By 10 a.m. yesterday, Rutgers beat me to it (from NJ.com):
The university terminated Rice’s contract Wednesday morning following a meeting with athletic director Tim Pernetti in his office at the Rutgers Athletic Center. Rice’s job status became tenuous when videotapes of his actions during practices from his first and second years on campus were made public by ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” program on Tuesday.
Rice was seen throwing basketballs at players — including one instance, throwing it at a player’s head — as well as shoving players during a practice. He was also heard using the term “f—— faggot” at a player and using abusive language.
The cynical could look at this as an attempt by Rutgers’ athletic director to save his own skin …
“I am responsible for the decision to attempt a rehabilitation of coach Rice,” Pernetti said in a statement released by the university Wednesday morning. “Dismissal and corrective action were debated in December and I thought it was in the best interest of everyone to rehabilitate, but I was wrong. Moving forward, I will work to regain the trust of the Rutgers community.”
… or as a case of using a word that alienated the wrong people:
Pernetti, who had given Rice a vote of confidence to return next season for the fourth year of his original five-year deal, had stated Tuesday during a brief sitdown with local media that the matter had been dealt with already. But with political heavyweights and leaders of both the country and the state’s LGBT equal rights groups calling for Rice to be terminated for using homophobic slurs, the outcome became inevitable.
Exactly what changed between December, when Rice was suspended, and yesterday? ESPN got hold of the video, that’s what.
Facebook Friend Kyle Cooper points out:
Look, coaches yell. Coaches scream. They may occasionally swear. But there’s a clear difference between being upset and being abusive. Just as there’s a clear difference between solving a problem and hoping it goes away. The focus of this Deadspin article is spot-on: Rutgers knew about Mike Rice’s, uh, methods, and its first impulse was to sweep it under the rug. Only when Rice’s behavior and the administration’s soft-pedaling were finally exposed did the university take action.
Recruiting is a cut-throat activity even when it doesn’t involve an issue that you just gift-wrapped for every conceivable opponent. You can hear the negative recruiting now, can’t you? “Rutgers is a fine school, but let’s just say they’re not much for protecting their student-athletes. They won’t look out for your best interests. You won’t have to worry about that at (university name here). We’ll never put you in a bad situation like that.”
What do a coach’s tirades teach? Football coach Bill Walsh had an interesting approach — when his assistant coaches started yelling at 49ers players, he would yell at the assistants, telling them to teach, not yell.
I’ve seen in a few different places defenses of, if not Rice exactly, “old-school coaches” who, if the writer is to be believed, said and did much worse things than Rice. Well, for one thing, that was then, and this is now.
The opposite of Rice perhaps is shown in this observation about Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, from ESPN.com:
Sports have made room for all sorts of personalities. From the crying Dick Vermeils to the restrained Tom Landrys, there’s no genetic strain that works better than another.
But the most fundamental skill for success seems to be the ability to deal — to deal with life and all its ups, downs, twists and turns.
In that, Boeheim is a master, which has served him well.
“There have been great books and great lectures and great speeches written to suggest what you do to avoid distractions,” he said. “Most people can’t do that. We can’t do that. Life is full of situations. You either handle them or you don’t. That’s nothing new. There are situations every year. Some you see, some you don’t, but there’s always something. If you can’t get through all of that, you’re not in this business very long.”
The coach who might be the best in college basketball today, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, has the coaching ability of his mentor, Indiana and Texas Tech’s Bobby Knight, without the public displays of out-of-control temper. CBS Sports produced a documentary about the early ’90s Duke teams, which featured two players who didn’t necessarily get along, Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley. Krzyzewski reportedly didn’t publicly berate them, or told one or both to knock it off; he simply told them that if they couldn’t get along, Duke wouldn’t win.
There are three questions that, if you can answer any one of them with a “yes,” justify Rice’s firing, and well before yesterday:
Is Rice’s conduct acceptable in the workplace today?
Would you like to be the subject of verbal and aerial (as in thrown basketballs) assaults from someone above you?
Would you like your son to be treated like that?
On the other hand, maybe something did sink in, based on Rice’s comments reported by ESPN.com:
Rice, in an impromptu news conference outside his home, apologized “for the pain and hardship that I’ve caused.”
“There will never be a time when I use any of that as an excuse,” Rice said, referring to his efforts toward a change in behavior. “I’ve let so many people down. My players, my administration, Rutgers University, the fans. My family, who’s sitting in their house just huddled around because of the fact that their father was an embarrassment to them.
“It’s troubling, but I will at some time, maybe I’ll try to explain it, but right now, there’s no explanation for what’s on those films. Because there is no excuse for it. I was wrong. I want to tell everybody who’s believed in me that I’m deeply sorry.”
Wisconsin takes on Mississippi in the NCAA West Region second round in Kansas City this morning.
Which means the Badgers’ biggest defensive challenge is Ole Miss’ Marshall Henderson, reports the Wisconsin State Journal’s Jim Polzin:
After leading Ole Miss to a 66-63 over Florida in the SEC tournament title game on Sunday in Nashville, Tenn., Henderson was asked about being named the most valuable player of the tournament after being relegated to the coaches’ All-SEC second team earlier in the week.
“I guess that’s just a shot at all the other coaches out here,” Henderson told reporters. “They’re losers. They didn’t win the tournament, we did. We went in with a chip on our shoulder. Maybe they’ll be smarter next year.”
Instead of resting up for the NCAA tournament, Henderson got back to Oxford, Miss., and celebrated with some friends.
At 4:22 a.m. Monday, he tweeted he had just won “10 in a row in pong.” Henderson left it to his followers’ imagination whether he was referring to ping pong or beer pong, a popular drinking game among college students.
Suffice to say UW coach Bo Ryan has no one with Henderson’s, uh, personality on his team. Nor would he.
The State Journal’s Tom Oates points out the Badgers’ problem on the other side of the floor:
After struggling to contain guard penetration early in the season, UW became another in a long line of defensive dynamos under coach Bo Ryan. Offense, on the other hand, has been a season-long mystery for the Badgers.
At times, UW scores with stunning efficiency, passing the ball inside and kicking it back out for wide-open 3-point shots. At other times, the Badgers rely too much on 3-point shots and just keep firing them whether they’re dropping or not. That has led to long droughts and embarrassing shooting percentages.
The biggest mystery is how UW’s offensive production can change so quickly, often within the same game. Even when the Badgers play well on offense, it seldom lasts more than two or three games.
That’s not good enough for long-term success in the NCAA tournament, which is why the length of UW’s run is tied directly to the efficiency of its offense. No matter how well the Badgers play defense, they’re going to have to score because the droughts at the end of both halves that sunk them against Ohio State in the Big Ten title game will do the same in the NCAA tournament. …
UW’s offense took a step up near the middle of the Big Ten season when guard Ben Brust and forward Sam Dekker became more aggressive in seeking their shots. In the Big Ten tournament, two other developments contributed to another offensive jump by UW.
First, Ryan did a masterful job against Michigan and Indiana of isolating players such as Ryan Evans and Jared Berggren in the post and Dekker and Traevon Jackson on the perimeter, giving them room to attack off the dribble. Evans in particular did a great job of facilitating the offense, which was a new role for him. …
Getting away from the defense-oriented Big Ten should be a breath of fresh air for UW, but that doesn’t mean the path will be easy. Although it plays at a fast pace, Mississippi still holds opponents to a respectable field goal percentage. Kansas State, Gonzaga, Pitt and Ohio State — all strong defensive teams — are potential opponents for UW later in the West regional.
In both cases, I picked the national champion correctly, Kentucky.
This year, I’m considerably more busy. I also didn’t have time to find a system, as I did last year. On the other hand, this year’s tournament is a considerably more wide open tournament, so maybe a system won’t help this year anyway.
This bracket is from a pool I’ve been in for several years:
The other bracket has a few differences, but the same Final Four — Duke, Gonzaga, Miami and Kansas — and the same national championship, Duke over Kansas.
I can’t say I’m particularly enthused about this. It is a difficult tournament to figure out this year. (For instance, last year’s national champion, Kentucky, didn’t get into the tournament. The Wildcats did get into the National Invitation Tournament, only to lose their first-round game Tuesday. Adolph Rupp is rolling over in his grave.) Maybe that’s why I picked three familiars, and why I don’t have Miami winning it all. I think that the team that wins it all is usually a team that’s been around the Final Four before, which certainly describes both Duke and Kansas.
I have Wisconsin and Marquette winning one game each. This Badger team is capable of anything from making the Final Four, which a few people I know have predicted, to losing Friday. They are that inconsistent, and I don’t think you become magically consistent in March. To coin a phrase used at numerous levels of numerous sports, you are what you are.
I am unimpressed with any Big Ten team, including Wisconsin, which is why I have none of them going to the Final Four. There are two ways of looking at that, I suppose — it’s a really even conference, or it’s not a very good conference. And there is certainly no team that stands head and shoulders over everyone, including regular-season champion Indiana and tournament champion Ohio State, both of whom lost to the woefully inconsistent Badgers earlier this season.
And, as of 11 a.m., away we go,. And if we’re lucky, we’ll see some of these:
The high school boys basketball playoffs start this week. (Weather permitting in some places.) That means the NCAA college basketball tournaments are imminent.
It has become fashionable, of course, to assert that Division I college basketball is “in trouble,” that it has become so slow and staid and overcontrolled it might ultimately wither into irrelevance. Some of this is hyperbole, since there’s an obvious upside to the parity that low scoring engenders, and since the NCAA tournament is still a financial windfall, and since a team like Wisconsin, under Bo Ryan, can drag games into the 30s and still win games and fill seats. But it is impossible not to notice that something is happening, that the balance has been thrown off, and it is silly not to acknowledge that the overarching trend is impacting how people view college basketball. “I’m not a guy who’s too concerned about whether the game is popular or not,” says Ken Pomeroy, who pioneered the notion of advanced college basketball statistics at his website, “but it certainly hurts the perception of it.”
Here is what the numbers confirm: Overall scoring, at slightly less than 68 points per game, is at its lowest level in three decades, and possessions are growing longer and longer. The game, as a whole, is slower and less free-flowing than it used to be. There are distinct lulls, and transition baskets are more and more difficult to come by. Ask why this is happening, and it becomes a Rorschach test: You will hear a dozen hypotheses from a dozen different sources, ranging from the length of the shot clock to the increased physicality on the perimeter to poor shot selection to the lack of competent post players to the profusion of timeouts to the NBA’s one-and-done rule to the spike in coaches’ salaries, all of which are entirely speculative, and any of which might be at least somewhat viable.
The last of Michael Weinreb’s hypotheses leads to another that may or may not be tied to coach salaries, because it applies to high school coaches too, most of whom are paid in no more than four figures. Weinreb interviewed former Oklahoma coach Billy Tubbs, whose Sooner teams were among the nation’s scoring leaders:
Toward the end of his Oklahoma tenure, Tubbs says, he could feel the culture changing, veering toward the conservatism he both embraces outside of the game and despises within it. (In 1991, a few years before Tubbs left Oklahoma for TCU, overall scoring peaked at 77 points per game, and it’s been trailing downward ever since.) Tubbs brought up the shadow of “political correctness” with me several times, which seems like a bit of an oblique connection, but I think what he was trying to say is that the coaches who should be willing to gamble — coaches, like Tubbs, who are blessed with superior talent — simply don’t think it’s worth the risk anymore. And so they take command of everything that’s happening on the floor. They slow the game down to call offensive sets, and they play it safe on defense rather than risk giving up easy layups in transition. And the very notion of running wild like Tubbs’s teams did, or of throwing caution to the wind like Paul Westhead’s Loyola Marymount teams did, or of raising hell like Nolan Richardson’s Arkansas teams did, becomes a concept too fraught with potential danger to even consider implementing. The favorites now play at the underdog’s pace. And this, one coach told me, is how a team like Kansas loses to an obvious inferior like TCU.
“To take command of everything that’s happening on the floor” happens to blunt one of the supposed benefits of athletics. Players of team sports learn to work as a team, to realize the greater good is more important than the individual, and how to deal with success and failure. They also should learn decision-making on the fly, because in life sometimes you have to make important decisions quickly. Student–athletes do not learn when their coach does all the thinking and makes all the decisions. Employers do not want automatons working for them.
Of course, any story about slow-tempo basketball has obligatory shots at Wisconsin. Tubbs was not known for caring about others’ opinions when he coached, and that apparently hasn’t changed:
“The thing you’ve got to look at is if the stands are empty in the arena. I’m seeing a lot of empty seats. You can play really conservative if you fill the gym. At Wisconsin, they don’t know any better, do they?”
Tubbs’ rude comment about Wisconsin aside, he’s right about the financial issues, which, as I’ve argued before, apply to football as well. Division I college coaches of revenue sports (primarily football and men’s basketball, plus men’s hockey at Wisconsin) are judged not merely on wins and losses, but on whether they fill their stadiums. The revenue sports at D-I schools fund all the other sports. When Bret Bielema left Wisconsin for Arkansas, I argued then (and believe now) that it was a stupid move because he was in no danger of losing his UW job because the Badgers filled Camp Randall Stadium, whether or not fans were always pleased with what they were seeing, or paying.
Whether UW fans like games in the 40s or not, Bo Ryan is similarly in no danger of losing his Wisconsin job. The aforementioned Pomeroy ranks Wisconsin fifth best in Division I and second best in the Big Ten, despite its 19–8 record. Ryan’s accomplishments at UW — Big Ten regular-season and tournament titles, something UW never did under Dick Bennett, and an Elite Eight team, the only area in which Bennett did better — make Ryan arguably the best coach UW has ever had. (It is interesting to note, though, that the UW Athletic Department was pushing season tickets into the regular season.)
Ryan is an example of the value of old sportswriters. Sports commentators working today assume that Wisconsin has always played a glacially slow style of basketball, dating back before Ryan to Bennett. Few probably realize that when Ryan was the coach at UW–Platteville, his teams tried to run and press their opponents out of the gym; in fact, UWP once led Division III in scoring under Ryan. Today’s sportswriters are too dense to realize that maybe Ryan’s offensive style is based on Ryan’s conclusions based on available talent within the state of Wisconsin.
Adding more hate, if you want to call it that, is Awful Announcing:
Tuesday night CBS Sports Network Debbie Antonelli went the extra mile to try and help viewers at home watching Rutgers-Syracuse. The score at the half was 19-15 Rutgers as both teams combined to shoot 22.2% from the field. Antonelli left the booth and went to the scorers table to try and select a new game ball and change the offensive luck of both teams. …
If only we could get whoever’s calling the next Wisconsin game to try this …
I’ve watched, covered and announced games of every conceivable tempo. I admit to preferring a faster pace, having covered the fastest-paced team of all, Grinnell College. It’s not that every game needs to be played at Grinnell’s insane pace, though. There are high-quality deliberate-paced games. There are also deliberate-paced games that are boring to watch, and there seem to be an increasing number of those kinds of games.
We know how the most successful sport, pro football, would handle this. The National Football League will tinker with its rules whenever the league feels it’s necessary to stoke fan interest, usually toward more offense. Today’s NFL game ties back to 1978, when the league liberalized what offensive linemen could do and restricted what defensive backs could do. The NFL realizes that sports is entertainment, and non-entertained fans don’t buy tickets and don’t spend money at the stadium.
College sports is entertainment too, whether or not the NCAA wants to admit that. Sportswriter complaints shouldn’t be the impetus for NCAA rule changes. Dropping TV ratings and diminishing attendance should be the impetus for NCAA rule changes. Fewer eyeballs watching games, in person or on TV, will ultimately mean less financial windfall for the NCAA.
Perhaps the most effective way (as the excellent sports editor of The Platteville Journal pointed out) to improve scoring has nothing to do with, as has been suggested elsewhere, the distance of the three-point line or the length of the shot clock. (Scoring now is below where it was in the days before the three-point shot and the shot clock, which demonstrates that coaches and players adjust to rules changes.) It doesn’t have to do with the lane, either, even though I’ve previously proposed the international lane, which trapezoid shape might make camping in the lane more difficult for offensive players.
It has to do with the officials’ calling the game as it is meant to be played, as opposed to how it’s played now.
What does watching old NCAA basketball demonstrate? It demonstrates how the game is supposed to be officiated. Playing inside shouldn’t reach contact levels consistent with charges for battery. Touching the player with the ball should be a foul. Contact should mean fouls. Not only would calling fouls mean more points directly (assuming players started practicing free throws again), it would mean changes in defensive approaches away from today’s no-autopsy no-foul strategy.
Coaches are not dumb. If officials called the correct fouls, coaches who played excessively physical styles would lose games. (This means you, Tom Izzo!) They would either adjust or get fired (because their teams lost and fans stopped showing up) and would have to find jobs as football defensive assistant coaches.
After a hiatus of slightly less than a year, I will be back broadcasting high school basketball tonight and Tuesday.
I am doing the boys basketball game between Southwestern, ranked 10th in Division 4 according to the Wisconsin Sports Network, and Cuba City, ranked number one in Division 4. The Cubans’ last loss was the WIAA Division 4 final last year.
Then, on Tuesday, I will be doing the Division 5 regional quarterfinal game between Benton and Potosi. Both games can be heard online at wglr.com (look for Sports Streams).
Both games represent trips in my wayback machine. In my rural newspaper past (as opposed to my rural newspaper present), I was half-owner and editor of the Tri-County Press in Cuba City, which covered the Cuba City, Southwestern and Benton school districts. The Cuba City boys basketball coach was Jerry Petitgoue, one of the winningest coaches in the state. The boys basketball coach is still Jerry Petitgoue, the winningest boys basketball coach in the state. (The Cuba City High School gym is named for him.) He and I were two of the founding members of the City of Presidents Committee, the nation’s longest running bicentennial project.
As for Tuesday’s game, Potosi’s coach is Mike Uppena, formerly a three-year starter for Potosi’s archrival, Cassville. Mike is the son of Dennis Uppena, Cassville’s coach, who has won three state titles in Cassville, with a few state trips, the first including Mike, added in. The first year I encountered Dennis and Mike (and Mike’s older brother, Mark, who coached boys basketball at Lancaster and is now a principal) was 1988, my first year in the work world.
I started my as-needed return to radio last Saturday at the Boscobel Division 3 wrestling regional. (The radio station set it up in great fashion — it covered three regionals, with half an hour at each, starting at 10 a.m. and running until I finally shut up slightly after 5 p.m.) Boscobel is my mother’s alma mater. To think I was calling sports where my mother used to hang out was weird — as weird as when I was announcing basketball games at the old Richland Center High School and its former football field, Krouskop Park, where my father used to hang out.
And now, via Facebook and Twitter, the best comments on the third-quarter power outage in Super Bowl XLVII (the headline was my contribution):
New Orleans Power & Light just got back at Roger Goodell.
This is evident testimony of a lights-out performance by the Ravens tonight.
Just play, pretend you’re outside and clouds are covering the sun! Geez!
Looks like Ray Nagin ran off with the power bill money.
I wonder if they will blame Bush for the lights going out since Katrina hit New Orleans?
Don’t worry. The last time the power went out New Orleans they had back on in four weeks.
I’ll bet Al Gore had something to do with this!
I’d rather be watching the Go Daddy commercial over and over again than listening to these knuckleheads.
Guess the NFL shouldn’t have held the Super bowl in New Orleans the same year they suspended Saints’s coach Sean Payton.
Clark Griswold: Sorry just testing my 2013 Christmas lights display!
As the lights start to come back on, I can see about 20 cans of Deer Antler spray laying around the Ravens’ sideline.
Oh Oh…. Lights out, lots of drunk people, limo’s parked outside…. SOMEBODY KEEP THEIR EYE ON LEWIS !!!
@OnionSports: Superdome lights return as all 53 49ers are lying motionless on ground. Whereabouts of Ray Lewis unknown
This wouldn’t have happened on Fox
if the lights are gonna be out and we have to watch nothing plus commercials, at least break the monotony with a 100 yard mascot dash or something… holy hell NFL
Just talked to my cousin the Sports Mechanic, (fixes games) Chinny, Cup o Vino and he said he had the power outage and points.
Somewhere Don Meredith is smiling!
Thinks its like Christmas lights? One goes out and the whole strand is shot!
Get Tulane stadium ready! Or Tiger Stadium [presumably LSU’s]
We’re down to mood lighting in here. Sexiest third quarter ever.
Gee Thanks Obama for shutting the Coal plant down in New Orleans…. How is that working out for New Orleans right now?
“Just kidding!”
Why couldn’t the power fail about 20 minutes ago?
Alright…which Beyonce hater cut the power at the Super Dome? You’re a few minutes too late, buddy. 😉
Too bad it didn’t happen when Beyonce was singing.
Terrorist attack that was half successful? At least the press booth was knocked out.
Did they lose power in the booth, too? YAY!! #dreamscometrue
That’s what they get for having a Super Bowl without the Packers!
Next year’s super bowl will be outdoors in New Jersey. That could be a disaster
The football team wants its fans closer to the action. The baseball guys simply want a baseball field that’s not an embarrassment.
But in the fast-track exercise of designing a new Vikings football stadium, a dispute over 20 feet of baseball foul line has made mixing the two a tricky fit.
With the architect’s first schematic design only weeks away, Vikings officials and members of the public authority supervising the project are at odds over how to squeeze a baseball field into a stadium designed primarily for football.
The impasse not only threatens to delay a nearly-billion-dollar project already facing tight deadlines, but also appears to be an early test of just how accommodating the Vikings will prove in the development of a multipurpose “people’s stadium.”
“The problem is you can’t put a diamond in a rectangle,” said University of Minnesota baseball coach John Anderson. His team hopes to take advantage of playing in the new downtown Minneapolis facility that will replace the Metrodome, which for decades has served as a warm and dry venue for hundreds of college and high school teams seeking an early start to the baseball season and refuge from nature’s worst. “Something’s got to give,” Anderson said.
The Vikings, hoping to put ticket holders and stadium suites as close to the action as any team in the NFL, favor a preliminary design that places the first row of seats 44 feet from the football playing field. Only one other recently built NFL stadium — Lucas Oil in Indianapolis, designed by HKS Inc., the architect for the Vikings stadium — puts ticket holders that close.
But that design squeezes some baseball dimensions.
The most glaring — a right-field foul line that extends 285 feet from home plate and a right-field power alley 319 feet away. Both distances are short by college and professional standards, and both are about 20 feet shorter than the design, already scaled back, favored by baseball coaches and the public stadium authority.
The Strib graphically demonstrates the issue, with the blue showing the “perfered” Vikings option:
You may have thought the replacement of the Metrodome with a domed football stadium ended indoor baseball in Minnesota as soon as the Metrodome deflates itself for the last time. After all, the Twins wanted and got an outdoor stadium.
For those unfamiliar, this is what outdoor football looked like in the state of Minnesota:
I hate to be on the Vikings’ side of anything, but the baseball coaches are conveniently forgetting some history. In days of old, baseball parks were built shaped on city blocks. That was how Fenway Park has the Green Monster, the previous Yankee Stadium had its short right-field corner and deep left-center-field power alley, and the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played, had short fences but deep power alleys and center field. For that matter, before Dodger Stadium was built, the Los Angeles Dodgers played their first four seasons at the Los Angeles Coliseum, whose left field foul line was 251 feet east of home plate. (The joke was that the Coliseum was the only ballpark in the world that could seat 100,000 people and two outfielders.)
On the other hand, the state of Minnesota and/or its baseball and NFL teams got it reversed. Irrespective of the fact the Vikings played more games at the Metrodome than Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, football is meant to be played outdoors. It’d be nice to play baseball outdoors, but the spring doesn’t often cooperate when your stadium is as close to the North Pole as the Equator.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Interstate 94 (from WTMJ):
Could the Cubs new home be in Milwaukee (at least temporarily)? According to Gordon Wittenmeyer with the Chicago Sun-Times, the possibility may be closer to reality than many realize.
According to Wittenmeyer, the owners of the Cubs have always denied the possibility of having the team play at U.S. Cellular Field, where the White Sox play, temporarily during renovations of Wrigley Field.
“Cubs spokesman Julian Green said the plan — which called for all home games in April and May in 2014 and 2015 to be moved to Miller Park in Milwaukee — was just one of ‘a number of different options’ being considered and is now ‘off the table,’” said Wittenmeyer.
But they did say that playing at Miller Park have been considered “seriously” and the Brewers had been consulted.
“For now, the Cubs say they’ll play all their home games at Wrigley Field while the anticipated work is completed,” said Wittenmeyer.
ESPN.com’s Gene Wojciechowski ranks the top 10 coaching jobs (the positions, not the coaches themselves) in either the NFL or college football. To inject some drama, let’s go from bottom to top:
8. Michigan/Ohio State
Sorry, these two programs are connected at the thigh pads. In many ways, they’re mirror images of each other when it comes to giving a coach the best chance to succeed.
Monetary value? Michigan is No. 3 at $618.6 million, Ohio State No. 7 at $520.9 million.
Football expenditures? Ohio State spent $34 million in 2011; Michigan spent $23.6 million.
Huge fan bases? Check marks for both. Huge recruiting bases? Check marks for both. Huge national exposure? Check marks for both. …
7. LSU
… In the cutthroat SEC, there’s a lot to be said about an LSU program that almost always gets the best players in the recruiting-rich state. Plus, the Tigers can cherry-pick in Texas, Alabama and, of course, Australia.
Les Miles might be called the Mad Hatter, but he isn’t stupid. He did his square dance with Arkansas, but at the end of the day, he knew LSU could show him the money and give him the best opportunity to win a national title. Plus, there are few places where football matters more than at LSU.
6. Alabama
It doesn’t have the prettiest campus, the best stadium or the most populous recruiting base. But what it does have is an aura, a houndstooth history deep in championships. “Roll Tide” isn’t a saying; it’s a way of life. You either believe or you don’t.
Bama isn’t for everybody. Nick Saban has succeeded there because his intensity and expectations somehow exceed those of a fan base that doesn’t take L’s for an answer.
No athletic department spends more on its football program ($36.9 million in 2011) than Alabama. You are given every tool in the box to win. If you do, you become a coaching icon (and very, very rich), as Saban has become. If you don’t, you become an appetizer on Paul Finebaum’s radio show.
5. New York Giants
Coaching the Giants can age you, break you or define you. But if you win there, you’ll never have to worry about the first sentence of your obit.
You’ll need Kevlar to handle the New York media and an ownership and front office willing to go to the NFC East mattresses against the likes of free-spending Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder. You’re on your own for the Kevlar, but generally speaking, Giants management knows what it’s doing. …
4. Notre Dame
The Packers of college football. Or are the Packers the Notre Dame of the NFL?
The point is, Brian Kelly has shown what happens when you correctly leverage the power of your football brand. Notre Dame has its own TV network, a national recruiting network, 125 years of football tradition and facilities that rival or exceed those of its peers. The diploma means something, too.
As always, it’s about getting players — and ND’s academic standards can eliminate some prospects. As does the winter weather. It is a program with high visibility, high expectations and its share of quirks.
But when properly operated, it is also a formidable program.
3. New England Patriots
Two words: Robert Kraft.
The smart, respected and instinctive Patriots owner knows how to run a business (second only to the Dallas Cowboys in franchise value — $1.635 billion, according to Forbes), but better yet, knows how to hire good people, support them and then get out of their way.
As a head coach, what more could you want?
2. University of Texas
… According to research done at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus, Texas’ football program is worth $805 million — more than the Forbes-calculated value of the Jacksonville Jaguars ($770 million), St. Louis Rams ($780 million) and Oakland Raiders ($785 million). In other words, the Longhorns aren’t sweating the $5.35 million salary they pay Mack Brown. Or the $25.9 million (U.S. Department of Education figures) they spent on the program in 2011.
If you can’t win at Texas, then you ought to consider another profession. The school and Austin are drop-dead gorgeous. You usually get first pick of the state’s lonnnnnng list of quality recruits. And it doesn’t hurt to have your very own Longhorn Network. Every conceivable advantage awaits.
1. Green Bay Packers
The statues of Vince Lombardi and Curly Lambeau stand outside the best stadium in the NFL. (Yes, you read it right: the best stadium in the league — perfect sight lines, perfect football atmosphere, no dome.) And you can’t swing a chin strap at Lambeau Field without hitting something connected to the Packers’ championship tradition.
Management is stable, supportive and committed to success. And whenever the franchise needs some extra walking-around money for, say, stadium expansion, it simply sells more shares of the worst financial investment on the planet: Packers common stock.
This is a franchise that cares deeply about winning, about its fans, about giving its coaches the best chance of getting their own statues.
Wojciechowski’s work is demonstrated by the fact that this list includes three of this year’s top Super Bowl contenders and both participants in the BCS national championship game.
As Packer fans know, his characterization of the Packers formerly wasn’t the case. It became that way thanks to the leadership of former president Bob Harlan and the expectations set by general manager Ron Wolf, which have been basically matched by successor Ted Thompson. Wolf replaced his first, best coach choice, Mike Holmgren, with Ray Rhodes, saw things he didn’t like, and fired Rhodes after one season.
Wolf and Thompson have had different, yet equally successful, approaches. Wolf was the master of roster churn, acquiring through trade and free-agent signing players at a blinding pace because of the hideous state of the Packer roster when he took over in 1991. Thompson has built through the draft because things weren’t nearly as bad when he became GM, and because building through the draft means you have players who play the game the way you want them to play.
The blueprint for a new stadium for the Atlanta Falcons was approved early Monday in a special called meeting of the Georgia World Congress Center Authority.
The state agency, in a unanimous decision, gave its thumbs up to a “term sheet,” which lays out the business terms with team for a new field, including who will pay for it, how the revenue will be divided and who will own the building.
The stadium the World Congress Center Authority is apparently going to build (there are few details except it apparently will have a retractable roof) is a replacement for the Georgia Dome, the home of the Atlanta Falcons, and the site of both basketball and gymnastics during the 1996 Olympics. (Each had half of the building.) That was an example of thought-out design, as was Olympic Stadium, which after the Olympics was partially dismantled and became Turner Field, the Braves’ home.
Because in sports as in life, new and shiny trumps tried and true. The Dome opened in 1992, and it’s a nice place two decades on, but by 2017 it’ll be gone, having been rendered superfluous by its billion dollar baby brother. …
The Falcons’ lease with the Dome is due to expire around 2017, and that was their pressure point. They didn’t threaten to leave town – “There was not a 1995-type lever,” McKay said, speaking of the days when teams told cities to build a new stadium or else – but they did make it known they had no interest in re-upping this lease. That left the GWCCA, which runs the Dome, with a choice it didn’t know it would have to make: Do we ditch a perfectly sound building to placate our biggest tenant?
To their credit, [GWCCA executive director Frank] Poe and associates forged a not-terrible solution. The Falcons stand to foot 70 percent of the $1 billion it will take to erect a new stadium, with public money – roughly $300 million from a hotel-motel tax that affects mostly non-Georgians – making up the difference. There are those who wonder if that $300 million wouldn’t be better used to upgrade infrastructure or further education, but this leads us to the unanswerable question: Why should ballplayers earn millions while schoolteachers make do with thousands?
In pro sports, a new stadium is almost always a shared venture, and far less public money will be earmarked toward the Falcons’ new home than was the case, say, in Indianapolis with the Colts and Lucas Oil Stadium. That’s as it should be: The Falcons are the ones who wanted this, and they should pay the most.
When this new-stadium balloon was first floated, the thought was that the GWCCA might be so cowed by Arthur Blank that it handed the famous owner everything he wanted. Instead the Falcons will settle for one stadium — they first wanted the Dome to remain in place just down the street, a notion laughable on its face – with a retractable roof (as opposed to an open-air facility). …
In these uncertain times, handing $300 million in tax money to fund a stadium that will be run by a team owned by a billionaire isn’t an easy sell, especially when the building that team occupies is presentable enough that it will, come April, stage the big-ticket Final Four. But the Falcons had leverage – they could move to Doraville and leave the Dome vacant on NFL Sundays – and they applied it. The GWCAA fought its corner and will get what amounts to a newer Dome. Maybe everybody won’t win in this, but there shouldn’t be many losers.
And if not … well, nothing is forever. The Falcons will be obliged to stay in their new home for 30 years. Sometime around Year 20, they’ll start angling for something bigger and brighter. That’s the way of our world. Everybody wants the latest iPhone, even if the old one works fine. Every professional team wants a new stadium, even if the existing place still looks pretty darn good.
Bradley’s last sentence is one-third correct in Wisconsin. Yes, the Bucks want a replacement for the Bradley Center. However, the Brewers are fine with Miller Park, and the Packers are improving Lambeau Field.
There is a Wisconsin connection to this story. The Georgia Dome replaced, for football purposes, Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium, the original home of the Milwaukee-to-Atlanta Braves. The original Braves’ and Falcons’ home opened in 1966. I was 1 year old.
(Oh wait, there’s a second connection: Before moving to Lambeau Field, more about which in a moment, Brett Favre started his NFL career playing in Fulton County Stadium’s last year, if you want to call going 0-for-5 with three interceptions “playing.”)
Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig paints a glowing picture of publicly funded sports complexes.
“There’s been a debate everywhere you’ve had it, and every community has wound up doing it and they’re happy they did it,” Selig told Wisconsin Reporter on Tuesday after a speaking appearance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“They bring in business. They make the community a better place to live. And overall it’s been a very positive experience, and I happen to believe in it,” he added.
Selig, former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, was at his alma mater to give a speech at the university’s business school on ethical leadership. In the big leagues, ethics of operation often involve wealthy franchise owners strong-arming cities for hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to pay for state-of-the-art stadiums on threat of losing the team to a city that will.
“We never really talked about that,” Selig said about the idea of moving the Milwaukee Brewers to North Carolina in the 1990s while politicians debated the merits of bilking $150 million from taxpayers.
They finally agreed. After the approval of a contentious multi-county sales tax that cost a Racinesenator his job through recall and tens of millions of dollars in cost overruns, Miller Park was built.
“But the Brewers put in a lot of money and there’s just not a debate. In fact … with (the Brewers) now drawing 3 million-plus people a year, that’s why I said all the critics are gone now, because they know they’re wrong. And they were wrong.”
The critics, as it turns out, are alive and well. Whenever a new stadium is pushed by an owner, however, their voices tend to be drowned out by vote-seeking politicians and the team’s loyal fan base.
Marc Levine, director of the Center for Economic Development University of Milwaukee, recently wrote in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op-ed:
“The same fallacious economic development arguments that were used to sell Miller Park are being trotted out to justify public spending for a new (Milwaukee) Bucks‘ arena: the building of a new facility, and the presence of a sports team, is an engine of economic growth for the city and region, a critical source of jobs, income and enhanced revenues for public services.
“Yet, with a unanimity that is rare in social science research, academic studies have found that professional sports franchises and facilities generate little or no job creation or income growth.” …
Selig and others suggest there’s an arguably bigger benefit to stadiums, particularly in communities like Milwaukee.
Minnesota state Sen. Geoff Michel, R-Edina, said during a discussion last spring on financing a $975 million Minnesota Vikings stadium that professional football is “one of the things that puts us on the map.”
Selig appears to have selective memory on that subject. I recall considerable speculation about the Brewers’ moving out of Milwaukee if Miller Park wasn’t built. One of the Carolinas was mentioned; so was, of all places, Mexico City. (Note that neither has a Major League Baseball team today.) Even had the 1996 package that got Miller Park not been approved, it seems likely the Brewers would have gotten a new stadium at some point, though not necessarily in Milwaukee.
Let’s be honest — how many Americans would know where Green Bay is were it not for the Packers, whose Lambeau Field was built with public funds (a 1956 bond issue approved by voters by a 2-to-1 margin) and renovated with more public funds (the 1/2-percent sales tax approved by 53 percent of Brown County voters in 2000)? Of course, the Packers’ stewardship of Lambeau Field since moving in in 1957 has been far superior to just the other NFC North teams. Since 1957, the Chicago Bears played in Wrigley Field, Soldier Field and whatever that is the Bears play in now; Detroit moved from Tiger Stadium to the Pontiac Silverdome to Ford Field; and Minnesota moved from Metropolitan Stadium to the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome (with an unscheduled stop at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium), with their new stadium at the Metrodome site in the works.
Regardless of the perceived benefits or lack thereof, there’s a big difference between a project such as Lambeau Field that taxpayers twice agreed to fund, and projects where there is no democratic buy-in. That would include Miller Park, depending on your perspective. The Legislature signed off on the funding, but Racine County voters who didn’t think they should be included in the 0.1-percent sales tax ended the political career of Sen. George Petak (R–Racine) via recall.
Had no replacement for Milwaukee County Stadium been built, at best the Brewers would have continued as an undercapitalized, underfunded, underperforming, underattended franchise. (Note the Brewers’ lack of winning seasons from 1993 until the Seligs sold the Brewers, which shows some combination of the slim margin for error of sports franchises in small markets, or years of poor management decisions in nearly every part of the franchise.) Maybe someone like Mark Attanasio would have purchased the Brewers and generated public support for a new stadium. And maybe someone else would have purchased the Brewers from the Selig family and moved them out of Wisconsin. And therein lies the rub: how important is professional sports — whether viewed in person in a stadium impervious to Wisconsin’s capricious weather, or viewable on TV — to you?
Whenever the Georgia Dome is deflated, man will do what nature was unable to do, in perhaps the strangest moment involving a stadium in at least U.S. history:
Fans weren’t expecting a tornado to visit the Georgia Dome during the 2008 Southeastern Conference men’s basketball tournament, but that’s what they got. Though the game interrupted by the tornado did finish, there was enough damage to the stadium that the remainder of the tournament had to be moved to Georgia Tech.
YouTube has other intersections of severe weather and sports, including tornado warnings at Wrigley Field in Chicago:
These are instances where a sports announcer becomes something between a newscaster and an amateur meteorologist. The second girls basketball game I ever announced, in November 1988, took place during a tornado watch, with tornado warnings across the Mississippi River in Iowa. Before the game I asked the athletic director what would happen in the event of a tornado warning. That forced him to pause, because he apparently had never had to consider a tornado warning-caused evacuation during a basketball game. (No tornado warning was issued where we were, although we could hear lightning over our FM signal, which isn’t typical.)
Two years later, a Lancaster High School football game got all of nine minutes in before a storm forced its postponement to the next night. Ordinarily football fields have the press box on the west sideline, which means, since weather generally moves west to east in this country, whatever weather there is is coming from behind you. The old LHS field, however, had the press box on the east side, which means we could see it coming. (So could my future father-in-law, a Grant County part-time sheriff’s deputy handling traffic in the parking lot. He got quite wet.)
Once I moved to TV, I announced two games with weather delays — the first during the first quarter, the second before the game. Both were, of course, on the road, meaning we returned home quite late. Both delays were longer than an hour, because of the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association’s policy of stopping play until 30 minutes has elapsed since the last lightning. Tape-delay TV means you merely turn off the camera. Live TV and radio that is not thrown to the studio requires a special art to fill images of rain and lightning.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 