The Super Bowl has become one of the few mass-audience appointment TV events left, to the extent that for several years the Super Bowl commercials have been avidly watched and scrutinized.
The title of best commercial is a matter of personal opinion. The title of most controversial commercial undoubtedly was the halftime Chrysler ad.
Neither Chrysler nor NBC is saying how much the 2-minute spot cost, but 30-second ads were going for $3.5 million. Suffice it to say that the ad cost Chrysler — which, remember, took more than $13 billion of our tax dollars — several million dollars.
I believe this counts as Eastwood’s first media experience with Chrysler products:
Rugged Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood proclaimed it was “Halftime in America” in the spot that did not mention a Chrysler car or truck but intoned that the automaker’s successful turnaround could be used as an example for the United States as it struggles with high unemployment and a slow economic growth rate.
“Detroit’s showing us it can be done,” Eastwood said.
Eastwood — or, more accurately, the script writer — left out the rest of Eastwood’s sentence — “by a bailout funded by non-Chrysler owners to benefit President Obama’s buddies, the United Auto Workers, in time for Fiat of Italy to buy Chrysler.”
(This probably is a good place to explain the headline: The Volaré and Dodge Aspen was the highest-rated, if you want to call it that, Chrysler product on Edmunds Inside Line‘s 100 Worst Cars of All Time list, described as “terribly built and rust-prone” while “subject to a long series of recalls.” One of my Boy Scout Scoutmasters was a Madison police officer, and he told me of an squad that had Aspen logos on one side of the car and Volaré logos on the other wide. I could have included two higher-rated AMC products, the Pacer or Gremlin, but they we”re built before Chrysler bought AMC in 1987.)
If Obama advisor David Axelrod felt compelled to tweet what a wonderful spot it was, then it counts as propaganda, irrespective of the White House’s and Obama campaign’s denials — and for that matter, the denials of Sergio Marchionne, Fiat’s (which means Chrysler’s) CEO, whose company is sticking the taxpayers with billions of dollars that won’t be paid back.
It particularly counts as propaganda on behalf of the unions, who worked hard to destroy their Detroit employers, as Christian Schneider points out:
While most cheeseheads saw the Super Bowl as a rare night off from the sucking hole of union politics, there it was in the ad — an image of the state capitol occupation by union protesters nearly a year ago.
While the video of the capitol’s illuminated east wing plays, Eastwood growls, “I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. [Edit. note: “Huh?”] And, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems like we’ve lost our heart at times. The fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead.”
Of course, the “division, discord, and blame,” in Wisconsin began when unions tried the burn the state down over Governor Scott Walker’s plan requiring them to begin paying into their own pension accounts, and to pay a little more toward their health insurance (although still half the private-sector average.) Walker scaled back their ability to collectively bargain, although they still retained more bargaining rights than federal workers, who can’t bargain for wages and benefits.
Everyone knows the results. Union protesters calling the Lieutenant Governor a “f***ing whore” to her husband’s face after a Walker speech. Screeching demonstrators being dragged out while attempting to disrupt Walker’s State of the State address. WWII veterans being greeted with Nazi salutes at a capitol Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony. Protesters disrupting a Walker-led ceremony for Special Olympics award recipients. Forged recall petition signatures. Lawmakers having beers dumped on their heads. The list goes on and on.
According to Chrysler, these are times when we just “didn’t understand each other,” and where both sides can be ascribed “blame.” In fact, it was the union protesters that understood perfectly — that their boorish behavior would probably one day land them in an ad lauding their activism. …
It also seems somewhat incongruous that Chrysler would lionize the Wisconsin union movement in such a way. Organized labor’s pay and benefit demands are what brought U.S. auto makers to their knees in the first place. As George Will is fond of saying, American car companies actually became health-insurance companies that happened to sell automobiles. It’s no coincidence that the American entities who have struggled the most in recent years — car companies, the American educational system — are the ones that are the most heavily unionized. (Wisconsin, of all places, should recognize this, as a major GM plant in Janesville closed in 2008, tearing the heart out of that union town.)
Schneider could have mentioned Milwaukee and Kenosha, which used to have Chrysler plants, but now do not. Wisconsin has no auto assembly plants, which means the $23.6 billion we will lose on the GM and Chrysler bailouts were of no real value to Wisconsin.
Eastwood had his own, uh, clarification Monday to Fox News:
Following the fall out over the controversial Chrysler Super Bowl halftime ad, Clint Eastwood spoke exclusively with O’Reilly Factor producer Ron Mitchell…
“I just want to say that the spin stops with you guys, and there is no spin in that ad. On this I am certain.
l am certainly not politically affiliated with Mr. Obama. It was meant to be a message about just about job growth and the spirit of America. I think all politicians will agree with it. I thought the spirit was OK.
I am not supporting any politician at this time.
Chrysler to their credit didn’t even have cars in the ad.
Anything they gave me for it went for charity.
If any Obama or any other politician wants to run with the spirit of that ad, go for it.”
Evidently Eastwood, formerly known as a conservative/libertarian, misjudged the reaction to the ad. His reaction came out before the late Monday news that Eastwood opposed the Chrysler bailout, according again to Reuters:
“We shouldn’t be bailing out the banks and car companies,” actor, director and Academy Award winner Eastwood told the Los Angeles Times in November 2011. “If a CEO can’t figure out how to make his company profitable, then he shouldn’t be the CEO.” …
Eastwood’s manager Leonard Hirshan said the actor has not changed his views on the auto bailout.
“He did a commercial that had nothing to do with politics,” Hirshan said. “What he did was talk about America. If anything, this was a pro American commercial not a Chrysler commercial. Chrysler just sponsored what he had to say.”
(And if you believe any of these denials, I have a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird with a 426 Hemi to sell you. It was driven only to church on Sundays.)
Truth be told, the most outrageous part of the ad doesn’t have to do with Chrysler, but with Detroit:
“People are out of work and they’re hurting and they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback,” Eastwood said. “The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again.”
That would be the same Detroit with, as a National Review comment put it, “a downtown that looks like a bombed-out ruin, large tracts of land and ornate buildings in a state of advanced decay, an indicted mayor, and a mass exodus of everyone with the means to escape.”
This ad is, in the words of Karl Rove, who was to George W. Bush what Axelrod is to Obama, “a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising and the best wishes of the management, which is benefitted by getting a bunch of our money that they’ll never pay back.” Yet it’s unlikely to make much difference in November. It won’t even make a difference in sales of Chrysler products, given that no one is buying cars or other big-ticket items these days unless absolutely necessary.
A former actor whose birthday was yesterday poses the correct question for November:
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute’s George Lightbourn on the correct way to assess state finances (which is not now being done by the Walker administration, nor was it done by the Doyle, McCallum, Thompson, Earl, Dreyfus, Schreiber or Lucey administrations, and so on, and so on, and so on):
Sheila Weinberg from the Institute for Truth in Accounting coined the term, “political math.” When politicians delay a payment and refer to the delay as a “savings,” they’re using political math. Or when no money is set aside for a bill they know is coming due, practitioners of political call the IOU a “savings.” It’s political math that allows state government to meet the balanced budget requirement while state accountants show it to be running a $3 billion deficit (according to the official tally released over the Christmas holiday).
Both Republicans and Democrats have used political math to make budgets balance over the years. Political math allowed my former boss Scott McCallum to balance the budget using one-time tobacco money and it was political math that green lighted Jim Doyle to “borrow” over $1 billion from the transportation fund. Thanks to political math, Governors and legislatures of all political stripe have been able to buy more government than they could really afford.
Last summer, conservatives celebrated the budget Walker put together with the help of a friendly legislature because it squeezed nearly all the political math out of the process. (We say nearly because they still used a couple of old tricks which included $264 million of “debt restructuring” a practice that permits state government to delay its debt payments for a couple of years). We finally have a budget that comes pretty close to balancing, i.e. spends no more money than is actually available.
Yet, no one, especially fiscal conservatives, should think the job is finished; far from it. What Walker and company accomplished was a one-off budget, one that can easily be undone – and then some – by the next governor and legislature. Wisconsin’s budget is as vulnerable as ever. …
Either an uptick of the economy or a change in the political whim could lead Wisconsin right back into the old style of budgeting where our politicians spend way more money than they have.
As long as the official books of the state are kept using cash accounting, political math will forever be part of our heritage and we will continue to spend more money than we actually have. It is time for the Governor to take a giant step toward creating a legacy of balanced budgets that will inevitably yield a more limited government.
One rather wonkish change would kill political math once and for all. Wisconsin state government to do what every local government and every Wisconsin business does – use generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) to balance its books. If our government made that one budget change, then any commitment to spend, no matter how far into the future, would have to be backed by actual money. …
Revolutionary? Hardly, since this is the same accounting standard that every local government and business in Wisconsin has learned to live with.
As I’ve written here before, it is crazy that an enterprise that spends $35 billion each year uses cash accounting. A business 0.0001 percent of that size wouldn’t use cash accounting. And using cash accounting instead of GAAP accounting has gotten us to where we are in government finance. During the past decade, one-third of the states ran GAAP deficits in any year, but Wisconsin ran GAAP deficits in every fiscal year.
As usual, we taxpayers have to be protected from our elected officials. Counting dollars correctly is a start. So are strict controls on government spending at every level, enacted in the state Constitution and essentially impossible to surmount.
Super Bowl XLVI wasn’t a bad game (particularly the finish), but it was missing a team, of course.
Between my overscheduled weekend and my head getting plugged, I lacked motivation to write a Super Bowl column.
Then, while watching (particularly the halftime show, which was a yawner), I wondered what might be the ultimate Super Bowl, which would be in parts, of course.
The broadcast begins with for my money the best NFL theme of all time that few remember:
You need a pregame with the world’s greatest marching band:
The National Anthem:
It begins with a bang, on a certain team’s second offensive play:
Add an unlikely hero, Max McGee, who demonstrated the best way to prepare for a Super Bowl is to be out all night with two women:
A better halftime than Madonna:
How about a kickoff return?
The Minister of Defense:
Another huge defensive play:
The best game-winning drive in Super Bowl history, called by my all-time favorite NFL announcer:
One more defensive stand …
… and a trophy at the end …
… with one more band performance:
The ultimate Super Bowl wraps up with the ultimate NFL Films Super Bowl music from, oddly enough, the Super Bowl V video:
Every year when I figure out my winter sports announcing schedule, I highlight one specific date.
That date is today, when Ripon College hosts Grinnell College in men’s basketball. (Which you can watch at 7 Central time online.) The Grinnell–Ripon game is the most exciting, yet most difficult-to-announce, game I do every year, which is why I look forward to it.
If you like basketball on fire, this is what you want to see. The safest bet every season is that Grinnell will finish first in points scored per game, and worst in points allowed per game. This year’s Pioneers are scoring 114.2 points per game and giving up 96.3 points per game. The next closest offense is Ripon, which is scoring 79.4 points per game. The next closest defense is Lawrence, which is giving up 80 points per game. (Grinnell is number one in the Midwest Conference in scoring margin, which is the best indicator other than win–loss record of how good a team is.)
The flood of points and shots isn’t what makes announcing the Pioneers difficult. The pace is frenetic, to say the least — Grinnell shoots as fast as they can, usually either a three-point shot or a layup, and after they score or lose the ball they press and trap their opponent to try to get the ball back. The other adventure for sportscasters and public address announcers is that Grinnell brings in between three and five players every time they substitute, which is once every scoreboard minute or so, in order to keep up the defensive pressure. (Ripon College’s PA announcer always suggests fans consult their souvenir programs. It’s easier to announce who’s in on TV than trying to do that and keep up with the action on the radio.)
Grinnell is Division III college basketball’s answer to UNLV and Loyola Marymount, two teams that let ‘er rip in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and before that the National Basketball Association of the 1960s and 1970s, when the scoreboard displayed three digits per side every game night. Grinnell has led college basketball — not just Division III, but all of college basketball — in scoring 16 of the past 18 seasons and three-point shooting in 14 of the past 18 seasons. The 2003–04 Pioneers set a record by scoring 126.2 points per game, breaking their own 2001–02 season record of 124.9 points per game. The first seven names in the Midwest Conference single-game scoring record list, the first nine names in the conference single-season scoring list, and the first four names in the career scoring list are Pioneers.
The architect of this chaos is David Arsenault, who has been causing his Midwest Conference coaching brethren fits since 1989. (The first time Ripon played an Arsenault-coached Grinnell team in Iowa, Ripon won 134–131.) For once, the Grinnell College Web page that says that Arsenault “has become nationally and internationally renowned for his innovative coaching techniques and offensive-minded basketball” is not hype:
A by-product of his high-flying, fast-paced basketball has been increased player participation, enthusiastic home crowds and a virtual assault on the offensive records section compiled by the NCAA Statistics Office.
Not to mention on-floor success. Grinnell’s 1996 Midwest Conference title was its first since 1962. (The Pioneers beat Ripon in the conference championship game, with Grinnell’s Ed Brands scoring 60.) Under Arsenault, who was hired to coach a team that had had 25 consecutive losing seasons, Grinnell has won four Midwest Conference regular-season titles and two conference tournament titles. When Grinnell opened its new gymnasium, ESPN televised the game, and Sports Illustrated previewed the game. Grinnell is the only Midwest Conference team that gets national publicity beyond scoreboard sections of newspapers or websites, including USA Today, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
Arsenault described his system thusly to SI: “We’re trying to perfect chaos. Most basketball today, especially at the professional level, has a lot of dead time. We send a new group of five out there every 35 seconds to run around and create as much disturbance as they can.” Another way to look at it is to watch how a team down eight points with 90 seconds left plays, and think of playing like that all 40 minutes.
Arsenault must have the easiest time of any Division III basketball coach in recruiting, irrespective of Division III’s lack of athletic scholarships. If a basketball player goes to Grinnell, he’s going to play. There is no alternative. The Pioneers’ leading scorer, Griffin Lentsch, plays just 20.5 minutes per game (yet leads the Midwest Conference in scoring at 26.2 points per game). Twenty-one Pioneers have played this season, and 14 players have played in every game this season. If Division III basketball is about participation, then Grinnell men’s basketball certainly achieves that standard.
And if Division III basketball is about academics over athletics, Grinnell succeeds there too. Grinnell fits no one’s definition of an athletic factory. (The average SAT score of a Grinnell student is 1350.) Arsenault took a sabbatical one season to write The Running Game — A Formula for Success and a video, “Running to Extremes.” He has since produced another video, “Running to Win.” Someone else is selling “The Grinnell System” video package, which is a high compliment indeed.
There is not only a method to this madness, but a statistical method to this madness. Several years ago, Arsenault commissioned some Grinnell students to figure out the statistical measures that predicted Grinnell’s success. Since this formula was discovered, meeting all five criteria has failed to produce a win only once, when Grinnell shot 16 percent from the field that night:
Shoot at least 94 shots per game, which averages to one shot every 12 seconds. (This year, Grinnell is averaging only 85 shots per game.)
Shoot 25 more shots than Grinnell’s opponent. (This year, they’re shooting 22 more shots per game.)
Shoot three-point shots on at least half of their shots. (This season, 61.1 percent of their shots are beyond the three-point arc.)
Generate at least 32 turnovers per game. (Just 28.4 turnovers per game this season. Their turnover ratio is plus 14.)
Get offensive rebounds on at least one-third of Grinnell’s missed shots. (This year, they’re getting offensive rebounds on 40 percent of Grinnell’s missed shots, and the Pioneers lead the conference in offensive rebounds per game.)
The result of this style of play could best be described as feast or famine, over an entire game or season. I’ve seen both Grinnell and Ripon come back from deficits of 20 or more points, and I’ve seen Grinnell and Ripon blow leads of 20 or more points. No lead by Grinnell or its opponent is safe, because the Pioneers never (or at least from what I’ve seen) let up on their style of play. Grinnell has both big wins and big losses (one year I announced a 99–55 Ripon win, and the Pioneers hold the record for points scored in a loss, 157–149 to Illinois College in 1994), and it seems that Grinnell most often finishes near the top or near the bottom of the conference.
I’ve called several Grinnell–Ripon games. The first season I announced Ripon games, I watched the two teams’ game in Ripon (Ripon 143, Grinnell 118) a couple weeks before Ripon’s trip to Grinnell. But watching that kind of game is not the same thing as announcing it. Five minutes into the Ripon-at-Grinnell game, I was running out of gas. (Part of it may have been the fact that Grinnell’s old Darby Gymnasium, described as the Boston Garden of the Midwest Conference, was infernally hot.)
Ripon won 110–107. That night also was the first night of the 1999 NBA season following that year’s lockout. Only one NBA team reached 110 points that night, and none of the games reached 217 combined points.
Since then, Grinnell–Ripon games I’ve announced include 103–100 in 2001, 124–110 in 2006, 120–118 in 2007, 137–129 in 2009, 127–107 in 2010, and 125–113 last season. In one of those games, the halftime score was 74–67. I got the halftime stats from Ripon’s sports information director, looked them over, and started laughing, because the halftime stats had more numbers on them than some games’ final stats.
The reaction of Grinnell’s opponents to the Pioneers’ contrarian style is interesting. I once asked Bob Gillespie, Ripon’s long-time coach, about Grinnell’s style. Gillespie replied that he wouldn’t coach that way, but it worked for Grinnell because they had won conference championships with that approach.
When USA Today did a story about Grinnell basketball last decade, the coach of one of Grinnell’s regular-season opponents called Grinnell’s style a travesty of basketball. (The coach took that comment somewhat back when the New York Times came calling.) The irony of that comment is that that particular opponent played similarly, though not to Grinnell’s extremes — they ran a lot, shot a lot of threes, scored a lot of points and gave up a lot of points. Another former rival said he loved watching Grinnell, but he hated playing Grinnell.
I give Arsenault a lot of credit for being willing to do this. Most team sports appear to have a sort of coaching groupthink, where peer pressure prevents a coach from doing something out of the box, like, say, never punting. (In the NFL, Tuesday Morning Quarterback swears that coaches coach with the goal of reducing the margin of defeat.) Ask yourself how many coaches in any sport would actually say ”We have fun. It’s almost a lost art in sports.” At a bare minimum, it’s highly entertaining to watch, and everybody plays because everybody has to play. One would think the Grinnell system would be quite effective in a college or high school conference known for its half-court slow-tempo style of play. (It would be interesting to take over a moribund high school girls’ basketball program, like this one, and see if this approach would work.)
Most teams, even those that play a deliberate style against anyone else, apply the take-what-the-defense-gives-you (or, in the words of former Iowa football coach Hayden Fry, “scratch where it itches”) approach to Grinnell. If you can get the ball out of the backcourt and their press, you are likely to have a high-percentage shot available for you. And that’s by design — Grinnell is happy to trade your two-point basket for their three-point basket. Ripon once lost to Grinnell despite shooting 67 percent from the field. Most teams therefore don’t shoot many threes against Grinnell unless they’re behind. (It shouldn’t be surprising that in addition to leading the Midwest Conference in points per game, scoring margin, three-point field goals, assists, assist-to-turnover ratio, blocked shots and turnover margin and assist-to-turnover ratio, Grinnell also leads the conference in average game attendance and road game attendance.)
Grinnell started this season with a bang by beating Principia 145–97, a game in which Grinnell deviated from its usual substitution pattern to allow Lentsch to score a Division III record 89 points. (The previous record was set by, of course, a Grinnell alumnus.) The Pioneers won 126–98, 150–137, 117–107, and 115–103. Their only loss was to Carroll 109–106 Jan. 14.
Tonight’s game is a rematch of their Dec. 3 meeting in Grinnell, won by the Pioneers 125–103. It will not only be an entertaining game, but a big game, given that Grinnell is tied for first and Ripon is tied for third in the Midwest Conference. (The team with which Ripon is tied for third, St. Norbert, is Grinnell’s Saturday opponent.) Since only four teams make the Midwest Conference basketball tournaments, a team that wants to have a shot at March basketball needs to finish in the top four, and it’s quite helpful to host the tournament, which the regular-season champion gets to do.
In addition to the conference implications, this should be a good game because Ripon leads the conference in scoring among teams not named Grinnell, and in free throw shooting. Grinnell plays physical defense (to say the least), so shooting 78.1 percent from the line should help the Red Hawks tonight. (Ripon is one of the few basketball teams I’ve seen that succeeds in any tempo of game and doesn’t try to control the pace of the game.)
Arsenault won’t be at the game, though. He’s on sabbatical this semester. (And unless you knew what Arsenault looked like, you wouldn’t recognize him as a coach, given that he usually sits on the far end of the bench and almost never even stands up during play.) His son, also named David, owner of the Division III record for assists in a game (34), is the interim coach this semester. Given Grinnell’s scores in the second semester, the younger Arsenault appears to coach like his father.
So if you’re interested in the most entertaining basketball you’ll see this season, come to the Storzer Center on the (west end of the campus of) Ripon College this evening, or watch us online. (Or if you’re busy Friday night, watch Grinnell at St. Norbert Saturday.) I guarantee you won’t be bored.
Today in 1959, one night after their concert at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson got on a Beechcraft Bonanza in Mason City, Iowa, to fly to Fargo, N.D., for a concert in Moorhead, Minn.
The trio, along with Dion and the Belmonts, were part of the Winter Dance Party Tour, a 24-city tour over three weeks, with its ridiculously scheduled tour dates connected by bus.
Said bus, whose heater broke early in the tour, froze in below-zero temperatures two nights earlier between the scheduled concert in the Duluth, Minn., National Guard Armory, and the next scheduled location, the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay.
Holly’s drummer had to be hospitalized with frostbite in his feet, and Valens also became ill. The tour got to Green Bay, but its scheduled concert in Appleton that evening was canceled.
After the concert in Clear Lake, Holly decided to rent an airplane. Holly’s bass player, Waylon Jennings, gave his seat to the Big Bopper because he was sick, and Valens won a coin flip with Holly’s guitarist, Tommy Allsup. Dion DiMucci chose not to take a seat because the $36 cost equaled his parents’ monthly rent.
As he was leaving, Holly told Jennings, “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up,” to which Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!”
Shortly after the 12:55 a.m. takeoff, the plane crashed, instantly killing Holly, Valens, the Big Bopper and the pilot.
The scheduled concert that evening went on, with organizers recruiting a 15-year-old, Robert Velline, and his band the Shadows. Bobby Vee went on to have a good career.
The number one single today in 1968:
The number one single today in 1973:
The number one album today in 1979 was the Blues Brothers’ “Briefcase Full of Blues”:
Birthdays begin with one of Dion’s Belmonts, Angelo D’Aleo:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 