On That What-The-Hell Happened Moment

Dyer's run was a what-the-hell-happened moment that symbolized this what-the-hell-happened season. The national title was decided on a play in which everyone stood still and stopped playing.--Pat Forde, ESPN

And now, of course, there is controversy, because there is always controversy, because a play like that could not precipitate a pushback by the losing side and by those obsessive freaks who have the time to blow up a photograph to elephantine proportions in order to determine whether Michael Dyer's ankle tape is part of his ankle, or whether the wrist is part of the hand which is attached to the elbow bone which was precipitated by butterflies in the stomach. Dyer was down, Dyer wasn't down: Such is the ageless mantra of an otherwise arrhythmic championship game, the kind of game that exactly no one predicted but, given the 40-day layoff brought on by the infinite wisdom of the bowl system, we probably should have expected.

What's amazing is that we have instant replay, and even instant replay cannot eliminate those last slivers of human error. Maybe that's a bad thing, but I don't think it is. Because the games I remember most are the ones that hinge on controversy: On whether Mike Guman may have somehow scored in the 1978 Sugar Bowl, on whether Mike McCloskey was out of bounds, on whether that final second should have even been on the clock in the first place. Because sometimes the best thing about sports is that the argument can seem so innocuous by comparison with actual life. From now on, Oregon fans will identify themselves through that play, for better or worse; their pain will build character in a program that's mostly associated with cheaply made workout apparel and hideous regalia. Dyer Was Down.

In the real world these days, the arguments we're having are the true what-the-hell happened moments: they are serious and stern and increasingly violent and frightening, and they don't seem likely to go away anytime soon. Maybe that's why this controversy seems so quaint: Because in sports, it is nothing more than a moment.

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

1. Driving

I spend my Christmases in Chicago, residing temporarily with the beings who created my future wife. Normally, it is no big deal--they have an airport in Chicago (in fact, I hear, they even have two airports), and so my trip generally involves stepping onto a flying machine, stepping off, shuttling to suburbia, consuming carbohydrates for three days, and returning home on a separate flying machine. However, this year, my home city was enveloped in chaos, thereby forcing the future wife and I to rent a vehicle via O.J. Motors and cover the eastern portion of America over the course of two days. To which I say, A.) Any rest stop with a Hardee's in it should either be named after a prominent antacid or targeted for immediate demolition,* B.) The vast expanse of northern Ohio is as utterly barren as I recall it to be, though C.) my home state's interminable width--it is the Vince Wilfork of I-80--is something I feel obligated to apologize for, and D.) if there is a way to sell off New Jersey while it still has some value remaining, I say we take the deal. Find some wealthy sheik with a Sopranos fetish, play him a copy of Greetings from Asbury Park, sell him on the notion of hired attendants pumping the fuel he sold us a premium, don't mention the endless array of nonsensical cloverleaf off-ramps, the drivers who treat lane markers as an optional exercise, and the very idea of Newark, and we might be able to raise enough money to purchase something Canadian.

2. Buckeyes

You don't need me to tell you that the NCAA is a bungling hypocritical cabal, and we can argue about the relative severity of several athletes selling items that seemingly belonged to them, but what skeeves me out most about Tattoogate is Ohio State's utterly patronizing attempts to act as if it had simply forgotten to mention a statute that Jim Tressel recalled prominently mentioning as recently as 2003. The fundamental problem here is that the adults never really get punished for anything, even though they're the ones making all the money.

3. Weirdos

This story is amazing. I've got to imagine there's a role for Vincent Gallo in the film adaptation.
 
*What makes it worse is that the Hardee's was paired with a third-rate fast-food Mexican chain. Which means, if your Thickburger did not immediately induce dysentery, you could layer it with something resembling a taco. The other rest-stop tandem in Indiana, by the way, was McDonald's with Dairy Queen, which makes me think the Indiana Turnpike must be heavily populated by successful Little League teams.

On Blair Thomas, Greg Oden, and Level of Bustitude

He stopped short, dropping his arms. "I..." he said, gasping a little, though his condition was fine and the run hadn't winded him. "I--once I played here."
--Irwin Shaw, The Eighty Yard Run


In my mind, Blair Thomas is not a punchline. In my mind, Blair Thomas is not a bust. In my mind, Blair Thomas is the running back in this video, the running back who, at the 6:25 mark, propels himself through the Syracuse defensive line and then bursts past five defenders for one of the most picturesque 92-yard runs you will ever see. In my mind, Blair Thomas is the running back who took his next carry forty yards for another touchdown, and finished the day with144 yards on three carries, announcing his presence in a way I've never seen a young running back do before or since. In my mind, Blair Thomas was a first-tier talent who tore up his knee before his senior season and never regained the same burst; I was a teenager who never played football and even I recognized that the Blair Thomas of 1989 was not the Blair Thomas of 1986. It is not his fault that the Jets were too inept to realize this; it is not his fault that the Jets overvalued him.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons: First, Jeff Pearlman, in compiling a list of the 100 Worst Players in NFL history on Deadspin, cited Thomas in his introduction. Not as one of the worst players in the NFL history, but as a "larger-than-large bust." Now, let's leave aside the fact that I can find no citation of Joe Paterno actually calling Thomas "the best player I've ever coached" (he did call Thomas the best all-around running back he'd coached, a relatively major distinction given the defensive stars who have come through Penn State's program); let's just ask the larger existential question that hovers over Pearlman's rankings (which are generally a goofy and well-rendered conceit): What is a bust? How do we determine a bust? Shouldn't mitigating circumstances be factored in?

Now, it is true that Blair Thomas did not live up to expectations. And so perhaps, at some level, at least in the minds of Jets fans, this makes him a colossal bust. In my mind, if you had to measure Level of Bustitude*, it is fair to rank Thomas higher on the scale than, say, poor Ki-Jana Carter, who may have actually been the greatest running back of the Paterno era but never could stay healthy when he reached the NFL. (Thomas might be 7; Carter is probably a 2 or 3.) The problem is, we don't make these distinctions. The problem is that there is no nuance in the classification of a bust; there is no measure of injuries and the mental burden of fame and the attendant pressure that may affect certain personalities in different ways than others.  And that brings us to Greg Oden.

Oden's career, of course, has been a story of failure. His body is flawed; his body has betrayed him, over and over again. This happens, but when it happens to an athlete like Oden, it somehow becomes his fault. In a matter of time, Oden will be inexorably connected to Ryan Leaf, even though the individual circumstances of their Bustitude could not be more different. This is not fair, but this is sports, and in sports, we never really consider the notion that the human body is a fickle and undependable instrument. Failure is failure, and Greg Oden is not possessed of the health and/or talent of Kevin Durant, with whom he will forever be compared (see Leaf: Manning). The circumstances are irrelevant, and the past matters to no one but ourselves.

*TM

On Cam Newton: A Kind Of Anarchistic Viewpoint

 

The good people at The War Eagle Reader, a fun/hipsterish Auburn-centric website, asked me to write something about the Cam Newton saga. So of course I wound up writing about Penn State...

Let me begin with this: I grew up a fan of Penn State football, and so you may assume that everything I say is couched in a certain amount of stodgy Northeastern academic elitism. At Penn State, they like to think they treat football and compliance with equal dilligence, which is why my alma mater often finds itself marooned in the Outback Bowl on New Year’s Day, led by a seemingly indestructible octogenarian who resembles a professor emeritus at Hogwarts. You may think of us a declining power with prison-issue uniforms and a stunning inability to defeat Alabama, but at least we are self-righteous about it.
And so, while it is true that, in the midst of researching my latest book, I bore witness to the holy act of Bo Jackson firing a crossbow in his own driveway, I am not going to lie and say I understand exactly what you are feeling down there at Toomer’s Corner at this critical juncture. (The closest Penn State has come to a truly juicy recruiting scandal revolved around Joe Paterno’s insistence on converting several future Hall of Fame quarterbacks to linebacker.) But we do have one thing in common: We have both felt the sting of being worked over by the pollsters.

Read more here. And while you're at it, listen to this:

On Glycerine, Battleships, and Thinking Fast

I accept it as a fact of life that I no longer have an attention span. I am constantly distracted from my life's work by the stiff breeze of a Twitter post about grizzly bears, or a Facebook update about a particularly popular brunch spot in a town I never plan on visiting. This is the way the world works nowadays; there is nothing I can do to prevent it short of sailing to a mysterious island and locking myself in a cage with a machine that dispenses fish biscuits.

This is my brain at age 37. And so I cannot imagine what it must be like for the 21-year-olds who have grown up hard-wired to technology, who have essentially never known a world without distraction. Seriously, how does anyone study? And far more important, how does a college football team manage to memorize its playbook? There is so much random information parading through our synapses that it is nearly impossible to keep everything straight. Which is why Oregon coach Chip Kelly has come up with the most innovative playcalling strategy of the modern era.

You may have seen these placards, the ones Oregon uses to signal plays from its sideline to its amphetamine-addled offense. On the surface, they make no sense. On the surface, they are just random bytes and seemingly unrelated snippets culled from ESPN and the Encyclopedia Brittanica and a Marlon Perkins special, but that is the beauty of Kelly's system: Whatever these symbols happen to mean (and I hope someday in the future, we get to find out), they are the optimal fit for the hard-wiring of a 21-year-old's brain, for a kid who spends all day clicking through to unrelated links on Twitter and processes hundreds of generally meaningless pieces of information over the course of an afternoon. They are utterly random signifiers. They are, as one Oregon coach notes, "something that would give our guys an immediate association so they could get out there and play fast."

It's not just about playing fast, of course. It's about thinking fast, which is generally the only kind of thinking we do these days. In winning game after game, Oregon just happens to be thinking a little bit faster. And the best way to do that is to assure that your train of thought makes as little sense as possible.

On 400

Shortly after Joe Paterno won the four hundredth game of his career, the scores of each of his victories began scrolling across the Jumbotron at Beaver Stadium. There were so many, rendered in such small type, that it was nearly impossible to read them from afar. And even then, it seemed like it might never end, like Paterno might not make it until the end of his own C.V. before bedtime.

I was standing in Section WG, Row E, in the same cramped metal bleachers from which I'd intermittently watched Joe Paterno coach for more than thirty years. I was there purely by chance, but I'm glad I was, because I realize it's going to end soon. That, for me, is the part that's most difficult to deal with; there are few things in life that last so long they seem like they'll never change. Joe Paterno is one of those things. But that night, there was a feeling that this was it, that at some point in the near future, Paterno will simply fade away, and that this was the last celebration* he will allow himself to indulge in. 

I won't sit here and spout platitudes; there are times when I think the cult of personality that surrounds Paterno is too overbearing. Maybe you think Joe Paterno is a self-righteous boor. Maybe you think his career has become one long octogenarian joke. Maybe you think all those years of beating up on East Coast weaklings render his records meaningless. That's your right. But what continues to strike me is that Paterno's uniqueness lies in his deft ability to tie his legacy to something more than the sport in which he coached.

One more thing: There's something ironic in the fact that all of this celebration of Paterno centers around the fact that no one can ever replicate what he did. Because one of the tenets of Paterno's Grand Experiment was that his program would set an example for all the others, that the marriage of academia and athletics was not an untenable proposition. And forty years later, we seem to be acknowledging that it is untenable. Which, if it's true, means that one of the two greatest coaches in the history of college football succeeded in impacting his university in unprecedented ways, but could not succeed in changing the way we view modern college athletics. Which means the Grand Experiment was an unqualified success, but it exists in a vacuum.

*Is there anything more lovely than Paterno beginning his 45 second victory speech by acknowledging the fact that most of the people in that stadium were thinking as much about the traffic in the parking lots as they were about the content of his address? How many other major college coaches would be able to separate themselves from their ego, if only for that moment, and acknowledge his audience's concerns about returning to the remote corners of the state from whence they came? In all, on what was supposed to be a celebration about him, Paterno spoke for less time than both Penn State's athletic director and Penn State's president.

(Photo: Centre Daily Times)

On Facemasks

So in the past three days we've reinforced a pair of truisms: 1.) Football (even terrible football, involving quarterbacks who once mocked me at pizza parlors while I was visibly drunk on Sambuca in college)* is the most popular sport in America, and 2.) Football is at a serious crossroads. "Isn't hitting hard part of football?" asks the Baltimore Sun's Kevin Van Valkenberg, in a blog post defending the defenders who are perpetrating violent hits that once went unnoticed. And he's right, of course, but I still see no way in which football can survive without undertaking some fundamental changes in the way it's played, or the way it looks. There's no more rationalizing these issues. So today, Joe Paterno advanced an idea that seems like a punchline to an octogenarian joke: Eliminate the facemask. He's not the first person to advance this idea; the idea behind it is that there's no better way to deter a defender than to ensure that a head-first hit will result in a severely deviated septum.

It's one of those ideas that won't ever be accepted by the mainstream; it sounds too counterintuitive, and it would look too strange, and my guess is the player's association wouldn't exactly be thrilled by the prospects of significant dental work displacing concussions. But maybe the best way to move the game forward is to drag it back in time.

*And can I just say, Kerry Collins now has more passing yards than Jim Kelly, Donovan McNabb, Phil Simms, Steve Young, Y.A. Tittle and Troy Aikman. If he had won the 2000 Super Bowl with the Giants, and then made the Super Bowl with the 2008 Titans, he would be a borderline Hall of Famer. As it is, he has to be considered as the most unnoticed decent-to-very good quarterback of the past fifteen years.

On Insightful Critiques of Terrible Ideas

I've already expressed my regard for Dan Wetzel's ability as a columnist on this forum, and I had a chance to read an advance copy of his new book, written with two talented Yahoo colleagues: Josh Peter, who wrote a book about professional bull riding that I've been meaning to read for years, and Jeff Passan, who regularly manages to craft the kind of baseball stories that someone like me, who's fallen out of love with baseball, still finds fascinating. And then Dan and I spoke about the book and GQ's Devin Gordon transcribed the whole thing. It doesn't really matter if you agree with these guys or not; if you care at all about college football, this is a book you really should read. Because I guarantee there are at least two or three completely insane facts about the BCS in here that you have absolutely no idea about.

Anyway, here's Devin's intro, and the first question. Follow the link for the rest, and then buy the book:

Like all great works of investigative reporting, this one began with a question: everyone knows that college football's Bowl Championship Series—a.k.a. the BCS—is the stupidest thing in sports, so why can't we get rid of it? The answer, like in all great works of investigative reporting, is complicated. Fortunately Dan Wetzel, an ace writer for Yahoo! Sports, and his co-authors Josh Peter and Jeff Passan, took the time and did the leg work to unravel it. Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case Against the Bowl Championship Series, Michael Weinreb, whose new book, Bigger Than the Game: Bo, Boz, The Punky QB and How the '80s Created the Modern Athlete, is the fall's other must-read sports book. delivers exactly what the title promises, bolstered by exhaustive reporting. It is a must-read for passionate fans of college football; just be prepared to be infuriated once you're done. The upshot? Yes, the BCS is as craven and foolish as you think. No, it isn't going anywhere, not for a while. To explain why, Wetzel got on the phone with another ace sportswriter who is similarly addicted to college football and despondent over the BCS:

After the jump, Wetzel and Weinreb pick apart the system and explain why the myths about its worthiness persist, how we can possibly get rid of it, and exactly how much bandleaders get paid for bowl appearances by their schools. (Yes, even they get paid.)

Weinreb: Your book is a great read, and there was a ton of stuff in there about how the BCS works that I didn't know about at all. And I think that's true for most fans of college football. None of us know this stuff.
Wetzel: We didn't either. The book started a few years ago when we decided to figure out why we really don't have a playoff system in college football. The excuses that they pop out—"We don't wanna inconvenience the cheerleaders"—is clearly not a reason. We've heard the propaganda for 14 years. And nobody believes it. So what's the real reason? Well, this is America, so you follow the money. We literally went through thousands of pages of tax documents, university contracts, talked to accountants, everybody. And at various times the light bulb would go on and we'd be like, "Wow, I hadn't thought of this." So where we ended up with the book was not where we started.

 

Read More: http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2010/10/death-to-the-bcs-sportswriters-dan-wetzel-and-michael-weinreb-destroy-the-stupidest-system-in-sports.html#ixzz12S1uSKLm

On 15 Jarringly Specific Predictions For This College Football Season

1. Penn State's true freshman quarterback, Robert Bolden, will throw two touchdown passes and run for one more in a win over Youngstown State, prompting ESPN's Craig James to pick Penn State to defeat Alabama while expanding at length on his relationship with Nittany Lion cornerback D'Anton Lynn.

2. Alabama will defeat Penn State 27-6.

3. Boise State quarterback Kellen Moore will throw for 252 yards and three touchdowns in a 31-17 win over Virginia Tech, thereby vaulting him to the front of the Heisman Trophy race.

4. Moore will then throw four interceptions in a 35-31 loss to Oregon State, thereby eliminating himself from contention.

5. Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez will launch into at least two tirades against the media, specifically singling out Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg for the demise of his career.

6. Notre Dame quarterback Dayne Christ throws for 302 yards and two touchdowns in a 24-7 win over Michigan, thereby prompting Beano Cook* and The Big Lead's Jason McIntyre to wonder whether he is "the Heisman Trophy frontrunner."

7. Notre Dame will lose five of its final seven games.

8. Alabama coach Nick Saban will liken his team's 21-17 loss to LSU to Hurricane Katrina.

9. Auburn will win the SEC West, then lose 48-0 to Florida in the SEC Championship game.

10. Pittsburgh, on the verge of a Big East championship and a spot in the BCS Championship game, will lose 17-16 to Cincinnati after Coach Dave Wannstedt chooses to run a fake punt from his own 41-yard line with two minutes, 12 seconds to play.

11. Michigan State will start the season 6-0, and finish the season 7-5.**

12. USC coach Lane Kiffin will indirectly threaten to napalm the UCLA campus the week of the rivalry game.

13. Ohio State loses 17-14 to Iowa after quarterback Terrelle Pryor chooses to transfer to the University of Miami in midseason so "I can be with my friends."

14. Stanford wins the Pac Ten and advances to the BCS Championship game, prompting millions of Americans to reaffirm their hatred for smart people.

15. Florida defeats Stanford 48-14 for the national championship. Florida coach Urban Meyer declares it a victory for the "regular guy," then retreats to the oxygen tent in his office for a nap.

*I love Beano. That man is a national treasure. Seriously.

**Is this even a prediction, or merely a truism?

On Boise State, TCU and Democracy in America

I wrote this piece for GQ.com.

In late 1969, one Richard Milhous Nixon, whose most prominent gridiron accomplishment involved having his front teeth separated from his jaw, declared the University of Texas the champions of college football. What gave Nixon the right to do this, no one really knew. Years later, Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, whose team went undefeated that same season, would wonder aloud how Nixon could know so much about college football and so little about Watergate.
Of course, Paterno—the closest thing college football has to a Northeast intellectual—is himself a Republican; he once gave a convention speech seconding the nomination of George H.W. Bush. Such is the overarching ethic of the sport: a 2009 survey found that college football fans, as an entity, were slightly to the right of NASCAR fans. College football lore is crowded with reactionaries, and this is how many Americans prefer it. This year, Alabama is the defending national champion and the preseason No. 1, and it feels perfectly natural, a throwback to the days when Bear Bryant surveyed practice from a tower and George Wallace openly insulted hippies.
And yet, despite that, 2010 has the potential to be the most progressive season in the history of college football, for two reasons.

Read More http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2010/09/wanna-strike-a-blow-for-democracy-root-for-boise-state-and-tcu.html#ixzz0yICqUfew

(Photo: AP)

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

 1. Killer Bees

So, let me make sure I've got this straight: Vuvuzelas are not even twenty years old (a weak case for preserving a "tradition," unless you consider steroid use a tradition), they may cause hearing loss, they are derived from bicycle horns, they are almost universally reviled by anyone who dislikes obnoxiousness, and they drown out the best and most interesting part of the World Cup, which is the weird and interminable chorus of song by thousands of inebriated and patriotic hooligans. Since when is the ability to annoy the world with an artificial noisemaker an inalienable right? I think most of us agree that if we could go back in time and murder Hitler, we would have to do it. Well, I wouldn't be so callous as to say the same about the inventor of this hellhorn--not to mention, the bozo who came up with the Thunderstix--but there are certain very narrow and limited things that the majority of the world agrees upon, and we've found one of them. Let's advance the cause of international diplomacy. Can't we at least have world peace on our television sets?

2. Don't Mess With...

I'm glad Texas is staying in the Big 12, mostly for selfish reasons. I'm glad Texas is staying in the Big 12 because the Pac-10 incorporating a bunch of teams from the middle of the country seemed so utterly unrealistic that it reminded me of a scenario generated in dynasty mode on XBox. It would have never seemed real, and more important, it would have taken me approximately 7.4 years before the facts of the Big 12's dissolution would have sunk in to my subconscious. Here's the thing: I still have trouble remembering that the Milwaukee Brewers are in the National League. I can never recall whether Boston College is in the Big East or the ACC.* When Boise State joined the Mountain West, I kind of presumed they were already in the Mountain West; yet it turned out they were in the WAC, and I have no idea who's in the WAC. I still presume BYU is in the WAC, but this may or may not be true.**Are the Cardinals still in the NFC East? Sometimes, it seems like they should be. My point is, change in sports doesn't register once a person advances beyond the age of 16. Therefore, the status quo is always, at some level, a victory. Which is why the new Big 12 should just rename itself the Southwest Conference. And then start giving away Cadillacs to recruits, just for old time's sake.

3. Paparazzi

It isn't easy to make a sympathetic documentary about an entirely unsympathetic person. But in case you're interested in such things, Smash His Camera is that kind of documentary.

*Honestly, right now, if I had to answer that question to save my life in front of a firing squad, I would place the odds of my survival at 53 percent. 
**38 percent.

P.S. I'm experimenting with new looks here, in anticipation of August 5. Further tinkering TK. Input is welcomed.

On Snow Bowls

It's snowing here in Brooklyn, and the shelves at Trader Joe's have been swept clean of Trader O's, and I've come to a conclusion: At this point in my existence, I like the idea of snow more than snow itself. I suppose that's inevitable; at some point, snow becomes a burden rather than an excuse, and the negatives outweigh the positives in every possible way...except when it comes to sports. I find myself actively wishing that the AFC Championship were being played at the Meadowlands this afternoon. I find myself thinking that a Super Bowl played in the snow would be, regardless of outcome, one of the three most memorable games in history. I realize that the NFL would never allow it, but the more I think about it, I'm not sure why they wouldn't; this is a sport that essentially built its legacy on a frozen tundra, but it's practitioners are too soft to play the most important game of the season in anything other than optimal conditions?

I would argue that, in this age of media saturation, we remember games affected by the weather more fondly than any other. I mean, if I bring up the Tuck Rule game, what's the first thing you remember? It was snowing. The Ice Bowl, and The Fog Bowl: This is football; or at least, this is football, until the Super Bowl, or until the bowl season.* So why not play a Super Bowl in New Jersey, or in Green Bay, or in Boston? Why not play the BCS Championship in Pittsburgh? It's not like the game won't sell out and generate millions in revenue, even if it's in Detroit. What exactly are they afraid of? CEOs contracting frostbite? Most of the halftime acts are already cryogenically preserved. If there's a populist revolution in the offing in this country, this is where the revolution begins: With a big game in the snow.

One of the three most memorable games I ever attended in person was this one, back in 1987. You want to know what I remember most? It's not the finish, even though the finish was outstanding**. What I remember is that I went to buy a hot chocolate at halftime, and I held it up to my lips and the chocolate dribbled down my chin. I was so cold that my lips had frozen into solid blocks. At the time, it was painful, but in retrospect, it was one of the seminal moments of my existence.

I don't think I'd ever want to experience that again, but I'd like to experience it vicariously.

*With the notable exception of the Cotton Bowl, where the weather seemed entirely unpredictable. The idea that it could snow in Texas never ceased to be shocking.
 **And damn, Blair Thomas was a truly great running back before he tore up his knee.

(Photo: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

On College Football and "Credibility"

I could write that, even if he does leave, he’ll never go back to the NFL, where he was booed and labeled a failure. “There’s no way,” he says, and (Boomer) Esiason agrees. “I don’t know if there’s nirvana for Pete Carroll—but I know it’s not in the pros.” And yet. When I press Carroll, I can’t help feeling that he hedges. “There’s no franchise, there’s no ownership, there’s no philosophy,” he says. “The only thing it would give me would be credibility. That you’re the best in the world.”--J.R. Moehringer, on Pete Carroll

There's an intriguing scene at the start of Joe Paterno's autobiography, in which he discusses his deliberation, in the closing days of 1972, over whether to accept a gilded offer from the Boston Patriots to become coach and part-owner and all-around czar of New England. He imagines the cottage on Cape Cod, the "high-tone" lifestyle, the advancement into a higher tax bracket ... and then he thinks about college football, and the marching bands, and the mascots, and he comes to this conclusion: In the NFL, you play only to win. "No other reason to play," he says.

Now, I realize that Pete Carroll is nothing like Joe Paterno--in the same way Montgomery Clift is nothing like Mickey Rooney--and I realize that Pete Carroll is also coaching in an era where winning has subsumed all other concerns even in college football, and I would prefer not to stand in moral judgment when a man chooses to accept millions of dollars and an unprecedented amount of power. But Moehringer's profile* did sell me on Carroll's singularity, on the notion that perhaps he was a throwback to the coaches of old, a man who was truly satisfied with his place in the world. I bought into the Carroll mythos, and even if it was all true--even if Pete Carroll really did want to curb gang activity in Los Angeles out of some altruistic instinct, and not just promote his own brand--that hardly matters anymore, because Carroll will now be viewed as something completely different: He is just a football coach again. USC will most likely go on probation soon, and he will have bolted just in time, and even if he succeeds in Seattle--and I don't imagine it'll happen, because it just seems that playing for Pete Carroll is kind of like watching Dead Poets Society, in that the core message gets progessively sillier once you turn 19--he will still be seen as the guy who constructed an empire and then destroyed it and didn't have the cojones to stay around and rebuild it again. And maybe that's unfair, but this was Carroll's doing; he set himself up as a man, like Paterno, for whom college football was a destination. Now he sets himself up as nothing more than football coach.

That's the funny thing: Pete Carroll had credibility. And simply by changing his mind, he has to chase it all over again.

*And it's still a pretty incredible piece of writing, regardless of whether it is fundamentally accurate.

On The Final College Football Game of the Season

A few disjointed thoughts on a bizarre championship game:

--In 1972, the NCAA permitted freshman athletes to participate in football and basketball; in the 1980s,* with the NCAA considering a repeal of said rule, a freshman named "Never Nervous" Pervis Ellison led Louisville to the national championship in college basketball. Hence, the notion of youth conquering all plowed ahead, and in the two decades since, we have come to expect remarkable accomplishments, sans neurosis, from the blue-chip adolescents who now essentially form the core of college basketball. If John Wall melts down, we don't blame youth; we blame John Wall.

In football, I know, freshmen are not quite as impactful, but I will admit, when Garrett Gilbert entered the game for Texas last night, I kind of figured he'd be fine. None of these guys get nervous anymore, I thought. Maybe he'd struggle with reads and progressions and blitzes and all the inherent complications of the position--maybe the football would bring him down--but I didn't imagine that anyone who was deemed strong enough in his inaugural season to back up Colt McCoy--not to mention win a pair of Texas high-school state championships, which is about as emotionally stresstful as running for governor anywhere else--would become so emotionally bamboozled. I mean, you could actually see Gilbert melting down into a puddle of adolescent angst come halftime; his body language was more overtly frightened than anything I'd seen on a football field (barring catastrophic injury) in many years. It's not something we witness very often anymore, and it was kind of humanizing and Saracen-esque,**and I'm relieved Gilbert was able to pull himself together in the end, because for a while there, I thought we might be witnessing the implosion of an otherwise promising career. Now I have this feeling we'll see him in this game again, and he won't appear nearly as uptight the second time around. Though I can't say the same for his coach, who appeared to plow through an entire case of Juicy Fruit in the first half.

--Speaking of coaches: Even when being showered with Gatorade, Nick Saban comes across as an entirely dishonorable human. He got away with that doltishly overaggressive fake punt early--basically, if McCoy plays one more series in the first quarter, Texas probably wins the game--and I have to imagine this will be the last championship he wins at Alabama. I have to imagine it will all seem far too easy for him after this, that he will lose interest, that his program will become embroiled in scandal or general malaise, and he will bolt in the middle of the night for a new challenge, while assuring us all along that he had no interest in the job he just took until 9/11 changed his life forever.


--Boise State deserves at least a few first-place votes. Boise State could have played Alabama tight. Anyone who doesn't believe that was not paying attention.

*In 1986, to be exact, which you can read all about in this book. Now with updated cover art!
**There is no question that Friday Night Lights completely altered the way I viewed that game last night. I'm starting to think it's permanently altered the way I view football players. If Moneyball was the previous decade's ultimate triumph of rationality over emotion, Friday Night Lights is its polar opposite. It's made watching football far more emotionally charged than ever before.

(Photo: Rodolfo Gonzalez, Austin-American Statesman)

On The Rules

Did you know it's been almost twenty-five years since the NFL adopted the instant replay rule? Well, it has, and yet I have a prominent writerly friend* who still hasn't quite gotten over it, who loves nothing more in the world than watching football and who constantly emphasizes rationality above humanity, and yet seems convinced that those five minutes of instant replay reviews--designed to assure fair play, and encourage rationality, and minimize human error--somehow cheapen his entire experience. At this point, it's not really a debate anymore; it's like arguing with Bronko Nagurski. But it remains a sore spot, something he cannot get over.

I bring this up because ESPN the Magazine ran a clever package this week, in which they suggested 31 minor rule changes that could actually improve sports. I agree with some, and I vehmently disagree with others, but it always fascinating to see something like this and realize how much of sport is derived from a tradition that may or may not be based in any sort of rational thought. We simply assume things are the way they are because that's the way they should be, even when we know they shouldn't.

So here are three suggestions I would add, specifically targeted to college football:

1. Disregard 87 percent of Peter Keating's ideas about fixing overtime; first of all, he calls baseball's overtime rules "great," and we all know that nothing has been great about baseball since 1994**. About the absurdity of college football overtime's statistics and yardage counting in the record books, he is utterly correct; all overtime numbers, with the exception of the score, should be disregarded. About college football's overtime process somehow being disconnected from the spirit of the enterprise, he is horribly misguided. College football's overtime is a strategic nirvana. College football's overtime is essentially a compressed version of the game itself, which is exactly what it should be, with one exception: Teams should take over at the 35, rather than the 25. This way, they would actually be forced (in most situations) to advance forward in order to gain three points. This way, overtime periods would sometimes end with neither team scoring at all, which would remedy Keating's concern over 61-58 final scores and inject another level of strategery into a system that is infinitely more perfect than the NFL's coin-toss solution.

 2. Graduation rates should somehow be tied into the BCS formula. That is, if the NCAA is actually serious about maintaining the ruse that amateurism still exists, and that a playoff does not exist because it will somehow cause several Texas linemen to miss their Candlepin Bowling final, then they should actually put some stock in these numbers. Either that, or they should just give up and embrace corruption and pay off everyone involved in the sport. Starting with the writers.

3. Bring back the five-yard facemask penalty. Apparently, it was abolished because it involved "interpretation" by an official, and interpretation is apparently too much for an official to handle when he is trying to avoid being mauled by several men the size of wheat threshers. This seems dubious, since the difference between a five-yard facemask and a 15-yard facemask can generally be interpreted in a matter of seconds by my girlfriend, who watches approximately three football games every year. I also understand that there is a safety issue here, but I presume that most football players don't set out to rip off helmets; it just happens. In fact, shouldn't this be the very reason to distinguish between an inadvertent facemask and a blatant (and sometimes intentional) facemask? Isn't this like the difference between grazing an old lady on a crowded subway, and punching an old lady in the face?

*Yeah, that's him. Welcome, Chuckolytes.
**Though I applaud Terry Pendleton on his election to the Hall of Fame.

On The Worst Thing to Happen to College Sports in the 00's

Warning: Disjointed Rant Ahead.

It's been almost five years since the NBA officially rendered college basketball into a mercenary exercise. By arbitrarily declaring that no player under the age of 19 could join their ranks, professional basketball managed to confirm what most of us already knew, which is that college sports are an elaborate and expensive charade in which everyone is making a good deal of scratch, with the exception of the players themselves. For me, that one decision essentially defined the sporting ethos of the '00s; everything about college basketball got just a little bit worse after that. Even the NCAA tournament, the greatest single sporting event in the world, began to feel a little more like an AAU showcase, like we're all just rooting for laundry.

Now, don't get me wrong. I still love college sports; I will always love college sports more than professional sports, if only because college sports are what I grew up with, if only because the product on the field/court remains less sterile and regimented, if only because Jets fans are some of the most ridiculous people I've ever seen. But honestly, I don't know where we're headed anymore. I've been thinking about this lately, as the bizarre and ignominious season of the college football coach nears its end; if it seems like more coaches are losing their minds, it's because, on the whole, they probably are. They're losing their minds, in part, because they have been set up to act almost entirely in their own self-interest; they're losing their minds because the culture has now been set up to encourage them to be as authoritarian and self-aggrandizing as possible, to work themselves into a late-night crying fit onto a hotel-room floor, to raise their profile so as to guarantee themselves a future position when their current school tires of them. Brian Kelley leaves Cincinnati for Notre Dame and people decry his disloyalty, but why should most coaches care about loyalty when it is abundantly clear that their bosses don't care at all about them, except as a commodity? Wouldn't this growing institutional distrust between administrators and coaches and players explain why Mike Leach, a weirdly engaging coach who actually seemed to care at least a little about such things as graduation rates, "turned for the worst" just in the past few months? Isn't this at least partly the fault of the colleges who continue to engage in mercenary behavior in order to land their institution a thirty-second jingle at halftime of the Outback Bowl?

I know that at some level this has been true at least since the 1980s,* and more accurately since the late 1800s, but here's where I think that college basketball one-and-done rule kind of sent us all over the edge: More than anything that's happened since freshman athletes were made eligible in the first place, one-and-done allowed everyone in the process, from top to bottom, understand that they are merely cogs in a machine. It elevated the value of coaches who are great recruiters, but are also truly terrible people. It was a naked admission that big-time college sports are now willing to be used as tools for the professional game, and that they are entirely about the moment at hand rather than any sort of gauzy fantasy of shaping one's future. But hey: It was that kind of decade.

Now, of course, we are at a moment in our American existence when populism is all the rage, and these are the moments when football (and organized sports) tend to arise as scapegoats. When Bobby Bowden retired, everyone in America lamented that there would be no more Bowdens or Paternos anymore, and I'm sure there will be calls for coaches to stop being such overbearing, singularly-focused jerks, and this will no doubt lead some second-tier bozo on Fox and Friends to lament the wussification of America, and no one will bother to question the wisdom of a system that encourages nothing beyond one's own self-interest.

*In fact, I write it here, in this book, which--conveniently!--is now available for pre-order.

(Photo: Danielle Levitt/New York Times)

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me (Chanukah edition)

1.Raging Against Rationality


O.K., so my health insurance rates just went up by sixty dollars a month, and I find Joe Lieberman to be as much of a mealy-mouthed slab of gefilte fish as the next guy, but why is it that the left seems so utterly hellbent on proving it can wallow in the same kind of petulant irrationality as the far right? I know we were all seduced by the skyrockets of hope and change, but in case you haven't noticed, the great virtue of the man we elected is that he believes, more than anything, in rationalism. And I'm sorry if I find this to be a good thing, if I actually feel proud that our president does not ponder life in absolutes, in the pointed landscape bordered by Daily Kos tantrums and Glenn Beck chalkboard screeds. I prefer a president who is firmly tethered to reality--how do we know that the public option is the best answer, or the only answer?--who will not abandon his self-control in a fit of pique over the tantrums of a man who represents a state best known for women's basketball and casinos. Get over yourselves, people. Have a latte. Watch Top Chef. Watch Jay Rockefeller bring the noise. Ram your Volvos into a wall, take a deep breath, remember that Howard Dean already blew it once, and then let it go.

2. Big Ten Expansion

Here's what the Big Ten should do about expansion: Trade Penn State to the Big East for Cincinnati. We all know our school never belonged; we all know that the only reason Penn State joined the Big Ten is because the Big East refused to form a football conference, and then once Penn State left the Big East, the dominoes fell, and everyone formed a football conference. So you deal Penn State back to where it belongs, and you put Cincinnati where it belongs; the Big Ten can then go chasing after Notre Dame, or spit out Northwestern and go back to living up to the literal reality of its name, splitting into a pair of five-team divisions and setting up a championship game. The Big East, meanwhile, could offer up Louisville to the highest bidder, and then go hard after Miami and Boston College and (perhaps) Maryland. If I've done the math correctly, that leaves the Big East with ten, the Big Ten with (!!!) ten, and Louisville...well, nobody cares about Louisville. And then we've essentially got the Eastern football conference that Joe Paterno was touting back in 1973.

3. Dove Bars

I always thought the chocolate bars and the soap bars were manufactured by the same company, which made me less likely to buy the chocolate and more likely to purchase the soap. Turns out I was wrong. However, I still believe the chocolate tastes suspiciously clean. And the soap makes me hungry.

On The U and The Greatest Game Ever Played

It is not difficult for me to recall the very pinnacle of my existence as a sports fan. That would be January 2, 1987. I was fourteen years old. I have this theory that, in the lives of themajority of American males, the love of sports peaks at approximately the age of fourteen; at this moment, you are old enough to understand the nuances of the game but too young to be unenthralled by media construction and the inevitable failings of human behavior. And so for me, it all came together that night: Penn State defeated Miami in the Fiesta Bowl, in a game no one thought they could win, in a game against perhaps the most talented team in college football history, in a game that had been hyped as a literal confrontation between good and evil. It was a wonderful (if largely false) mythology, and it fit perfectly with the age; I write about it extensively in my book*--in fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that this game inspired the entire book, though it comprises just one chapter--but I was intrigued to see the situation portrayed by someone who grew up from an opposing perspective, that someone being Billy Corben, who directed "The U," ESPN's 30 for 30 film about the University of Miami football team in the 1980's.

I should say this: I thought Corben's first film, "Cocaine Cowboys," was a wicked piece of entertainment. And I feel the same way about "The U"--as an entertainment, as a presentation of a singular and oft-exaggerated viewpoint, it works beautifully; it was so effective in drawing out the visceral hatred of my childhood, I actually had to pause it a few times and walk in circles around my living room to cool myself down. But it should be said: Corben's made a propaganda film. There are no opposing voices. There is no one to point out that when the Miami players accuse Penn State of making racist remarks, they are referring to Penn State's (now deceased) punter, John Bruno, who, in what I can only assume was an attempt to defuse the racial tension in the room, made a joke about Penn State allowing the black players to eat at the training table once a week; there is no one to point out that Bruno also mocked Jimmy Johnson's hair, which is such an obvious and open target for ridicule that the Miami players do it themselves in the documentary, or that Bruno delivered the greatest line uttered by a punter in the history of football, when he refuted Jerome Brown's statement about the Japanese not dining with Pearl Harbor before they bombed by saying, "Didn't the Japanese lose the war?" And there is no one to point out that Miami did not merely lose that game because Vinny Testaverde threw five interceptions, but because Penn State's defensive backs intimidated Miami's receivers by jarring them with hard hits, and because Penn State's defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, designed a brilliant game plan that Johnson could not solve. And it's not just the Penn State game--there are moments like this throughout the whole film, when Corben seems so determined to present a sympathetic and entertaining picture of this team he adores that he glosses over the truth.

I mean, I understand the intent: I feel like Corben, as a Miami fan, set out to make a film that would purposefully and defiantly goad me, the fourteen year old kid who grew up sheltered in Central Pennysylvania and was utterly perplexed by the Miami ethos. (If that's the case, he succeeded.) I feel like Corben, a few years younger than me, possessed the reverse negative of my own worldview at age 14; maybe when Penn State beat Miami, all Corben could see, like Jimmy Johnson, was that the better team had lost, that the racism and stodginess of middle America had prevailed, that the team he loved was misunderstood and discriminated against. Of course, there is also much I know now that I did not know when I was adolescent, about race and poverty and African-American culture; there is much I can sympathize with, even if I can't bring myself to swallow it completely. It was the eighties, after all; everything was exaggerated.

And yet there is one moment in "The U" that breaks through Corben's protective screen; it comes when Miami players are decrying their image, and the media's portrayal of them. And it comes from--of all people--Michael Irvin.

"There was no conspiracy against us," he says. "We were just baaaaad boys."

And for a moment, when I heard that, I felt fourteen again.

*Ahem...available for pre-order.

On the BCS: A Brief Sick-Day Screed

Amid a Sudafed-induced haze this afternoon, I realized that it's now been fifteen years since the best Penn State team I've ever seen went undefeated and finished second in the national polls. Everything has changed since then, and yet nothing has changed. For decades, college football has served as perhaps the most prominent example of capitalism subsuming rationality; that continues even now. The system is imperfect, and everyone knows the system is imperfect, and now the trendy argument against moving the system closer to perfection is that we can never actually achieve perfection, so why bother trying when we have this wonderful corporate system that makes us all a great deal of money and satisfies the whims of overpaid bowl executives with non-existent duties? I mean, how truthy is that! Such is the stance of the BCS on its much-reviled Twitter feed; that's the only argument they can make that isn't directly based on a falsehood. Essentially, they are relying on the inherent irrationality of Internet culture to take hold. They are relying on the notion that, in the Information Age, information can be manipulated to fit their own ends.

So yes, let's acknowledge one facet of their argument: Things are better than they were fifteen years ago, and if the BCS existed in 1994, maybe the problem might have been solved, at least in that particular case. But a great deal has changed in those fifteen years. And the BCS, given its rigid adherence to the current power structure, is incapable of flexibility; the BCS cannot evolve with the game. The BCS cannot adapt to a structure where teams from non-power conferences are now utterly capable of competing for championships. The BCS, in 2009, is just as irrelevant as the bowl coalition was in 1994, and just as irrelevant as the bowl system was in 1969. We all know the rational and simple solution to this problem; we've always known it. The question is whether rationality even matters anymore.

On Bowden vs. Paterno: The Final Verdict

I will submit my usual disclaimer up front: I have a deep and inherent bias on this issue.

So this is how it ends for Bobby Bowden. It's a bit protracted, a bit painful, as these things tend to be, though it's not quite as bad as it could have been--at least it's not a Woody Hayes ending. And let me say this: I'll miss the guy, even if I never had any real affinity for his football teams. I'll miss his dadgums, and I'll miss his charm, and I'll miss that squinty look of his, which always made him appear as if he'd left his bifocals in the locker room. As a football coach, it felt like Bowden was perpetually underestimated, perhaps because he was so charming, skillful at deflecting credit in the wake of victory and shouldering blame in the face of defeat--and no one suffered more painful defeats than Bowden's teams in the 1990's. He was one of the game's most earnest ambassadors, and he was an epically successful football coach, and even when he was angry he was charming.

But he is nowhere near the coach Joe Paterno is.

Now, I doubt these men ever meant to set themselves up for a direct comparison. It just kind of happened, as they both refused to succumb to age, as their victory totals soared past three hundred, past three fifty, past Warner and Stagg and the Bear. In Paterno's autobiography, written in 1989, there is not a single mention of Bowden in the index. (There are ten mentions of Bear Bryant.) They were always friendly, but they had separate objectives. Bowden never seemed interested in being much more than a successful football coach. This was his prerogative; this was what mattered to him, and there is no shame in that, but Paterno never framed his occupation that way. Call him self-righteous, call him self-aggrandizing, but--with the exception of Bear Bryant, who happened to come along at a moment of radical change in the American south, and perhaps Eddie Robinson--Paterno did more to change the perception of an entire university than any coach in the history of the game. Penn State is a completely different college than it was when my father arrived there as a professor in 1978--it's far better than it was when I graduated fifteen (gulp) years ago--and while it's still not Yale (or even Swarthmore), you have to give some of this credit to Paterno, who, for all his faults, has always focused on the reputation of the university as a whole. Because of Paterno, Penn State has elevated its stature as an academic institution, and this is a unique legacy, and this is something that cannot be duplicated, and this is why the victory numbers don't matter. This is why they never mattered.

In terms of one's ability to recruit/coach winning football teams, you may argue all you like. But in terms of legacy, it's not even close.