Super Bowl 58, this country’s largest unofficial holiday, is Sunday.
Based only on football Packers fans might be torn about this game. On the one hand, Kansas City, whom the Packers beat during the regular season, is coached by former Packers assistant Andy Reid, one of the most likable NFL coaches. On the other hand, San Francisco, who ended the Packers season in the playoffs, has as its quarterback Brock Purdy, who has gone from the final NFL draft pick his rookie year to a Super Bowl quarterback.
Unlike most Super Bowls, this one has unfortunate political portents because of the presence of Taylor Swift, girlfriend of one of the Kansas City Chiefs players who besides being an entertainment bazillionaire endorsed Joe Biden for president and before that a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate who lost. That is anathema to those who believe celebrities should stay out of politics and, for that matter, accept no other political views besides their own:
I was standing in the beer line with a group of Pittsburgh Steelers fans midway through their home game against the Green Bay Packers when a cadre of women with Glamsquad hair walked by. They wore decidedly bespoke yellow and black outfits, emblazoned with player names you typically won’t see worn on fan jerseys. “There go the WAGs, they’re like the Real Housewives of Pittsburgh,” a female fan dressed in more temperature-appropriate attire informed me. “I get my hair done at the same place as her,” pointing to a blonde wearing the last name of Pittsburgh’s placekicker. In a crowd of camo jackets, wool beanies and winter coats, the shiny-heeled boots and excess of tanned skin stood out — but no one said fashion was easy, especially in the National Football League.
A new piece by the Ringer’s Nora Princiotti has managed to do something perhaps thought impossible at this stage — write something interesting about the NFL’s Taylor Swift year, and what it means for both the culture and the business of sports.
Her comparison to the Victoria Beckham era of the mid-2000s is apt, yet there’s just one part of Princiotti’s theses to which I take exception: her suggestion that the NFL has poorly served female fans in the past and that the descent of the WAGs on the sport is an opportunity-filled break from that. She writes:
In a commercial sense, Swift and her fellow WAGs’ prominence this season has been a coup for football, more evidence of the power of female audiences, who remain underserved as fans of basically anything, including sports. The NFL is the ratings juggernaut in entertainment, but its biggest long-term concern is that the average fan is a fifty-year-old man. The league knows this and desperately wants to appeal to a younger and more diverse audience, but it doesn’t know how. Overtures to female fans via pink jerseys and plunging V-neck logo tees have been condescending, not to mention downright ugly. But in 2023, a group of influential female tastemakers who demonstrated in real time how they want to present themselves as fans fell organically into the league’s lap, modeling game days as an aesthetic — not mob wife, but football girlfriend. Swift’s outfits are well documented and have led to plenty of sold-out merchandise, and after she, Mahomes, Biles and Culpo all wore Kristin Juszczyk’s custom team gear, the NFL gave Juszczyk a licensing deal.
I have heard this hypothesis expressed occasionally by media types who don’t typically pay attention to sports — and it’s important to keep some perspective on all this. While women are underrepresented as a portion of pro football viewership during the regular season, the total number of NFL viewers is so huge and dwarfs all competition to the point that women still watch the NFL way more than any other sport, by far.
To understand the level of difference we’re talking about: the lowest-watched Super Bowl of the past decade was in 2021, when about 92 million people watched (a far cry from the famed New England-Atlanta comeback, watched by more than 170 million). But roughly half of those were women. By comparison, the 2023 Stanley Cup finals averaged 2.6 million viewers, the 2023 World Series averaged 9.1 million viewers, and the 2023 NBA Finals averaged 11.6 million viewers. The 2022 World Cup final had 25.8 million viewers. Even if literally every viewer for all those professional championship games was female, it still wouldn’t total the number watching even a down-year’s Super Bowl.
The point is, more women are fans of the NFL than literally any other sport and more of them watch it than any other sport — which is why advertising has already shifted in their direction. What Taylor Swift has done is dramatically increase the attention paid to the sport by women who aren’t already sports fans — something that you see in the expanded coverage from media outlets who don’t have any idea what a Shanahan offense looks like.
And this has obviously created a spike in WAG efforts, lived out in competitive “gameday couture” and intentional attempts to go viral to boost makeup artists or designers. The fact that one of the most viral non-Swift moments from the box level was Cincinnati Bengals backup Jake Browning’s girlfriend in her all-white jumpsuit just indicates that we’re only going to see things escalate from here.
The NFL still provides the most drama on television, and now it’s reaching a new demo. Just wait until they start having opinions about Tony Romo’s announcing — that’s when it’s going to get real.
This is less a new trend than Domenech may realize given the numbr of female Packers fans, including the biggest Packers fan I know, my aunt.
Football is a cyclical game. Teams are always trying new things—plays, formations, coverages—to get an edge. Some innovations work for a few weeks, some for a season. Others, like creative pre-snap motion, become part of every team’s playbook. In time, every innovation is either foiled or copied.
The NFL is in the midst of another schematic revolution. In the past two decades, innovations percolated from the college level up to the pros. This time, though, teams around the league are embracing an old brand of football with a modern face.
At the fore of this revolution are the San Francisco 49ers, representing the NFC in this weekend’s Super Bowl. San Francisco led the league in every major offensive category this season, including rushing and passing efficiency. Their coach, Kyle Shanahan, is a wunderkind who has befuddled opposing defensive coordinators and elevated his quarterback, Brock Purdy, from the final man selected in the 2022 NFL draft to the heights of the football world. Shanahan’s assistants have filled coaching vacancies around the league as teams strive to imitate San Francisco’s success.
Shanahan succeeds by zigging as the football world zags. Where high school and college teams across the country have traded neck-roll-wearing fullbacks and plodding tight ends for speedier wide receivers, Shanahan’s 49ers use a fullback more than any other team. Colleges have all but ditched traditional under-center formations for the shotgun, while Shanahan’s pro-style, under-center formations call to mind your father’s 49ers. And as the football world seeks to stretch defenses with wide, spread sets, Shanahan usescondensed formations—with the wide receivers aligned close to the tight ends and offensive linemen.
Shanahan’s offense is predicated on the “outside zone,” which his father, Mike, used to win consecutive Super Bowls with the Denver Broncos in 1998 and 1999. The premise is simple. At the snap, all five offensive linemen take steps in concert to the “play side” of the formation. Their goal: to “outflank,” or beat to the sideline, the defender in their “zone.” If they succeed in sealing off their assigned defender, the running back is left with a huge gap to the play side.
If they don’t—or if the defense anticipates the play and “outflanks” the offense—the running back is often left with a giant “cut back” lane on the opposite side of the play …
As The Ringer’s Ben Solak notes, because this play requires the defense to move laterally, Shanahan can set up passing plays that mirror his running plays, leading to easy throws for the quarterback:
Each of these plays, you’ll notice, uses a fullback—the bulky blocker who lines up in front of the running back. At the start of the 2024 season, only 14 NFL teams listed a fullback on their roster; at the college level, the fullback position is all but extinct. Not in San Francisco. Shanahan signed fullback Kyle Juszczyk to a $21 million contract in 2017, the largest for a fullback in league history. “When you have a fullback out there, that’s the only time an offense can fully dictate what’s going on,” Shanahan said. “If you don’t have a fullback in there, there are certain things a defense can do where you have to throw the ball.”
Making this choice in an era that puts a premium on speed, Shanahan has cracked the code. By using “heavier” personnel, he forces defensive coordinators to make a decision: play a beefier linebacker to match the offense’s power in the running game, at the risk of having a slower defender on the field for a pass, or stick with a quicker, scrawnier defensive back who is better able to cover the pass but could get exposed by San Francisco’s brawling fullback and tight end on a running play. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
This is characteristic of how Shanahan’s offense succeeds: he gets defenses to anticipate one thing, only to deliver something else. He breaks the huddle with an All-Pro running back and fullback, only to line up with an empty backfield. He plays the running back, Christian McCaffrey, as a wide receiver, and the wide receiver, Deebo Samuel, as a running back. He motions a tight end and pulls an offensive lineman right, then throws a screen pass left. For Shanahan, what started as a spin-off of his father’s wide-zone scheme has become an exercise in deception. As Solak put it, “The keystone of the 49ers offense is that you think it’s one thing, and it turns out it’s something else.”
The Shanahan system is not without critics, and it bucks the prevailing philosophy at the high school and college levels. The antithesis to his approach is that popularized by the late Mike Leach, the eccentric Texas Tech and Mississippi State head coach who midwifed the “Air Raid” offense into the football mainstream. The Air Raid is an up-tempo, no-huddle offense predicated on passing and snapping the ball as many times as possible. It is a relatively simple system, with short, often five-to-seven-word play calls, which communicate to the quarterback, receivers, and linemen one of a handful of staple route combinations (where the receivers run after the snap) and protection schemes (how the line blocks defensive pass rushers).
Where Shanahan uses long huddles and short running plays to keep opposing offenses on the sideline, Leach believed that “the greatest time of possession in the world is a touchdown.” Leach disdained the strategic precision of Shanahan-style offenses, with their 17-word play calls and elaborate pre-snap motions, for the chaos of a pass-first, on-the-move offense that never gave defenses a chance to adjust.
Whether Shanahan’s or Leach’s vision wins out in the long run remains to be seen. Coincidentally, though, one crucial player in this Sunday’s Super Bowl—Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes—played in an Air Raid offense at Texas Tech. Consider this year’s Super Bowl a referendum, perhaps, on the future of America’s game.
A referendum for now, perhaps. The line that NFL stands for “Not For Long” applies to all sorts of things.
The “Air Raid” is the offense Wisconsin played this fall under new coach Luke Fickell, to mixed results. Shanahan is part of the same coaching tree as Packers coach Matt LaFleur (both worked for Mike Shanahan at Washington), and there are similarities between the 49ers’ and Packers’ offenses.
Conservative social media is engulfed with a Taylor Swift conspiracy theory centered on the idea that the NFL is rigging games to ensure the pop superstar and boyfriend’s team both make and win the Super Bowl — just in time to give a nod to President Biden in the presidential election.
Swift, coming off a year in which her “The Eras Tour” broke records, her concert movie boosted the box office and her romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce broke the internet, is perhaps at the peak of her popularity and fame.
That’s attracted attention from the political world, with the Biden campaign said to be interested in a “dream” endorsement from Swift, according to an article published Monday by The New York Times. Swift endorsed Biden in 2020 and has been somewhat active in politics, also endorsing Democrat Phil Bredesen against Republican Marsha Blackburn when the latter was first elected to the Senate in 2018.
Swift’s incredible popularity is also bringing to the forefront various ugly sides of 21st century American life, from explicit AI-generated deepfakes of the superstar that briefly closed down Taylor Swift searches this week on X to unfounded conspiracy theories.
Kansas City has been to three Super Bowls in five years and won Sunday in a game that featured terribly timed turnovers and careless penalties by the losing Baltimore Ravens. While Kansas City was the underdog, the victory was hardly a big surprise.
But that seems to matter little with those fanning the conspiracy on the right.
“I wonder who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month,” former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wrote the morning after Chiefs victory.
“And I wonder if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall. Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next 8 months,” said Ramaswamy, no stranger to conspiracy theories.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, later retweeted another post on the subject from Ramaswamy with this message: “Exactly.”
Jack Lombardi, a conservative activist who ran an unsuccessful bid for the House in 2022, also posted on social media he has “never been more convinced that the Super Bowl is rigged.”
“The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open,” claimed far-right influencer Laura Loomer. “It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion [get out the vote] Campaign.”
Are there any progressive leftists who can live by the rules they seek to impose upon others? Recently this column noted a report suggesting that Beltway wokesters can’t stand working with each other. Then came the quiet visit by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.) to a state he officially deplores. Turns out there’s an interesting new detail about that trip’s expenses. And now it appears that the growing list of condemnations issued by Mr. Newsom and his fellow California pols could thwart the ambitions of one of the Golden State’s premier public universities.
Last month the University of California, Los Angeles shared exciting news about an ocean of football money that will soon be flowing its way. A UCLA press release stated:
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block and Martin Jarmond, UCLA’s Alice and Nahum Lainer Family Director of Athletics, sent the following message to campus on June 30.
For the past century, decisions about UCLA Athletics have always been guided by what is best for our student-athletes, first and foremost, and our fans. Our storied athletics program, based in one of the biggest media markets in the nation, has always had unique opportunities and faced unique challenges. In recent years, however, seismic changes in collegiate athletics have made us evaluate how best to support our student-athletes as we move forward. After careful consideration and thoughtful deliberation, UCLA has decided to leave the Pac-12 Conference and join the Big Ten Conference at the start of the 2024–25 season…
As the oldest NCAA Division I athletic conference in the United States and with a footprint that will now extend from the Pacific to the Atlantic, Big Ten membership offers Bruins exciting new competitive opportunities and a broader national media platform for our student-athletes to compete and showcase their talents. Specifically, this move will enhance Name, Image and Likeness opportunities through greater exposure for our student-athletes and offer new partnerships with entities across the country… although this move increases travel distances for teams, the resources offered by Big Ten membership may allow for more efficient transportation options.
Speaking of travel resources, a number of away games in the Big Ten’s Midwest heartland will occur in states that California has officially condemned for not having suitably leftist social policies. As of the day after that joyous UCLA press release, the 20 states currently on the sanctions list are now due to become 22, under a 2016 state law called AB 1887. A reasonable person might figure that Americans in other states generally ought to be free to make up their own minds about local policies. A reasonable person might also consider the possibility that if 22 other states—and counting—don’t choose to mimic California law on such topics as transgender policy, perhaps it is California law that ought to be improved.
In any case, the California condemnations have consequences. The UCLA website states:
July 01, 2022
The California Attorney General’s office has updated the list of states where state funds may NOT be used for travel. Indiana and Utah are the latest states to be added.
As of July 1, 2022, there are now 20 states where AB 1887 prohibits the use of state funds to pay for travel to a state on the Attorney General’s list, except where one of the statutory exceptions applies. It does not affect travel that is paid for or reimbursed using non-state funds.
The following two states, Louisiana and Arizona, will be added to California’s travel restrictions list as listed below.
Alabama
Arkansas
Florida
Idaho
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Mississippi
Montana
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
West Virginia
Louisiana (will be added on Aug 1, 2022)
Arizona (will be added on Sept 28, 2022)
An accompanying page of frequently asked questions on the UCLA website includes the following passage:
What if an athletic team has committed to participate in a bowl game or other competition in an affected state?
If a contract to participate in an event was entered into before January 1, 2017, then it would be permissible to use state funds to travel to participate in a bowl game or other type of sporting competition. If the contract was entered into on or after January 1, 2017, then state funds should not be used for the travel.
It sounds like UCLA will have to figure out how to avoid using state funds on a number of conference road trips, and perhaps even more if California adds more states to its banned deplorables list or if, for example, the independent University of Notre Dame also decides to join the Big Ten.
Perhaps UCLA can contrive a way to have a private entity fund some of its travel to the Midwest, but another prohibition also raises a hurdle, according to UCLA’s list of frequently asked questions:
Can an employee be required to travel to one of the prohibited states on the AG list?
No. California Government Code Section 11139.8(b)(1) prohibits UC from requiring any employee to travel to one of the states on the AG’s list (absent applicability of one of the statutory exceptions listed in Government Code Section 11139.8(c) …
The exceptions listed in the 2016 law don’t appear to apply to sporting events but the law does explicitly apply to a “state agency, department, board, authority, or commission, including an agency, department, board, authority, or commission of the University of California, the Board of Regents of the University of California, or the California State University…”
Will the coaching staffs, athletic trainers and other UCLA employees stay home when the kids go off to play? It’s possible UCLA has found a way to classify them all as private workers but this would be news to many Californians. The Sacramento Bee reported in April on the compensation of state employees:
The Bee obtains pay figures from the Controller’s Office for civil service workers along with employees of the University of California and California State University systems…
The top-earning California public employees are athletic coaches at UCLA and UC Berkeley, along with several doctors at University of California hospitals…
UCLA football coach Chip Kelly earned $4.3 million in 2020, for instance, and UCLA basketball coach Mike Cronin earned $3.3 million.
Perhaps UCLA will be aggressive in claiming exemptions. This brings us to the California governor’s trip to Montana, a state he officially deplores. His office told Emily Hoeven at Cal Matters that taxpayers didn’t fund his trip and then declined to answer, she reported on Twitter, when she inquired about security costs.
Now it seems that taxpayers did indeed pick up some travel costs. A New York Times story from Blake Hounshell and Michael Shear reports:
… while California did not pay for Newsom’s Montana trip, the state did pay for his security detail.
Anthony York, a spokesman for Newsom, said the trip was very much a personal, and not political, one…
York denied that Newsom’s office was being coy about his whereabouts, and said that the office was trying to balance transparency with safety. “On the security side, the law explicitly states there is an exemption for public safety, and the governor has to travel with security,” he said.
Public safety requires a trip to Montana? Will O’Neill tweets:
So…Gov. Newsom individually is the “public”?
It’s hard to imagine anyone claiming that California public safety requires lucrative sporting events in the Midwest.
It’s possible that UCLA can structure much of its activities to legally operate as private entities to get around California’s official condemnations of other states.
But won’t that just serve as additional proof that California’s cultural cancellations are unworkable, unreasonable, intolerant and overdue for repeal?
Well, the state of California has two years to fix this.
Thursday marks Opening Day of the 2022 Major League Baseball season …
… weather permitting …
… which means it’s open season for hot takes about how to fix what ails the National Pastime—disputes between labor and management, declining attendance and TV viewership, increasingly dull on-field product, etc.
The New York Times Wednesday probably won the MLB preseason hate-clicks derby by publishing a Matthew Walther op-ed under the headline, “Baseball Is Dying. The Government Should Take It Over.” It’s at least semi-satirical, so not worth getting exercised over (beyond the basic responses of “No it isn’t,” and “No it shouldn’t”), but both the essay and the spectacle of an ambivalent Opening Day are timely reminders that much of what plagues the sport is not solvable by government, it emanates from government.
It’s weird that baseball would still require rescuing, given that Congress as recently as 2018 passed the Save America’s Pastime Act (see how semi-satire works?). That law, which probably never could have been passed as a standalone bill, was actually crammed into a must-pass omnibus spending whatever, and as such is a fine example of what happens when you mix government with baseball.
Sold both by gullible congresscritters and arms-twisted Minor League Baseball (MiLB) owners as the last, best hope for maintaining small-town professional ball, the act in fact was something closer to the opposite: a way for bottomless-pocketed Major League Baseball (MLB)—which pays for, and dictates terms to, the captive feeder leagues—to use the threat of franchise-contraction for a federal exemption from labor laws, so that minor leaguers could continue being paid as low as $1,100 a month for their seasonal work.
Within seven months of the act’s passage, MLB started leaking out the names of MiLB franchises that would be euthanized anyway. By December 2020, the deed was done—40 of the original 160 teams were summarily severed. As I wrote in a feature on the topic last year, “Local governments were suddenly on the hook for a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of investment in event spaces that no longer held events.”
Hmmm, why would local governments invest in professional sporting facilities? Let’s hit the refresh button on one of the worst recurring examples of mixing public sector activity with a private sector business: Stadium welfare.
Giving out subsidies and tax breaks for sports business owners is self-evidently terrible enough, as have concluded virtually every non-corrupted economist who has ever studied the issue. (The eminent domain used for these projects, too, constitute abuse egregious enough to inspire Ry Cooder albums.) But let’s not sleep on how such a culture of welfare dependency has been bad for the recipients, and especially to fans of the allegedly boosted sport.
By acclamation, the single most spectacular facility to watch a football game is SoFi Stadium, home to both the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers, and host to the most recent Super Bowl. Unlike virtually every other National Football League facility constructed over the past three decades, SoFi was built without government subsidies.
In baseball, the handsomest stadium I’ve ever set foot in is Oracle Park, home to the San Francisco Giants. Opened in 2000, it was the first ballpark built without public money since the 1960s. Why, it’s almost as if people who spend their own money on a thing take extra care to make it real purty!
Self-funders are also incentivized to stay put, rather than jilting the local fan base. “When governments become landlords,” I wrote last year, “sports businesses, no matter how deep their pockets, start acting like tenants: always eyeing the exits for a potentially better deal. If you build it, they will leave.”
Baseball doesn’t need to be nationalized, it needs to be privatized—no more subsidies, no more finger-wagging congressional hearings, no more State of the Union address moralizing, no more unique-to-this-one-sport carve outs from federal law. It’s time for these welfare queens to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, and compete for audience share as if their bottom lines depended on that as much as it does on the ribbon-cutting innumeracy of dull-witted politicians.
Ten days ago, this newsletter noted that the opening days of the Genocide Games — er, the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing — had generated a “cataclysmic loss of audience” for NBC. Over the past week or so, the audience size hasn’t gotten any better — and it’s not just here in the United States:
Television ratings for the Beijing Olympics are off by 50 percent from PyeongChang levels in 2018, which themselves were well below the levels of Winter Olympics past. But to hear the International Olympic Committee tell it, there’s no problem, no problem at all. . . . In the United States, though, with the exception of the post-Super Bowl bump, ratings for the Games have bounced off the bottom of the ocean floor at historic lows.
No, it’s not only a viewer boycott of China that’s driving the low ratings, but it’s hard to believe that it’s not a factor. Viewers around the world have a lot of reasons for antipathy toward China these days — from the ongoing Uyghur genocide, to the crackdown on Hong Kong, to the aggressive moves towards Taiwan, to that virus that started in Wuhan which has killed almost 6 million people around the world officially and perhaps many, many more.
For a long time, the IOC insisted to the world, and perhaps to themselves late at night, that autocratic regimes such as Russia and China were challenging but worthwhile partners who helped make the games a truly global event. It contended that the long history of blatantly unethical behavior by these regimes, inside and outside the field of play, shouldn’t be a reason for concern and certainly wasn’t a reason to exclude those countries’ athletes or bar them from hosting the games. Whatever Beijing and Moscow lacked in ethics, they made up for in money and the authority to build stadiums quickly.
These games brought another embarrassing and outrage-inducing scandal, this one involving Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old Russian figure-skating prodigy. Valieva tested positive for the heart drug trimetazidine on December 25 at the Russian nationals; the test results were only delivered from a Swedish lab last week, after Valieva helped Russia win gold in the team figure-skating event. “The IOC ruled there would not be a medal ceremony for the team event, in which Russia won gold and the U.S. won silver. If the Russian team is eventually disqualified over the positive drug test, the Americans will move up to gold, Japan will win silver, and Canada will win bronze.” When Valieva competed in her free skate, she fell apart, falling twice and finishing in fourth place.
No one believes that a 15-year-old girl would obtain and take a performance-enhancing substance on her own; someone had to have supplied it to her.
You know a situation is bad when the usually mild-mannered Mike Tirico, NBC Sports’ anchor for the Olympics coverage, calls out the IOC on-air for utterly failing to protect Valieva or to mitigate Russian cheating and rule-breaking:
Something undeniable is the harm to the person at the center of it all: a fifteen-year-old, standing alone, looking terrified on the ice before her free skate. This image, maybe more than anything else, encapsulates the entire situation — the adults in the room left her alone. Portrayed by some this week as the villain, by others as the victim, she is in fact the victim of the villains — the coaches and national Olympic Committee surrounding Kamila Valieva, whether they orchestrated, prescribed or enabled, all of this is unclear. But what is certain is they failed to protect her.
Guilt by association is often unfair, but it’s called for here. Russia has been banned from using the name of its country the last three Olympic Games, because of the systemic state-run doping program that was uncovered after they hosted the Sochi games in 2014. The deal that was broken was supposed to ensure a level playing field while giving clean Russian athletes a chance to compete, but that scenario totally broke down here.
Now, a failed drug test from one of their athletes has tarnished one of the marquee events of the games and taken away from every skater’s moment. In the name of clean and fair competition, Olympians and gold medalists from across the globe have spoken up and IOC president Thomas Bach, at his end of the games press conference in the last hour uncharacteristically openly criticized Valieva’s entourage for their quote ‘tremendous coldness’ at the end of her skate and said that those involved should be held responsible
But now it’s time for the IOC to stand up — whether it’s about blocking Russia from hosting events for a very long time or stringent and globally transparent testing for Russian athletes going forward, if swift action from the top of the Olympic movement does not happen quickly the very future of the games could be in jeopardy.
Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski, an NBC figure-skating analyst, added that, “It makes me angry that the adults around her weren’t able to make better decisions and be there for her, because she is the one now dealing with the consequences and she’s just 15 and that’s not fair. . . . Again, with that being said, she should not have been allowed to skate in this Olympic event.”
Give NBC Sports a little credit for calling out the IOC on air. Maybe NBC is concluding that operating as a de facto public-relations firm for a spectacularly corrupt and increasingly incompetent Olympic committee just isn’t worth it anymore. The ratings aren’t high enough, the advertisers aren’t happy enough, and NBC Sports employees no doubt want to broadcast unforgettable human triumphs — not to try to polish a turd and implausibly assure viewers at home that the games are fair, free, and abiding under the rules.
Discussions involving Valieva keep spurring the comment that, “It’s not her fault.” Yes, that’s precisely the point, and that’s why the Russian Olympic team used her in this manner. The people who run her career know that the IOC and the world will feel hesitant to judge and rebuke a tearful, angelic-faced 15-year-old girl. That’s why they’re attempting to cheat by using a 15-year-old girl! If this were an adult man, all of us would be reacting much less sympathetically. Our inner conflict about punishing a teenage girl for the actions of others is what the Russians were counting on; they figured that gave them a better chance of getting away with it.
These games have been a debacle, and the IOC was warned. Adam Kilgore, the Washington Post’s correspondent in Beijing, wrote this morning that the games are concluding under “a pall of pervasive joylessness” and noted that “athletes, officials and media members [are] shuttled from hotels to venues, forbidden to see the host city except out of windows.” What was the point of selecting Beijing, then? These games could have been held anywhere.
Dan Wetzel, a Yahoo Sports national columnist, sees the Russian coaches’ heartless on-air verbal abuse of a terrified 15-year-old girl as the natural fruit of a long string of bad IOC decisions and a refusal to confront national Olympic teams that are systemically abusive: “This is the Olympics that Bach, who has been president nearly a decade, has built. This is it. He just happened to see it in all its depravity on his television Thursday. He was disgusted at what he saw. Join the club.”
The only silver lining to this mess is that Xi Jinping didn’t get much of a propaganda victory out of it all.
Super Bowl LVI on Sunday significantly changed after Rams wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. was lost for the game due to a knee injury after his leg was caught on the SoFi Stadium artificial turf. Beckham, who had two catches for 52 yards and a touchdown on three targets, was dominating the league championship game before the injury.
Not only was Beckham unable to play for the rest of Super Bowl LVI, but he has to worry about his future after suffering what is expected to be another torn ACL to the same knee he injured last season while on the Browns, according to CBS Sports NFL insider Jason Las Canfora. Beckham’s injury caused NFL players, current and former, to eliminate the use of field turf at stadiums.
Of course, the $5 billion SoFi Stadium is one of them.
There’s a lot of support for natural grass fields, but what is the “Flip The Turf” campaign? Half of the league’s teams play on artificial turf, which is why players are pushing for change. There are statistics in the campaign to back up why fields should switch from turf to grass.
In the petition, turf fields have:
28% more non-contact lower body injuries.
32% more non-contact knee injuries and 69% more non-contact foot and ankle injuries occurred on turf.
Turf can get up to 60 degrees hotter than natural grass, increasing the rate at which toxic gases are released and ingested.
There are also environmental issues behind the campaign:
Currently, turf can’t be recycled in the US, leading to an estimated 330 million pounds of landfill waste each year, and microplastics in our water and irrigation systems.
On average, one turf field requires over 440,000 pounds of petroleum derivatives. The production of which emits carbon, creates fossil fuels, and contributes to global warming.
Unlike grass, turf does not cool the environment. It does not filter air and water pollutants. It does not fix carbon dioxide or release oxygen. Turf has zero climate benefits.
Players are pushing for change. perhaps Super Bowl LVI may be the breaking point.
(For NFL players accustomed to gas-hogging sports cars and SUVs and flying in private jets to be raising environmental issues is a little hypocritical, but be that as it may ….)
Beckham’s first knee injury happened on artificial turf, at, of all places, Cincinnati. Paul Brown Stadium had grass when it opened, but converted to turf, as did the Houston Texans’ stadium. Conversely, the Baltimore Ravens’ stadium started with turf and then converted to grass.
This is, remember, the much-improved turf (supposedly) from the bad old days of carpet of 1/4-inch blades, essentially green-painted asphalt at Camp Randall Stadium and every other college stadium I marched in in five years in the UW Marching Band. But NFL players, all of whom are too young to remember the old turf, seem unimpressed with the new turf.
Lambeau Field has a hybrid surface of grass with plastic blades to keep the grass in place. (The Packers also use grow lights to keep the grass growing as late in the season as possible.) That would seem to be the ultimate grass surface, and the company that sells it, GrassMaster, also equips many soccer pitches in Europe, but at only one other NFL stadium, in Philadelphia.
The Arizona Cardinals’ stadium and the new Las Vegas Raiders stadium have grass fields that slide out fo the stadium during the week to get sun and rain, then slide back in for game day. The Raiders’ stadium has a turf surface underneath, and that was what the Badgers played on for the Las Vegas Bowl in December.
The problem with replacing turf with grass is that the team ends up losing its practice field, since most college teams with turf practice in their stadium, such as UW. (The original turf went in in the late 1960s, and I believe the old football practice fields are either parking lots or buildings.) That should make one skeptical that colleges will be replacing turf with grass anytime soon.
Whether NFL teams replace turf with grass is a more interesting question. In the NFC North Minnesota and Detroit have indoor stadiums, and so putting grass in would be complicated. (Grass was put in temporarily in the Pontiac Silverdome for the 1994 World Cup and in the Louisiana Superdome as an experiment or a Packers’ preseason game back in the Brett Favre era.)
This will be interesting to watch if expensive NFL players continue to get hurt on turf fields.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 