the quarterback for a football team—take responsibility. They don’t blame Congress, their shareholders or their fans. They focus on improving themselves and working harder to compete for a winning result.
…
Unlike Tebow, President Obama refuses to accept responsibility for the economic destruction he has unleashed via socialist policies like ObamaCare, bailouts, net neutrality regulations and by blocking oil production.

Probably this is just poor wording, but I did wonder for a second if there was a press conference where Tebow took responsibility for the recession and somehow I missed it. It wouldn't really surprise me if he did, simply out of politeness.

Anyway, more from Kieffer:

Football is competitive. There are winners and losers. Talent and hard work win; incompetence and laziness lose. Football rewards innovative risk-takers and analytical thinkers, not sentimental whiners. By instilling capitalistic principles, football builds leaders. In contrast, by discouraging competition, socialist principles encourage people to do the bare minimum, shirk responsibility and reject leadership.

Tebow lives his life in a way that embraces capitalistic principles and he is a leader because of his strong character.

Am I reading this wrong, or is she calling Blaine Gabbert a communist? Regardless, it's fantastically twisted logic. If the point is that successful athletes personify the basic principles of capitalism, then the quarterbacks we should be exalting include Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, and, ahem, Ben Roethlisberger. If the point is that "innovative risk-takers" are rewarded, then that ignores a fundamental tenet of capitalism, which is that sometimes they aren't (and nevermind that much of Tebow's NFL success can be attributed to being risk-averse).

Moreover, and I realize I'm well past the point of taking this too seriously, but football really isn't capitalistic, for the simple reason that in football there will always be an equal number of winners and losers.^[4] There can be no growth—average win totals are stagnant from year to year (at least, until the league goes to an 18-game schedule). Thus, playing to win is strategically identical to playing to cause your opponent to lose. In capitalism those two things are often different, and, at least in theory, you're always better off playing to win. If your competitors manage to win too, good for them.

But I'm not here to pick apart ill-conceived analogies. Well, I am, but also to say that I'm very much enjoying this, and I'm excited to see where it goes. What conservative talking point will Tebow's unconventional brand of marginally-above-average quarterbacking be shoehorned into next? Will his fearless running style be used to justify military intervention somewhere overseas? When a replay official overturns a Tebow touchdown, will Newt Gingrich cite it as further evidence of the threat judicial review poses to American values? And how long until he becomes a pawn in the ongoing War on the War on Christmas? The sky's the limit.

1. That was an homage to (or perhaps a ripoff of) this outstanding Deadspin headline: Tim Tebow Tebows 59-Yard Tebow To Force Tebowtime.

2. Answer: The amount of inexplicable animosity he generates by being openly Christian (and the counter-animosity his fans have for his detractors, and the counter-counter-animosity his detractors have for his fans) would look quaint by comparison.

3. Oh yeah, the abortion thing, when Tebow revealed that (a) he wasn't aborted, and (b) he's happy about that. These are both things that were already self-evident, but I guess when you say them out loud you're going to turn some heads.

4. Not to mention the flagrantly Marxist nature of the draft.

Professional Football's Age Barrier

As of the 2011 college football season, the Big Ten Conference has 12 teams and the Big 12 Conference has ten teams. I point this out because, well, it's funny, but also to provide some perspective, because on the list of the screwiest things about college football right now, the Big Ten/12 situation doesn't even make the top ten (or 12).^[1]

For a look at the items at the top of that list, Taylor Branch's aptly-titled Atlantic piece, "The Shame of College Sports", is required reading. This early paragraph is a nice summary of what follows:

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

I'm also partial to this, by deceased Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko (not really…probably), who skillfully deflates the "but they are getting paid, in the form of an education" argument. And this, by Clay Travis at Outkick the Coverage, which addresses the morality (or—spoiler alert!—lack thereof) of a system that not only forces people with extremely valuable skills to wait at least three years for their first paycheck, but makes sure they remain exposed to potentially career-ending injuries the entire time.

So I'm not going to rehash the argument for overhauling college football to allow the players to share in some way the profits they generate, because the case has largely been made, and I'd just be running up the score. But there's still one lingering piece of the pro-NCAA argument that, as far as I can tell, hasn't been addressed. From a comment on the Outkick the Coverage article:

I agree with most of what you say with the exception of, "The NFL's age restriction is a fundamental restraint of trade that is completely un-American." It is entirely up to the NFL to make rules regarding hiring. That is America. The right for the owner to decide when, whom and if he/she hires someone. The owner of a corporation, partnership, legal entity, etc has rights just as the college player has rights and personal liberties. The player can choose to stop playing college ball and wait for the draft status to open or he can go play in the CFL or [some other professional league]. . . . Are the universities making money off of some of the players? Hell yes, why shouldn't they be? The bottom line is capitalism in it's truest form is about profits, contracts and freedom of choice. The player chooses what he/she wants to do, no one forces them to play college ball.

It's a tough point to argue with, because I'm not sure it's wrong. It might also be the most important point in the entire debate. If 18-to-20-year-old football players really do have a viable pro alternative, then the NCAA is, while still problematic, a fundamentally benevolent organization that does a lot of good for those who choose to keep their amateur status.^[2] But if players don't have a viable pro alternative, then they're essentially forced into an adhesion contract where they have to spend at least three years making money for others—receiving in return only the non-negotiable benefit of a college education they may not want, and probably won't be able to take full advantage of anyway—before they can start trying to make money for themselves. In that case, the system is every bit as indefensible as Taylor Branch and others make it out to be.

So I decided to look up the players who joined a professional team rather than attend college. The NFL's rule is well-known—you can't enter the draft until three years after your high school class graduates—but there are other pro football leagues, so at least in theory there are options available. But what kind of money are those players making? How enticing were the scholarship opportunities they passed up, if any? Are they getting attention from NFL scouts?

I went through the leagues that are currently active (NFL Europe, we hardly knew ye), looking over rosters, league rules, and whatever other information I could find.^[3] There aren't many, but, sure enough, I did find a handful of athletes who went pro at age 18 or 19. There's Mikkayla Flores of the Cleveland Crush, Ciara McMillan of the Tampa Breeze, and Dominique Oro of the Los Angeles Temptation, to name a few. But if NFL scouts are hanging around at Lingerie Football League games, it's probably for a different reason.

As for the other significant (by which I mean not overwhelmingly insignificant) leagues, here's what I found:

League	Youngest player (age as of Oct. 29, 2011)	Previous team(s)
Canadian Football League	Zack Evans, Saskatchewan Roughriders (21 years, 125 days) Youngest American: Javes Lewis, Toronto Argonauts (21 years, 323 days)	Evans: Regina Thunder (of the CJFL, an amateur junior league for Canadians only) Lewis: University of Oregon (2008-10)
Arena Football League	Will Hill, Arizona Rattlers (21 years, 237 days)	University of Florida (2008-10)
United Football League	Saalim Hakim, Las Vegas Locomotives (21 years, 271 days)	Palomar CC (2008), Tarleton State (2009-10)
National Football League	Tyron Smith, Dallas Cowboys (20 years, 322 days)	USC (2008-10)

Aside from the aforementioned LFL, I could only find one professional football league in North America with any players under 21. Oddly enough, it's the NFL.^[4]

The NFL is also the only league without a good deal of haziness surrounding its eligibility rules. According to the never-wrong-about-anything New York Times, the CFL has no minimum age.^[5] I'm skeptical, especially after going through the team rosters, but I haven't seen an official source that says otherwise. It's a similar story with the AFL and UFL—a number of questionable online sources point to a minimum age of 18 or so, but I can't find anything definitive.

There are, of course, a number of reasons a player with NFL aspirations might not want to join an alternative league, even if that league will have him. To begin with, it's rather pointless to forgo a full scholarship for a miniscule salary in an unstable organization, and, other than the CFL, which pays decent money and isn't going to fold anytime soon, it's nothing but question marks. The AFL had to cancel its entire 2009 season, and upon its return in 2010 player salaries were drastically reduced. The fledgling UFL pays its players around $40,000 a year—not NFL money, but enough to live on, and seemingly more than the league should be able to afford. In related news, the UFL just cancelled the last two weeks of its regular season, and may never return.

And then there are the differences in the game itself. Arena league games are played on a smaller field with rules designed to encourage a faster pace and lots of scoring. CFL games are played on a field the size of Luxembourg with rules that allow this to happen:



But, ultimately, it’s all gridiron football, and anyone who excels at one version has the potential to succeed at another. So why is it so difficult to find even a single player who went pro out of high school? I can think of two possible explanations:

1. Every talented 18-year-old football player in the country independently made the same decision—to go to college instead of playing for money. And yet, while in college many (though certainly not all) of these players will (a) neglect the academic coursework they voluntarily chose to pursue, (b) accept "improper benefits", jeopardizing their eligibility and exposing their schools to NCAA sanctions (and undermining the initial decision to play on an amateur basis), and (c) leave for the NFL as soon as the rules allow, whether they've graduated or not. Or…
2. No professional league is interested in signing players right out of high school.

One of those explanations is a bit more plausible than the other.^[6]

I'm not arguing that the NCAA or the NFL are somehow illegally restricting competition (though I'm tempted to try), but this is another of the many, many signs that there's something wrong with the system. The term "slavery" has been thrown around, and that's unfortunate, because there's nothing approaching slavery going on, but it certainly looks like the choice isn't between playing as an amateur or as a professional—it's between playing as an amateur or not playing at all.

1. What does this have to do with conservatism? That's a good question, for which I have two answers. First, it's what I feel like writing about, so whatever. And second, what doesn't it have to do with conservatism? From the overly cautious on-field tactics and the attempts to eliminate victimless behavior on dubious moral grounds (e.g. banning certain touchdown celebrations), to the we-know-what's-good-for-these-kids-better-than-they-do paternalism of the college system and the anti-capitalistic shadiness of the NFL's antitrust exemption—virtually everything objectionable about modern conservatism is reflected in football.

2. Of the major American sports, baseball has by far the best system for handling the transition from amateur to professional, for the simple and obvious reason that the players have a choice. This is why nobody complains about college baseball players not getting paid. (Well, that and the relative lack of money in college baseball, which isn't unrelated to the fact that players have a choice.)

3. I made a pretty good effort to be comprehensive, but I didn't obsess over it, and it's certainly possible that I overlooked somebody. There are also a few teams (I'm talking to you, Omaha Nighthawks) that don't have rosters online, along with countless other reasons the available information might be incomplete or wrong. Suffice it to say, I might've missed some things, but I think my overall assessment is pretty solid.
    Oh, and I decided not to worry too much about the various second-tier "indoor football" leagues (for legal reasons, they can't call it arena football), or the Stars Football League, which is totally a real thing. From the SFL's Wikipedia page: "Its inaugural season began June 30, 2011 with two teams; the league phased two more teams into the schedule over the course of the 2011 season to finish the season with four teams." It might not sound like much right now, but they're on pace to have 256 teams by this time in 2013.

4. You can probably figure this out without my help (if you don't know it already), but just to be thorough: Since the NFL defines eligibility relative to a player's high school graduation, there's really no minimum age, and every so often somebody manages to parlay an atypically early graduation into an atypically early NFL debut (most notably Amobi Okoye, who was still 19 when he was drafted in 2007).

5. I'm tempted to write a whole 'nother post about the comments on that Bryce Brown article, because there are some great examples of the bizarre attitudes people have about college sports. Even at the New York Times website, of all places, the idea of an 18-year-old cashing in on a marketable skill—perfectly acceptable in every other (non-criminal) profession—brings out so much inexplicable vitriol. I especially like this one:

Send a kid to the CFL rather than college? The average NFL running back career is just over three years. Then what? Now you have to PAY for college rather than getting it for free.

That's right, after he spends three years in the lucrative world of professional football, making piles and piles of money, he'll have to PAY for college. How will he ever be able to afford it?

6. This isn't a new development, by the way. In the mid-80s the USFL adopted the same eligibility rules as the NFL, which at the time disallowed the signing of players who had yet to use up their college eligibility. (A rather controversial exception was made for Herschel Walker, who was coming off his third college season and would've been able to enter the NFL draft under today's rules.)
    Similarly, the XFL made no attempt to undercut the NFL, though there were reports that after its first season the league considered recruiting 18- and 19-year-olds. They still wouldn't have been in direct competition with the NCAA—the plan was to talk only to players who had been unable to get into college for academic reasons—but, regardless, it never happened, because the XFL's first season turned out to be its last.

Four-Down Football

If you don't know the story, you can read about it here. Or if you don't know the story and you're also a fan of hysterical overreactions, here. And if you'd rather just watch the damn video, here.

Basically, one year ago two days ago, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick found himself in a situation where the overwhelming majority of coaches wouldn't hesitate to zig. Belichick chose instead to zag, and a few minutes later the Patriots lost the game. I won't go (too far) into the pros and cons of the decision itself, because way too much has been said already, and also that's not the point. Suffice it to say, it was defensible. Maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong, but any reasonable person can recognize that neither option—punt, or go for the first down—was substantially preferable to the other.

Alas, those with strong opinions about decisions made by professional football coaches are not, by and large, reasonable people. The backlash was immediate, and it came from all corners. Sportswriters (like Jay Mariotti and Pete Prisco):

This was the most obvious decision a coach could make on any level, NFL to Pee Wee. Punt the friggin' ball.

Each and every week we see bad coaching decisions in the NFL, but never, and I mean never, have I seen one as dumb as the decision Patriots coach Bill Belichick made Sunday night.

Players (like Rodney Harrison and Trent Dilfer):

This was the worst coaching decision I have ever seen Bill Belichick make.

This decision was ludicrous…This is the coach who's always talking about making good decisions…well he needs to be held accountable.

Coaches (like Tony Dungy):

You have to punt the ball in that situation. As much as you might respect Peyton Manning, you have to play the percentages and punt the ball.

And the football-watching public:

Bellicheat is no genius! Bottom line...he blew the call last night and cost New England the game!

There is absolutely no way to support the call he made. None.

It was the WRONG call last night. PERIOD.

So, yeah, a lot of people thought it was a bad idea, but note the subtle variations in the reasoning. There's "everybody punts in this situation," "going for it was too risky," "he must not respect his defense," and on and on. I'm resisting the urge to identify and pick apart as many as I can,^[1] because I want to focus on the one line of reasoning I find most disturbing. From Sports Illustrated's Peter King, the Indianapolis Star's Bob Kravitz, and the Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy:

I hated the call. It smacked of I'm-smarter-than-they-are hubris.

How did it come to pass that Belichick, a brilliant man, …eschew[ed] the obvious punt, arrogantly choosing to go for the first down?

[The] Patriots are saddled with a loss that will haunt them for the rest of the season. And Belichick gets the blame. Too smart for his own good this time. The sin of hubris.

While the "it was wrong for hazy and/or speculative tactical reasons" stuff was largely a product of the Patriots losing (because there's no faulty logic there), I'm not sure the "arrogant bastard!" crowd really cared who won—in fact, they might've been even more upset if the play had worked.

King, Kravitz, and Shaughnessy (who, by the way, are hardly alone here) sort of try to make tactics-based arguments, but you can tell their hearts aren't in it.^[2] They're writing out of anger. I don't know why they're angry—maybe because Belichick is (by many accounts) a fairly unlikeable guy, maybe (in Shaughnessy's case) because the Patriots lost—but I suspect at least part of it is that a guy widely considered to be smarter than pretty much everyone, and thus probably smarter than each of them, had just made a decision they didn't understand, and that pretty much all the early support for that decision came from other smart people.

Now, some may say, "in this era of high unemployment, out-of-control spending, and the president being a communist or something, who cares what a bunch of sportswriters said about a play in a football game?" Well to them I say perhaps it's time to work on your microcosm-spotting technique, because, pardon the oxymoron, but this whole thing is a big-ass microcosm. (Also, thanks for reading!)

The same attitude shows up everywhere, including areas where it can actually be dangerous. For example, climate change, and the ongoing debate about whether humans have caused measurable harm to the environment, and the related debate about whether we're capable of reversing or mitigating whatever damage has been (or will be) done. To be clear, I'm a lot more comfortable talking about football than climate change, in large part because I don't know where to go for scientific data that isn't biased in some way or another (is there such a thing?), but I'm a big fan of what Bjørn Lomborg says here:

Common sense was an early loser in the scorching battle over the reality of man-made global warming. For nearly 20 years, one group of activists argued—in the face of ever-mounting evidence—that global warming was a fabrication. Their opponents, meanwhile, exaggerated the phenomenon's likely impact—and, as a consequence, dogmatically fixated on drastic, short-term carbon cuts as the only solution, despite overwhelming evidence that such cuts would be cripplingly expensive and woefully ineffective.
…
Acknowledging that man-made climate change is real, but arguing that carbon cuts are not the answer, amounts to staking out a middle ground in the global warming debate—which means being attacked from both sides. For so-called "alarmists," pointing out what's wrong with drastic carbon cuts is somehow tantamount to denying the reality of climate change, while so-called "deniers" lambast anyone who accepts the scientific evidence supporting this "mythical" problem.

Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong, but any reasonable person can recognize this as a reasonable way of looking at things. At the very least, it's worth thinking about, right?

On the other hand, in the words—and I use that term more loosely than ever before in my life ^[3]—of everyone's favorite former Alaska governor:

Copenhgen=arrogance of man2think we can change nature's ways.MUST b good stewards of God's earth,but arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature

Translation: "I simply cannot let the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit conclude without tweetin' my objection to what I perceive as the fundamental flaw of the event's underlying ethos. Namely, the notion that we, merely the humble children of our benevolent God, are capable of imposin' our will on forces—both natural and supernatural—beyond our full comprehension. To subscribe to this mentality is as arrogant as it is naïve, which is to say an excessive amount of both. That said, I do believe in treatin' the environment with respect, lest we do irreparable damage to this terrestrial home God has so graciously provided for us, and somehow I fail to realize that by qualifyin' the first thing I said I am, in fact, refudiatin' its logical foundation."

I don't think those sportswriters honestly believe going for the first down was indefensible, and I don't think Sarah Palin honestly believes there's nothing we can do to change the environment for the better. So, what's really going on?

It could be any number of things, I suppose, but, when a new idea challenges your worldview, it's a whole lot easier to attack the person who came up with it than the idea itself, because to attack the idea requires thought. So…that's my guess.

1. Alright, just one (this is why I love footnotes). From Bill Simmons:

Belichick did play the percentages…I am not disputing the numbers or the methods for achieving them.
…
In the biggest game of the regular season when a football coach tries something that…I cannot remember another team doing on the road in the last three minutes of a close game, that's not "gutsy." It's not a "gamble." It's not "believing we can get that two yards." It's not "revolutionary." It's not "statistically smart." It's reckless

No! Don't do things that give you a better chance of winning football games! That's reckless!
    I like Simmons, and I've obviously been subconsciously influenced by his writing style, and I really don't think he would've been one of the torch-wielding villagers in 17th-century Italy calling for Galileo's head, but that's what this makes me think of.

2. Peter King's half-hearted attempt is by far the silliest:

Let's place the odds of Brady getting two yards at 60, 65 percent. The odds of Manning going 72 yards to score a touchdown in less than two minutes…that's maybe 35 percent.

Ok, I'll play along. King says the Colts have a 35% chance of scoring after a punt, which means the chance of them not scoring is 65%—about the same as the odds he gives the Patriots of converting on fourth down. And, by the way, a failed conversion doesn't guarantee a Colts touchdown, nor does a Colts touchdown preclude the Patriots from re-taking the lead on their next possession, so New England's odds of winning would be somewhat higher than 60, 65%. Later, he adds:

[T]his would never have been a great call. Even it you think you've got a two-out-of-three chance to make two yards deep in your own territory, the cost of missing it is too great.

So going for it gives you a 66.7% chance of winning, and punting gives you a 65% chance of winning. Therefore, going for it is stupid and indefensible. Arrogant bastard!
    Peter King is trying to make an argument that only sounds reasonable if you justify it with made-up numbers, and he can't even do that right. It's mind-boggling. I blame the public schools.

3. Look, I realize Twitter's character limit creates a certain degree of difficulty, and I realize Palin likes to play up her folksiness, and I'm decidedly not a prescriptivist (I know I made some jokes above, but I'm more than willing to defend Palin on her gerunds and on the "refudiate" thing), but this is just awful. Even if I agreed with everything she said, I'm not sure I could ever vote for someone whose transcribed thoughts look like that.

Three-Down Football

Conservatism is more than just a political philosophy. It's a way of life, leaving its mark on practically every facet of society. And as a red-blooded American Southerner, there is exactly one facet of society I care about from September through January: Football.^[1]

It's a perfect match, really, conservatism and football, because conservatives can't stand change. "We've been doing things a certain way for as long as we can remember," they say. "We're not just going to start doing something different on a whim." Not that I'm opposed to that mindset—if something works, and there isn't overwhelming evidence that something else would work better, it does seem a bit irresponsible to shake things up—but, every so often, a new idea turns out to be rather compelling. Meanwhile, the status quo—the best system given what we knew and believed at some non-specific time in the past—has taken on a life of its own, becoming this thing that must be protected because it's the status quo, as if that alone is proof of its superiority.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, football, where the status quo is fanatically adhered-to all the hell over the place.

For those unfamiliar with the game, the team with the ball is given three plays, or "downs," to advance ten yards. This process repeats as many times as necessary until (1) the ball is advanced into the end zone for a touchdown, (2) the ball is stolen by the opposing team, (3) time expires, or (4) a play on the third and final down falls short of the ten-yard threshold. In the latter case, the team must either punt to the opposing team or attempt a field goal.

Or so it was commonly believed, until, in 2005, a professor at UC-Berkeley made a game-changing ^[2] discovery: In addition to the three widely-known downs, there was another, "fourth," down. It turns out that, by taking advantage of the new down, a team can make more attempts to advance the ball downfield than ever before—up to 33% more, by some estimates.

The implications are staggering. Could it really be true that Lombardi, Landry, Halas, and all the other legendary coaches were doing it wrong? It's a question that borders on heresy. The conventional wisdom, after all, is the sum total of more than a century of analysis, observation, and experimentation, dating back at least to 1906, when a St. Louis University student named Bradbury Robinson had the audacity to throw the ball forward. And yet, evidence continues to mount that—in terms of the crucial decision a coach must always make after a failed third down play—most have been, and continue to be, doing it wrong.

The football world, shockingly enough, doesn't want to hear it, because what could a bunch of number-crunching eggheads possibly know about football? "We'll just stick with punts and field goals," they say. "Fourth down attempts are risky." Well, of course they are. Risk/reward scenarios are the very essence of sports!

It's as if status quo-defenders are unaware that the more familiar options have risks of their own. A punt involves voluntarily giving up control of the ball without scoring points—not a sacrifice to be taken lightly, as the primary method of determining success or failure on a game-by-game basis is by comparison of cumulative point totals.^[3] A field goal, at least, is worth a few points, though on average less than half that of a touchdown. And most fans need not be reminded that, from time to time, field goal attempts go awry.^[4]

Obviously, it would be crazy to embrace fourth down with reckless abandon (except that maybe it isn't). The ideal approach is to seek an appropriate balance between caution and curiosity, but only a handful of coaches have been even that adventurous. Instead, most have planted themselves in a familiar, comfortable spot near the conservative extreme. Like an alien visitor to a three-downs-and-kick planet, fourth down is seen as strange and unwanted and probably dangerous. It's a threat to the status quo, and the best way to preserve the status quo is to refuse to question it.

Otherwise, you might find out the status quo isn't worth preserving, and that's a risk few are willing to take.

Coming up: A look at the events of one year ago today,^[5] when an unconventional thinker did something unconventional, and received a lot of very conventional criticism. Basically, this article, but with more specifics and without all the condescending tongue-in-cheekiness. Well, not as much of it, anyway.

1. Ok, there's also politics, pretentious films, and, you know, friends and family and stuff. But mostly football.

2. Pun very much intended.

3. As noted above, most-points-scored is the preferred method of determining winners of individual games. It logically follows, then, that most-games-in-which-more-points-were-scored should be the preferred method of ranking multiple teams over the course of multiple games.
    This is the case in the NFL, but in college football that method is used in combination with countless others. To name a few: most-points-scored-against-hapless-opponents-who-never-had-a-chance, fans'-willingness-to-travel-and-spend-money-on-tickets-and-hotel-rooms, votes-held-by-a-team's-own-coach (up to a maximum of one, which doesn't sound like much, but it's a lot more than zero), and, of course, intangibles (having a contract with NBC, being last year's champion, not being from Idaho, having once employed Paul "Bear" Bryant, etc.). It's a staggeringly complex system, and yet, somehow, it seems to work. Sorry, I mistyped. It doesn't work at all.

4. Another good choice for that link: Wide Right, the band. Any guesses where they're from? Highlight the bracketed text (or just go to their site) for the answer: [Buffalo, New York—former home of NFL kicker Scott Norwood!]

5. "One year ago today?," you're probably thinking. "Why not post that article today, and this one a few days earlier?" Aren't you clever. Where were you this time last week, when I was blissfully unaware of the impending anniversary of the Patriots-Colts debacle?