I was so, so sorry to hear of the death by gunshot wound in an apparent suicide of linebacker Junior Seau, who played for the Patriots between 2006 and 2009. It’s too soon to know whether Seau’s death is linked to brain injury—the Boston Globe points out that Seau appears to have shot himself in the chest rather than the head, as did late Bear Dave Duerson, who wanted to preserve his brain for scientific study—or a sad conclusion to other troubles. Seau was hospitalized after falling asleep at the wheel in 2010, and arrested on assault charges. No matter the cause, it’s sad to see someone who gave me so much pleasure leaving football to something other than a happy, fulfilling retirement.
Stories tagged with “Football”
Does the NFL Need More Female Scouts?
ESPN has an interesting, if somewhat general, piece about whether the NFL could use more female scouts to avoid groupthink in the draft, and to help teams avoid players who might end up making a team atmosphere toxic, rather than helping a squad cohere:
Women, on the other hand, are much less likely to have blinders when it comes to big moves. They also do a better job placing choices in context. In football terms, female scouts might have seen that Vince Young, for all his awesome talent, was not a good fit with the team, coaching staff or scheme in Tennessee.
Another place where the NFL could really use a woman’s touch is with the impossible task of predicting how a newly minted 21-year-old millionaire will behave once he hits the league. Most teams use personal interviews to gauge a potential player’s intangibles — work ethic, leadership, motivation, teamwork — but the results would likely be more reliable if women were leading this process. Shrira says studies show that women are intuitively better at discerning and exploring a candidate’s character. Adds Spencer, “This is the unique dimension women would add to the draft: getting to the absolute heart and soul of a player.”
A lot of the piece is based in general business psychology, rather than in the track records of the very few women (like Linda Bogdan, pictured here) who have gotten a say in NFL. But that research and the evidence of other successful businesses do make a compelling case that any organization might want to consider diversity not simply for its public image, but for its bottom line. Different perspectives can bring not just different ways of making decisions, but different costs and potential problems to light. Myra Kraft famously convinced the Patriots to release Christian Peter after the team drafted the man even though he had a horrible record of violence against women. A scouting corps that included more women might be more likely to weigh past records of such allegations more seriously, not just because abusing women is bad, but because players who get in trouble outside of the stadium lose playing time and mental focus.
There’s no question that it won’t be easy to get more women in the scouting and executive ranks. It’s not like there are no women who are substantially interested in football, but it is a specialization beyond general business acumen. And if, as the article points out, women tend to get powerful positions in NFL teams only if they’re related to the owner, even if they perform well, that’ll likely be a hurdle to convincing other teams that they got their on their own abilities, no matter how sterling those abilities are. Allegations of nepotism tend to stick, even if they’re utterly unfounded. I’m not sure what the way in will turn out to be. But, rooting interests aside, I’d applaud whatever team decided to seek new insight and get some women in the mix. Neither men nor women are collectively perfect decision-makers. But new eyes and new perspectives are rarely a bad idea, and it would be interesting to see how female scouts challenge the existing consensus about what’s valuable in the NFL, and in other sports.
Super Bowl Aftermath
First, let me note that taunting your blogmistress when she’s in emotional extremis is both ungentlemanly and unladylike and a quick ticket to outer darkness. But, congratulations to the Giants, who just played a superior game of football tonight, and consistently outplayed us this season. And to Chris Ashley, who wins our pool, and gets to make me write about the piece of culture of his choice.
Off the field of play, which was tense and exciting, and I think missed being a truly great game because of some sloppiness on each side, this seemed like a rather slack event to me. There was no standout ad (though I thought Budweiser’s shoutout to rescue dogs was cute). GoDaddy has reached (or, really, reached several years ago) the same point as Lady Gaga where doing something demure would be more shocking than any way they could find to comment on the female performance. I do, however, appreciate anything that lets me see Det. John Munch dance:
and Clint Eastwood’s Obama ad. But overall, I thought it was a lackluster year.
Madonna’s performance was, I thought, both a display of professional showmanship and a reasonably canny nod to the straight dude demographic once it shifted from chariot bearers to cheerleaders. And how great is it to get to see a woman do the greatest hits show that white dude rockers are regularly entitled to without comment on their age or creakiness? Nary a crotch-slam into the camera for the Queen of Pop:
I also think of all the judges from The Voice NBC could have brought out for the show, Cee Lo Green was the best and most gratifying choice. He’s a great fit for the gospel riff, and it’s so much fun to get him to see him dust off and re-sequin his “Closet Freak” robes:
Sometimes, the right people get to make the big money and stand under the bright lights.
Update
People apparently want to know if I have thoughts on M.I.A. flipping the bird at the end of her verse. So here they are: I think it’s exactly the kind of bland, predictable, wannabe-controversial-but-utterly-predictable-and-meaning-free thing she would do, and as such, essentially unworthy of notice or comment.
On Joe Paterno’s Passing
After a swift decline in his health, former Penn State coach Joe Paterno passed away this morning at 85. I’ll be thinking of his family, but his death is a tragedy in that it cuts short what could have been a process of education and seeking forgiveness. If Paterno had lived, and had been lucid enough to come to terms with his abdication of responsibility; if he had sought forgiveness for it and worked to help other programs become safer, more responsible and responsive organizations, he could have made a contribution to coaching far beyond his work elevating the Nittany Lions into a nationally competitive program.
Maybe he would have done none of those things had he lived, out of denial or a lack of capability. But his death forecloses an opportunity, however slight, to make recompense, and to remind the students who still saw him as a deity that there are more important things than football.
Intermission
The bridge is yours.
-Tim Tebow: powered by elves.
-I am also pretty excited about these sci-fi and fantasy movies.
-I just really love listening to Jay-Z rap about how much he loves the women in his family:
Should College Football’s Biggest Bowl Games Be Allowed To Call Themselves Charities?
This is the final part of a three-part series about college football’s bowl system, the Bowl Championship Series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.
Alabama trounced LSU 21-0 in last night’s Bowl Championship Series National Championship game, earning the school’s 14th national championship. But while the game settled questions regarding who receives college football’s top prize, many other questions about the BCS remain unresolved.
The BCS, a consortium of the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and the University of Notre Dame, manages college football’s five biggest bowl games — the Rose, Fiesta, Orange, and Sugar bowls and the BCS National Championship. Because those bowls are set up as tax-exempt, nonprofit charities, they pay little, if any, taxes on huge profits, even as they receive millions in taxpayer subsidies from state and local governments.
Amid recent scandals and reports involving the Fiesta and Sugar bowls, critics have raised questions about why the games are classified as charities and whether they should continue to be classified that way in the future.
The question of whether bowl games should or should not be classified as nonprofit charities is ultimately up to the IRS. But recently, public scrutiny toward the BCS has intensified. The Department of Justice is investigating whether the BCS violated federal antitrust laws, and after scandals involving potentially illegal political donations from Sugar and Fiesta Bowl employees to officials in Arizona and Louisiana, anti-BCS group PlayoffPAC asked the IRS to investigate multiple bowls. That bowl CEOs are making, on average, more than $500,000 a year and spending money on lavish trips for executives, donors, and other affiliates has raised even more questions and prompted an internal investigation at the Fiesta Bowl.
Bowl games claim that they are nonprofit charities by touting the fact that they generate hundreds of millions of dollars in economic benefits for state and local economies, help universities, and provide aid to charities in the communities that host the games. But separate investigations into such claims have found that the bowls provide much less aid than they claim, particularly to public universities and local charities. An HBO Real Sports investigation, for instance, found that while bowls claim to give “tens of millions” to charity, they actually gave just $4 million in 2009 — despite generating $261 million in revenue.
BCS officials did not respond to requests for comment on the bowls’ nonprofit statuses. But Dan Wetzel, author of Death To The BCS, laughed off the notion that the BCS games were comparable to smaller, more traditional charities. ”They classify themselves as charities, and say they give a certain percentage to local charities,” Wetzel told ThinkProgress. “But the idea that this is the homeless shelter down the street is ridiculous. It’s not.” Of the bowls’ classifying as nonprofit charities, Wetzel said, “It’s a sleight of hand.”
Meanwhile, the games are generating huge profits and giving CEOs huge salaries. The Sugar Bowl, which hosted its own bowl and the BCS title game in New Orleans this week, made $11.6 million in tax-free profits in 2007, the last time it hosted both games. And the schools that participate, most of which are taxpayer-financed public universities, continue to lose money at alarming rates just to play in the games.
Calls for changes to the BCS from fans, newspaper columnists, and even President Obama have thus far gone unheeded, though there are signs that changes in structure could come when the organization’s current contract with the six major athletic conferences ends in 2014. But when it comes to using their nonprofit status to avoid paying taxes, the bowls may have too sweet a deal to change unless the IRS forces it upon them.
“Just like most things in America, there’s a problem, and somebody is profiting off of it,” Wetzel said. “It’s a massive boondoggle.”
How Taxpayers Finance College Football’s Biggest Bowl Games
This is the second part of a three-part series on college football’s bowl system, the Bowl Championship Series. You can read the first part here.
Bowl season, college football’s month-long end-of-season extravaganza, generates millions in revenue and often millions in profits for the organizations that run each bowl game. But because many of those bowls are classified as nonprofit charities, they often pay little, if any, taxes on those earnings.
The largest bowls — the five that make up the Bowl Championship Series — dole out huge salaries to their CEOs and send executives on lavish trips. At the same time, several of them have received millions of dollars in tax subsidies from the states that play host to them, and the taxpayer-financed public universities that play in the games often lose money by participating. That has fueled questions about why the bowls are classified as tax-exempt nonprofits and whether they should be in the future.
The Bowl Championship Series was formed in 1998 as a consortium of the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and the University of Notre Dame. At the end of the season, 10 schools send teams to the five BCS bowls — the Rose, Orange, Fiesta, and Sugar Bowls and the BCS National Championship game. 57 of the 67 schools that make up the six major conferences that receive automatic invites to those games are public universities that depend on taxpayer funds. But many of them lose substantial sums of money from expenses incurred traveling to and participating in BCS games.
In 2011, Virginia Tech’s athletic department lost more than $420,000 from the school’s appearance in the Orange Bowl. Had the Atlantic Coast Conference, of which Virginia Tech is a member, not helped cover its losses, the school would have lost $1.3 million in 2008, $2.2 million in 2009, and $1.6 million in 2011, all years in which it appeared in a BCS bowl. Tech isn’t alone: over a three-year span, universities lost an average of $331,137 in BCS bowls, according to the Arizona Republic. The average loss in non-BCS games in 2011 was $139,604.
The BCS does, in theory, provide money to schools in other ways to help them make up those losses. Athletic conferences that have a participant in a BCS game receive payouts from BCS bowls — the six major conferences will split a total of $145.2 million this year — that is then divided between the schools. But as HBO Real Sports found during an investigation into the bowl system, those payouts often aren’t as lucrative as the bowls claim.
In an interview with HBO, a tax adviser to 23 bowls set up as charities said most bowls “pay out 75 to 80 percent of all revenue to schools.” HBO’s investigation, however, found that reality was much different. Out of 16 nonprofit bowls that provided complete records, none gave 75 to 80 percent of their revenue back to schools. The average percentage payout was in the mid-50s, and the Humanitarian Bowl (which is not affiliated with the BCS) gave less than 30 percent of its revenue to schools.
At the same time, multiple bowls take taxpayer-financed subsidies from state and local governments, including the Sugar Bowl, which tonight will host this year’s edition of the BCS National Championship. The Sugar Bowl has taken $11 million in subsidies from Louisiana since the BCS began, including $1.4 million in 2009, even as the state cut spending on many public programs to fill a budget gap. Such deals faced scrutiny from local lawmakers and residents and have since stopped. Tempe, Arizona, meanwhile, will pay the Fiesta Bowl $6.45 million through 2013 to host a smaller bowl game, the Insight Bowl.
The BCS and its advocates counter that bowl games provide economic boons for the cities that host them. An Arizona State University study found that Tempe saw a $355 million economic boost from hosting the Insight Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, and BCS National Championship in 2011. Still, the arrangement begs the question: at a time when states are cutting spending to vital programs, including funding for state universities, are taxpayers getting a fair shake from bowls that utilize tax-funded universities and, at times, public subsidies to earn millions in profits that are often tax free?
How College Football Bowls Earn Millions In Profits But Pay Almost Nothing In Taxes
This is the first post in a three-part series about the college football’s bowl system, the Bowl Championship Series.
When Louisiana State University and the University of Alabama meet in tonight’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) National Championship game in New Orleans, college football’s top prize will be on the line. More than 75,000 will be in attendance, and millions will watch on TV. The Sugar Bowl, host to this year’s game, stands to make millions of dollars in profits. And little, if any, of it will be subject to federal taxes.
That’s because the Sugar Bowl and the championship game, like the three other bowls that make up the BCS, are classified as tax-exempt nonprofit charities, set up with missions to do public good with the money they earn and spend. In 2007, the last time New Orleans hosted both the Sugar Bowl and the BCS title game, the games generated $34.1 million in revenue — $11.6 million of that was tax-free profit.
The BCS, a consortium of the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and the University of Notre Dame, has been in place since 1998 and manages the five biggest bowl games — the Rose, Orange, Fiesta, and Sugar Bowls, and the BCS National Championship Game. The revenue generated by the BCS games and other nonprofit bowls — $261 million in 2009 — along with lavish trips for executives, large compensation packages for their CEOs, and scandals involving potentially illegal political donations have raised questions about why the bowls are classified as nonprofit charities and whether they should continue to be in the future.
The reason bowl profits aren’t taxed “is because it’s supposed to be serving a public purpose,” Gary Roberts, dean of the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, told the Arizona Republic. The bowls, Roberts said, are not supposed to “squander this money that is not taxed.”
And yet, since the BCS began, average pay for the CEOs who run each bowl has more than doubled and now exceeds $500,000 a year, the Republic found. The Sugar Bowl, which has cash reserves in excess of $34 million and until recently benefited from tax subsidies from the Louisiana government, pays its CEO more than $593,000. In 2007, when the Sugar Bowl also hosted the BCS championship, it paid its CEO more than $645,000. Average executive pay at BCS bowls ranks in the top 2 percent of pay among nonprofits with similar budgets, and in the top 9 percent among nonprofits with budgets twice their size, the Republic found.
“If you’re running these bowls, it’s an opportunity to do good, not to do well,” Dean Zerbe, who investigated charitable exemptions while on the staff of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), told HBO Real Sports. “You can pay yourself a reasonable salary…and after that it has to go to a charitable purpose.”
Charitable purpose, however, likely doesn’t include lavish trips for executives and guests, another area that has drawn criticism. Executives at the Fiesta Bowl spent more than $100,000 on a corporate golf trip, and former CEO John Junker spent more than $1,200 at a strip club, according to an investigation into the Fiesta Bowl after a scandal enveloped the bowl in 2009. The bowl spent $3.3 million on The Fiesta Frolic, an annual trip for sponsors, executives, and others involved in the game, since the start of the BCS. In the same time frame, the Orange Bowl hosted a similar trip, The Summer Splash, at an average annual cost of more than $111,000.
The bowls, in some ways, have come to resemble America’s corporate structure: huge profits, high executive pay, and little, if any, taxes paid to the government. At the same time, the bowls depend on the participation of taxpayer-financed public institutions and, at times, taxpayer subsidies. As Sharon Schneider, a director at a Connecticut-based company that runs nonprofit foundations, told the Republic, “(The bowls) are saving millions, and the states and federal governments are losing millions with these four bowls on tax revenue they would collect if they were not nonprofits.”
NFL Players Call On Indiana Republicans To Drop Their Anti-Labor Bill Before Indianapolis Super Bowl
For the last two days, Democrats in the Indiana legislature have prevented the consideration of a “right to work” bill, which would make Indiana the first state in the U.S. industrial belt to allow non-union workers to free-ride on union contracts, which obviously undermines the ability of the union to do its job. Today, the National Football League Players Association called on the Indiana GOP to drop its bill in advance of the 2012 Super Bowl, which is being played in Indianapolis, saying that the NFL’s biggest game “should be about celebrating the best of what Indianapolis has to offer, not about legislation that hurts the people of Indiana“:
To win, we have to work together and look out for one another. Today, even as the city of Indianapolis is exemplifying that teamwork in preparing to host the Super Bowl, politicians are looking to destroy it trying to ram through so-called “right-to-work” legislation.
“Right-to-work” is a political ploy designed to destroy basic workers’ rights. It’s not about jobs or rights, and it’s the wrong priority for Indiana. [...]
As Indianapolis proudly prepares to host the Super Bowl it should be a time to shine in the national spotlight and highlight the hard working families that make Indiana run instead of launching political attacks on their basic rights. It is important to keep in mind the plight of the average Indiana worker and not let them get lost in the ceremony and spectacle of such a special event. This Super Bowl should be about celebrating the best of what Indianapolis has to offer, not about legislation that hurts the people of Indiana.
Conservatives love to claim that being “right to work” helps a state boost its economy. But according to the Economic Policy Institute, “right to work” laws, far from helping workers, actually:
– reduce wages by $1,500 a year, for both union and nonunion workers, after accounting for different costs of living in the states;
– lower the likelihood that employees get healthcare or pensions through their jobs—again, for both union and nonunion employees;
– have no impact whatsoever on job growth
Indiana Republicans have, so far, not backed down in their desire to move the bill through the legislature. But as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow put it, the GOP may want to rethink that strategy considering that “”America’s most celebrated union members (the NFL players) and a whole lot of national media are coming to town.”
Batman, Milton’s Satan, and Occupy Gotham
I’m no badass Milton scholar like John Rogers (whose lectures on his poetry are free, and awesome). But the things he taught me while I was in college have left me with a permanent interest in what it means when artists put compelling words in their villains’ mouths. And goodness is Christopher Nolan doing a lot of that in the first full-length trailer for The Dark Knight Rises:
I’m most interested in Selina Kyle’s dancefloor warning to Bruce Wayne that “You think you can last. There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you could ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” This is what’s at the heart of the most convincing critique of Batman, isn’t it? The idea that he needs Gotham’s corruption for self-gratification more than he needs to eliminate it in the name of justice, that he’s used his wealth to purchase the capacity to engage successfully in endless conflict. But are we supposed to believe her?
If there’s a hallmark of Nolan’s exploration of the Batman legend it’s this: Bruce Wayne squares off with an intelligent foe who articulates an opposing worldview so Batman can vanquish them both philosophically and physically. In Batman Begins, Ra’s al Ghul is repeatedly shown to be wrong that crisis will deliver a cathartic shock to Gotham, leading people to support a revolutionary upheaval of society. And he dies in a train crash, an act that both obscures his own death among a larger tragedy, and that fails to achieve the kind of effect he’d hoped for. In The Dark Knight, Gotham City’s convicts prove the Joker wrong more than Batman does, actually. But even though it’s at great cost, Wayne and Commissioner Gordon manage to create a set of perceptions that keep the city’s residents faith with the government. Here, I’ll be curious to see if Bruce Wayne proves his genuine fidelity to Gotham City’s 99 percent.
And I’m intrigued by Bane launching his campaign on the city with an attack of the closest thing America has to a national church, professional football. (And please tell me the Wayne family owns the team and the movie riffs on bad owners. Please, Santa, I have been SO GOOD.) Of all years, coming after the Penn State scandals, the Times’ move from reporting on football and concussions to the role of enforcers in hockey, to the allegations that the NBA fired a male employee who spoke up for his female colleagues who were being sexually harassed, this would be an interesting time to rigorously interrogate sport’s role in our national life. Of course we won’t, and the attack on the stadium will just be proof that Bane is another combination of brain and brawn with a strong sense of symbolism. But it would be interesting to see Bruce Wayne acknowledge that one of his opponents is a little bit right. God may have blown off Satan’s critique once his former antagonist was in the pit. And look where that got him.
