Sports and The Power of Assumption

There are often a lot of parallels between sports and politics. Team fandom and partisan allegiance often have a lot in common even while there are significant differences in importance and ramifications. It is not the case that political partisans are the equivalent of t-shirt fans for sports teams, but the similarities create a lot of parallels, and you can sometimes more easily notice something about one because you see it with the other. It’s true of most situations involving factions, but these two are the ones where the factions are most formalized. Recent events in the college sports world have me thinking about the way we approach and discuss misinformation, which of course has ramifications everywhere.

If you don’t care much about college sports, here is basically all you need to know: Two of the Pac-12’s biggest schools left for a more profitable conference, the Big Ten, leaving the Pac-12 vulnerable. Another conference, the Big 12, is reportedly interested in other Pac-12 teams. Various reports have suggested a merger while others a combination of four (“the corner schools”) or six (“The corner schools”¹ and Washington and Oregon). This has set off a firestorm of discussion, especially in Pac-12 and Big 12 circles. This post isn’t about what’s going to happen (as of right now no one knows) or what should happen, but rather the nature of assumptions and how the mind can have difficulty separating hypotheticals from facts if you dive in deep enough.

There is this guy on Twitter who reportedly has inside connections, MHver3 (hereafter “MH”). He correctly suggested UCLA and USC were in discussions with the Big Ten right about when they would need to have been happening for the announcement to come when it did. So he has become a source for a lot of people as he shares what he’s heard.

The thing about MH is that he actually has no source and doesn’t know anything more than the rest of us. He is this Twitter personality that is well known for spitting out insider knowledge that is rarely testable and when testable rarely comes to pass. He got lucky on that one thing. But sometimes all it takes is one and you have people’s attention.

And so, it is on a Big 12 message board that I frequent. The vast majority of board participants do not believe he has much inside knowledge. But it is the football offseason and sometimes in the lack of real news² and they get discussed as we wait for The Corner Schools to decide what they’re going to do (they’re likely waiting on some TV projection numbers, both the Big 12 and Pac-12 are up for negotiations soon). Mostly as a hypothetical. In the absence of real information, it’s incredibly easy to act like fake information is a useful discussion point.

Up to a point, this is fine. But as I said at the opening, it becomes really easy over time to forget that you’re discussing hypotheticals. Conjecture from a person that doesn’t know any more than we do and possibly less. This is especially true when you don’t have any hard information to contradict it. Is the Pac-12 TV negotiation going to be worth $25m per team per year as MH says? Maybe! It’s as good a number as any other one suggested. So, let’s talk about what happens if the Pac-12 negotiation if it’s $25m. I say they stay in the Pac-12, you say they come to the Big 12. We argue about it. We debate what the Big 12 contract would be and the value of geography and rivals. We debate how much of a factor Oregon and Washington’s interest in leaving the Pac-12 weighs in as a factor. And we do this all surrounding a $25m benchmark that was almost certainly up. But considering before we were debating whether that figure is $15m or $20m or $30m, it actually feels like we’re making progress because we have at least settled that number. With fake news.

In addition to this, there is an old saying that lies travel half way around the world before the truth puts on his shoes. So over time MH information starts to seem more and more true because more and more people are repeating it. So it sounds like multiple sources when in fact it’s all downstream of a guy making stuff. Nonetheless, it provides the illusion of verification. Throw in some motivated reasoning and you’re more likely to see it because the people on your side are more likely to share it because they’re more likely to say it. One minute MH is saying that the corner schools are on their way, and Big 12 people like that and share it widely. Another minute MH says that WVU is headed to the Atlantic Coast Conference, which no one but WVU fans want, so it gets less play (except, presumably, in WVU circles).

In addition to bad actors like MH, we also do this to ourselves. Early on I staked the position that the Big 12 would be better off going big, getting almost all of the teams or doing the out-and-out merger. I’m not going to go into my rationale too much, except to say that it rests on a series of assumptions about what the TV networks are going to want for our next contract. And if I’m being honest there’s some motivated reasoning in there as well. However, the more I argue on the basis of that assumption, the more I internalize it as being the truth. If you ask me straight whether my assumptions are true or conjecture, I will say they are conjecture even while I have long since stopped talking about them as though they are conjecture.

This leads to a lot of arguments that seem like they are about something else but really are almost entirely about underlying assumptions. We think we’re arguing about the merits of inviting Cal and a lower-conference school like San Diego State, but we’re actually arguing primarily about the effect of inventory on television value. I believe that increased inventory will attract networks that want to enter the college sports space but need a minimum of inventory to justify it, and that the most important thing the conference could do is completely demolish or absorb the competition (the Pac-12, which is the only other conference TV networks have to bid on between 2023-25 for the next decade). They believe some combination of diminishing marginal returns for each team added or that the conference’s value will come down to the sum of the values of the individual teams divided by the number of teams. We have this argument over and over again, with the individual teams just being the examples.

It makes it easier to see how smart people can latch on to political arguments and assumptions that seem so obviously false to outsiders. This is especially true with people who discuss politics a lot the same way sports fans do sports. Echo chambers are what they are through a combination of filtering and repetition. On the sports message board there isn’t a whole lot of filtering – even the part about WVU to the ACC gets out there – but the repetition can be quite insistent with the brain. Not just the repetition of what people are saying to you, but the repetition implicit when it becomes the basic assumptions of the conversation. This is the danger of being a devil’s advocate for conversational sake. For someone like me, it’s the danger of “meeting them where they are” by stipulating to their assumptions for conversation’s sake.

None of these discussion dynamics are entirely novel, but it can be extremely helpful to watch it unfold using a background that is a lot less important than government and politics. It makes it much easier to see what’s going on when the discussion is not rooted in actual consequences that will tangentially make our lives better or worse. It can also add clarity because unlike governance, which is messy, everybody on the forum ultimately wants the same thing or something very close to it. We want the best for our university, and for the conference we’re signed on with. In the political realm, even when co-partisans all want the Democrats to win, strategy debates are often not only about getting into power but what you do in power once you are in.

1. the University of Arizona, Arizona State, the University of Utah, and the University of Colorado, names such because they are all in universities that are connected by the cornered AZ-UT-CO-NM intersection
2. This is further complicated by the fact that actual news organizations are also saying things that are untrue. Not even about future events, but verifiable information like how many votes would be required to dissolve a conference or alter a media deal.