Sports and The Power of Assumption

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

Related Post Roulette

16 Responses

  1. The Big 10 has 14 members and the Big 12 has 10. The Pac-12, oddly enough, has 12.Report

    • As things stand right now, the Big 12 will either have 12 teams or teams in 12 states. So there’s that.

      I sort of feel like the Big Ten is going to expand to 20 eventually and change their name.

      Not sure what the Pac-12 is going to do if they don’t bring in two new teams. They may stick with 12. My guess is they drop the number altogether.Report

  2. dhex says:

    a better metaphor is sports bars – groups of people yelling at a tv over the theatrical actions of immensely wealthy people who don’t even know or care about their existence…except in the aggregate as a source of funding for said wealthy lifestyle.Report

  3. John Puccio says:

    I did not have OT covering MHver3 tweets on my bingo card. This is hilarious.

    Agree about the B12 getting aggressive to become ‘the best of the rest’ conference behind B1G and SEC. Getting raided first may end up being a blessing in disguise for the XII. Regardless of conference affiliation, this is a make or break year for WVU and Neil Brown. Looking forward to seeing JT Daniels behind center.

    Per the point of the article, while there are many similarities between sports fans and political partisans, I think there are just as many big differences. The primary one being that the vast majority of fans are usually pretty critical of their team’s players, coaches, ownership, etc. Political partisans are generally incapable of seeing their side’s shortcomings.Report

    • Per the point of the article, while there are many similarities between sports fans and political partisans, I think there are just as many big differences. The primary one being that the vast majority of fans are usually pretty critical of their team’s players, coaches, ownership, etc. Political partisans are generally incapable of seeing their side’s shortcomings.

      Yes and no. A lot of people take aim at their party for either losing too many games or not scoring enough point… I mean for losing elections or not getting enough done.Report

      • Pinky in reply to Will Truman says:

        I’ve watched my brother watching a political debate and a football game, and he acts the same way: he wants a touchdown on every play, and if only they’d listen to him they could do it! That said, I felt like this article didn’t really go anywhere, and I’m not sure if it holds up once you get beyond the partisan rah-rah. There is a thing that politics is attached to, policy, and that is a real thing. Sports is like politics if there were no consequences.Report

        • Michael Cain in reply to Pinky says:

          For the universities, there are consequences. Texas and Oklahoma are going to learn what it’s like to play football in a conference where Alabama’s currently-projected starting QB — who has never thrown a pass in an actual game — has a million dollars in NIL contracts lined up for this next season. Texas may be able to line up alumni who can match that. Oklahoma certainly can’t. USC and UCLA are going to discover that they aren’t competitive in this day and age with the top teams from regions where football is a religion.

          And they’ve all sold their souls for a TV contract that shows them getting their asses whipped in front of a national audience.

          Notice that Nebraska, my undergraduate school, with a national title contender history, joined the B1G believing they would be competitive.Report

          • Ben Sears in reply to Michael Cain says:

            Your point still stands, but for the record Bryce Young, the Alabama quarterback you mentioned, played as a back-up two years ago to Mac Jones. He only played in seven games in garbage time when a big part of the job is to hand off and keep the clock running but he completed twenty-two passes.
            It was last year when he was the projected starter and signed NIL deals (I believe there were several) totaling around a million dollars. It turned out to be a good gamble for the companies that paid him. He was unproven but he came in as the number two qb in the nation in 2020 per 24/7 rankings, handled himself well those few times he was on the field in 2021, got raves from coaches, players, and reporters in practice updates, and – this is key – the touted backup quarterbacks were not performing.
            There was no one capably of ably spelling him so the coaches would likely rarely put him at risk. He started every game last year and though he is a great runner you could tell he was coached not to take hits (he did in the early season but that was because of some offensive line discordance that eventually worked itself out.) When he scrambled he rarely passed the line of scrimmage, preferring to run east and west looking for a coverage break or to throw it out of bounds.
            A projected but unproven superstar with no one to back him up on a high profile team with national championship hopes means he’s going to be on a big TV stage a lot, on highlight reels a lot, and the subject of articles and commentary a lot was worth the gamble. Turns out all he did was start every game last year, win the Heisman Trophy, and make it to the national championship game.
            They got a pretty good return for their money. I read that last March BMW signed Young for 1.9 million on top of what he was already projected to earn.
            Again, your point still stands and is one I agree with. Alabama football just happens to be something I geek out on.Report

            • Michael Cain in reply to Ben Sears says:

              Good to know. I was going from the Saban quote, “Our quarterback has approached ungodly numbers, and he hasn’t even played yet. If I told you what it is… it’s almost seven figures.” Presumably he meant hasn’t played this year.Report

              • Ben Sears in reply to Michael Cain says:

                He said that in 2021. Saban’s got all manner of verbal ticks but when he says something like “he hasn’t played yet,” he means meaningful snaps. The guy hadn’t been tested is the idea I think he was trying to get across. Saban uses press conferences and speeches a lot of times not to talk to the press but to his team. I suspect he was saying to Young, “That’s great that you got all that money but quit congratulating yourself and get back in the film room.” Local sports radio is often an exercise in divining what Saban’s intentions for saying one or the other thing was.Report

        • Will Truman in reply to Pinky says:

          Politics and partisanship is only a small piece of this (just the “echo chamber” part). It’s not so much “Cougar fans be saying this and Bulldog fans be saying that.” It’s all Cougar fans up and down.

          Everyone here:

          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.

          Is rooting the the same team (and the same conference). It’s not a matter of being attached to a theme, but attached to a theory about media value. That’s part of what I found interesting about it. Even when there are almost no faction dynamics and comparatively little in the way of existing ideological or philosophical allegiances. It’s a mental trap you can fall into by repeating the same assumptions, even without those things, and even knowing ahead of time that the assumptions are largely speculative (in the case of the media value question) or probably false (in the case of MHver3’s “information”)Report

  4. Michael Cain says:

    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.

    Except that there’s a huge range of definitions for best, for university, and for the relationships between all the parts.

    When the PAC-12 hired a new commissioner, one of the very first things he said was that the PAC-12 was going to be all about football and men’s basketball. His definition of “university” was the athletic department, and definition of “best” was biggest possible TV contract. So far as I could tell, every AD in the PAC-12 agreed with him. But there was a lot of push-back from presidents and student bodies, who have very different definitions. When some part of “Stanford” said they were on board with the plan and would be cutting a bunch of smaller sports, the protests were big enough the decision was reversed. I suspect that if the student bodies at USC and UCLA got to vote, the switch to the B1G would lose. I suspect that if the alumni from USC and UCLA got to vote, the switch to the B1G would lose.

    Kind of an odd thing to think of, but recall Galadriel from Lord of the Rings, when Frodo freely offered her the One Ring and she declined it:

    ‘I pass the test,’ she said. ‘I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.’

    There are a whole bunch of universities who would be better off if they said, “I will join a regional conference, and not pursue national football titles, and remain an institution that places academics first.”Report

    • I’d be really interested to see some polling. My guess is that it’s one of those things that the more interested in sports you are the more you favor the move. So the average student at UCLA is against it but the average student-alumni fan isn’t. At USC you are more likely to have broad support. I think a lot has changed in the past couple of years as far as that goes.

      Yesterday I saw an inter view for the Denver Post that was saying he actually thought that the CU students would like the move but the admin (that likes the Pac-12 prestige association) and alumni (disproportionately living in California) favor the Pac-12. Though when he talks about “students” he may be implicitly talking about “Student that cares about CU athletics”.

      Reportedly one of the reasons the corner schools are receptive to the Big 12 at all is a degree of feeling like Big 12 schools are more serious about athletics than Pac-12 schools and there is a cultural disconnect. One of the conflicts I see going forward for the Pac-12 is schools that want to filter for academics if they bring in more teams and schools that don’t, which is likely to have a corner-coast divide. It’s a problem because there really isn’t that much overlap between academically suitable candidates and athletically competitive ones. You have to give SDSU a break on academics or SMU a break on athletics, which I think is what is going to happen if they expand (Boise State and Rice respectively being a bridge too far in each direction).

      There are a whole bunch of universities who would be better off if they said, “I will join a regional conference, and not pursue national football titles, and remain an institution that places academics first.”

      A fair number of universities do… but they are not in the national conversation because they are in the Big West, Patriot League, Ivy League, etc… and not the Pac-12.

      There are some suggesting that depending on whatever happens with the Pac-12, Stanford and Cal may reassess. I’ll believe it when I see it. (I could see Stanford choosing independence over the Big 12, though.)Report

      • I believe it’s inevitable that the top 48-64 college football teams will separate themselves from the NCAA. They may still be tied to universities by name, and by financial arrangements like leasing stadiums, but they will establish their own recruiting/pay/eligibility limits and there will be no more academic and “institutional control” nonsense.

        When that happens, I also expect the universities that are now free of having to run a football program will reverse a considerable amount of the conference realignments to reverse itself. UCLA, to pick a likely example, will decide that it just makes sense for them to be in a group of schools along the West Coast, or perhaps the West more generally, for the remaining sports.Report

        • I think formal separation creates too many political complications. The main reason why the BCS/P5 conferences never broke away. The closer they get to excluding everyone else, the more congress starts getting involved.

          My expectation is that we will continue to see what we’ve seen: Continued financial/resource stratification and marginalization, but with the schools taking up the rear continuing to take what they’re given as they try to keep up.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Michael Cain says:

      At some point in the last 50 years, the purpose of the university switched a toggle from the whole “best, brightest, education, etc” to “maintain an endowment”.

      If the purpose of the university was to do the whole best, brightest BS, then of course they’d see athletics as, at best, a way to do the whole “well-rounded” thing.

      But if it’s to maintain (or grow!) the endowment? Yeah, those non-football and men’s basketball sports are legacy distractions. As quaint as the student union.Report