As folks around here know, I oppose a playoff for college football. The notion that it produces the “fairest” result is far from clear when. More to the point, though, there is no perfect way to determine a champion. March Madness isn’t perfect. Major League Baseball isn’t perfect. The pursuit of perfection, often in the form of allowing more and more teams into the playoff because the 9th team is arguably just as good as the 8th, merely pushes the can down the road.

This post isn’t about playoffs. This post is about what is often behind the push for playoffs. That pursuit of perfection. A fool’s errand, as often as not. The notion that any system is going to produce the perfect result, unsullied by a freak loss here or a bad call there.

Until relatively recently, I was opposed to instant replay of any form in football. The idea being, even the instant replay people aren’t going to get it right sometimes. The typical “incontrovertible evidence” standard means that the replay booth is left to decide between whether it really looked like the ref’s call was wrong, or whether it really, really looked like the ref’s call was wrong. And sometimes they get it wrong entirely. Sometimes a pivotal call is one that can’t be reviewed. Sometimes the call on the ground is so effed up that there is no right way to do it (a fumble is confused for a forward pass, a whistle blows the play dead and the live ball is picked up with an open field for a touchdown… how do you sort that one out?). There is, of course, more fair and less fair, but the delays and such didn’t seem worth it.

My mind changed as (at least at the college level) the reviews got a lot better and, most importantly, faster. Particularly in the first half of the season. There seemed to be some backsliding towards the end of the season. But the first half of the season, as well as last season (which is when my mind was changed), demonstrated that it’s possible to correct the obvious bad ones (of which there are many) without delaying the game. My main point, though, about sometimes just accepting the bad calls as a part of the game rather than a betrayal of the game, stands… in the abstract, at least.

While I was down in Colosse, I watched a Southern Tech basketball game against (who else?) Utica. I don’t watch basketball on all that regular a basis, but it was the worst officiating I believe I have ever seen. Of course, that’s one of the fundamental differences between basketball and football. In football, there are some bad calls (even with instant replay) and they can sometimes have a powerful impact on the game. You can debate it, discuss it, pick it apart. But basketball? It comes down to 100,000 ref calls throughout the game. And there can’t be anything like instant replay. And a whole lot of them are in gray areas and all of them are in realtime. In a lopsided game, there isn’t much the refs can do to affect the outcome, but if it is at all close, the best you can hope for is that the refs screw up equally.

And that’s okay. It, like at least some crummy officiating in football, is built into the game.

To get back to playoffs, when I think of March Madness, whatever problems I have with it from a fairness standpoint, I don’t think anything it does even remotely compares to the arbitrariness of the referees. A reason for me to prefer football, perhaps, though in the end it’s as much about the excitement of the games as it is about a true contest of superiority.

And that’s yet another reason why the LSU-Alabama rematch sucked.

Imagine yourself in a coffeehouse, book store, or some other third place. A man who appears to be in his late-twenties walks up to you and says, “Excuse me sir/ma’am, but do you have a cell phone?” Do you:

(a) Say “buzz off”

(b) Say yes, suspiciously.

(c) Say yes and ask why without suspicion.

(d) Say “go away”

(e) Say yes, grab your cell phone, and hand it to the stranger.

My answer, I must confess, would be (b). I wouldn’t lie or be so rude as to tell them to buzz off, but I guess I am just suspicious of strangers walking up and asking me something like that. It’s not necessarily a rational thing, but once I did loan my cell phone to a stranger when they proceeded to use it for twenty minutes trying to get a hold of somebody. I wasn’t in a hurry, but my plan was not to hang around where I was for twenty minutes. Then being the villain anyway for asking for my phone back before they were quite done.

I was the late-twenties guy (I’m not in my late twenties, but I look like I am) and asked that to a guy at a coffee shop in Redstone. He went with (e), though before he could actually give me the cell phone I told him what I was wanting (”Could you call my cell phone? I can’t find it.”). He called the cell and proceeded to walk around the coffee shop and help me find it.

It’s not unlike back when I was living in Deseret. Shortly before I left Colosse, my car was broken into and a few thousand dollars worth of stuff was taken from my car (it’s a long story as to why I had a few thousand dollars worth of stuff in my car). I called the Colosse PD, who couldn’t have been less interested if they had tried. I had to basically force them to take the serial number of my laptop in the event that it resurfaced at a pawn shop.

Flash forward to Deseret and I left my jacket somewhere. In my jacket was a checkbook. A couple months later, someone wrote a check to a pizza delivery place with said checkbook. I’d already canceled the account that the checkbook was cancelled to (something I had intended to do anyway, since the bank had no branches in Deseret) but the loss of my last checkbook expedited matters. Anyhow, the pizza delivery place sicked the credit collection dogs on me. In order to get out of it, I had to file an affidavit.

I apologized to the detective for taking up his time. But his response couldn’t have been more different from the Colosse PD’s. He got a subpoena for the cameras for the day in question. They didn’t have that, so he interviewed employees there. He gave me updates every two or three days. I didn’t stop him because I was interested in retrieving the jacket if it was at all possible. After about a week, he apologetically said that he had burned all leads.

Of course, we can ask “What else would a detective in small-town Deseret actually do with his time?” No doubt, there is some truth to this. But I became acquainted with the Detective over time because he lead a handful of drug arrests at the apartment complex I was living at. He was not an unimportant guy. Flash forward a little later after my car had been broken into and the culprit arrested, a DA visited me personally to ask if the plea bargain they had worked out was okay with me or if they should pursue it to the maximum extent of the law (I told her the plea bargain was fine).

I was at a tire place this morning. In the waiting room was a woman talking on the phone. She talked about all of the gossip going on around her (maybe the local) LDS church. She was actually quite witty and I cracked a smile at some of the things she said. This got a Look Of Death from her for listening in to her conversation.

Of course, I would rather not have been listening in to her conversation. I would rather have been watching TV on my phone, but I couldn’t hear it because she was talking. So instead I just got caught up on blog-reading. The only alternative was for me to go outside, where it was -5 degrees. It’s because of that I don’t blame her for not going outside to talk, which is what I would have done if I’d needed to have a phone conversation while waiting for winter tires to be put on my car. This, despite the fact that it is a pet peeve when people talk on the phone in places that are difficult to leave. I feel that way when I am driving and a passenger is talking on the cell phone. It not only means I have to listen to half of their conversation, but also that I can’t be listening to something that I would rather be listening to.

So I don’t blame her for talking inside, even in the waiting room. Except that (a) it did not seem to be a necessary conversation, and (b) when you have a conversation in such a place, your expectation of privacy is nill.

I was reminded to look into something relatively trivial today: Whether a former apartment complex I used to live in (Midlerth) was located in a particular district in town. I discovered, to my chagrin, that it’s not. I say “to my chagrin” because, with a city as sprawling as Colosse is, it’s helpful to be able to say I lived in Cameron Grove rather than trying to find the two nearest streets of note and saying “around there.” On the upshot, being able to say that I lived right by Cameron Grove is almost as good.

Anyway, Cameron Grove is actually more known as a business district. It includes the corporate headquarters of a global software company that you have probably never heard of but is actually one of the largest in the world. It was founded by a Southern Tech alumnus and benefactor. There is actually a sweet story about one of the nicer water fountains on campus that was placed there because he proposed to his wife at that particular spot on campus decades ago. They divorced three years ago.

Another generous benefactor of Southern Tech died not too long ago. This is important to Sotech, but not because he was universally beloved. In fact, a lot of people don’t care for how he made his fortune. He was also known for being a rather personally difficult, reckless, and an alcoholic. He had a DUI conviction and died in an automobile accident with a passenger (and without a seatbelt). Unmarried and childless, he left his entire state to his do-good foundation. Southern Tech, his alma mater, is expected to see a lot of that. So, god bless the bastard. (It’s actually kind of funny: Most well-known Southern Tech alumni are… somewhat disreputable individuals. The guy from the previous paragraph is an exception.)

EDK writes on Forbes about the changes we’re going to need to make for a better environment and to deal with Peak Oil.

The car culture we’ve cultivated since Eisenhower’s highway project won’t survive when gas prices get too high, and even the electric car requires power generation, which requires coal.

It’s not likely that solar and wind can power the vehicles of the future unless those vehicles drive a lot less. Alternative modes of transportation, such as rail, are a key ingredient.

Redesigning our cities to be more dense, walkable, and green will be another key. And the political forces arrayed against solar quite literally pale in comparison compared to the thicket of political resistance to improving zoning laws, increasing dense urban development, and putting an end to the suburban model of city planning.

I have to confess that I do have a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction to proclamations that the solution to a pressing problem (or more than one) are to redesign a society in a way that we would prefer society be redesigned even without the pressing problem(s). There seems to be an astonishing correlation between those who believe (a) suburbs are culturally dreadful places and (b) they will just have to change their ways because of such-and-such problem.

In a previous piece, I asked what if suburbanism and increased oil prices are not incompatible? Because they might not be. Granted, our current car culture is environmentally wasteful and may indeed be unsustainable. But this treats the question as an either-or. We can still be reliant primarily on automobiles and still consume a lot less resources than we presently do.

The issue with the car culture is not entirely one of a lack of density and public transportation. People can choose to live closer to their jobs, for instance, and still drive. Decisions within the car culture are presently being made with comparatively inexpensive gas in mind. As gas prices go up, people may start making different decisions. Those decisions may be something other than holing up in a condo or row-house less than half the size of their current abode.

The last three places we’ve lived have all been chosen specifically to be near my wife’s work. Walking distance, really. But she drives. And if gas were $20 a gallon? She’d still drive. Walking takes too long and biking isn’t an option for much of the year due to ice (at her previous jobs, ice wasn’t an issue but personal safety was). And $20 a gallon doesn’t add up all that quickly when you’re refilling your tank once every couple of months.

My commutes have, historically, been much longer. If gas had been $20 a gallon, that would have factored pretty heavily into my decision to work. I might have been more eagle-eyed towards finding work near me, but more density wouldn’t have been all that favorable to me seeing as how I worked and lived in different towns. For three straight jobs, I did this.

A lot of long (and therefore gas-eating) commutes are not the subject of the typical suburb-to-city (which is to say, sprawling-to-dense) situations. And when you can live within a few miles of your work, you can afford some pretty expensive gas. And, if we run out of gas, electrically powered cars fueled by other fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, or whatever.

When we talk about the things that make our day-to-day cost of living, one of the big ones is real estate. Sprawl, for all of its faults, can help keep real estate prices down. Maybe you can ease housing costs in the dense areas cheaper with ever-more and ever-higher construction, but I still maintain that there is a really strong chance that the price tensions will result in less density as jobs relocate and satellite offices are opened up in places more near where people actually live. And rather than a thousand corner markets opening up, people may instead make monthly trips to Walmart where they can get everything in a single trip.

In conclusion, tough decisions are going to need to be made. A world in which people have to live closer to their work would result in sacrifices. But those sacrifices are not necessarily the ones that urbanites are expecting or hoping for.

I don’t know if it was a league-wide thing or just the team that I followed, but I know it used to be that some major league baseball franchises had a ban on beards. I know that it was true at least of my favorite franchise, because I remember when they did away with it. Maybe it was a league rule and then it was passed to the teams, or whether it was just team-by-team and something that most teams did. I struggle to think of anyone from the 80’s or before who had a beard.

It sounds pretty ridiculous when you think about it. A beard? How offensive is a beard? Aren’t they taking it a little too far? That was kind of my thinking at the time. At east in part because I never like mustache’s and there were a lot of them around.

Flash forward a decade or two, though, and I think that either MLB or the teams had a point. I was watching the World Series. It happened to be on TV when the football game I was watching ended and it was a close game. Not having watched baseball in a while, I was really struck by how… ragged… the players look these days. They used to look like professionals or at least adults. Now they look like college drop-outs on weed. At least some of them look like the sort of person you would avoid while walking through the park. Few of them look like people you would necessarily trust to babysit your kid.

Some of this is, no doubt, a function of age. When you’re young, all old people look like adults. When you become an adult, well some look more adult than others, except you think of it in terms of “respectability” and whatnot, if you differentiate.

How did we get from here to there? I suppose there is an argument to be made that the rules were too strict for too long so that when they were finally allowed to “let loose” they did so in a conspicuous faction. Maybe it was gradual and for some reason nobody said “Look, a goatee is fine, but you do have to cut it every now and again.”

Or maybe it’s just a sign of the times. Things that were once rebel have become rather common - especially among athletes. Back in the day, rebels were often clean cut by today’s standards except for their hair and their clothes (clothes are, of course, the team uniforms and 80’s hair doesn’t work so well under a baseball cap, so they were clean-cut by default). And so athletes are a mirror of society in general. There are also ethnic considerations, though it’s worth pointing out that baseball has been integrated for a long time.

Whatever the case, it makes me feel old in a “get off my lawn” sort of way. Not that it’s the first time, since I look around at what constitutes “business attire” and roll my eyes.

I happened to catch the tail end of the game between UAB and Central Florida last week, wherein the former got their first win of the season upsetting the latter. It was a great game that came down to the final minute of play. Though the network (something called “CSS”) was loathe to show wide-angle shots of the stadium, I would guess that maybe 500 people were there to see it. This was an intraconference game with a big opponent (UCF is likely headed to the Big East soon).

At least they aren’t Eastern Michigan. UAB claimed that there were 8,000 people there, but I doubt it. At least they have the excuse that it was a weeknight game in somewhat crummy weather. EMU has to hit up their sponsor to buy tickets. Tickets cap out at $9 and they still can’t get people to show up.

I am loathe to say that a school should give up its football program because people aren’t showing up, but… geeze.

Meanwhile, an SMU player called his team’s atmosphere a”pee-wee league experience.” SMU, like UCF, may be headed to the Big East. Their attendance isn’t as dreadful as UAB’s, but it would likely stand out in the BE (which itself is no SEC, attendance-wise).

Southern Tech pushes hard to get people to show up, though is not in the position of EMU, UAB, or SMU. Though University of Delosa people look at any empty seats as a sign of abject failure.

It’s all relative, I suppose. But when you’re being beaten out by high school football and college basketball in attendance, you have something to answer for in a way that West Virginia (whose coach complained about fewer than 40k showing up for a game) doesn’t.

Last season, I went to go see most of the Callie Cougars home games, all of which but one they won by 40 points or more (the other they won by 27 or so). They went on to lose in the first round of the playoffs. Since the decision was more-or-less made that we were not going to be staying in Callie very long, I decided to divest my interest in the Cougars. I decided instead that I would see the Redstone Copperheads, being that I work for the district in all. Also, last year I got to see the construction on the “new” stadium and look forward to actually sitting in the stands of it. So I’d just wait for a Friday teaching job and stick around, but that never quite came. So I made a trip up today.

I didn’t do due diligence, however. Otherwise, I would have waited until next week. The Copperheads are playing Alexandria High, the #1 school in the state sitting at 8-0. The chances of winning are not very high (Redstone is 4-4). Meanwhile, the Cougars are playing St Matthew, Redstone’s hoity-toity private school that I vaguely root against. St Matthew, usually a powerhouse because they can pluck the local football talent from Redstone High with football scholarships, is having a down year. Callie is 8-0 and the #1 team in its divisions (St Matthew and Redstone are both from a division above).

So instead of seeing Callie pound the school I don’t like, I’ll be watching Redstone get pounded.

But the stadium should be cool. It’ll also hopefully give me a chance to get a Redstone Copperheads t-shirt, which they stopped selling at Walmart right about the time I decided to get one (they still carry St Matthew shirts).

Addendum: No shirt. They sold posters, but no shirts. Frustrating. Callie be St Matthew by over 50 points. Redstone lost by 12, though it was actually a close game that came down to the final minutes of the game. A minute and a half to go, Redstone had the ball in the red zone, but couldn’t convert a fourth down. Alexandria’s beefy running back then made an 85-yard run.

It’s been several years since the NCAA decided to start punishing schools that use tribal mascots and imagery. For the most part, it has shaken itself out and almost everybody has selected a new mascot. They became the Red Wolves, RedHawks, Warhawks, and Mustangs. The Illini are still the Illini, but without the imagery, and the Tribe are still the Tribe, but without the feather. The lone hold-out remains the University of North Dakota, and they’re about to pay a steep price:

When UND was accepted for Big Sky membership in November, the conference’s other colleges believed the issue was settled and UND would retire the nickname, Fullerton said in a letter to Kelley. Should UND keep the Fighting Sioux nickname and Indian head logo, the school could face boycotts from other colleges and cancellations of athletic events, he said.

“Boycotts by individual schools or leagues will certainly have a negative effect on all of your programs, including hockey,” Fullerton wrote. “Couple these issues with postseason restrictions, and we are concerned that this state law has the possibility of destroying Division I athletics at the University of North Dakota.”.

The “individual schools” joining the boycott include the nearby University of Minnesota, an important rival for their hockey program (UND’s primary sport is hockey, their football program being overshadowed by North Dakota State). Losing their spot in the Big Sky Conference is itself quite a big deal, as the Big Sky is one of the better FCS-level conferences and includes some pretty big western schools. The mascot has already cost them a spot in the Summit League and Missouri Valley Football Conference, which the other three Dakota schools, as well as Nebraska-Omaha, will be playing in soon. Their hockey program will also be sidelined from playoffs.

The school had already announced an intent to change mascots, but they were overruled by the state legislature. Also important, some very big UND donors have threatened to stop donating money to the program if they make the change. This puts the university in a really rough place. The legislature and boosters are counting on the NCAA flinching, or else gambling with their entire athletics program to hold on to the tribal connection. Is it worth being the Sioux if nobody will play you?

A lot of this points back to the poor way that the NCAA handled this. The NCAA doesn’t have the authority to make any schools do anything, but they nonetheless played a pretty heavy hand. They allowed waivers that let Florida State, Utah, and others get through if they had the support of one or more tribes that they were representing. But otherwise, they set a pretty high bar for any school representing a tribe with more than one faction. North Dakota actually has the support of one Sioux tribe, and in my mind that ought to be enough. Making their continued use of the name contingent on tribal approval strikes me as a good compromise.

In addition to avoiding this trainwreck, it could have been a truly beneficial exchange. Things worked out very well with Florida State, where the school started changing its iconography and imagery to that of the actual Seminole tribe. Likewise, had UND been required to retain the goodwill of the Sioux, they could have asked for the same. Or money, for that matter. Or admittance and scholarships. This could have been a win-win. The origins of UND’s selection of the Sioux are actually known. They were chosen because the school wanted something that was good at killing Bison, which is the mascot of their in-state rival, and they researched it and determined that the Sioux were great bison-hunters. Putting UND’s specific situation aside, schools with generic names like Indians could conceivably have even be asked to emphasize the name of their sponsoring tribe, which for a lesser-known tribe that would like a higher profile, would be a positive. Especially if it came out that they were good hunters.

When I first started substitute teaching up in Redstone, one of the things I was worried about was, well, Redstoners. The term was introduced to me by my trainer with the Census Bureau to express her disdain to the Redstone hand-off person. A Redstoner is a Redstonian that basically doesn’t have their act together at all. The hand-off person, for instance, was pregnant by one of two men while trying to convince a third man that he was actually the father. She thought that the not-father might buy it because “Redstoners can’t count to nine (months).” It’s a slight at a particular kind of Redstonian, but with the assumption that most of them fit that profile.

Callieites, as a general rule, don’t like Redstone. I do. But even so, it’s hard to deny that there is a certain lack of… ambition… or put-togetherness among much of its population. Barely 20% have college degrees despite the fact that they have a college. It has a high drop-out rate and a median home price of $115,000. Callie looks downright cosmopolitan by example. My wife’s coworker’s husband, Jack Alvarez, is a thrice-successful entrepreneur who had intended to start a business upon arriving, but quickly discovered a distinct lack of human capital (a lack of people in Callie, a lack of people with skills in Redstone).

So I wasn’t sure what to expect when I signed on to teach their young. Particularly given how the Catholic school likely siphons off a lot of those from good families (2/3 of the town is Catholic, 3/4 if you include Greek/Serbian/Eastern Orthodox). But the student population really surprised me. There were certainly some that were obviously future Redstoners, but a lot that weren’t. Their personalities really start to form in junior high where you can start seeing their trajectories. Some are destined to be Redstoners. A lot, though, seem to me the exact kind of people that would become future employees of Jack Alvarez. Do all of them lose all of that in high school? That was a depressing thought. Then I wondered what these people would do professionally, and in a “no spit, spurlock” moment it became all too clear what happens to them.

They leave.

They go off to college, stay wherever they went, or move some place else where there are jobs. Redstone has lost population (and Alexandria gained it) more census counts than not since it’s peak over half a century ago. Some come back and teach (seems almost every teacher I’ve met went through the Redstone schooling system), but if they keep track of how many of the top half of high school graduates end up staying in Redstone, I’d bet the number to be pretty low. The thought isn’t as depressing as when I was wondering if there was some natural regression, but it’s still kind of sad.

Of course, what’s the alternative? Back when I was working in Mocum, Deseret, I wondered aloud on this blog why so many of the people I knew there were still there working for less than $10/hr when their skills could get them so much more elsewhere. I suppose if I taught in Mocum’s schools I would probably consider the tragedy of those who do leave rather than those that chose not to.

Clancy had some paperwork to catch up on, so I watched the Superbowl at a local bar, The Calfway House. I figured, if nothing else, it would help me meet and get to know some of the locals. If we’re going to stay in Callie, one of the things I am going to need to do is get to know people. A bar is probably not the best place to meet likeminded people, but it’s a place, which is better than watching the game at home on my TV.

One of the first people I met was a woman who seemed to be about my age. It turned out that she, like myself, had once lived in Fort Beck, Deseret. I discovered this when someone at the bar was badmouthing the state. It turned out that she was not really “about my age” at all. In fact, the more she and I talked, the older it became apparent she was. At one point, I wanted to ask “Just how old are you, lady?” Her children were out of the house (and I got the impression that they had been for some time) with one of them giving her two grandchildren. I had been under the impression that she had lived in Fort Beck during her college days, but she later said that she lived there from 1968-71, meaning that either she’s nearing sixty or I misunderstood.

I also met a patient of Clancy’s. I found this out the typical way. Basically, he found out that I moved her recently. There was all manner of good food at the Calfway and I asked him if I needed to leave money in a jar for what I ate. Apparently, feeding people (with, did I mention, good food?) is something of a Calfway tradition, and so he knew that I either didn’t live here or that I had moved here recently. So he asked what brought me to Callie, I told him my wife’s work, he asked what she did, I told him that she was a doctor at Dent Hospital, he asked her name, and lo and behold he is a patient. This has happened three or four times since I have arrived. Every conversation unfolding nearly the same way.

I also got to know another guy somewhat, who was about my age and seemed like an interesting guy. The sort of guy I was hoping to meet; the sort of guy I will be able to converse with easily in the future. As often seems to happen, I never did get the guy’s name. Neither of the other two, either (which drove Clancy crazy when she tried to remember the patient). That’ll have to be the next step. Learning their names.

Every year or few, there is a push in football to emphasize calling a particularly penalty because of injuries occurring from a particular type of hit or penalty. This year, in college football, it’s “helmet-to-helmet contact,” though I think they’ve renamed the penalty to something else. With the ramifications of concussions becoming more clear, the concern is understandable.

Unfortunately, player behavior often follows the rules and we’re starting to see that later in the season. Ball-carriers seem to be intentionally lowering their head more frequently, making them harder to hit without getting them in the head. So on at least a couple of occasions, the announcers have mentioned what seemed obvious to me: without hitting the head, there’s simply no way to tackle to runner. They’re all but guaranteed a few extra yards or an extra 15 (plus an automatic first down) if they make the hit anyway. This is, perhaps, a small price to pay for player safety. And it seems to be effective. But I wonder if the end-result isn’t going to be runners retrained to get those extra few yards or even better draw a huge penalty. That would be a huge backfire.

A while back, Transplanted Lawyer complained about the NFL stepping up penalty-calling for injury-causing tackles:

Instead, it’s wimping out and threatening to penalize — including fining and suspending — players who hit each other hard and risk injuring their opponent. There is an inherent risk of injury in this sport, and all sports. People agree to do it anyway — they compete and dedicate their entire lives to giving themselves even an opportunity to do it, because there is a tremendous audience for it — and it’s fun. I don’t mean to suggest that the NFL should go back to the days of leather helmets, no pads, and adopt an eye-gouging rule. There should be reasonable ways to protect players from unnecessary and avoidable kinds of harm. I like that the players wear well-designed helmets, armor, and that there are particular kinds of maneuvers and stunts that are not permitted. It’s a fine line to draw as to what kinds of methods of forcing your opponent to the ground should be permitted and what should not be. The guys who run the show need to do what is reasonable and appropriate to prevent injuries — but they also need to bear in mind that we’re talking about tackle football. There are going to be injuries and I thought everyone knew that.

One of the ironies is that football would likely be safer if they did away with the pads and the helmets. The introduction of these safety measures resulted in players changing the way the hits are made. The illusion of invulnerability has caused players to become more and more reckless. Compare football to rugby, that other tackling sport that doesn’t have the pads, and it’s the former where injuries are far more common. Back when I was in junior high, in the offseason we would play a hybrid rugby-football game without pads and injuries never occurred because the hitter had no more protection than the hittee and so the result was that tackles were made with the aim of getting the player down rather than making sure that they don’t get that extra yard or two.

I’ve heard similar things about how seat belt and safer cars make things more dangerous for pedestrians, though I don’t know how true that is. There’s also a pretty strong argument to be made that the illusion of safety that condoms provide created a culture where people were less cautious about their sexual behavior and this is precisely why unwanted pregnancies and illegitimacy rates climbed ferociously as more and more ways to prevent same have become available.

Not sure if any of you have seen this, but for those who don’t want to view the video, what happened is that a quarterback pretended that the ball needed to be moved 5 yards downfield due to a penalty. While everyone was standing around, he made a break for it and scored the game-winning touchdown.

There was also a recent case when a Cal coach was suspended for having his players fake injury:

Because they run a tempo offense, this sort of thing happens to the Southern Tech Packers with regularity. Pack fans have taken some heat because we’ve come to start booing injured players from certain teams, which is a no-no. It doesn’t help that it often happens with one of Sotech’s rivals, the Piermont Riptide.

Some rivalries are made (due to proximity, usually) and some are born. Sotech and Piermont actually have next to nothing in common as universities (Piermont is a small, private school with a mildly religious background while Sotech is a large public school) who had a rivalry born with a long history of playing one another in games with a lot at stake. Also, Sotech used to be in the habit of running up the score on and on a couple of occasions posted victories with more than 90 points on the board, and Piermont has never forgotten (and they consider it further proof that we are a low-class school). Adding to all of this is an immense dislike by Packer fans of Piermont’s coach, Rod Gandi for reasons I won’t get into.

Anyhow, a couple of seasons ago Piermont inexplicably redesigned their uniforms for a game to emulate ours. Presumably to confuse our players. Typical Gandi, we thought. Then, as we were driving down the field to win the game, over and over again they kept getting “injured” and slowing us down as we were trying to catch their defense off-guard with high-tempo, no-huddle play. Same two players. After the game, Piermont fans were bragging about that it’s not against the rules or anything (actually, as the video demonstrates, it is) and we should just suck it up.

Flash forward to the next season and the our team and our fans are going ballistic every time a player gets hurt. The Piermont fans (on the message board) complained and again suggested that it just showed how low-class our fans were. Others even admitted that they had faked injuries before but that the benefit of the doubt should always go to the limping player. Our fans, obviously, disagreed.

The problem with trick plays like this, whether they are against the rules or not, are that they often lead to things like fans getting angry at injured players for the other team (for the record, one Piermont player we booed was out for the season). I don’t like injured players getting booed. And I want to give every seemingly-injured player the benefit of the doubt. But our coaches and players are left to appeal to the refs every time a player doesn’t get up right until the stretcher comes out and it becomes apparent that there might be a real injury here.

As cute as the high middle school play shown above is, it creates a similar problem. In the event that there is any sort of confusion, what should the defensive players do? If they’re wrong in one direction, it’s a touchdown. If they’re wrong in the other direction, it’s a 15-yard penalty (and possible ejection from the game). Ultimately, it’s not just a trick play, it’s a bad-faith play. A few of the articles talking about the play are saying that it’s a play you only get away with once. Maybe. And maybe some kid will get tackled because some defensive lineman thinks that play has started. In this case, the player walked past the defenders, but next time he may just start walking to the sideline with the ball. Maybe he will genuinely be confused. Maybe not. When there’s not a clear indication of what the defense is supposed to be doing, it’s a recipe for potential problems.

Which is a shame. Cause it really is kind of a cool play.

I’m back at the Copper Cafe. I decided that it was finally time to leave the dog at home, in the yard, alone. To make sure she doesn’t go crazy. I figure that going to Redstone at least gives me the ability to get back quickly if she escapes and someone calls the number on the tag.

I’m here less than half an hour and apparently the Christian-Marxist-Greens are holding their meeting and I’m already getting distracted. This is the second time in a row our paths have converged. To no great surprise, at least a couple of them are college professors. One used to live in Colosse and another in Soundview. They’re discussing the merits of democracy. One of them is trying to reconcile Marxism and democracy. Another is arguing that real democracy doesn’t include votes but rather is a state of consciousness and therefore a nation that looks after its own is more democratic than is a country like the United States wherein we vote but the government is unresponsive to our needs due to the corporate interests.

Next door is a really interesting house. Well, kind of a row-house that was converted from a restaurant or cafe of some sort. It has a really neat patio. Until you look in the windows (or notice the absolute lack of signage) it looks to all the world like a the competing cafe it probably once was. On the other side of the Copper Cafe is an actually residence that’s split into what was split into what must be two pretty small abodes.

The Copper Cafe has no air conditioning, which in the current weather is quite pleasant. This was not the case a couple months ago.

A couple of articles recently have centered around the subject of women’s athletics at the college and professional levels. First, Christina Hoff Summers:

Diana Nyad, sports show host for National Public Radio affiliate KCRW and a celebrated distance swimming champion, was moved to write a special introduction to the latest report: “Women’s athletic skill levels have risen astronomically over the past twenty years … It is time for television news and highlights shows to keep pace with this revolution.” She describes the neglect of women’s sports as “unfathomable and unacceptable.”

But the heavy focus of news and highlights shows on men’s sports is not only fathomable but obvious—that is where the fans are. And that is where advertisers expect to find customers for “male” products such as beer, razors, and cars. Men’s professional sports are a fascination (obsession is more like it) to many millions of men, because they offer extreme competition, performance, and heroics. Women’s professional sports, however skilled and admirable, cannot compare in Promethean drama.

Even women prefer watching male teams. Few women follow the sports pages and ESPN, but many enjoy attending live games—featuring male athletes. According to Sports Business Daily, 31 percent of the NFL’s “avid fans” are women.

By and large, men want to watch men play. Most sports fans are men. But women that are interested in sports usually want to watch what the men are watching. This is true in part because it was likely their father or brother or husband that got them into sports in the first place. So they are introduced primarily to men’s sports. There are some exceptions to this, such as gymnastics and ice-skating, but it still remains generally so.

Once interested in the NBA of NCAA MBB, there’s no reason for them not to branch off to women’s basketball or, for that matter, volleyball. But sports are, generally speaking, a social activity. It’s not as fun to watch a sport that nobody cares about because, apart from Internet chatting, there’s nobody to talk to about it. So while Lacrosse may be a perfectly respectable sport, if you try to talk to anybody about the National Lacrosse League you’re simply going to bore them. I run into the same thing when it comes to non-alumni of Southern Tech University athletics. They’re not national players. Their conference is not one of the three or four premier conferences. Better to be able to talk about the wildly successful Delosa Panthers who draw 80k a game than the Southern Tech Packers who struggle to draw half of that.

That’s why a lot of universities that have difficulty succeeding in football or men’s basketball don’t just switch to another sport that they can dominate. A few have done so, but is the fact that the University of Denver and Alabama-Huntsville have stellar hockey teams something that registers at all? Did you even know that they had really good hockey teams? Or that Cal State-Fullerton has a really good baseball team? Given how hopeless it would be for these universities to build good football programs, going the hockey route may indeed be the best option for them, but collegiate hockey and women’s basketball are never going to really dominate our interest and so it’s not worthwhile to throw a whole lot of investment that way.

Of course, to some extent they don’t have a choice when it comes to women’s basketball or softball or soccer. Title IX requires that they field teams and that these teams are funded adequately. A lot of people like to rip on Title IX, but was (perhaps an overreaching) solution to a real problem. My father-in-law was actually the first coach of the Vandalia Fighting Vandals women’s basketball team many years ago. The pre-T9 accommodations were nothing short of pathetic. Since the reason for college athletics is ostensibly to support student athletes, there’s no reason that they shouldn’t be adequately funded in some relation to the way that men’s athletics are funded. That’s not to say that Title IX couldn’t use some tweaking - I would argue that revenues brought in by men’s sports should count for something - but I consider a lot of the criticisms off-base.

Less off-base, though, than complaints about the media. Other than perhaps soccer, no sport has ever been pumped up by the sports media more than women’s basketball. Indeed, when I was growing up there were three major college sports and women’s basketball was one of them. Now there are two major sports and two secondary ones with women’s basketball in the latter category along with college baseball. A few years ago I wondered exactly what happened to women’s basketball. What I discovered is that there was really a lack of interest. Why did interest decline? I don’t think it did. I think that the interest was never there. ESPN and the like just spent a whole lot of time and effort trying to build the interest. Sports media wants there to be more popular sports. Nothing would please them more than a robust women’s college basketball system because it would give them more stuff to sell you and it would increase leverage with Atlantic 10 men’s basketball to be able to play off Big East women’s basketball against it (”If you don’t take this paltry sum, we’ll just show this other thing instead!”). Attempts by ESPN and Fox Sports and the like to build sport interest are spotty. Particularly women’s sports, though there was a push for hockey a few years back that was unsuccessful as well. The only successful one I can think of is Poker.

The second article (teaser, really) on the subject I’ve read is one about a Division III conference getting in trouble for playing the women’s game before the men’s in double-headers. Like James Joyner, I initially thought the objection was that it was demeaning to the women athletes to have to open up for the men. If that were the case, my response would be the above. While it’s good that women are given an equal chance to play as men, we can’t just pretend that there is or could be equal interest. And having them as the “opening act” probably goes them a greater service than having them play on different nights. I was a JV basketball player at the junior high level and we benefited greatly by playing before the varsity squad and drew better crowds than varsity women’s who played on a different night. As it turns out, that’s only part of the object. The other part, that earlier games cut more into class times than later ones, is a more valid objection. In that case, it might actually be better for them to play on different nights.

ED Kain reports that we have Jimmy Carter to thank for America’s booming beer industry:

To make a long story short, prohibition led to the dismantling of many small breweries around the nation. When prohibition was lifted, government tightly regulated the market, and small scale producers were essentially shut out of the beer market altogether. Regulations imposed at the time greatly benefited the large beer makers. In 1979, Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening back up to craft brewers.

I am personally positively bland in my beer tastes. My “favorite” beer is a Delosa-based outfit (”Wurzbock”) that’s something of a state institution. I put favorite in quotes because I’m not sure if I actually prefer it to Budweiser. Back when I was going to a lot of bars (for music shows) I made the switch to Budweiser simply because it was cheaper. Having moved away from Delosa, I now drink Wurzbock whenever I get back into town simply because it’s less available outside of the state. I say “less available” because according to Wikipedia it’s actually available in over 40 states. I would periodically see Wurzbock trucks when I was in Cascadia. I was tempted to follow one just to see what bar it was headed to. There was another local beer I sometimes drink instead that costs the same as Budweiser, isn’t as good, but is named after my home state. Home field advantage, I guess.

Most of the time, I am fine with Budweiser (or Miller or Coors)g. I’ll drink any non-lite beer. I have some friends that are beer snobs and try to push this really malty stuff on it. I would periodically order Guinness only because I hate it and therefore one glass would last me all night long. For the most part, I am the opposite of a beer snob. Mostly because I don’t really like beer all that much. I had to force myself to like it in the first place (that I would do so astonished many Delosians Deseretians). I did so by basically taking hot days and instead of drinking a coke like I wanted I would just drink a beer. Eventually my mind began associating beer with refreshment. But the effects have sort of worn off as in Arapaho and Cascadia there were never many really hot days. I used the same tactic with diet coke, though that always wears off almost instantly as soon as I drink a couple cans of the real thing.

So unfortunately President Carter’s contribution is more or less lost on me.

Earlier this week I had dinner with my parents and some of their old friends (The Harrells) from before we moved to Delosa thirty or so years ago. Anyhow, I noticed something odd about the way that the waitress spoke. It was hard to pin down, but it seemed like she might be suppressing an accent. She would start out sounding strange and then within a few words it would come out normal. Sorta normal. Not accenty, but a little off.

After I noticed this for the third time or so, I commented on it to Mr. Harrell, who said that he had noticed something similar. However, he thought it was coming from the opposite direction. As in, she was very American trying to affect a foreign accent. She would slip into sounding normal because she would forget she was in accent mode. For some reason, Dad thought she was a he. Well, not entirely, but he was trying to figure out what was so strange about her.

Mr. Harrell was the one that had the courage to ask where she was from. Turns out that he was right and I was wrong. She was from a place in Kingsland that he used to live. They actually talked about it a little while. She was well-enough versed in the area and the local high school that there was no doubt that she was actually from there and not an illegal immigrant from The Czech Republic.

So he was right. Most likely. I still maintain that I might not have been wrong if the accent she was trying to bury was a southern accent. The pronounced potato “poh-tah-to.” My Aunt Evelyn uses the same sound. Po-tah-to instead of potato. Ont instead of ant for aunt. She was raised in the rural south every bit as much as my mother and other aunt were. But from a very young age, she sought to get out. Out of rural. Out of poor. Out of the south. She still lives in the south because she married a (wealthy) southerner who didn’t want to leave, but she is an anglophile that identifies more with Britain than the US in some ways. Along the way, long before I met her and before I was ever born, she slaughtered her accent.

But I think that just further proves that Mr. Harrell is right, though. Most likely she pronounced po-tah-to for the same reason my aunt did, because that’s the way that Americans think Brits pronounce the word. She faltered between this unidentifiably accented voice and this sort of… I don’t know… chrome… voice, but never slipped into a southern voice that I could determine. The chrome voice came off to me like someone trying to sound like an American by way of watching too many movies. But maybe not.

In any event, the speculation passed the time while my folks and the Harrells talked about a bunch of people they knew before I was born or before I turned four.

Going to live music shows means dealing with audiences that are sometimes unpleasant. I have gotten frustrated with audiences in the past for one reason or another. For instance, there are the people that inexplicably decided to go to a music show in order to chat about things while the singer is trying to sing. Or cases of fan-girls going gah-gah and embarassing themselves over an attractive singer. The guy who doesn’t see the “no smoking” sign. And I’m sure there are those that would complain about me obstructing their view.

In only one instance have I been so frustrated with an audience person that I wanted to throttle them.

Shane Cooper is a folk-type singer in Delosa that I stumbled across due to a particularly clever song about Buddhist monks, bubble gum, and bad luck. I listened to more of his stuff and heard a sensitive, insightful, descriptive, and humorous singer. Despite his vocation that puts him on stage in front of crowds every night, Cooper is a serious introvert. It’s hard to get him to talk at all either in person or on stage. I wonder if he took up songwriting because it was the only way that he could communicate.

One time Cooper and this other guy named Max Knowles were doing a show at a local sit-down bar. Knowles was a songwriter who has had songs taken up by Willie Nelson, Dollie Parton, and others that you’ve heard of, though Knowles himself was a guy I’d never heard of until that night. He had a bit of a chip on his shoulder on how some of the songs that were taken up by big artists were reworked and bastardized and he was not shy talking about it. I found it all kind of interesting, but I could see how some might get irritated. Nobody ever said anything to him about it, though.

Cooper, meanwhile, chose this particular night to finally open up. He started actually talking about a song that he wrote about a family friend that took him hunting when he was 10 or so. It’s not my favorite song, but it has more depth than most. The attention to detail and sort of feel of the song told you that this was one of those that was based on something real. And there he was, at the club, actually talking about it. I couldn’t have been more excited.

Then… out of nowhere… at that precise moment, some drunkard in the audience told him to just shut up and sing. Cooper did just that, post-haste. He didn’t need any more excuse than that. The rest of the night the audience tried to prod him into talking again, but he would say “By popular request, I’m just going to shut up and sing.” And he never talked about his songs again.

My brother Mitch, my father, and I went to a Colosse Canes baseball game. It worked out perfectly because they already had tickets and it gave Mitch and I the opportunity to spend some time together. My other brother Oliver has a wife that’s giving birth in the next week or two has since given birth, so he’s sort of tied up at the moment.

I hadn’t realized that I would be going to a baseball game or else I would have bought down my precious Canes baseball cap (precious because it’s a size 8, difficult to find). I don’t have any shirts or anything else, but as luck would have it my father has one that he goes running in and so I was able to be appropriately attired.

I was a bit conflicted as to how to cheer. I haven’t really been a fan of the Canes since leaving Colosse or really for a while before that. I mostly bought the cap out of regional pride. I wanted to buy the cap from when I followed the team, but alas the most current was all they had available. But the real reason I was conflicted was that the starting pitcher for Queen City was a fellow alum of Southern Tech University. Not that I knew him or anything, but he pitched for our team.

The game did not stay close for long. The Trumans make a point not to get bored at baseball games and we never, ever leave early. So we entertained ourselves with talk of the league. A while back I created a spreadsheet with all of the markets for the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Mitch and I talked about where the MLB would expand to if they took my advice. I quizzed both Mitch and Dad on which market is the biggest without any teams in those three leagues and which market is the smallest to have a team in any of those leagues (anyone who wants to hazard a guess is free to do so* - using real-world city names, of course).

Dad was really proud of himself for having taken a plastic knife with him. I didn’t understand why until we got our chili dogs and I struggled to part mine up with just a fork. It’s amazing how times change. There was a day when Dad would die rather than spend $7 on a hot dog. Or I would die rather than spend $8 on a beer.

Budweiser is apparently running a deal where if you agree to be a designated driver they will buy you two free soft drinks. Dad took them up on that, but I declined. I figure I don’t get to go to games very often and a beer at a game was something I wanted to do. As with my previous experience with alcohol when I was stranded in Meriwether, it didn’t take much to get me inebriated. Mitch and I drunkenly discussed the future of college football on the way home.

* - Update: Since a couple people are actually taking a stab at the questions, I figured I would post a bit about the methodology. The answers are in the comment section, so don’t read through the comments if you intend to guess.

The most important is that if a city is within a 90-minute drive of another city with a team, it’s considered too close. That bumps up to 150 minutes if the cities do not both have teams in any league. So Green Bay and Milwaukee are considered the same market, as are Orlando and Tampa and San Jose and San Fransisco. Raleigh and Charlotte (and LA and San Diego) would be different cities.

Yeah, the rules are kind of arbitrary, but I needed a formula for what I was working on at the time. I was aggressive about coupling markets together, but that was to deprive the person I was debating with of an easy argument (”You list all of these potential markets but some don’t count because they’re too close to other markets and therefore I am going to conveniently ignore all of your other points!”). It was related to this.

The numbers are taken from the MSA from the census. In the event that there is an “anchor city” (Milwaukee to Green Bay, San Antonio to Austin) we’re looking at the population of the MSA. The original census numbers I was looking at were from a few years ago, though I’ve done some spot-checking to see what’s changed (ie New Orleans, Oklahoma City getting a basketball team, and so on). Feel free to challenge if you think I missed something.

There are two cities of any significant size near Callie, Alexandria and Redstone. Redstone is a little closer, so when I need a “big city thing” like a Walmart, I go to Redstone. My doctor’s appointment, however, was in Alexandria. A lot of people prefer to drive the extra distance to go to Alexandria anyway. I am coming to prefer Redstone and all of is decrepit rustic authenticity to Alexandria’s yuppie charms.

I will say this of Alexandria, though. Toenail polish here is kept to a minimum. Maybe only half the women in open-toed shoes (common in this season) seem to be wearing toenail polish. I applaud this development. Callie has more in the way of nail polish than I would have guessed. Deseret didn’t have it nearly as much and Callie is only a couple hours away from Mocum. I was thinking, hoping, that it was a western thing. Nail polish was less frequent in Estacado, too. It’s nigh-universal in Colosse and Delosa, alas.

I had to drive Crayola, my almost-teenager of an economy car. Since taking on my Census Route, I have been driving Ninjette, Clancy’s fully-teenager (but really quiet and smooth) full-size. Unfortunately, she had to visit a doc in Redstone the same day I had to visit a doc in Alexandria. Since I was the one that arranged this little inconvenience, I volunteered to drive Crayola. It’s good to get some quality time with him before we swap him out in August (we think/hope), though I had gotten quite used to (a) cruise control and (b) the ability to accelerate.

But I’m not really thinking about that as I drive. Instead, I am thinking “Man, I wonder what happens next?!” Tom Clancy audiobooks will do that.