Pity the Whining College Professor: Where’s the ESPN for Physics?
Filed under: College Basketball, College Football
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 27, 2012 – The New York Times ran a long article by author Laura Pappano a week ago entitled How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life, which included these missiles from a couple of midwestern academics:
Ohio State boasts 17 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, three Nobel laureates, eight Pulitzer Prize winners, 35 Guggenheim Fellows and a MacArthur winner. But sports rule.
“It’s not, ‘Oh, yeah, Ohio State, that wonderful physics department.’ It’s football,” said Gordon Aubrecht, an Ohio State physics professor.
Last month, Ohio State hired Urban Meyer to coach football for $4 million a year plus bonuses (playing in the B.C.S. National Championship game nets him an extra $250,000; a graduation rate over 80 percent would be worth $150,000). He has personal use of a private jet.
Dr. Aubrecht says he doesn’t have enough money in his own budget to cover attendance at conferences. “From a business perspective,” he can see why Coach Meyer was hired, but he calls the package just more evidence that the “tail is wagging the dog.”
Dr. Aubrecht is not just another cranky tenured professor. Hand-wringing seems to be universal these days over big-time sports, specifically football and men’s basketball. Sounding much like his colleague, James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan and author of “Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University,” said this: “Nine of 10 people don’t understand what you are saying when you talk about research universities. But you say ‘Michigan’ and they understand those striped helmets running under the banner.”
I think Pappano has it all wrong. Aubrecht is another cranky, tenured professor. In fact, his comments epitomize the crankiness of academics whose inability to adapt to today’s culture, media environment and the vast opportunities attendant to them and dooms them to local, regional, national and international invisibility. That is, of course, outside of their own field of study and the students who are unfortunate enough to have to take their classes.
How so? Consider:
• The enormous expansion in coaching salaries, ticket prices and national television (and other media) exposure is a fairly recent phenomenon. It has been fueled in significant part by deregulation of the television industry and the enormous expansion of cable television and, now, the Internet. As long as advertisers and viewers support a channel, it will prosper. That’s what is driving increased revenues in college sports and increased spending.
• Noting this trend, universities have tried to cash in . . . some of them quite stupidly, with the resulting loss of monies that could be spent elsewhere on campus. That’s a local failure, not a failure of colleges as a whole, and chancellors and university presidents should be held accountable. But the trend is unmistakable.
Even the Ivy League, about which Pappano refers to its founding agreement that its student-athletes “enjoy the game as participants in a form of recreational competition rather than as professional performers in public spectacles,” has recently entered into an agreement with Versus (now the NBC Sports Network) to televise multiple football games each fall. The Harvard -Yale game is still a spectacle: 55,137 attended the 2011 edition in New Haven.
• If whiners like Aubrecht are unhappy with the exposure they receive, where are their plans to increase revenues? Where is his plan for a Physics Channel? Or an Ohio State academic channel? Are there not television facilities on-campus and in Columbus, Ohio?
And if his classes and field of study are so uninteresting as to draw no interest, why is he in a tenured position? Shouldn’t he be excused and replaced with lower-cost lecturers in the topic . . . if it is to be taught at Ohio State at all?
• One more aspect to consider: some of the more entrepreneurial university professors are now being expensively recruited by campuses because of the research funding they attract, often from public institutions such as the U.S. Government. How much of their income is from grants and other non-university-provided funding, and where is the public posting of their contracts? How many hours per week do they spend teaching and how many hours in for-profit research? Urban Meyer’s deal with Ohio State is quite public; what about Professor Aubrecht?
In any case, Aubrecht especially shouldn’t be complaining, but praising Ohio State’s financial approach to athletics. OSU is one of only eight schools out of the 120 Football Bowl Subdivision institutions which in the 2009-10 school year (a) took in more money than they spent on intercollegiate athletics and (b) received no subsidies from their university’s general fund or student’s fees. These schools are (in alphabetical order):
• LSU
• Nebraska
• Ohio State
• Oklahoma
• Penn State
• Purdue
• Texas
• Texas A&M
These schools deserve our congratulations on being both self-sustaining, and in the case of Ohio State, giving money to the university annually in the form of scholarship funds!
The USA Today list which noted the eight schools that had surpluses without subsidies also noted another 22 schools which had a surplus from their intercollegiate athletic programs, but which received at least some money from the university or its students (alphabetically):
• Alabama
• Arkansas
• Florida
• Georgia
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Kansas State
• Michigan
• Michigan State
• Oklahoma State
• Oregon
• Virginia Tech
• Washington
• West Virginia
There were a number of other schools with balanced budgets that were not noted, but it is also true that only 22 out of 228 NCAA Division I schools showed a surplus of revenues over expenses in intercollegiate athletics for the 2009-10 academic year.
In my view, that’s what should be looked at. If an intercollegiate athletics program balances its budget, or makes money, without the use of university funds, criticism rings hollow. Where university funds are used, the question of priorities is open for discussion.
But envy solves nothing. In a country where there are many all-sports networks, but also dozens of quite profitable channels given over to news, finance and even government and history (not to mention the three excellent non-profit channels of C-SPAN), the energy wasted on whining would be much better spent in developing new ways of bringing science, literature and philosophy to the public.
(You can stay current with Rich’s technology, sports and Olympic commentaries by following him at www.twitter.com/RichPerelman.)
Meb Keflezighi atop the Pyramid of Success
Filed under: College Basketball, Olympic Games, Track & Field
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 15, 2012 – UCLA’s legendary basketball coach John Wooden created one of sport’s greatest dynasties, winning 10 NCAA championships in 12 years from 1964-75. His legacy as a teacher and winner has continued and enlarged, but it is still felt most strongly on the UCLA campus, where he coached for 27 years.
The most tangible aspect of his legacy is his “Pyramid of Success,” which he developed to encapsulate the elements he felt contributed most to what he considered success to be; a copy is posted in almost every coach’s office at UCLA today. At the very top is “Competitive Greatness,” which he defined as:
Perform at your best when your best is required. Your best is required each day.
So it was for a 5-foot, 7-inch tall, naturalized American citizen and UCLA alumnus named Meb Keflezighi, who won the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in Houston last Saturday. (Photo courtesy Basil Honikman/SBPhoto Co.)
Given his achievements – Olympic silver medalist in the marathon in 2004, former American record holder in the 10,000 m, four-time NCAA champion at UCLA and more – his victory in Houston was not much of a surprise.
But it should have been.
In a time when the marathon record book is being rewritten, and Keflezighi’s then-lifetime best of 2:09:13 ranked only in a tie for 94th place on the IAAF’s year list for 2011 – five and a half minutes behind new world-record holder Patrick Makau of Kenya’s 2:03:38 – he confidently finished 22 seconds ahead of Ryan Hall (who ran 2:04:48 in Boston in 2011) and 39 seconds in front of Abdi Abdirahman (2:08:56 in 2008).
Moreover, Keflezighi’s 2:09:08 – a very modest time that would have placed him 90th on the IAAF’s 2011 world list – was a new lifetime best.
His win was no fluke. As Amy Shipley of the Washington Post wrote of Keflezighi and women’s winner Shalane Flanagan:
The pair ultimately took charge in two professionally executed, respectably paced, coolly run races that rewarded the athletes that pushed hard from the start and left no doubt about who deserved tickets to this summer’s London Olympic Games.
That bodes well for Keflezighi going into London, where the circumstances will be much different than the speed courses which make up many of the world’s most famous marathon routes today:
• The 2012 Olympic Marathon route will be a four-lap race on a course considerably different from the annual London Marathon, even though both finish in central London. Tactics will be at a premium rather than speed.
• Unlike the World Marathon Majors races, there will be no pacesetters; the Olympians themselves will have to set the pace. That leads to all kinds of unpredictabilities in the race, a plus for tacticians like Keflezighi.
• Perhaps most important are the limits on national participation. Unlike the world’s other big marathons, the Olympic race will be limited to three per country. So only three Kenyans will be in the field, a considerable advantage for those from other nations since Kenya accounted for 25 of the top 26 places on the IAAF’s 2011 world list. And there will be only three Ethiopians in the field, which will also include contenders from Bahrain, Brazil, Eritrea (Keflezighi’s birth country), Japan, Morocco, Qatar and a few others.
All of these elements open the door for Keflezighi and coach Bob Larsen (also his coach at UCLA) and his teammates Hall and Abdirahman. Happily, no one gets a medal for just running fast at the Olympics. You get a medal for finishing in the top three.
Competition is the essence of the Olympic Games, just as it was for Wooden. His teams always seemed to play their best in the biggest games; perhaps his most astounding record was not the 88 straight games his teams won in the early 1970s, but the 38 straight NCAA Tournament games that his Bruins won between 1964-74. That’s performing under pressure.
For Keflezighi, he will train and plan with care and if he feels fit on August 12, no one will be all that surprised if he finishes in the medals once again. Because, as they say at another kind of track, he’s a race horse and not a show horse.
Just the kind Coach Wooden appreciated most.
(You can stay current with Rich’s technology, sports and Olympic commentaries by following him at www.twitter.com/RichPerelman.)
BCS Championship Game won’t end media whining about bowls
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 6, 2012 – The national championship rematch between Louisiana State and Alabama on January 9 in New Orleans will mercifully bring an end to nearly three weeks of college football bowl games.
The media wailing about bowl games, their number and selection, however, won’t be stilled until the beginning of next year’s college football regular season. The complaints about the BCS system continue to stack up against the call for a playoff system to determine the national championship, and for the 2011-12 bowl season, questions have been raised about what teams “deserved” to be in the sub-championship BCS games.
Memo: stop whining.
A playoff would likely have resulted in an LSU-Alabama rematch
The moaning over a rematch of the November 5 game at Tuscaloosa won by LSU over Alabama, admitted by most as the two best teams in the nation, is loudest among those who demand a playoff to determine the national champion. What if we had a playoff?
If we use the BCS standings to create a 16-game playoff, the dream of playoff proponents, the match-ups would look something like this:
• (1) LSU vs. (16) Georgia (a re-match of the SEC championship game)
• (8) Kansas State vs. (9) South Carolina
• (5) Oregon vs. (12) Baylor
• (4) Stanford vs. (13) Michigan
• (6) Arkansas vs. (11) Virginia Tech
• (3) Oklahoma State vs.(14) Oklahoma (another regular-season rematch)
• (7) Boise State vs. (10) Wisconsin
• (2) Alabama vs. (15) Clemson
Right away we see regular-season re-matches, so any complaint from the playoff purists about an LSU-Alabama re-match are shown up as silly. In fact, the first-round LSU-Georgia and Oklahoma State-Oklahoma games would have teams playing each other two weeks in a row!
Moreover, the outstanding feature of this bracket is that LSU and Alabama are – by far – the best defensive teams in the field. And defense wins championships; my view is that both LSU and Alabama would make it to the title game without significant difficulty. Consider that among the 16 teams listed, only Alabama (8.8) and LSU (10.5) rank among the top five in scoring defense, and only five of the top ten (also Michigan-6th, Virginia Tech-7th and Michigan State-10th) would even be in the tournament.
LSU and Alabama are two great teams that proved their mettle during the season . . . and against each other. They should play for the title, and would have anyway under a playoff system.
Bowls are not in the business of picking “deserving” teams
Among the top-tier bowl games, the “experts” were ga-ga about match-ups like the Rose Bowl (Oregon vs. Wisconsin), the Fiesta Bowl (Oklahoma State vs. Stanford) and the Cotton Bowl (Arkansas vs. Kansas State), and generally enthusiastic about the Georgia-Michigan State (Outback) and Nebraska-South Carolina (Capital One) games on January 2.
Much less popular and subject to some withering criticism from high-profile commentators like ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit were the team selections for the Gator Bowl – Ohio State and Florida, both with 6-6 records – as well as two BCS games: the Sugar Bowl with Michigan (seen as deserving) and Virginia Tech (criticized) and the Orange Bowl, in which both West Virginia and Clemson were hissed at as champions of two weak conferences, the Big East and Atlantic Coast.
Forgetting for a moment that all of these teams – except Clemson (a 70-33 loser) – played in pretty exciting, close games, the critics missed one central point: bowl-game organizers are in the business of making money, or at least breaking even, and are not about rewarding “deserving” teams.
Bowl-game organizers are about promoting their destinations, selling tickets and filling hotel rooms.
The entire bowl-game concept was pioneered by the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association, which created its Rose Parade solely as a promotional vehicle for the little-known California city in the late 1800s, and then, in 1901, thought a football game would bring it even more publicity. And so the 1902 Rose Bowl featured the best team in the West – Stanford – and Fielding Yost’s point-a-minute Michigan team (a 49-0 Wolverine win).
The rest is history.
The proliferation of bowl games is more about ESPN’s desire for programming – it televises 33 of the 35 bowl games held today – than it is about the commercial appeal of the games. And with the lousy economy, bowl attendance is down about 2.1 percent from last season, but still about 50,000 fans per game. Pretty good.
Moreover, playoff proponents have not yet even tackled the critical question of how well their proposed playoff games would be attended. Unlike the bowl system, where a team plays once after its regular season (and conference championship game) is over, a playoff would involve multiple games. Are the games held on campus stadiums? Or are they so important that neutral sites are needed?
If that is the case, would fans of each team travel week after week to see their team play? Even in better economic times? The two finalist teams in an eight-team playoff would play three games; in a 16-team playoff, they would play four. Who bears the liability for less-than-full attendance? Can fans even get to the next game on the already-stretched U.S. air-travel system? No one has the answers for these questions yet.
So, what’s next?
If strict meritocracy is the goal, then a playoff is the only way forward. And it can happen as soon as the presidents of the NCAA’s major football-playing institutions decide to move that way, perhaps as soon as 2014, when the current BCS agreement concludes.
Those who desire change must aim their influence – and plans to meet the inherent issues of a playoff system – with the only group that can effect change. Start solving the problems, and stop whining.
(You can stay current with Rich’s technology, sports and Olympic commentaries by following him at www.twitter.com/RichPerelman.)
Edna Kiplagat is one more reason why sports is so great
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 30, 2011 – Now on the threshold of the Olympic year of 2012, there is a seemingly unending parade of sporting events – college and pro football, college and pro basketball, hockey and some other things – many with attendance in the tens of thousands and sometimes close to 100,000 people for a single event.
All for sports; you don’t see crowds like this for theater or opera, and rarely even for concerts or civic events.
When considering why, I can’t help but think of Kenyan marathoner Edna Kiplagat.
Sure, she’s the 2011 World Champion from Daegu, but that’s her current status. It was a lot different just a couple of years ago.
Kiplagat had won silver and bronze medals in the World Junior Championships 3000 m races in 1996 and 1998, respectively, but as the new year of 2010 dawned, she was 30 years old with few prospects.
She hadn’t distinguished herself on the American road circuit and was nowhere among the World Rankings on the track. Coached by her husband, Gilbert Koech, a former Washington State distance star (and a 2:14:39 marathoner), she had only run one marathon, an unexciting 2:50:20 in Las Vegas in 2005.
As she later told countryman Wesley Korir, who had emerged with a win in the 2009 Honda LA Marathon, she thought she was perhaps at the end of her career. Remembered Korir:
We got talking about life, and Edna was telling me how much she had struggled trying to get into running, and she had reached the point of giving up.
I was telling her about how the L.A. Marathon really changed my life and started me off to where I’ve been, because we all need something, we need a chance and the LA. Marathon gave both of us a chance to re-discover our talents and it was really amazing the way she was really talking highly about the L.A. Marathon.
It was the last chance she had, the only chance. She said she tried to get into races, but she couldn’t get in any races; the only race that would take her in was the L.A. Marathon, so she talks high of the L.A. Marathon and the chance.
And the L.A. Marathon definitely changed her life; it gave her motivation to run more and gave her motivation even to train more because when she won here, she goes ‘I can really do this.’
The rest, as they say, is history. She won the Honda LA Marathon with a 24-minute improvement to 2:25:38, winning $145,000 in cash (including $100,000 for beating Korir to the life in the race’s unique male vs. female challenge) and a new Honda sedan. She said afterwards that she “was not surprised” by the results because of her fitness in training, but her smile at the finish line (shown above) underlined her change of circumstances because someone gave her a chance.
She’s had no trouble getting into races since.
Eight months later, she won the ING New York Marathon in 2:28:20 for another $130,000 in prize money. That set up her 2011, which notably included a personal-best 2:20:46 for third place in the London Marathon in the spring and then a solid 2:28:43 victory in the World Championships marathon in Daegu, South Korea, leading a Kenyan sweep of the medals.
At 32, she’s now among the favorites for the Olympic title to be determined in London in August. But none of this would have happened except for the opportunity afforded her in Los Angeles almost two years ago.
It’s the surprises in life, the uncertainty of sports and the achievements – often unpredictable – of people like Kiplagat and so many others that makes sports so great.
Judging by the crowds for sporting events across the country during this holiday season, even in difficult times, many people agree. Here’s hoping that 2012 will be the great sports year it promises to be; a lot of us will be watching closely.
(You can stay current with Rich’s technology, sports and Olympic commentaries by following him at www.twitter.com/RichPerelman.)
Will there be the London legacy?
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 23, 2011 – Canadian Dick Pound, one of the International Olympic Committee’s most respected members, famously said in the 1990s that some of the best fiction he’d ever read was in the bid books submitted by would-be organizers of the Olympic Games.
He didn’t mean to make fun of any specific bid, but that the wildly-inflated claims of civilization-changing Olympic celebrations must be seen for what they are: hyperbole.
Eventually, reality creeps in as the British government, British taxpayers and the London organizers have found out:
• The government’s proposed £2.4 billion (~ $3.75 billion U.S.) budget in 2005 quickly ballooned to £9.3 billion (~ $14.55 billion U.S.), nearly four times the originally-expected cost and recent reports indicate that might not be enough.
• The London Olympic and Paralympic organizing committee (LOCOG) has a budget of £2.15 billion (~ $3.36 billion) from its share of television rights sales, tickets, sponsorships and licensing, worryingly augmented by the recent £41 million (~ $64 million U.S.) addition from the government to bolster the opening and closing ceremonies.
So, the total cost is around £11.45 billion (~ $17.91 billion U.S.) as of now, compared with a bid projection of around £4.5 billion (~ $7 .0 billion U.S.). Pound was right.
So the budget exploded, there are reports that surface-to-air missiles will be stationed in Hyde Park during the Games as protection against terrorist threats, and LOCOG chair Sebastian Coe’s hope that more Britishers will add 30 minutes of exercise three times per week has foundered as noted in Ashling O’Connor’s December 2 story in The Times of London entitled “2012 legacy plan for a fitter Britain is quietly scrapped” in which it is noted:
One of the key promises which helped London win the right to host the 2012 Olympics is being quietly scrapped by ministers because Britons are stubbornly resisting efforts to get them playing more sport.
So what about London’s legacy? Actually, the opportunities are still there, but not those originally expected:
• Achievement: Assuming the Games come off reasonably well, the Brits can celebrate the fact in the midst of a worldwide recession and in one of the most densely-populated cities in the world, they put on a memorable show, becoming the first-ever city to host a third Olympic Games.
The value of this is not to be under-appreciated. Unlike a World Cup, which is spread all over a country, the Olympic Games soaks up all the resources even a city like London has and then much more. Where the U.S., China and Russia are seen as the world’s power leaders, Britain can say it stepped up when it came forward to organize one of the world’s largest peacetime events.
The local, regional and national momentum for this can be considerable, especially in attracting capital for new industry and jobs. If Britain can handle the Olympics in the middle of London, it can handle new factories, technologies and so on and needs to say so. Los Angeles benefitted mightily from this “era of good feeling” for eight years after the 1984 Games.
• Enthusiasm: LOCOG is on pace to sell out its public ticket allocations for both the Olympic Games and the Paralympics, an unheard-of achievement. That should translate well for the future for shared public experiences of all kinds: civic, cultural and sporting. Clever companies and institutions with an eye to get people involved could profit by this in future years.
• Health: Coe’s idea that hosting the Games would lead to more people participating in exercise might not be dead yet. But the onus will be on the organizers and especially the health sector to step up after the Games.
Forget about fitness clubs, pick-up soccer matches and swimming lessons; the simple activity of walking is perhaps the best exercise of all and this can be promoted by maintaining some of the Olympic landmarks that will otherwise be forgotten soon after next summer’s events are completed:
=> Maintain a visible marking of the Torch Relay route throughout the country and mark off one-mile (or one-kilometer, if you must be metric) segments so that people can simply walk along the route for exercise. Mark the route with permanent signage featuring the Olympic Torch design.
=> Use British Olympians (who are mostly supported at taxpayer expense) or other stars of the Games on similar routes in other parts of London and in other parts of Britain. People can walk the “Dai Greene mile” named after the 400 m Hurdles world champion, the “Mo Farah 5k” after the famed distance runner or the “Jessica Ennis Half Hour” after the heptathlon star. Put up signs with their faces on it and words of encouragement. This will cost a lot less than a national ad campaign trying to get people to exercise for the next several years.
=> Mark off lanes for walking around some of the Olympic venues with signage indicating how far a “lap” around the facility is. Organize road races themed around and held at the Olympic venues, which will help to keep them in the public eye.
• Tourism: Olympic host cities always talk about tourism to the Olympic venues, but the actual impacts are rare. By creating some of the locally-based attractions noted above to promote exercise, the possibility of “running tourism” to London can be significantly expanded, well beyond the current interest in the famed London Marathon.
Since the Olympic track is planned to be preserved, hold a regularly-scheduled, weekly all-comers meet where people of all ages can sign up to actually run on the track and receive a certificate of achievement and finish-line photograph. Create a lasting tourism impact from hosting the Games, long after the 2012 event ends.
And, of course, keep bidding for major events; the 2017 IAAF World Championships are a good start, but there are 25 other sports on the 2012 program that have events as well.
• Academics and Television: London’s newspapers, radio and television channels are bursting at the seams with Olympic programming . . . which will all end as soon as the Olympic flame is extinguished. Keep it going.
London could easily start, in concert with one or more universities and its home-grown sponsors, an annual Olympic symposium, perhaps around the time of its annual Diamond League track & field meet. For all of the effort that goes into the Olympic Movement, there is precious little study of major events and their impacts, and the impact of the I.O.C. on the world today. Britain and talking heads? A perfect match!
There are many more ideas, of course, but you get the idea. The real legacy of a successful Games is that people continue to share in that success, long after the costs are forgotten. Despite the cost explosion, the million-and-one details and the organizational headaches still ahead, the opportunity for a successful London legacy is still there for the taking.
(You can stay current with Rich’s technology, sports and Olympic commentaries by following him at www.twitter.com/RichPerelman.)
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