On The Week's Top Five

1. Royalties

You know what upsets me far more than garish ceremonies celebrating a vestigial institution? It's people who utilize garish ceremonies celebrating a vestigial institution in order to engage in self-righteous condemnation. Let us say, for instance, that you are a sports fan, and you condemn the royal wedding largely because it is an exercise in garish symbolism. Does this mean that you are also in favor of the abolition of marching bands? Of school mascots? Of player introductions? Of uniforms? At some level, myths and symbols infuse every aspect of our culture, but nowhere more than sports. You may argue about the need for/cost of such symbols, but to completely disregard the notion that these symbols hold emotional weight for a great number of people is as ignorant as declaring that pep rallies are a national embarrassment.

2. The Culmination of the NBA Playoffs...

Will be that moment when Kobe Bryant finally engages in physical assault on Pau Gasol.

3. Proof of Life

You know the best part of those early seasons of The Apprentice? It was those segments when Trump would deliver his advice on business and on life, because I imagine the advice Trump would give to young entrepreneurs is very similar to the advice Ahmedinejad would give to young terrorists, if Ahmadinejad played golf.

4. Listening to...


"The Envoy," by Warren Zevon. Because I am feeling especially cynical today.*

5. Reading...

"An Accidental Hero," by John Ed Bradley, SI.** 

"True Colors," by Malcolm Gladwell.

*See Number 3.
**I would argue that Bradley is one of the most underrated writers in that magazine's history. I have yet to read any of his novels, but his memoir about playing college football at LSU is outstanding.

On the Evolution of Football

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: I love football, and I don't imagine my opinion will change anytime soon. And yet I also know--and I've known for quite some time--that every time I watch a football game, I am essentially throwing my wholehearted support behind an act of barbarism. Football is brutal, and football tears men to pieces, and that is one reason why we love it, and I could get onto some extended meditation about the marginalization of masculinity in modern society and how it relates to the selection of the All-Madden squad, but I won't, because that's not my point. My point is that it's never been more confusing to be a football fan, and if you're not convinced, take a few minutes to read Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece about the parallels between football and dogfighting; even if you don't buy completely into his thesis, it would be delusional to admit that he doesn't have a pretty solid point here.

Gladwell summarizes what you already know, if you've read pretty much any publication in America these past few years: That all those posthumous studies are essentially proving what we all suspected--football actually destroys your brain. So how are we supposed to get around that? We can build a better helmet, but we're still dealing with collisions that occur with the force of a three-car collision on the Schuykill Expressway.* We can ban tackling altogether, which probably makes the most sense intellectually, but would essentially neuter the game and trigger the emotional destruction of millions of Americans like me. So somehow we have to find a middle ground; somehow, we have to find a way to allow the game itself to subtly evolve to the point where the intricate strategies and formations and techniques of the game itself come to overshadow the brute violence. Somehow we have to find a way to make violence a secondary element of football. That's not an easy thing to do, but you could argue that it's already happening: Look at the NFL in the 1960's compared with the NFL today. A couple of years ago, I interviewed Conrad Dobler, the "dirtiest player in the league" in the 1970's, an offensive lineman for the Cardinals who engaged in unspeakable acts of violence in the name of self-preservation. Many of Dobler's tactics are now blatantly illegal, and so the game itself has cleaned up; the problem is that the players themselves have evolved, too, so that they are bigger and stronger and faster than they've ever been.**

So that's where we find ourselves. I think football is at a true crossroads. We're faced with a moment when the game itself seems to be embracing its own evolution, stretching out to the edges of the field, to three- and four-receiver sets, to the Wildcat, to a game of finesse and strategy. And I think those who oversee it are trying to encourage it in that direction, and it's not always going to seem very smooth. We are in an adjustment period. I have no scientific proof here, but I think I've seen more questionable pass interference calls this year than I've ever seen before; I presume that's partly because teams are throwing more than they ever have, but also because we're trying to facilitate evolution by streamlining the physicality, by eliminating any unnecessary contact, by muting the brutality. And yes, it does seem that any marginally late hit, or any blow anywhere near the vicinity of a player's head evokes a personal foul call; this, too, seems extreme (and occasionally ridiculous) within the moment, and will no doubt evoke accusations that game is already neutering itself--and Arkansas fans have a legitimate argument on both these counts during Saturday's loss to Florida--but maybe this is just how it has to be. It seems like a short-term annoyance, but it is a long-term necessity. For football to survive, it has to evolve.

*Which is, unquestionably, the most frightening highway on which I've ever traveled. I remember all the locals I knew used to call it the "Surekill Expressway," yet another example of the inherent coarseness of Philadelphians.
**In my new book (available for pre-order today!), I write a section about William "Refrigerator" Perry, who was, in his time, considered a shining example of American gluttony. The Fridge, of course, weighed approximately 300 pounds; this weekend, during Penn State's game against Minnesota, I learned of Jeff Wills, an offensive tackle for the Gophers, who is 6-feet, 7 inches tall, and weighs 365 pounds. In other words, there are no longer appliances large enough to serve as appropriate nicknames.

(Photo: Bill Frakes/SI/Getty)

On Randomness

I'm in the midst of reading Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules of Our Lives, a nifty little tome whose purpose is to ensure us that our instinctual assumptions about probability are almost always completely wrong. It is, in a way, the contrarian counterpart to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. (Perhaps, with enough public pressure, we can arrange a cage match between the two, involving whiteboards, graphing calculators and a curling iron.)

Anyway, Mlodinow writes a great deal about sports (since it often provides the most literal example of his thesis, as uber-baseball geek and Bill James fanatic Joe Posnanski has ably noted here and here), and at one point, he reveals a simple statistical truth about a seven-game playoff series, which is, essentially, that even seven games cannot truly minimize randomness: Even if we can somehow statistically determine that, say, the Lakers would win 55 percent of their games against the Magic, the Magic would still win the series four out of every 10 times. And even if the Lakers could be expected 66.6 percent of their games against the Magic, Orlando would still win 20 percent of the time (let us call it "The Pietrus Effect.") In the former case, it would take 23 games to achieve "statistical significance," meaning the underdog would win less than 5 percent of the time; in the latter, it would take 269 games, or roughly the temporal equivalent of watching the director's cut of Kobe: Doin' Work.

Here's the point Mlodinow did not make (at least, not yet): In sports, increased randomness is almost always a good thing. This is why the two most exciting times of year in sports are the college football season (where top teams are constantly falling victim to unexpected upsets) and the NCAA tournament (where upsets have become the tournament's entire commodity, and where the application of mathematical processes like the RPI have , in recent years, actually threatened the tournament's wonderful spontanaiety.) And this is why I think football has become an inherently better (and more popular) game than either baseball or basketball, especially on the professional level: Because it is physically impossible for football to play its games in series.

And, yes, I will freely acknowledge that this will never, ever happen, if only for financial reasons: But can you imagine if, for one experimental year, the NBA playoffs (or the baseball playoffs, for that matter) were staged like the NCAA tournament, with the championship perhaps as a three-game series? After all, why should we pretend that a seven-game series will produce a more "authentic" victor when all it does it minimize The Pietrus Effect by a small amount, without rendering it statistically insignificant? Why not allow your best players to throw everything they have into a single game in order to preserve their season (or in baseball, to utilize your entire pitching staff on a single evening)? Maybe it would throw the entire process into chaos. Maybe we'd wind up with a Bulls-Jazz final. But if the Lakers sweep the next three games, who's to say the random result wouldn't be the more interesting one?