I was a terrible baseball player, but I wasn’t as bad as my first year of Little League baseball would suggest. The truth? Just before the final game of the season, my coach pulled my parents, who were in attendance for the first time, aside, and said to them “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but I think your son is left-handed.” Of course, my parents knew this very well. What they apparently didn’t know was that in America’s pastime, lefties need a glove that fits on their right hand, not their left–I had been trying all season to throw the ball with the hand that, as I often observed in later years, I only used for “zipping my fly” and, even then, arguably wasn’t used often enough.

In fairness to mom and dad, I had a predilection for asynchrony that colored my own understanding of the game, and doubtless contributed to my failure to raise my (other) hand about my problem. I hit more than dozen homers that year, and astonishingly, managed to do so without my bat ever leaving my shoulder. I was a classic all-or-nothing hitter back (back, waaaay back) then–I would either strike out, walk, or get hit by a pitch, trotting down to first base to cheers of “good eye!” or “walk it off!” as the case may be.

Because many of the other players weren’t much better with their gloves on their left hands than I was, this usually marked the beginning of an exciting journey around the basepaths, which, often as not, would conclude with my crossing the plate to more cheers. Each time this happened, I credited myself with another home run because, after all, I had successfully touched ’em all.

The naivete of my confirmation bias was an externality of growing up in a family whose indifference and disdain–if not downright hostility–towards sports of all kinds had compelled me to be grateful I’d at least been armed with a baseball mitt, rather than a mitten. On the other hand, because I was–and am–a born contrarian, the more they dismissed athletics in all its forms,¹ the more passionate I became about them.

While I never did become proficient in any sport,² as the oldest child in a young academic family, I moved six times during my K-8 years, and my key ‘new kid’ survival skill everywhere I parachuted into was to survey the recess landscape, learn what games my classmates were playing, and appoint myself the official scorekeeper/statistician, feverishly raising the ladder behind me³ by continuously making up new measures and records to track. In this way, without ever managing a single pull-up (or push-up in acceptable form), without ever scoring, assisting, or contributing a point or a goal,⁴ without ever getting a hit,⁵ without ever being picked next-to-last (as opposed to last–even by good friends), without ever winning a match–in any sport at any level–I can say with confidence that sports saved my life, at least the life I have today.⁶

That’s how powerful sports can be, and are. And maybe you already knew this, and I’m preaching to the stands, not my family.  But if not, consider the forgoing also to be an advance confession that I may not be a completely reliable narrator when trying to convince you that nothing is more important to and for our country, if not the entire human race, than sports, nor when I further claim that, among others, anyone familiar with the centrality of play periods in mammalian development, as well as many, if not most, world political leaders, would truly “take less money” to be on my team in the ensuing donnybrook.⁷  My parents, who I love and admire, are living proof (still!) that life without sports is possible, but at the risk of triggering the overrated backfire effect, I’d even go so far as to suggest that if you find sports trivial, it may only literally be a reflection of your own superficiality, insufficiently weighted by life to explore their depth.

Sports Science 

But rather than just be an insultant and leave it at that, I believe I can persuade you that I’m right, or at least convince you to suspend disbelief, via the foundational postulates of the highest form of science⁸ (according to physicists), in particular Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, the law of conservation of energy, and related concepts of potential and kinetic energy.⁹

Kinetic energy is the energy of movement, the energy objects possess by virtue of being in motion. The law of conservation of energy postulates that energy can neither be created nor be destroyed, which raises the question of where kinetic energy comes from. The answer is that it derives from energy stored when the object(s) involved are at rest, a.k.a potential energy.  Fittingly, the concept of these forms of energy and their relationship to each other are often illustrated via sports examples, especially soccer, as demonstrated by my favorite sports star of all time (still and forever):

Potential and kinetic are like the yin and yang of energy–potential energy is converted into kinetic to enable an object’s motion to occur; then, as the object slows and eventually stops, its kinetic energy reverts back to potential form.

But motion does not only occur among inanimate objects or individual living organisms–it occurs in ecosystems and societies as well. Kinetic energy in society is easy to imagine and see–in activism, in markets, and business more broadly, in scientific research and new technologies, in labor of all kinds, in the professions.  And when you think about it, the primary sources of potential energy they draw on aren’t hard to fathom either–our religions, faiths, spiritual beliefs and rituals, education and educational systems at all levels, politics (when in the form of a product we consume), and sports.

Of course, like the lines drawn between church and state by our founding document (and the line between sports and politics that, ironically, would be drawn by those who chafe most at any exclusion of religion from the public square), the lines between potential and kinetic are blurred by transformations between the two, and we can’t help but observe that there are elements of any dynamic society–like the arts and the humanities or labor unions–that seem betwixt and between–acting, perhaps, like biochemical catalysts.¹⁰

But there’s no need to descend into ontological onanism, if we all agree that sports is a tentpole-level contributor to the dynamism of our–of any society.  Why we seek this consent and consensus follows.

Sports Sense

Most of us have had the experience of reaching a destination by car with no memory of having driven there.  Such an experience is usually accompanied by a jolt of adrenaline that makes our head spin as we consider what could have happened as a result of our apparent complete inattention to our responsibilities as drivers. Something of the same feeling occurs when a nation reaches a crossroads at the edge of a cliff, where we reside today: how did we get here, we ask, again and again.

In answering this question, it helps to remember that, as in the case of our Self–driven cars, we couldn’t have arrived where we find ourselves–sans clue how–unless it was a journey we had taken before. We remember novelty, we take business as usual for granted.

Thus it should surprise no one that these debates (which we feel compelled to resolve before we, the people, take another step outside the guardrails, for better or worse) tend to revolve around history. Two views of history in particular, the so-called “great man” and “social forces” theories of the case, which, in their current application, generally seem to come down to–who else?–Donald Trump (would he have it any other way?), and whether he is uniquely responsible for tearing apart the country, or whether that’s giving him too much credit,¹¹ that he was the inevitable consequence of dynamics that predated him.

Personally, as someone of mostly German descent, I’m skeptical that if Hitler had not existed, we Huns would have invented him, and I tend to doubt the veracity (beyond the margin of error ascribable to hand-waving) attached to allegedly accurate descriptions of allegedly real things, like invisible hands, quarks–and historical forces–that can’t be seen.  And in any case, being both Hegelian and American by nature, I tend to believe the truth lies in the combination of these perspectives, that leaders who “make” history do so by seeing and leveraging the available interplay of forces,¹²  by being “the right person at the right place at the right time,” that “reality distortion fields” have limited ranges, and that Trump, in particular, is more diabolic than diabolical. But at the same time, absent leadership, change is halting at best. While Rebecca Solnit is right when she says the largely rudderless Occupy movement, for example, has had significantly more impact than it’s been given credit for, we surely all agree its impact, at least so far, has been at least multiple orders of magnitude less than the civil rights, environmental, and feminist movements of the ’60’s. Change does not live by social forces alone.

The real problem with great men, social forces, and even their synthesis, however, is an unusual and ironic one. In an era in which we find ourselves beset by those who would reduce us to atoms and molecules, bits and bytes, these worldviews, and others like them, have the equal and opposite flaw: they have nothing like a biology, chemistry, or physics to underpin them, no units, no building blocks, no mechanisms of action, no agency (unless you happen to be a leader), no R, G, and B values to generate the pigments required to paint a convincing facsimile of reality as theory sees it. This is obviously not the right time or place–and I am not the right person–to deliver those goods, but I do want to put down a marker or two, in the right power of ten, relevant to where we are as a nation–and the subject at hand.

First of all, I postulate that:

You would think this was so obvious, it’s borderline insulting for us to even state it.  But think about the state of our discourse today–does any of it sound or seem like it’s governed by this simple, common sense description of reality?

Second, as a logical corollary:

We thought about making this look and sound more scientific by expressing it in the form of a limit, a la first semester calculus.¹³ But let’s get to where we really want to be, for purposes of this discussion; the ergo or QED of Statement 1 and Statement 2:

In other words, there’s no mere quotidian shoe that’s cost us our kingdom and no magic bullet to save us.¹⁴  Something close to every Who in Whoville will be required. Especially every Who contributing to one of the four major sources of potential energy in our society, because there’s going to be a lot of kinetic energy required to right this ship.  Especially everyone involved in sports.

Why?

Because sports are, by far, the most democratic potential energy source available, and not only does this make them the ideal octane for the first country founded on democratic principles, but means they contain the greatest available supply of PE (no pun intended) as well.  New sports are created all the time, by the people, not dictated from on high, and the sheer number and variety of sports, and roles within them, including the fundamental option to participate, spectate, or both, in activities where even spectators can have impact, ensure that virtually everyone has a sports story and history–even my mom and dad.  Meanwhile, religions are highly hierarchical and less than half of all Americans are religious, the savage inequalities in education from Pre-K through college make it profoundly undemocratic, severely limiting it as a potential energy source, and the increasingly undemocratic nature of our politics is how we got to the cliff to begin with.

Furthermore, we all know polarization is the gating problem we need to address before we can overcome climate change, growing inequities, authoritarianism, and myriad other challenges we’re facing, and sports may be our last, best hope in addressing it, because it’s only thing that still brings us together, that we still share–with the decline of religion, it’s unquestionably our most common shared experience.

Every team in every sport has fans across the political landscape, and most individual athletes do as well.  If there were polarized lenses capable of detecting vibes in the infraright or ultraleft spectrum, we’d probably all be shocked by how many people of the opposite persuasion are working out with us in our gyms, playing with us in our rec leagues or alongside us on our courts, passing us (hopefully in the opposite direction) on our trails and bike paths. And as we know from the history of LGBTQ+ rights, knowing people who are “different” from us is the beginning of recognizing Them as Us, and the beginning of the end of division. Those who benefit from polarization will say and do anything to prevent this, but they can’t stop us from playing or watching sports together.

So how can we help sports unleash the energy we need to move forward as a nation? There are many possibilities, but I want to focus on two very specific ways in which sport is not only falling short of its potential for potential, but actually contributing to the corrosion of who we are as a people, because if we’re going to help sport go nuclear in powering positive change, eliminating–and, in fact, reversing–the instances where it’s moving us in the opposite direction–has to be our priority.

As any sports aficionado will tell you, sports discussion among ordinary mortals¹⁵ typically centers on narratives or, as the media calls them, storylines.  So we’re going to do likewise, basing our case and its elucidation on two stories, one about an event, another about a man. An event–Super Bowl XLIX–and a man–Bo Ryan–we know and care a lot about. Because while sports have long been a vehicle for change, this is in part because they’re so tradition/hide-bound and resistant to it. So, as Archimedes (and Bobby Kennedy) would say, you’d better have a place to stand and a long lever if you’re going to do it. Or, as many an athlete in many a sport might say: you’d better know your s***.

And as I think you’ll come to agree, when it comes to this event and that man, and what their stories tell us about what can and should be done, I know my s***.

XLIX

Nothing in sports brings America together like football, and no sporting event does so like the Super Bowl.  For many years, fans of both teams got together in bars, good-naturedly taunted each other throughout the games, matching each other cheer for cheer, and not only usually did so peacefully despite the quantities of alcohol imbibed, but sometimes boozily went on pub crawls together, which would be a miracle if it weren’t par for the course in everyday America.  We looked over the pond at “soccer hooligans” in England and the Netherlands (the Netherlands!) and just shook our heads.

The notion of there being bars dedicated to specific teams, while it probably always existed, is a relatively recent phenomenon, aided, no doubt by the Internet doing the two things it does best.  Like light–the only thing faster than information traveling through a packet-switching network–the nature of the Net takes two forms that seem diametrically opposed to each other.  Light is both a particle and a wave; the Internet brings people together and divides them.  Thanks to the Net, fans can easily find bars dedicated to their teams, which, in turn, incents bars to take sides, not just in one location, but everywhere, until the Bears or Packers or [insert the other thirty teams] niche is filled for every market with critical mass in the country.  And of course, the Net is also, at the same time, helping Bears or Packers fans find one another and bring them together, albeit only with their fellow Bears or Packers fans.

Being the democratic phenomenon that they are, sports always reflect the tenor of the country–soccer teams even have national characters.¹⁶  But just as the politicians who are supposed to lead us are usually followers of we, the people, sports are often a harbinger of what’s to come in the public sphere (which is another reason they’re so important, especially if it’s the public sphere that needs changing).  Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color bar in 1948, which was followed by similar events in professional football and basketball, not to mention many college teams–both in terms of integration of their squads and even the elevation of a trickle of Black Americans into the coaching ranks–all presaged the accomplishments of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Super Bowl XLIX, between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks, contested on February 1, 2015 was clearly a portent of things to come.  It would be another 4+ months before Donald Trump descended that now infamous escalator, but in hindsight, Trumpism, though still colorless and odorless, was already a toxic pollutant in the air.  And the lead-up to the game made clear it would be the most political since Super Bowl III, which took place at the height of what was then the most fraught period in our history since the Civil War–the 60s and early 70s–between the upstart New York Jets of the upstart AFL, led by their young, brash quarterback Joe Namath and the heavily favored, very establishment, old school Baltimore Colts of the NFL.

For XLIX, representing old-school tradition were the New England Patriots, who, like most Boston/New England teams, were decidedly whiter than average, renowned therefore for their “smarts,” “intelligence,” and “discipline,” coached by Bill Belichick, an acolyte of the Bill Parcells school of management, predicated on instilling fear in and manipulating the help (though Belichick was milder in that regard than Sean Payton, for example), led by a classic quarterback qua what a quarterback should be, in the form of Tom Brady–tall, handsome, immobile as a statue, and white.  The Patriots were the right-wing establishment’s team, through and through–literally seizing (and commercializing) the mantle of patriotism, as the modern right is wont to (falsely) do, from their name to their helmet to the colors of their uniform.  Both its owner and coach would prove to be vocal Trump supporters, though its quarterback, one of the most misunderstood athletes in modern history,¹⁷ would not.

The Patriots were widely admired throughout corporate America for their ruthless lack of sentimentality (or what the rest of us would call lack of loyalty) in jettisoning many of the players who had done the most to make them successful, while they still had “something left in the tank” to give them trade value.  Like pretty much every just-so story companies have told themselves to justify cruelty, caprice, and exploitation (remember Chainsaw Al?), this alleged “talent” was exposed when an unwanted Brady left the team, at which point it became very clear that the Pats’ long run of success was much more the product of their non-pareil QB than any white-collar cleverness. It’s harder, however, to dismiss the contribution of the other aspect of The Patriot Way admired in C-suites from coast-to-coast: what the corporate media called their “gamesmanship,” and many of the rest of us more simply knew as “cheating.”

On the other side of the field were the Seattle Seahawks.  The Black Lives Matter movement had launched two years earlier, in the wake of the “not guilty” verdict handed down by the jury in the trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, and by game time had gained substantial momentum.  The Seahawks, including their coach, Pete Carroll, were widely known as the most “woke” team in the NFL, the most vocal against injustice, at the center of every political action undertaken by the league’s players, and conspicuously involved outside the lines as well.  With the exception of Carroll, all the Hawks’ political leaders were Black, though the team’s white players were notably in solidarity.  In the previous year’s final clash, the Seahawks had demolished and embarrassed another classic quarterback (and ubiquitous corporate pitchman¹⁸) Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos, like the Patriots one of the marquee teams in the league, 43-8.  They were looking to repeat, and the establishment was looking for revenge.

Beyond their politics, the Seahawks’ symbology, coach, and quarterback couldn’t have been more different from their counterparts in New England. In his magnum opus, The Dawn Of Everything, anthropologist and Occupy leader David Graeber makes a compelling case that the Founders, whom the Patriots iconized on their original helmet, and all the rest of the European colonists and explorers who came to our country, for that matter, originally learned the Enlightenment values immortalized in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution from the Haudenosaunee (Iroquoi) and other Native American tribes who, he argues, we would actually find more familiar and similar to us than the Europeans who had known only authoritarian rule to that point.  As a result, he simply refers to the Native peoples as “the Americans” in his work.  Which certainly puts a different spin on what it really means to be patriotic.  Symbolically, at least, the Seahawks would agree–the bird on their helmet is a representation of a Pacific Northwest Native American totem. And while there’s a lot of blue in their uniform, its other colors are silver and bright green, not red and white.

In contrast to the Patriots’ dour and taciturn Belichick, Seattle’s Pete Carroll was and is enthusiastic and energetic, the ultimate player’s coach, who created a positive culture unprecedented and attractive to players all over the league. It would be impossible to do Carroll and his methods justice in the space we have, but here and here are two pieces that will begin to give you a taste, if you’re not already familiar with his work. As the two most successful coaches of the past decade, with Belichick owning the better overall record, and Carroll winning all but one head-to-head matchup–this one–both men deserve high marks for creativity, but achieved it in very different ways.

For Belichick, creativity is in the scheme and play design, and the players’ job (other than the QB) is just to execute what’s been called. For Carroll, creativity is something that typifies the best teaching and training, and that you instill in your players in the process. A Carroll scheme is fairly simple and basic; he trusts the players to make the right decisions, applying the special talents they were drafted for, the techniques they’ve been taught, and the attitudes & capacity to improvise they’ve inculcated. Through this approach, the Seahawks built a defense, the Legion of Boom, that was tops in the league in DVOA an unprecedented four years in a row.

As for the QB, if Tom Brady was the prototype, the Hawks’ Russell Wilson was anything but: small (the smallest to ever win a Super Bowl), mobile, Black¹⁹, a master of off-schedule play, the deep ball, and the 4th quarter comeback–not the choreography, precision, timing, and the short to intermediate routes of the dominant West Coast offense. The punditry universally declared the Seahawks had wasted a 3rd round pick on him, only to find him the starter in game one of his rookie year, and every game thereafter for the next 9+ seasons, until he broke a finger on the helmet of Rams All-World defensive tackle Aaron Donald.  Pundits hate to be wrong, especially about something as fundamental as what’s prototypical vs what’s impossible, and in this day and age, they just keep doubling down until they’re right. Unlike the Ukraine haters/Realpolitik “realists”/Great Powers lovers who confidently predicted the Russians would be in Kyiv within 48 hours of the commencement of their invasion, Wilson haters had no thumb to put on the scale, and for a decade the best they could do was claim Wilson had to be a phony because he was too good to be true.²⁰  Super Bowl XLIX would be a momentary break in the clouds for the short sellers, or at least the mirage of one, and as short sellers are wont to do, it was one they burst through with glee.

A standard–and well-publicized–pre-game ritual in Super Bowls past was for the mayors of the two competing cities to make a friendly wager on the result, putting up the best their towns have to offer as the coin of the realm, which meant that even the losing town–and the country–won, by getting to showcase and introduce the products of their labor they’re proudest of to the winners, to say hey, we may have lost the game, but come on over and we’ll show you how great we are anyway, how much our country has to be proud of.  Quick: what was the bet between the mayors of Kansas City and San Francisco this year? If a bet like this gets next to no coverage, did it really happen?

As you’ve probably realized, the story we want to tell is not so much about the game itself, which was one of the best in Super Bowl history, but rather the before and after, with the game as context and reality check, because it’s how the game was built up, and how its story is told, how it’s positioned, that takes the temperature of the nation and determines its ultimate impact on the body politic once it has entered and rippled out through the national consciousness.  Of course, you can’t tell how healthy a body is, whether it has a fever, and if so, how bad, without making comparisons.

Think back to 1950, and the dramatic and unprecedented three game baseball playoff between the Giants and the Dodgers for the right to lose to the Yankees in the World Series. How do we remember that game? Bobby Thomson’s winning three-run home run, of course, the “Shot Round The World.” Do you remember the name of the pitcher who served it up? For years he was a forgotten trivia question until Thomson began to do events with him.  Those who did recall who he was typically did so with a “there but for the grace of God” sorrow for his misfortune, not second-guessing and vitriol.  In football, it was much the same, from Johnny Unitas to Joe Namath to John Riggins (who remembers the name of the cornerback who Riggins stiff-armed into the turf, breaking contain, allowing the Redskins’ battering ram to gallop 40+ yards for the decisive score?), and beyond.

If fandom and related media coverage were the same as it was for all those years, how would Super Bowl XLIX most be remembered?  A: For what (exasperated) observers in the know have felt compelled to keep reminding us: the extraordinary play made by Malcolm Butler, the rookie cornerback out of South Alabama–the Jaguars, not the Crimson Tide.

Think on it. First, a split second after a snap when everyone expected Wilson to hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch, who had gained more than 100 yards and been stopped just short of the goal line on the previous play, Butler had to recognize the quick-developing pass play that had actually been called instead. Second, he had to have the courage of his conviction to abandon the area in the end zone he was charged to defend (with most of the team set to stuff the run) to break strongly on the ball. Third, rather than try to stop the receiver, Ricardo Lockette, from getting into the end zone (a la Mike Jones in Super Bowl XXXIV, or Dont’a Hightower on the previous play) or just break up the pass, he had to decide to go for the interception by undercutting the route completely, risking getting called for pass interference (effectively giving the Seahawks the additional timeout the lack of which led to the pass play to begin with) and/or having the ball pass through his hands and/or be taken from him by the significantly larger Lockette.

Instead the game is remembered for:

• Russell Wilson blowing it by throwing an INT on the final play (with some alleged experts saying, with a straight face, that he should have thrown it to a location 3-6 inches different than he did, which would be great advice if Wilson was a pitcher throwing a baseball–without a bunch of very large men surging towards him with their arms in the air)
• Pete Carroll and/or OC Darrell Bevell blowing it by calling a pass play (the correct call, given the defense, the time remaining, and Seattle’s timeout situation, according to opposing coach Belichick), allegedly to ensure Wilson, not Marshawn Lynch, would be MVP, per Wilson’s request/demand

When in fact the play was, in microcosm, a perfect example of all the things that have to go wrong²¹ for a result as effed up as it turned out to be for the Hawks and their fans, with the perverse result that the real hero of the game was adjudicated to be Tom Brady, whose contribution to the final outcome was to stand helplessly on the sidelines as the Seahawks marched down the field, clearly having visions of David Tyree and Mario Manningham after Jermaine Kearse’s miracle catch two plays earlier.

The Brady storyline, in particular, quickly devolved into one in which the brave Patriots, facing down the august Legion of Boom secondary (all of whom actually had injuries coming into the game known be serious enough to require surgery after it²²), overcame a record deficit (true, but highly misleading–see below), and stunned, roared back and crushed, outsmarted, and owned the Seahawks, a non-pareil triumph in which Brady, in particular, “outdueled” Wilson.   The objective statistics of the game, however, tell a story directly and very much at odds with this dominant post-game narrative, both with respect to the teams in general, and Brady vs Wilson in particular, as shown below.

 

 

It’s fashionable to sardonically quote Mark Twain endlessly on the subject of statistics, but just as the famous quote was not originally his, there are no empty yards in a game as hard-fought at such a high level as this one. In fact, even the Butler storyline does so little justice to the contest as to be criminal. If ever a football game couldn’t be encapsulated in a single play, it would be Super Bowl.  I spent a lot of time “hitting the boards” online for a week or so after the game, and as a Seahawks fan (could you tell?) found myself cutting and posting a number of events other than the Wilson INT/Butler Pick that not only had a inconveniently significant impact on the game, but an even more inconvenient impact on the Good Plucky Smart Patriots Smack Down Big Bad Dumb Seahawks narrative being pushed by the corporate and media establishment.

Key Event 1: Seahawks DB Jeremy Lane intercepts Brady in the end zone.  As he’s tightroping up the sideline and about to go out of bounds, Patriots WR Julian Edelman launches into and spills him, in a play that frankly, if Lane had been a QB, would likely have resulted in a penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct.  In the fall, Lane breaks his wrist and is knocked out for the duration. Brady and Edelman will pick on and run up yards and points against his replacement Tharold Simon, a second year, 5th round draft pick, for the rest of the game.

Key Events 2-3: Patriots hero Butler commits one and possibly two PIs, one borderline, the other blatant, both of which end promising Seahawks drives when Wilson & Co had all the momentum and were seeking to build on their 10 point second half lead.  The second infraction, in which Butler, in desperation, trips the unfortunate Lockette likely costs the Seahawks a TD, given Lockette’s speed and all the green grass in front of him when Butler made his move.

Key Event 4: Despite the coverage advantage Edelman has opened up by knocking out Lane, the Seahawks are doing an effective job of containing Brady, thanks to a ferocious pass rush led by Michael Bennett and Cliff Avril. But on a play in which Bobby Wagner intercepts Brady, Patriots running back Brandon Bolden initiates helmet-to-helmet contact with Avril, and as Avril is falling, potentially concussed, tosses in a forearm to the head. Carroll, who unlike Corporate Bill, actually cares about the health and safety of his players, puts Avril in the concussion protocol, and out of the game.  With Avril out, the Patriots are able to double-team Bennett, the Seahawks’ pass rush disappears, and the Brady comeback begins.

Key Event 5: A few plays later the defining difference between Carroll and Belichick splits the game wide open.  Brady throws a pass over the middle to Edelman, by far his favorite receiver in this game, without whom the Patriots could not possibly have come back to take the lead.  Seahawks’ safety Kam “Bam-Bam” Chancellor, the hardest tackler in the game, is lying in wait, and absolutely annihilates Edelman, who gets up wobbly and glassy-eyed. If you’re a Pats fan, take a look at the images at right and try to explain how it’s anatomically possible that Avril was concussed but Edelman wasn’t.  Yet Belichick puts Edelman right back in the game, and he proves as instrumental in completing the Patriots’ comeback as Avril would have been in preventing it.  Some people, some teams, like some companies, just consider themselves above the rules, or the law.

Sports, as we’ve said, are often harbingers, and in this case there may have been a harbinger of our harbinger, 1991’s Super Bowl XXV between the New York Giants and the Buffalo Bills.  Like XLIX, it was tightly contested, came down to the dying seconds, and is considered one of the greatest Super Bowls of all time (the NFL’s official site ranks XXV No. 5, and XLIX No. 3).  Like Pete Carroll, Bills leader Marv Levy was famously a player’s coach who, before getting his first head job in the league, had been a legend of special teams coaching, working tirelessly to get the most out of the youngest and/or most marginal players on the roster. His counterpart on the other sideline wasn’t just a Bill Parcells acolyte, but the main man himself.

Like the Patriots, the Giants were (and still are) firmly ensconced in the NFL establishment, and the ’91 Bills, like the ’14 Seahawks, were considered to be troublemakers.  Both were guilty, in the eyes of the corporate establishment, inside and outside the league, of letting the “inmates run the asylum,” instead of imposing the harsh hierarchical “discipline” that all entities allegedly need to thrive in a capitalistic society.  Worse, there were what capital punishment fans like to call ‘special circumstances’ in the case of each. The Seahawks’ original and cardinal sin was being political–especially, “woke”–and handing the reins of their team over to a player who couldn’t possibly be a starting NFL quarterback–he broke all the unwritten rules!

With the Bills, the apostasy was more singular, but also more all-encompassing: their no-huddle offense, which they ran throughout the game, not just in the last two minutes of the game or when playing catch-up.  To the establishment, it was just as impossible that such a scheme could end anything but badly as it was that a short Black dual-threat QB could lead a football team to glory. The establishment had managed to convince itself–and more importantly–American fandom, when the Seahawks really did crush and dominate the Broncos in the previous SB, that Wilson had just been a game manager along for the ride (ironically, they said the same thing about Brady for his first three Super Bowl wins) in spite of the fact that Wilson’s skill set was so complimentary to Seattle’s main perceived strengths–a powerful rushing attack and a defense that dominated primarily by aggression–that if we believed in the word “perfect,” we’d use it here to describe his fit with the team.²³

They powers-that-be knew they wouldn’t be able to tell this just-so story again, and the “woke” stuff was only getting more problematic for the league as smartphones and the Net exposed more and more racist police brutality, increasing the dissonance and tension between the league’s mostly Black performers and its mostly white conservative fan base.  As for the Bills, the possibility that they were right (about the no huddle), the rest of the league was wrong, and other teams were going to have to follow suit, ready & fit or not, and turn football into a game of racing up and down the field, like (gasp) basketball or even (gasp, gasp) soccer, in which fans would get considerably more than 6 minutes of actual action for every three hours of their time, was never more of a threat than on the eve of Super Bowl XXV, in the aftermath of an AFC championship match-up with a highly respected Raiders team in which the Bills had used the no-huddle to run their counterparts off the field to the tune of 51-3, one of the biggest blowouts in playoff history.

These two teams, the Bills and Seahawks, needed a comeuppance, and so they got one, whether they actually did or not.  The Giants, like the Patriots, won the game, by an even closer score, 20-19, yet the post-game narrative about what and how it happened, deployed to shape fandom’s memory of the game, was, if anything, even more outrageously one-sided, a tale of how Big Blue dominated, brutalized, beat up, and smashed the Bills and their no-huddle (on “both sides of the ball,” natch), a narrative that, again, is completely unsupported by objective measures of the game.

The one stat that supports the establishment’s propaganda is one they’d have to be diabolically dishonest, shamelessly hypocritical, and/or mind-numbingly stupid to use: time of possession.  The Giants had the ball for 40:33 minutes, the Bills only 19:27.  But of course, this is precisely because the Bills were running a no-huddle offense, and in fact, the brevity of drives in this offense is exactly what the establishment claimed was the no-huddle’s fatal flaw (because, they claimed–with some justice–it didn’t give the team’s defense enough time to rest between drives). In political terms, making this kind of argument would be like attacking Obama for being Black, for example, then claiming that McCain not only won the election but dominated, using, as the proof of this, that he had less melanin on Election Day.  Even in the Bills’ victory over the Raiders, a game that, again, Buffalo won 51-3, they barely won the proverbial “battle for time of possession.”

Truth be told, there are a lot of box scores in pro football where the statistical difference between winner and loser appears to be minimal compared to the outcome of the game—sometimes the loser even appears to have outplayed the winner–and in many, if not most cases this isn’t just an artifact of what the sports media calls “garbage time.” Frankly, this relative statistical parity in game after game after game is as it should be, given the talent, courage, dedication, and effort (among other things) required to play professional football “on both sides of the ball” (it would be fun to put a few pundits on the field during “garbage time,” wouldn’t it?). This isn’t Alabama vs The Little Sisters of Mercy, and “Any Given Sunday” is for real. The objective data of statistics, the hard-earned yards and first downs, the numbers of tackles made, passes defensed, and more, supports and honors this—and honors the concomitant sacrifices for our entertainment these athletes make in a sport they know is likely to break the very thing they spent their entire childhood and early adulthood building.

Of course, they’re well-compensated for chronic pain and cognitive impairment in their 30s that most of us don’t experience until our 70s (if at all), aren’t they? Sure, that’s why 2/3 of them are broke within 5 years after their football career is over.²⁴  Hopefully no one reading this would just love to trade places with a pro football player, and thinks this desire—plus the price of a ticket—gives them the right to disrespect those who are “in the arena,” as TR would say. If so, they should invite the Right Reverend Ray Lewis to their homes and ask him to tackle them. At that point, they’ll likely realize all the war metaphors associated with the game aren’t as far-fetched as they thought, that as in war, vicarious experience from a distance beats a spot in the trenches, maybe even start thanking players for their service—you don’t have to carry a gun to serve your country, your society, or your community after all.

The kind of stats deemed worse than the damndest of lies are those that have been manipulated in their collection or presentation in some way to support a desired outcome. Box scores, which have been added to, but neither transmuted nor transformed—for decades—are not such statistics. Yet the interpretive, explanatory, and adjudicative value of data like that found in “the boxes” is increasingly dismissed by fans and pundits alike as the FAKE NEWS of the sporting world, even though it’s the only completely objective information we have about the outcome of these games. The preferred analytic tools range from the vaunted “eye test” to increasingly opaque “advanced metrics.”

All such “tools” have one thing in common: they promise a simple binary answer to the question de jour: which team–or player (when it’s players being compared)–is better? Box scores typically don’t do this; they’re messy. They typically reveal that each team did some good things; some things Team A did better, in the case of others Team B was best. At the college and high school levels, box scores do something else as well: provide the opportunity for families and communities to celebrate the teams—not just the score or the stars recognized in the recap–when they see the names of the next generation on whom they pin their hopes, and we pin ours, in print.

The search, and increasingly the demand, for simple answers to questions about even this most complex of sports has, in turn, led to something else Super Bowl XXV and XLIX had in common–a shift from the celebration of heroes to the search for goats–someone to blame for the loss.  In XLIX, the candidates were Carroll and Wilson; in XXV, it was Bills PK Scott Norwood, who missed a 47 yard attempt that would have won the game for Buffalo.  It’s a long way down from “The Shot Heard Around The World” to “Wide Right” (yes, Norwood’s miss is a noun, with its own Wikipedia article). Why has this happened? The answer to this question really is simple: if you’re looking for simple answers to questions about wins and losses, as JFK famously observed: “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”

We call those who are responsible for sports losses “goats,” rather than some other animal that looks more like a loser, because it’s short for “scapegoat,” a concept whose origins seem to make it tailor-made for modern use in sports. Originally a ritual element of Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of atonement, the scapegoat was a goat or other animal upon whom celebrants placed all their sins. Today, a scapegoat is someone who symbolically takes on the sins of others.  As we’ve seen, there were any number of other plays (of which we’ve only shared a fraction) in XLIX that contributed to the final result, and there were many in XXV that led to Norwood attempting a field goal at the limit of his range on a second down with only 8 seconds remaining.

Even within the play itself, just as in XLIX, there’s blame to go around–e.g., holder Frank Reich mistakenly spun the laces of the ball to the right in setting the ball for Norwood to boot, rather than to the left as the kicker was expecting (and assumed in aiming), which would have–and did–cause the ball to drift right, resulting in a kick that had the distance but passed one foot to the right of the right goalpost.

This is not something lost on the participants, the coaches and the players–that’s how we know Reich spun the laces the wrong way.  After every game in which the sports media focuses on the turning points of the game in interviewing the losers, and seeks to hold them “accountable” by asking what it thinks are penetrating questions about what it believes are critical mistakes made by Player X, Y, or Z, whomever is being asked, whether player or coach, reflexively, every single time, tells the reporters that there were a lot of other plays that were critical, points to his own mistakes, says the team never should have been in a position where the play in question was decisive et al.  That’s because the players and coaches understand what it means to be part of a team, something our country used to understand better than any other in the world, but increasingly doesn’t.

Focusing on who was responsible for a loss, no matter how big, rather than who contributed to the win, is not just the opposite of inspiring, but beyond this, as I can attest from my time online after the Hawks’ defeat, it fuels rage, mockery, personal and racist attacks, and worse.²⁵  The dismissal of objective information (aka facts) in favor of opaque quackery; oversimplification; an insistence on binary answers and solutions; the search for those who can be blamed; tribalism on steroids; blistering, out-of-control rage and anger–it sounds a lot like our current political discourse, not just what’s happening in fandom, doesn’t it?  Our once deep well of potential energy has gotten shallow and is being poisoned, and all that’s good and positive in sports is being turned instead into a multiplier of the ugliness tearing our nation apart.

The model, the avatar for what needs to be done, in our opinion, was and is a most unexpected one, the Seahawks’ volatile, trash-talking shutdown cornerback, Richard Sherman, seemingly the only person in our country who sensed the import of Super Bowl XLIX, who understood, knew, and acted on the right response to it. Yes, the same Richard Sherman who (in) famously walked up to Tom Brady after the Hawks had defeated the Pats in typical heart-stopping fashion and said, tauntingly, “You mad, bro?” The same Richard Sherman, who, a year earlier, after deflecting a pass into an end zone interception to seal a Seahawks victory in the NFC championship, went into a profane rant on national television in the post-game interview, shouting “When you try me with a sorry receiver like [Michael] Crabtree, that’s the result you’re going to get. Don’t you ever talk about me… Don’t you talk about the best, or I’m going to shut it for you real quick.” The same Sherman who was mugging for the cameras earlier in the game to deride rival cornerback Darrelle Revis after Wilson completed a TD pass to a wide-open Doug Baldwin (who’d used the ref as a pick to get free), the same Sherman who had just reacted to the Wilson interception with a look of disbelief and disgust worthy of the Grinch.

Tom Brady was cradling the ball in his hands after the final kneel down with a faraway look in his eyes. It had been a decade since he had won his last Super Bowl.  He would go on to win three more.  He’d said “I never wanted to win a game as badly as this one.” And now he had; he was out of the wilderness, he was back.  Sherman walked up to him and extended his hand. Brady, understandably, didn’t seem to see him at first, then, even more understandingly, seemed startled to see him when he did. Brady rose to his feet, they shook hands, said a few words to each other, and Sherman walked away.

As he would say later, “I have a tremendous amount of respect for the man, the player.  And I just go out there and do my best to make his life as miserable as I can and help my team win, to line it up and play again.  It wasn’t like we got cheated, it wasn’t like we–some crazy thing did happen, but they won it fair and square, so you shake the man’s hand and you walk away. And that’s what I did.”

Imagine what could happen if we all did likewise. If every time your favorite teams played a rival in football, basketball, baseball, or any other sport, you went onto that team’s boards afterwards, win or lose–especially lose, and congratulated them if they won, told them you thought it was a good game, and why, told them what you most appreciated about their team and the way it played, and ideally, if applicable, what you like about their team’s fans.  Sure, you’ll likely get some abuse, especially if the game appeared to be decided by referees (commiserate, if you can–you’ve doubtless had the same experience). But so what?

If everyone was doing this consistently, it would have a significant impact on the political climate, and if you don’t think so, frankly I’d feel compelled to ask you whether you’re a human or a bot.  It will, I know it will, because I’ve done it and am doing it myself.  When I do, people say “thank you” (two words we hear less and less of all the time in our country), they say good things back to me about my team, they say they’re surprised and pleased that people rooting for my team can be so classy (a little back-handed, for sure, but better than watching fights break out in postgame handshake lines, or marinating in no-win conspiracy theories,²⁶ which is what we’ve devolved to since XLIX). Some have even become my friends. When Richard Sherman extended his hand to Tom Brady, he was at the top of his game and, for that reason, clearly had no ulterior motive, but Brady never forgot it. And years later, when Tom Terrific was playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Sherman was an unsigned free agent dealing with some mental issues, Brady lobbied for and convinced Buccaneers management to bring him on board.

More broadly and importantly, every time we show someone who thought we were ‘the enemy within’ in this realm–and therefore who knows how many others, that we’re really just two people, two Americans, who are passionate about the same thing, sports, we believe an angel watching over America gets its wings, and it can’t help but make us–ourselves and those we’re talking to–wonder if we’re not mistaken about people we thought were our enemies in other spheres as well, like politics, especially politics these days, without–and this is important–conceding or appearing to concede anything on the political front, which could otherwise be seen as a sign of exploitable weakness, especially by those on the right. Anger directed against people we know is often salubrious; it’s anger against people we don’t know and have no way to express our feelings to that festers, grows, and metastasizes to dangerous, even fatal effect to the polity and the nation.

Just as we’d like our politicians to do more leading, and less following, our society could really benefit from sports using more of its power to bring people together. But just as we can’t rely on politicians to manifest the courage of their convictions unless they know we have their back, we are the ones who will have to make that power of sports real.

Bo Knows

 

New England’s win in Super Bowl XXXIV was the fourth for Brady and Bill Belichick, bringing them up alongside Joe Montana and Chuck Noll respectively, which began to stir thoughts in many that each might be the greatest ever in their respective professions, Noll having died the previous summer. In the case of Belichick, it was only natural to ask for a take from the man in whose rear view mirror he had suddenly appeared, the now late Don Shula, all-time leader in wins in NFL history. With a tight smile, and through gritted teeth, Shula’s response was terse and simple: “You mean Belicheat?”

Some might think this a bit melodramatic, not to mention self-serving (especially from a man whose undefeated 1972 team still gets together every year to celebrate when the last unbeaten squad loses its first game), given that the only such incident ever really proven was that the Patriots videotaped opponents’ defensive signals during games, the kind of overkill in the quest for success that brought down Richard Nixon, to whom Belichick has often been compared.  At one point, it was reported they’d also filmed the St Louis Rams’ pre-Super Bowl walkthrough before pulling off the monumental upset that kicked off their long run of success, but this claim was later retracted by the Boston newspaper that had published it.  And “Deflategate,” the scandal that marked the run-up to XXXIV, never made much sense.

But Don Shula is hardly the only person for whom cheating seriously tarnishes the legitimacy of the Pats’ legacy and, in fact, many feel (much) more strongly about it than he does.  One reason for this is that in a society as capitalist as ours, people are well aware that people and organizations who cheat almost never do it only once, and that when they’re caught, what they’re caught doing usually turns out, under the hot lens of prosecution, to be just the tip of the proverbial (and now melting) iceberg.  The aphorism “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” dates back to at least 43 BC, but it’s doubtful that any society uses it more than ours.

Still, the Patriots are hardly the only the NFL team that’s been shown to engage in skullduggery, at least some of it arguably more serious and impactful than “Spygate.” After all, it’s not actually illegal to steal your opponents’ defensive signals–it was just the videotaping that got the team in trouble.  Had they just found an assistant with a photographic memory or one better at taking notes, they could have stayed on the straight and narrow.²⁷  Meanwhile, several NFL teams with indoor stadiums, most notably the Colts, Falcons, and Vikings were accused, during the same period, of pumping extra crowd sound into their buildings when their opponents had the ball, making it more difficult for the opposition to hear verbal signals from their quarterback, center, and others, leading to false starts and other timing problems in executing their offense.

Does that not seem like a more serious type of cheating than what Belichick did, all things considered? Everyone tries–and often succeeds–in stealing defensive signals in football, at all levels.  It’s part of the game, and therefore, as Wall Street would say, “baked in” where expectations are concerned.  But indoor stadiums are a relatively recent phenomenon, pumping in crowd noise even more recent, and this isn’t a tactic available to all teams, only those with indoor arenas. And yet, where was the outrage? Why weren’t–and aren’t–these teams tarred with an even thicker brush than the Pats?

For good reason, in my opinion, and here’s why.

What is America’s greatest strength? What is her greatest gift to the world? In the course of explaining why we’ve come to be known as the “indispensable nation,” in one of our most popular pieces, Americanism, we argued that it’s essentially this:

One of the most popular children’s shows in the U.K. for decades has been It’ll Never Work, a programme primarily concerned with making fun of bad inventions, bad ideas, and failed inventors.  From the title alone, one can intuit this is not a British import any of our networks will be looking to copy any time soon–we are, by nature, an optimistic people, not a cynical or fatalistic one, and however much the distinguished world-weary likes of Graham Greene may rail against this, it has served both us–and the world–well; certainly better than the colonial rule of any European nation… America has never compared itself or the results of its actions against anything but the best, and even more often only against an ideal, exceptional version of itself, while holding others to the same standards.  Even in China, the street word for America, meiguo, means “the beautiful country.”²⁸

There’s a reason why no other nation has our “can do” spirit: it’s hard to be an optimist, much harder than being a pessimist or a cynic, and optimism is fragile.  We aren’t an optimistic people because we’re better than everyone else; we were blessed with the wide-open spaces that gave us the running room and runway to get airborne enough to be able to see and take the long view optimism requires, airborne enough that like-minded people around the world could see us and take the long view that’s also required to leave one’s country of origin and brave all the challenges and dangers of immigration.  But our spaces and, more importantly, our social mobility, aren’t as conducive to optimism as they once were.  Globalization has had the perverse, unintended effect of hemming us in, and capitalism has proven inherently antithetical to the free markets it promised.  If optimism is our real Fort Knox–and it is–we’re going to have to do more, much more to protect it while we figure out–and help the world figure out–the towering wave of new challenges collectively facing us.

What is optimism’s greatest enemy? What’s most corrosive to its spirit? Anything that furthers the belief that the system is rigged, which induces a growing sensation of learned helplessness that curdles optimism into pessimism, or worse, cynicism.  And what’s one of the surest signs, if not the cardinal indicator, that a system is rigged?  When cheaters get away with cheating, when cheaters prosper, especially when it appears they are aided and abetted by the authorities who are supposed who are supposed to be neutral arbiters upholding the rules.  The story of the Indianapolis Colts has mostly been one of heartbreak, blessed with only one Super Bowl win since the early 70’s (and that one a gimmee against a team that hasn’t had a real quarterback since Sid Luckman in the 1940s), despite having one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of the game for more than a decade, followed immediately by one who could and should have been one of the greatest, too.

The Atlanta Falcons? Decades of mediocrity–at best–punctuated by two Super Bowl appearances in which, in both cases, the team imploded, the only difference being that the first time it happened before the game even started, and the second time not until the 4th quarter (a dubious sign of progress, at best)–against who? The Cheatriots, of course. Blowing a 28-3 lead, the biggest meltdown in Super Bowl history–now that’s karma with a capital K. The Minnesota Vikings? Losers of four Super Bowls, all of them complete beatdowns, none since the 1970s, with multiple excruciating NFC championship game and other playoff losses since.  Apparently God and the Devil had another wager going, double or nothing, this time testing a whole team instead of just one guy, and it took 50 years, but the Devil finally won when the dulcet tones of extra crowd noise first wafted through the rafters of the Metrodome.

Then there are the Patriots. Winners of six Super Bowls in the Belichick-Brady era, AFC champions and Super Bowl participants in another three, players in the AFC championship another four–that’s 13 times out of the 20 seasons Brady was with the Pats–65% of the time–that they reached in AFC championship game or better.  Oh, and the one time the authorities traced the smoke all the way to a fire, and made Belichick cough up the evidence of his team’s malfeasance, they granted him a grace never afforded to his role model: they destroyed the tapes.

Furthermore, most Americans are self-aware enough, where our ahistorical amnesia (which has often served us well) is concerned, to know that over time, all that will be remembered is the team’s amazing record of achievement, unless someone (or whole fan bases) keep(s) the memory of that dark side alive.  Which comes with a serious cost to the American psyche, American optimism, because it means remembering, and reminding others, over and over again, that they got away with it, that the authorities let them walk with nothing more than a slap on the wrist, the football gods never punished them either, and God only knows what else they got away with. The system was rigged, both here on earth and in heaven too.

That’s why the Patriots are treated differently than other teams that broke the rules (who come off, by comparison, like everyone’s favorite City Paper feature, Least Competent Criminals).  And why they most definitely should be.

Which brings us to former University of Wisconsin basketball coach William Francis “Bo” Ryan.

Don’t you hate it when people making a PowerPoint presentation just read the text off the slide?  Well, in the case of Hall of Famer Bo, it’s hard to resist listing off–and making your community listen to or read–his bona fides twice, if not more.  A college coach whose teams won five national titles, went to two Final Fours, three Elite Eights, seven Sweet 16s, made the NCAA tournament every year he coached the Badgers (not even the likes of Mike Krzyzewski can make that claim), never finished worse than fourth in one of most competitive conferences in the country, has the best lifetime winning percentage (among coaches who coached at least 100 games in the conference) in the history of that conference (surpassing the legendary Bobby Knight in that regard), including a winning record against every other conference coach, most notably fellow Hall of Famer Tom Izzo (who he owned for most of his career)–not to mention the highest winning percentage of any coach in any division in the 1990s–and is the winningest coach in Wisconsin history, which may not seem like much, but the Badgers have actually won twenty Big 10 titles in basketball, third most in the conference.

As a coach, Bo Ryan was known as an innovator.  He took over the program from Dick Bennett, who was two years removed from one of the most astonishing Final Four runs in history, with one of the least gifted teams in the history of the NCAA, mainly on the back of his patented Pack Line defense and a deliberate, if not glacial, pass-heavy half court offense.  When eventual champion Michigan State defeated the Badgers in the national semifinal 53-41 in what Badger fans would declare the real championship game (since MSU went on to drub Florida by 13 rather than 12), North Carolina coach Cryin’ Roy Williams gratuitously declared the Badgers had “set the game of basketball back by fifty years.”  Having watched Bennettball in person a few times, I can say it was a helluva lot more beautiful than watching Williams’ Heels run mindlessly up and down the court, no matter how spectacular the dunks, but we’re not bitter about Ol’ Roy anymore, not after it was a 23 point thrashing at the hands of the Badgers in the first round of the 2021 NCAA tournament that caused Coach Hear No Evil, See No Evil to hang up his whistle and surrender (or retire, as he would prefer to call it). A badger never forgets.

Many Wisconsinites thought the school had “settled” in hiring Ryan to replace the retiring Bennett.  It took less than a year for them to realize they were wrong.  Ryan asked Bennett’s son Tony to stay on as his assistant–a tough Pack Line-style man-to-man defense would continue to be a Badger trademark–which Coach Bo combined with an offense of his own creation, known as the Swing because in the half-court the ball would move from side to side, testing the defense until it broke, giving the Badgers not just a good shot, but a great one, time after time.  It was also designed to give all five players on the court scoring opportunities, not just a star or two and, in order to take full advantage of the opportunities the defense provided, required bigs (centers, forwards) who could step outside to shoot 3s (in this, Bo was well ahead of his time) and guards who could penetrate and drive.  In other words, it required players who were patient, unselfish, and versatile.

Because the players, both on offense and defense, had to effectively be “always on,” in as close to perfect form as possible, it also required players in top condition, which is why the first thing Ryan did at his first practice was to take the team to a hill 20 minutes from campus and have them run up it.  While this sounds like something out of the Bear Bryant manual of cruel and unusual, Ryan initiated it while coaching Division III to help protect his players’ health, as he found that the usual wind sprints on the practice courts were resulting in back, knee, and joint issues, and believed, correctly as it turned out, that a hill, with a softer surface with more give than a court, would reduce these injuries.  When the team, predicted to finish 9th, instead finished in a four-way tie for the Big 10 title in Bo’s first year, running The Hill became something Wisconsin players believed, going forward, was a secret weapon that gave them an edge against their opponents.  Far be it from us to argue.  But the ultimate proof of Bo’s creative coaching genius is a simple one: anyone who coached against his Badgers, especially non-conference opponents, would tell you that Wisconsin under Ryan was one of the toughest teams to prepare for, because opposing players had almost never seen anyone play like the Badgers before.

Related to this, another key credential for a truly elite coach, at least for those of us who believe teaching is the most important part of the job, is his “coaching tree,” which ideally includes not just former staffers in general, but assistants who implement and build on the principles the coach has established.  In this regard, Ryan’s record is impressive as well.  In addition to the winning ways of the assistant who succeeded him, Greg Gard, former assistant Tony Bennett, now at the University of Virginia, aka Wisconsin East, has won a national championship in his own right, Lamont Paris, after having won a Southern Conference title, was snatched up by the SEC’s University of South Carolina, where, deploying a Ryan-style scheme, he’s rapidly turning the school team from a regular doormat into Wisconsin South (26-8 this year, the Gamecocks’ best record in fifty years), and two other former assistants, Rob Jeter and Saul Phillips, have won multiple titles in the Horizon & Summit Leagues, respectively.

At this point, you’re probably thinking; well this Bo Ryan guy sounds pretty amazing, and maybe you’re even going so far as to suppose that if you’re going to know more about something than you could possibly want to, Bo’s about as good a thing to take up more space in your RAM buffer as any. But still you might quite reasonably ask or wonder why we are spending so much time–your time–telling you about him.

Well, remember when we told you that Coach Ryan’s a Hall of Famer? That’s certainly true in the sense that he should be–and we assume you agree. But he’s not actually in the Hall. In fact, he wasn’t even on the ballot until the year he retired, it’s been eight years since then, and in six of those subsequent years he hasn’t been on the ballot either. 

Also, one of the five national championships he’s won is only in the State of Wisconsin (and in the diaspora of the fair-minded).

Many of us in the Badger State were sure Ryan would be elected the first time he appeared on the ballot. After all, the previous year he had taken the Badgers to their first national championship game since 1941, more than seventy years prior. And the other two college coaches on the ballot were:

• • Tom Izzo, whom he had beaten head to head, 16-12, as well as in conference winning percentage, overall winning percentage, total wins (he’s still ahead of Izzo on that score, eight years later), Big 10 coach of the year awards (4-3), Big 10 tournament championships during the years both were in the league (3-2), while tying him in others.
  • John Calipari, whose quest for perfect season the previous year had seemed destined for success until Ryan’s Badgers decisively defeated his Kentucky Wildcats in the national semifinals (after seeing victory over the Cats just slip from their grasp the previous year at the same juncture, despite leading most of the game, when the KY’s Aaron Harrison rattled in a miracle 3 with 5.7 seconds left and the hand of Wisconsin’s best defender in his face, erasing a 2 point deficit to put Kentucky up by 1, and Wisconsin’s Traevon Jackson’s subsequent jumper–an ordinary jumper, not a “desperation” one as was reported by the corporate media–at the buzzer rimmed out).

Both Izzo and Calipari were inducted that year, Ryan wasn’t, and still hasn’t been.

The easy explanation for this, though it was unspoken at the time, was that both Izzo and Calipari had won national championships and Ryan hadn’t.²⁹ But this was untrue, outrageously so. While as we’ve said, one of the championships on Ryan’s ledger is recognized only in Wisconsin and among fans of fair play, he won four national titles at the Division III level–no “albeit” or asterisk included–more than Calipari and Izzo combined. And he did it at a school “in the middle of nowhere” on “a two lane highway,’ as Gard, his successor at Wisconsin has observed, with no prior history of basketball success, winning games at a clip that exceeded all of his peers at all levels for a decade in the process. There are high school-only coaches in the Hall, there are Division II coaches, why not Division III, especially when the coach in question went on to unequaled success in Division I?

And what’s the difference between Division I and Division III coaching anyway? Recruiting. All the best, most preternaturally gifted players go to Division I schools. As Gard, who joined Ryan as an assistant at Division III UW-Platteville, has accurately pointed out, it’s a lot harder to win at Division III because “you don’t have all the resources, you don’t scholarships,” you can’t just ride your players’ God-given talents to glory. All you can do is coach.

Not surprisingly, given his record, John Calipari is one of the best recruiters in college basketball history. Since taking over at Kentucky, his sole innovation has been to harvest the best ‘one and dones’ in the country from America’s high schools every year, kids already so good at the game that they’re widely expected to jump to the NBA after a single season of college ball–no matter who coaches them. Oh, and it’s said he developed a unique “platoon system,” because he was so good at outcompeting his peers for the hearts and minds of 17-18 year olds and their parents that he sometimes had two teams’ worth of the best talent in the country, so needed to develop a system to ensure that all would be getting enough playing time to keep the door revolving, and maybe even get a few to stay for a second year. It should be noted that 15 years of collecting the best talent in the country every year has enabled Calipari to harvest exactly one national title.

For Bo Ryan, the jump from Division III to Division I didn’t quite result in the same concomitant meteoric rise in available talent.  Patient, unselfish, versatile, and dedicated to rigorous conditioning, aka the requirements of his system‐‐how many young NBA players in the last 20 years does that combination of characteristics describe?  It’s not that these aren’t virtues any basketball coach would treasure‐‐the NBA players who come closest to embodying the full set include names like LeBron James, Tim Duncan, and Steph Curry (the only college player I can recall making a Ryan-coached team look like the Washington Generals)–but when Bo Ryan became a Division I coach, the demands of the Swing offense he developed, plus the Pack Line defense he deployed, left him at a huge recruiting disadvantage against the Caliparis of the game. His was — and is — a system designed to build a team, not showcase stars for the NBA draft.

To illustrate just how big of a talent gap he faced–and overcame a lot more often than not–we conducted a little thought experiment involving Ryan’s most NBA-ready team, the 2014-15 Badgers who reached the NCAA Division I championship game, and their two Final Four opponents, Calipari’s Wildcats and Coach K’s Duke Blue Devils. We imagined Ryan’s roster taking on K’s and Calipari’s in a 7 game series in which each game represented a subsequent NBA season, e.g. Game 1 in the series drew on data from the 2015-16 NBA season, ie the first season after that fateful Final Four. To keep things simple (as opposed to creating yet another “advanced metric” ultimately representing nothing more than our subjective judgment), we tallied up the scoring averages (points per game) of the members of each roster in the NBA that year, rounding the totals to the nearest whole number. You can check out our full analysis here, if you’re interested, but a summary is below:

Put another way, based on their NBA production, the team Duke put on the floor should have more than doubled up Bo’s in the final tally; Calipari’s should have spit-shined that floor with the Badgers, by an average of 69-13.  And this summary is actually quite generous to Ryan’s boys, as we tallied ppg season averages irrespective of number of games played. The scoring averages of the vast majority of Duke and Kentucky alums are based on full seasons of play; in the case of the ex-Badgers, by contrast, they’re based on as little as three games in the season before the player was cut or sent back down the NBA’s minors (the D-League), plus the two best players on Ryan’s squad were injury-plagued as pros.

How did Bo Ryan compensate for talent disparities like these? There’s only one way he could, isn’t there? Coaching, coaching, and more coaching‐‐and not just more coaching, but superior coaching at that.

This is further supported, in the case of Calipari specifically, by another experiment that was actually carried out. The hypothesis to be tested: What would happen if John Calipari were to move to a league–the NBA, for example–where he could no longer use his ability as a recruiter and had to rely on his ability to coach alone? For that matter, what has happened when any and all the coaches who are in the Hall primarily for their college accomplishments moved to the NBA? Versus what happened when Bo Ryan, who some may want to claim was just a big fish in a small pond in Division III, moved up two levels in class? The results are shown at right–and bear in mind as you review them that the only “college” coach faring well in this comparison, Larry Brown, is primarily in the Hall for his pro accomplishments (at least I hope so, given that his three most successful college ball sojourns all ended in recruiting and/or eligibility scandals)

All of which leads us to the first of two existential questions we’d like to direct to the Naismith Hall of Fame. As an institution whose ultimate raison d’etre, whether you like it or not, is‐‐as you’ll find confirmed if/when the proverbial feces hits the fan in our country‐‐to represent, support, and encourage the best of American ideals, is this best done by considering coaches for the Hall primarily based on their ability to recruit? Or their ability to teach?  Does our country need and benefit more from being thought of as a place where people build things? Or where they sell them?

Oh, and we have a follow‐up. One that (much) more relates to where our discussion began. Because another, even more core–and, we believe, critical‐‐difference between John Calipari and Bo Ryan is that Bo Ryan ran an absolutely clean program with never so much as a remote suggestion of scandal. As do many other coaches, believe it or not. “Everybody does it,” “everybody cheats?” Bull. Shit. BT, even. A steaming pile of Big Lie.

What is true is that before he went to Kentucky, Calipari had the very dubious distinction of being the only coach in NCAA history to have two Final Four appearances, with two completely different teams from two different schools “vacated”–stricken from the record books–because they involved players who were ineligible because of rules violations, mainly the receipt of improper benefits. The nature of some of these violations may seem quaint in the NIL era, but they were the rules, and plenty of other coaches obeyed them, which means that, like Trump’s lies to bankers and insurers, his actions disadvantaged others competitively, and therefore were not “victimless.” In a sports context, in fact, we have a simple word to describe them: cheating.

The first scandal involved his best UMass player, Marcus Camby, accepting $28,000 from two sports agents, during what was still only his junior year.  Calipari claimed not to have known this was happening, and the NCAA decided to believe him. And to be fair, neither UMass nor Calipari gave Camby the money, Camby declared for the draft after the season’s end–after one of the agents threatened to out him to the media unless he signed with said agent, so if the goal was to funnel enough money under the table to Camby to keep him playing at UMass, said plan misfired badly. Still, one has to ask why Camby thought it was OK to accept the money and why the agents (multiple agents, not just two) thought he would be open to this. Where there’s smoke…

The second case, involving the recruitment of Derrick Rose to Coach Cal’s Memphis squad, which the future NBA MVP led to to the brink of Finals victory before the Tigers somehow blew a 9 point lead in the last two minutes (due to substandard actual coaching, perhaps? A Bo Ryan 9 point lead, by contrast, was typically regarded as anybody else’s 18 point margin), after which he turned pro, is much harder to explain away, either in its particulars or as some kind of no harm, no foul incident, because without the actions involved, Rose might well never have played for Memphis at all.  Still, Calipari might be able to weasel out of the first part of the scandal–someone helped Rose get a high enough score on the SAT or ACT to be eligible for admission to the school–which Calipari denies all knowledge of, of course. He claims the same about the other major component of the NCAA’s case, but we doubt his protestation will pass your laugh test any better than it did ours. Rose’s brother Reggie was heavily involved in Derrick’s recruitment and choice of school. Throughout Derrick’s one and only year at Memphis, Reggie was allowed to travel on team busses, team flights, and stay at team hotels, all free of charge, all of which Calipari claimed to have been unaware of. Team buses. Team flights. Team hotels. Throughout the year. Had no idea. LOL.

Some will claim that Calipari was punished for all this when the records of his teams in the years he was caught were stricken from the record books. Sure, having those numbers struck from a book nobody reads definitely erased all the memories of those teams, who are surely part of the reason he’s in the Hall today–or are we supposed to believe he’d be in like Flynn for one championship in 15 years at the bluest (literally) of blue blood schools, while having the most raw talent in the country on his team (emphasis on raw, sure, but whose fault is that?) every single one of those of those 15 seasons. If getting records “vacated” meant so much to a striver like Calipari, don’t you think that after UMass he would have done everything possible to ensure nothing like it ever happened again, rather than get involved in rules violations far more egregious the second time around?  As for his time at Kentucky, do we really believe that after two light taps on the wrist, he’s been a good boy ever since? Would a criminal whose first two sentences were at Club Meds really believe the third strike was anything to fear? And even if he did, would it result in anything more than greater care in covering his tracks–or simply putting more layers between himself and the deeds, given how well even implausible deniability worked for him in his the first turns on the dance floor with the NCAA?

Don’t you feel that un-American sensation of cynicism growing in you as you read this? That is, unless sports, on top of everything else, hasn’t already maxed and curdled you out.  The cheater got away with it, the cheater prospered, and the supposedly neutral authorities, the arbiters, aided and abetted him in doing so. What’s worse, unlike the Patriots case we began with, there’s a clearly innocent competitor in Ryan who’s been treated like the cheater should have been.

While I was pondering the implications of this (wondering, in particular, how I’d respond to someone who dismissed everything I’ve said as just the picayune ranting of a guy whose coach at his alma mater has–arguably–been done wrong, rather than a real problem worth the length of what you’ve read so far), I ran across an article about the late Lefty Driesell, another coach with a stunning record of clean success who had nonetheless been denied entry to the Hall for what the columnist, John Feinstein, deemed to be an inordinate amount of time. Feinstein attributed this to the death of Len Bias, who might well have been a worthy rival to Michael Jordan for virtually his entire career, had he not ODed the night after being picked #1 by the Celtics in the NBA draft.

As Feinstein argued, it seemed–and seems–unfair to blame a coach for a truly stupid mistake one of his players made after the end of his senior year on the court and, indeed, close to the end of his entire senior year and college career. Still, at least with Lefty, there was an explanation that could make sense to someone about why he had been held out, even it was ultimately illegitimate. Not so with Bo Ryan. But the fact that there were now two such cases I was now aware of, Ryan and Driessel, led to another analysis whose results I suspect you will find all too appalogical, and I hope the Hall will too, sooner than later

As you’re probably aware, as elite as most halls of fame are, there are still strata within them that serve as an informal ranking mechanism, mainly defined by when the honoree got in, i.e., was he/she a “first ballot Hall of Famer (at one end of the spectrum) or someone who was only voted in by some kind of (veteran’s) committee many years after their original eligibility expired (at the opposite extreme). Most Halls require the potential honoree to hang up whatever they need to hang up and wait a few years for the dust of their career to settle and the bones to be read before they are considered. The Basketball Hall is relatively unique in that, at least where coaches are concerned, a worthy deemed appropriate can be inducted years, even decades before he/she retires. On the flip side, there’s no standard “first ballot” waiting period. Thus we view its de facto ranking criterion as the number of years before or after their retirement the individual was inducted.

With this in mind, we went through bios of every Hall of Fame coach whose induction was likely at least partially in consequence of their accomplishments as a collegiate coach, and we sorted them into two groups:

• tarnished — meaning there was at least one scandal in their coaching career, in all but one case (which we’ll discuss below) involving some action to gain a competitive edge through prohibited means (ie cheating), and
• clean — coaches who, at the same level of diligence, did not appear to have any tint of scandal associated with them and who, therefore, we considered to be running, or to have run, clean programs.

You can see/read about why we included each of what we called the Not So Sweet Fifteen in the tarnished category here. The overall results of our research are below (arrows associated with some of the bars mean the coach is still active, meaning the years before or after retirement that they were honored is still changing every year):

 

Like we said, appalogical—appalling but par for the course in today’s America. Yup, you’re reading it right — the coaches known to have broken rules or otherwise behaved unethically for a competitive edge have been getting inducted, on average, more than thirteen years earlier in the arc of their careers than coaches who’ve run clean, honest programs. We can debate the placement of individual coaches in one category or the other, but with this number of coaches and the size of the difference between the two categories, it seems unlikely that any amount of quibbling around the edges could change the clear conclusion, that the Basketball Hall of Fame is, and has been, sending a clear message to the American people: cheaters prosper and the honest get punished. Just the message we don’t need in this country anymore.  Just the kind of message that turns the potential positive impact of sports on our society into a multiplier of the negative, in this case undermining American optimism and curdling it into cynicism.

Some might find it strange to find Bobby Knight lumped in with all these cheaters, since his program was famously scandal‐free and he had a phenomenal dedication to making sure all his players actually graduated and got their degrees. I myself was a fervent Knight supporter and defender for many years for these reasons (growing up in Indiana doubtless contributed).

The reason he’s included is that the point of our exercise is to explore how athletics has contributed to the downfall of the American psyche and American values, and how it can return to the positive force in support of Americanism it was for so long.  Whatever his virtues, I was eventually forced to conclude that his detractors had been right all along, that Knight is exactly the kind of poor example and nasty, rage-filled, rude, disrespectful, negative, manipulative grudge and grievance holding “leader” that has driven both corporate and civic America to its knees. We are living through the deleterious impact even one such person in high places can have on who and what America is,  and it’s no accident that Knight was one of Donald Trump’s earliest athletic supporters–he fit like a jock strap–and continued to be so until the day he died. Game knows game.

Furthermore, it’s also no exaggeration to suggest that Knight was, in fact, just as much a product of the corruption of college basketball as anyone else on this list because that corruption enabled him to use his few virtues as a shield to cover his many less savory qualities for much longer than would otherwise have been possible. Just as the corruption in our country caused millions of Americans to turn in desperation to a man who promised to be the thief to catch the thieves and, in his wake, we’ll likely have to defend ourselves from individuals nearly as noxious who make the argument that “at least they’re not Trump” and seem like a “breath of fresh air” by comparison.

Still, if you really object to Knight’s inclusion, we could always swap him out for someone more deserving in the way we’ve defined demerit for everyone else. For example, we could replace him with his most famous pupil, the sainted Coach K, which would give us the chance to explain why so many of us in Wisconsin believe that Bo really did win the Division 1 title that would probably have resulted in his induction the first time he was a finalist in 2016 (which also probably would’ve meant we’d never have done the investigation we’ve just shown you–but only we can make that worth what’s happened to Bo and other coaches and athletes like him, and therefore society at large), only to have it snatched away and given to K to add to his collection.  If you’re interested in knowing more about that story, and how it justifies adding Saint K to the tarnished list, we’ve written extensively about that here.  Otherwise, know there’s a reason why he’s not included on either side of the chart above.

Now you may look at what we’ve presented and say “so what?” Nobody cares about who gets into the Basketball Hall of Fame. But there you would be wrong, on multiple levels. First of all, coaches care–Bo Ryan may not, but most do. If coaches continue to see that the fastest way to the Hall, and bragging rights over all your peers who take longer (being competitive being a gating requirement for big-time coaching) is to play fast and loose with the rules–with no reason to fear it could cost them, then cheating will only become more rampant. And the more cheating goes on, the more it becomes a corrosive drumbeat for the tens of millions of Americans who follow the sport. Some may wish their coach would cheat. Many more will see echoes in other parts of their life, as workers, as consumers, as voters, as Americans, and it becomes another cynical nail in the coffin of their optimism, and another blow to our strength as a nation.

If, on the other hand, the Basketball Hall starts declaring cheaters ineligible, it will have a chilling effect that’s actually cool; enabling the growth of flowers of purity from the manure of corruption, a reason for people to realize that cheating is not inevitable, not the cost of doing business, not the American way, not a fact of life, or any of the other lies that justify the drain of corruption, a social opiate poisoning our body politic. If the Hall goes further and starts fast-tracking, rather than slow-walking, clean coaches onto its honor roll, the effect will be even more salubrious.

Bo Ryan’s Swing offense may be unique, but the principles behind it–unselfishness, sharing the ball, versatility, opportunities for all, operating and coordinating as a team–are more widely shared among the coaches running honest programs. Why? Because if you want to run a clean program,  you have to forego high-end recruiting–the capitalist competition for 5 star recruits (and maintaining their eligibility) is the source of the vast majority of cheating in college sports. And if you forego that, you need to be much more focused, as Bo was, on developing a team, rather than a showcase for one or two stars while everyone else becomes a complementary player, aka the help.

The good news is that if you do this, you’ll have a much more solid foundation and be much less likely to crash and burn.  Bo Ryan never had a down year, and slowly built his program to higher and higher heights. Coach K can’t say that, neither can Calipari, nor Roy Williams at North Carolina, nor can Rick Pitino, Jim Boeheim, or Jim Calhoun et al. His professional counterpart where values and philosophy are concerned, Gregg Popovich, had 22 winning seasons in row, the longest such streak in NBA history, but wasn’t admitted into the Hall until he’d won 5 NBA titles and become the winningest coach in NBA history as well.

Maybe there’s something about the values and philosophy of guys like Ryan and Popovich that the Hall doesn’t like.³⁰ If so, they need to get over it. Corporate America, which has become increasingly boom and bust in recent years,³¹ resulting in levels of destruction of assets and lives we can no longer afford, needs to be compelled to hear stories like Bo’s. And they will, if he and more coaches like him get admitted to the Hall, because Hall of Fame coaches in basketball, football, and other sports are asked to give talks at companies all the time, and their books are widely read in the corporate world. Top coaches also have the ear of politicians and political groups, non-profits, talk show hosts, and more. A talk by a real team-builder like Bo would be worth its weight in gold compared to a used car salesman like Calipari. It’s too bad that Calipari has had that cachet for nearly a decade now and is still only 65. Bo is 76 and still doesn’t have that calling card to open corporate and other minds where true leadership is concerned.

Whatever is done to reform the Basketball Hall can and should become a model for other Halls of Fame as well, multiplying the impact. As far as we know, only the Baseball Hall seriously considers character, even though it’s plainly embedded in the definitions of both fame and infamy:

These definitions were gathered from a variety of sources.  Note the most common word–reputation–a trait that’s practically a character synonym.  Do cheaters have a good reputation, a reputation of “favorable character?” Seems unlikely, especially when the example the Cambridge dictionary uses to illustrate a person who is infamous–the opposite of fame–is someone who thinks cheating “is the way the game is played.” LOL.  And no, we had nothing to do with that.  Coaches and players who cheat, commit crimes, say grotesquely inappropriate things, engage in bullying, hazing, or other bad acts are all “known” for “something bad,” the opposite of fame–so what are they doing in anything that calls itself a Hall of Fame? Those who oppose making character gating for induction inevitably make the kinds of “everybody does it” excuses that represent cynicism at its worst–and never have the slightest overlap with the role of uplift and inspiration that justify making sports so central to so many societies, and its practitioners as well-compensated as they are.

Teaching is “doing something important.” Is recruiting?  There seems to be a clear understanding that the public’s recognition of merits is important–“public estimation,” “popular acclaim,” “widespread reputation.” But none of these Halls involve the hoi polloi in any way, and in fact, many (including baseball’s) are increasingly distancing themselves by, for example, using “advanced metrics” as decision criteria, even though they mean nothing to the average fan, let alone the public in general.  Bottom line: all of these institutions should be given an ultimatum: change your criteria or change your name.

And if you’re still thinking this is small potatoes, know this:

If everyone were to pick one “small thing” like Hall of Fame criteria they feel passionately about (rather than just being overwhelmed by how much needs to be changed) and work to change it, we would soon find ourselves realizing the macro version of Bobby Kennedy’s tiny ripples of hope, in which the ripples from wildly and completely different endeavors criss-cross and build even more robust and organic tsunamis of change.

Even with regard to sports, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the potential power of reform to positively impact the human spirit. Here’s another prospective example: how about getting rid of penalty kicks as the way to decide soccer matches, and going back to the number of corner kicks achieved by each side as the decider? What kind of a message does deciding matches after 120 minutes by a coin flip send to fans? Is it “why bother trying because the world is completely random?” Or “no need to work hard–you can always get lucky?” You know it’s a coin flip, and so does everyone else–that’s why weaker teams always play for penalties.

As a metric, corner kicks reward the team that has won the run of play for 120 minutes, rather than the team that got lucky for 5.  Corner kicks motivate offense, daring, and excitement, and a team that’s “hopelessly behind on corners” is especially motivated to score. Penalties only motivate “parking the bus” (pulling your entire team back close to your own goal to prevent the other team from getting off so much as shot). Deciding matches via penalties might reduce them to sports show/YouTube-friendly clips that anyone can understand, but they’re a desecration of the sport, a sign of appalling decline-and-fall decadence.

After six years of being inexplicably off the ballot, Bo Ryan is once again a finalist for the Hall this year, and some in the know seem hopeful he will finally get in. What the results of our research confirm is that while this result will be very welcome, should it manifest, it will not and cannot wipe away the systemic injustice done to Ryan and those like Ryan who “worked hard and played by the rules,” nor erase the negative impact this had on society at large, doubly negative because the power of sports to set a positive and inspiring example has been systematically corrupted to confirm and multiply the worst and most cynical beliefs we may corrosively harbor about ourselves and our country.

Bo doesn’t seem to give a crap whether he’s in the Hall or not, and that’s understandable given the basketball establishment jobbed him inches from the promised land in his final year of coaching.  But we should. As always, when someone has been wronged, the least we can do is seek to insure that what was done to him/her/them is never done to anyone else again.

This post is dedicated to my stepmom Helen Bee, my never-to-be indicted co-conspirator in our mutual love of sports, and in collaboration to evangelize the sporting world to the rest of our family...

(Hey Helen, did you know Peter gets–and reads–The Athletic’s newsletter now?)

 

Creative Politics is the world’s first community-based political incubator, perpetually under construction, as we synthesize the best of liberal and conservative ideals with technology and history to generate policies, strategies, applications, and actions for the post-modern era that are well outside the beltway, and well beyond just talk.  All Creative Politics blog posts are collaborative, living documents, the way Madison and Hamilton would create them if they were writing The Federalist today.  Let us prove it (with credit) by leaving us a comment below.

¹ Since it’s my parents, my intellectual parents I’m speaking of, whose knee-jerk reaction to generalizations of all kinds mirror my own (to their put-downs of sports and pop culture in general), I have to include what would otherwise be the kind of self-absorbed caveat I’d normally avoid at all costs by noting the one exception to their sporting disdain: the Cold War-era Olympics, as my father was/is an immigrant from behind the Iron Curtain and my mother was/is the daughter of a German-American political scientist and constitutional scholar who, out of a profound hatred of totalitarianism and religious intolerance, led the effort to get Jewish academics out of Germany in the 1930s, and had no more love for “Uncle Joe” Stalin and the USSR (which drove his pioneering work after WWII on what would become the EU). Back

² I think I may have briefly held some kind of record in the Presidential Fitness Test when I succeeded in recording a toss of -50+ feet in the Softball Throw, and experienced only one moment of Beamonesque glory in my childhood when, out of nowhere, I uncorked a standing broad jump leap of 5’10” in 6th grade. I did become proficient in paddle/racket sports in college, when my brain and body finally figured out how to work together to channel my aggressions, and in long distance running out of necessity (as a Peace Corps volunteer in a village with a glorified riverbed as the only road to the nearest town, 17 km away), but it wasn’t until the age of 51 when I finally learned how to hit a baseball, while trying and flailing to show my son how to do it–it turns out that keeping your eye on the ball is something you’re supposed to do even after it leaves the pitcher’s hand–who knew? Back

³ What’s now known as creating barriers to entry Back

⁴ I did briefly have a moment after college akin to stealing home^3a when I was on leave from the Peace Corps working as a volunteer in a halfway house for the mentally ill (where all the residents thought I was one of them, and that my talk of “going back to Africa” was just typical delusion–until I said goodbye). I had been invited to join a group playing pick-up basketball in the “inner city” of Madison, Wisconsin, in which I was so ridiculously overmatched I was reduced to hiding behind my ability to gather the occasional rebound that caromed off at an angle that only the slow, meek, weak, and wrongly positioned could have predicted. In the closing moments of the game, feeling a momentary wave of compassion leavened with pity, the best player on “my” team passed me the ball and urged me to “take it to the hoop.” Harboring exactly the opposite complex of emotions, the best player on the other team ran at me, screaming. With a hand in my face, I threw up a desperate heave, and swished an NBA 3-pointer, stunning everyone on both sides into helpless laughter Back

^4a Unlike me, legendary singer-songwriter Paul Simon is not only an avid baseball fan but was an excellent player as child (and still plays stickball in The City on occasion). The game has made platter appearances a number of times in his music, most famously in Mrs Robinson, but also Night Game and, most recently, Cool Papa Bell, among others. It was while waiting for a Yankees broadcast that he first heard and fell in love with rock-and-roll, and for many years he often said that the greatest moment of his life was when he stole home for his high school team in one of the last games he played; he still keeps a reproduction of the Long Island Press article (“Simon Steals Home”) reporting the feat on display in his Manhattan office.

⁵ I am not counting my last at-bat in the last game in my last year of summer camp when, by pre-arrangement, a friend pitching for the other team grooved a ‘meatball’ to me just so I could experience making contact for once in my childhood, and I banged a “double” to right field, which I put in quotes because by then the power of scorekeeping had definitely gone to my head, leading me to regularly award errors and take away hits for balls that, in my considered judgement, “should have” been caught, even, in some cases, where no fielder had touched the ball at all. Like the rabbi playing golf on the Sabbath, how then could I award myself a double, or a hit at all, when its sole raison d’etre was plainly that no one on the other team expected me to so much as nick the pitch straight backward? Back

⁶ I can, without reservation, recommend this path to any nerd or parent or other caretaker of a nerd, particularly in the case of nerds who are unusually strange. Precisely because sports are so central to the human experience, and lend themselves readily to everything from philosophy and literature to science and mathematics, an obsession with them will absolutely not harm your (or your child’s) intellectual development–in fact, as we are, at root, and at the end of the day, a social species, I would argue they can only enhance your/their cerebral prowess (e.g Nate Silver was a moneyball geek well before he became an electoral savant). Back

⁷ Granted, many, if not most, of the leaders on my team would be authoritarian dictators Back

⁸ As opposed to subjecting us all to the lengthy, grandiose, tendentious twisted chain of poetics attached to a small, but solid and spiky, mace of history generally required to bore sports skeptics into resignation or submission Back

⁹ Full disclosure. At the request of Baker, I have been re-reading War & Peace and am getting close to the end. If you’ve read and remember it, particularly the place where Tolstoy veers off from straight narrative, you will probably understand why I am reaching for a nuclear option at this juncture.^9a If you haven’t, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Thanks to generations of translators, there are versions (like the Penguin Classics edition I’m reading) that while perhaps less “authentic” and accurate than their more critically acclaimed peers, have been polished to a point where you can glide as effortlessly over the prose as you can in a bodice-ripping potboiler, or could if you read such things.

Which isn’t to say, if escape is the goal of your entertainment, that a Tolstoy tome is as easy a carpet ride as going to a movie or bingeing a streamer. But we would contend that the initial effort involved in immersing yourself in a good book, which requires you to construct much of the world of the story yourself, and do so using the materials you find most real, results in a deeper, more profound, more lasting escape, one that makes movies and television, where the experience is constructed completely for you, seem like the fast food, the junk food of escape by comparison, leaving you hungry for more just an hour or so later.

I’m also, less relevantly but perhaps more apparently, reading Infinite Jest. We’d like to think our footnotes are better than DFW’s. Are they?
Let us know
In comments below
So we know
If anyone is reading them.Back

^9a Inspired by Tolstoy and the Occupant, we figure what’s the point of having the fruits of physics if you’re not going to use them? Back

¹⁰ Since, after all, we’re a bit more complex than the universe of particles and waves physics rules over. Back

¹¹ While begging the question of what to give the man who already takes credit for everything (and blame for nothing). Back

¹² There is, in fact, actually a theory of history that says just this, developed for the same purpose. For the life of me, I can’t find its name (if you know it, please tell us in comments below), so I’ve included this note to ensure anyone for whom what I’m saying is not just common sense doesn’t think I’m claiming it’s original to me) Back

¹³ The second time I’ve used limits in my adult life, both times more metaphorically than actually.

¹⁴ In fact, in a grotesque irony, the closest we’ve come to a shoe drop required at least four decidedly un-magical bullets delivered between November 22, 1963 and June 5, 1968 (with February 21, 1965 and April 4, 1968 in the interim in between). Which isn’t to say we haven’t found a shoe or two. One could argue, for example, that we were extremely fortunate to have, as our first leader, a man who refused many offers of monarchical powers and set a critical precedent for democracy when he stepped down after two terms. But perhaps it was this aspect of his nature, perhaps not directly, but as a facet of his larger character, that moved and drew his fellow compatriot patriots to name him as their leader to begin with. Surely it wasn’t only because he was tall. Speaking from personal experience in the clouds, I doubt it. Back

¹⁵ As opposed to advanced metric geeks, film study cinephiles, jargonheads, and the like Back

¹⁶ E.g., the German team is organized and precise, but often rather mechanical (it had a period when it was more free-flowing, which peaked in its 7-1 World Cup semi-final demolition of Brazil on the latter’s home field–but since then has fallen apart, so we won’t be surprised if there is a return to tradition); the French team has artistic flair, but is often arrogant and overconfident–at least that was the case until it became largely made up of Frenchmen of African origin; the Italian team is ruthlessly tough, especially on defense, but also notoriously operatic in its efforts to get referees to red card players on the other team or award the Azzurri penalty kicks, etc. Back

¹⁷ Brady, joined by most of the Black players on the team, especially its stars, did not attend either White House ceremony in honor of the team that took place while Trump was in office. He also publicly stated, contra Trump and the radical right, that Colin Kaepernick (the former 49ers quarterback who had been blackballed by the league (under threat by Trump) for kneeling when the National Anthem was played at every game he played in, as a form of silent protest against the treatment of Black Americans by the police and white society at large) was still good enough to start at quarterback on any number of teams, and should be allowed back in the league. While known for trash-talking on the field, off the field, it’s doubtful there has been a better teammate in any sport in recent years. Each year at training camp, he made a point of getting to know all players trying to make the team, even those who clearly had no chance of doing so, and did the same with every member of the Patriots staff as well, no matter how humble their duties. When awarded his fourth Super Bowl MVP, in the aftermath of leading an unprecedented 4th quarter comeback from 25 points down, he made clear he believed the award should have gone to running back James White, who had set a Super Bowl record for points scored in game, and emphasized this belief by giving White the keys to the car that came with the award. He also became a model for the virtues of deferring payments he was entitled to in order to free up money for the team to continue its winning ways (one area where his counterpart in the game, Russell Wilson, whose career echoed Brady’s for many years, could and probably should have learned from him) Back

¹⁸ Unlike Brady, who was largely invisible on advertising outside New England, which makes his financial losses in the SBF scandal both ironic and tragic, depending on how much he has left. To be clear, we like Peyton, a lot actually–he reminds me more than practically any other player in the NFL, of the campers and counselors of Camp Pasquaney, the oldest continuously running overnight summer camp for boys (leaving aside the pandemic) in the country (founded in 1895) that played a very positive and formative role in this very odd child’s life. Back

¹⁹ For some,  the fact that Wilson was both short and Black was not just additive, but multiplicative and synergistic in its offense. For them, it was bad enough that they had to accept Black quarterbacks at all in a position reserved for the best, most intelligent leaders, but at least they could tell themselves that these “bucks” were superhuman athletes, which might overwhelm any lack of leadership skills and intelligence that might otherwise disqualify them as an alleged proxy for their race. But to have to accept a normal-sized Black man as a quarterback? That’s a bridge too far. Doubt this? Ask yourself why there has been so much more and more sustained discussion of Wilson’s height than there ever was about the height of white quarterback Drew Brees, who is only one inch taller.  How often is Baker Mayfield’s height mentioned compared to that of Kyler Murray or Bryce Young? Back

²⁰ Interestingly, both the left and right considered him a “phony” for the same (racist) reason–his conspicuous lack of Black ‘attitude.’  As for the main, flight of the bumblebee (bumblebees can’t fly), substance of their claim, it took (1) a trade to a completely dysfunctional franchise with a rookie coach who’d been hired to attract a completely different quarterback, Aaron Rodgers (Nathaniel Hackett failed at that as well), followed by (2) the hire of Sean Payton who, by Year One word and deed, looks to be, like Joe Gibbs before him, a legend who’ll end up wishing he’d stayed retired, for (3) the punditocracy to finally get to declare, 12+ years later, that they’d been right all along–at least until Wilson suits up this fall as the starter for the Pittsburgh Steelers, backed by owner royalty, a coach who’d better be in the Hall before Payton, a defense that’s perennially been among the league’s best for decades, an OC whose offensive style is suited to what Russ does best, and better weapons at every skill position than he ever had in Denver. I’m looking forward to hearing what Kurt Warner et al have to say then. Back

²¹ E.g.in addition to Butler’s great play, Belichick’s brilliant decision not to call a timeout, which complicated the Seahawks’ decision-making, and equally brilliant defensive call, which forestalled the run while taking away a lot of pass options as well, (1) it could be argued that even if a pass play was the right pass play, it probably wasn’t the best pass call under the circumstances, asking a 5’11” QB to throw a 1 yard pass to the middle of the field over the heads of a Patriots’ defense stacked against the run (during the following season, Raiders’ QB Derek Carr mocked Wilson for throwing that pick, then threw one himself on the exact same play–a slant pass over the middle at the opposition’s 1 yard line); it might have been smarter, with Wilson in his dual threat prime, to call an RPO roll-out or bootleg instead (2) WR Jermaine Kearse, he of the miracle catch two plays earlier, was supposed to set a pick for Lockette on the play; instead, and ironically, he got jammed by Brandon Browner, a prototypical Pete Carroll cornerback, tall, strong, and rangy–and a member of the Hawks prior Super Bowl team who they’d let leave in free agency–which complicated Lockette’s route, making it possible for Butler to jump it (3) As OC Bevell pointed out after the game, Lockette, who clearly never saw Butler coming, short-armed the ball when making the catch, making it significantly easier for Butler to pull it away from him.  Lockette, who was one of the less experienced receivers (which, some have argued, with some justice, made making him the primary target on such a critical play an error in judgment–a too cute by half overthinking) was truly the tragic figure in what transpired.  He believed the interception was entirely his fault, apologized repeatedly to Wilson, who could not console him, broke his leg the following season, ending his career. Back

²² All-World shutdown corner Sherman played most of the game with only one functional arm, for example. I’d say that was braver than any of the Pats, with the possible exception of Julian Edelman, unless that hit by Kam Chancellor was so hard he was feeling no pain. Back

²³ During Wilson’s early years, he was one of the top dual threats in the game, rushing for nearly 550 yards in 2013 for an average of 5.6 yards per carry, and nearly 850 yards in 2014 at a clip of 7.2 yards/carry. Most, if not nearly all of his rushes were designed runs as part of run-pass option plays in tandem with Marshawn Lynch.  On these plays, Wilson could give the ball to Lynch, keep it himself, or pass it downfield. The possibility, on every such play, that Russ would exercise the second or third options (keep or pass) opened up big holes for Lynch, who ran for 1,257 yards in 2013 and rumbled for 1,306 in 2014.

The Seahawks ranked 4th in the league in total rushing yards in 2013, with Lynch and Wilson combining for 82%+ of the Hawks’ 2,188 yards that year; in 2014, they were 1st in the league in rushing, with Wilson and Lynch accounting 78%+ of the team’s league leading 2,762 yards on the ground.  Furthermore, Wilson’s ball security in those years was outstanding in those years as well: he lost no fumbles in 2013-14 combined (and fumbled only 7 times across those two years), and threw only 7 interceptions in 2013 and just 9 in 2014 (as a second and third year player!).

The key to long, time-consuming drives in football is the ability to run the ball effectively without turning it over.  Because the Hawks could do this (thanks to the QB they had and his specific skill set), the Seattle defense got plenty of rest on the bench every game, and this, in turn, meant they consistently had the energy throughout entire games to maintain the hyper-aggressive, balls-t0-the wall style they used to strike terror in the hearts of opposing offenses.  Wilson’s dedication to ball security amped the D’s style up even more, because it meant the Legion rarely had to defense short fields, which allowed it to pin its ears back and take more risks.

As for Brady, the only reason I can think of why he was derided as a game manager in his early years is that he was a 6th round draft pick from a school (Michigan) known for its medievally conservative  three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust offense, in which the QB’s primary responsibilities were to hand the ball off or run it himself.  So again, as far as the punditocracy were concerned, Brady, like Wilson, was not a QB they would have drafted and, in fact, every team in the NFL had passed on drafting at least five times, so he had to be a nothing but a game manager or bust–they couldn’t be wrong.  They probably should have watched a little film of the Michigan-Alabama donnybrook in the 2000 Orange Bowl, in which Brady threw it all over the yard, leading the team to a rare bowl win in SEC country, 35-34 in OT. But they clearly didn’t, because they already knew best 😛 Back

²⁴ There are two very good bad reasons why this happens. First, in the kinds of environs most hail from, it truly takes a village to raise an athlete, and most athletes feel–or are made to feel–an obligation to support that village (not just an “entourage”) in return, something even their strong young bodies and palettes of freshly minted cash cannot do alone. Second, they’ve typically sacrificed every opportunity for life skills development they might have had (to the extent such opportunities are even available in neighborhoods where PTSD is the default homeroom teacher) to take the highly improbable shot for glory they did. When a player refers to himself in the third person, it’s not a show of conceit, it’s a reflection of the complete disconnect between the life and expectations laid on a pro athlete and who they really are. NFL Football Star is a role they’re trying to figure out; where they came from is reality. Are there players who ride the tiger like wranglers? Sure, and there are people who survive pancreatic cancer, too–but we don’t ask the dying why they can’t be more like the survivors. Back

²⁵ All of it egged on by sports shock jocks spewing “commentary” they know they’d never repeat in front of their own mothers. Back

²⁶ I almost feel sorry for the Trump supporters caught up in the tangled web of their own weaving in the most recent Super Bowl between the Chiefs and 49ers.  You would think they’d be diehard Chiefs supporters in this one, pulling hard for a team whose jerseys are as red as the state the team hails from (not to mention their MAGA hats), and whose fans still do the very politically incorrect “Tomahawk Chop” during home games.  But no.  Because the Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce participated in a pro-vaccine commercial for Pfizer, and was (and still is, as of this writing) dating pop superstar Taylor Swift, who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, and has only become even more popular (and a true cultural force) since, the Trumpkins convinced themselves that the Biden administration, in cahoots with the NFL and the ever-present deep state, had fixed the game for the Chiefs to win, with the expectation that in the post-game on-field celebration, Taylor, who would, of course come down to the field to participate (as she, in fact, did),  would of course, after giving Travis a hug and a kiss, announce, in place of the traditional “I’m going to Disneyland,” her endorsement of Biden in this year’s election, despite everything The Donald had done for her since.  Which left the hapless red caps rooting for the team from Sodom, Gomorrah instead. And when the Chiefs won, because of course they did, left them waiting, as they did for JFK Jr in Dealey Plaza, for an announcement that never came.  Like I said, almost. Back

²⁷ Of course, Nixon didn’t need to bug Democratic Party headquarters or break into Daniel Ellsberg’s offices to win the 1972 election– one of the all-time greatest landslides–either, and that smoke turned out to reveal a raging–literally–inferno at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.  So, too, it may have been with Belichick. Back

²⁸ As Medium blogger Perpetual Amazement notes, “the official name…is even more flattering: 美利坚合众国 (meilijian hezhongguo), or “The United States of Beauty, Advantage, and Endurance.” Back

²⁹ We should–and will–acknowledge that Izzo, at least, has, in addition to winning a championship, taken his MSU teams to a remarkable eight Final Fours. What’s even more astonishing, and likely a record that will never be broken, from 1998 to 2022–that’s twenty-four consecutive years, for those keeping score–every kid who played for Izzo for a full four years played in at least one Final Four. And to achieve this, Izzo had to set another remarkable standard: he’s won seventeen games–and counting–in the tournament in which his was the lower-seeded team (i.e., the underdog in the game). Bottom line: even though we included Izzo in our Not So Sweet 15, fwiw (and it ain’t much, we know) we have absolutely no problem with his being in the Hall, nor where he was in his career when he achieved this–in fact, we think he should have been admitted sooner. We just think he and Bo, after all their battles royale at the top of the conference, should have gone in together, and we get the sense that Izzo agrees–we understand he’s been actively lobbying the Hall to finally do the right thing and let his 76 year old archrival in. Back

³⁰ In the case of Bo, it wouldn’t surprise me if the capitalist establishment found his offense (with all its unselfish sharing) and defense a little Marxist. But their bigger problem with him is probably his refusal to admit, with tens of millions of fans behind him, that the better team won the Division I championship his Badgers played in, and were clearly cheated out of. Moreover, given that his opponent was corporate America’s favorite coach and team (Coach K and Duke) and the title was K’s fifth, it meant Ryan was denying the larger, overriding narrative that the establishment–which must have been able to feel the populist tsunami coming (just two months later, the Demagogue in Chief would descend to begin stoking and harnessing it to his ends)–wanted to impose on the result, that the rich get richer, and deservedly so.

As for Pop, where do we begin? He’s been outspoken against gun violence, racism, authoritarianism (including against China), Trump, and stronger in favor of environmentalism, labor unions, justice for Native Americans, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights (he hired the first female assistant coach in NBA history), and more. A key test, therefore, of the sincerity of any Hall reform will be how long it takes them to admit the similarly outspoken Steve Kerr, 5 times an NBA champion as a player, and 4 times (and counting) as a coach. Back

³¹ Even with the unprecedented support of seven rounds of major bailouts and counting since the early 1980s, not including last year’s mini-bailout of tech banks. Back