Category Archives: Sports

Official Quackery

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The abuse of science is so common, hardly anyone notices. It’s not the abuse of science itself, but more the appropriation of the language of science. This is always done as an effort to fool people into believing things that are not based in fact. People tend to trust science, so if you couch an idea in the language of science, they will tend to accept it, even if it is a little nutty. As a result, junk science turns up all over the place. The latest example is in this story about the NFL concussion settlement. 

The awards would vary based on an ex-player’s age and diagnosis. A younger retiree with Lou Gehrig’s disease would get $5 million, those with serious dementia cases would get $3 million, and an 80-year-old with early dementia would get $25,000. Retirees without symptoms would get baseline screening and follow-up care if needed.

The science supporting concussion is not strong. It has been known for a century, at least, that repeated blows to the head can be damaging to the brain. Boxers have been called “punchy” for at least a century. The degree of causality has never been established, as most boxers start out rather slow witted. There’s really no way to know if taking blows to the head cases dementia, using statistics, because you cannot have a control group that mirrors the experimental group. You need more than correlations.

The CTE hysteria of today is based entirely on the worst sort of observational science, along with endless media hype. That is, the people trying to ban football claim they see a higher incidence of brain related disease among football players than the general public. Well, there’s also a higher incidence of college diplomas and advanced degrees. That’s right, football players are awarded advanced degrees at higher rates than non-football players. No one is claiming football causes pursuit of college credentials.

That’s the difference between correlation and causation. Correlation can be a clue to causalities that are unknown. They can also be meaningless. While it seems reasonable that there are long term costs to playing a sporty that is as physically damaging as football, controlling for all of the environmental and genetic factors is impossible, at least with regards to this issue. Maybe people prone to dementia are also risk takers, and thus engage in high risk hobbies like playing football or boxing.

To now claim that ALS is caused by football is bordering on insanity. ALS is most certainly a genetic disorder. There’s some evidence of inheritance, but that’s only clear in about 10% of the cases. The nature of the disease, however, strongly suggests a genetic defect. There’s no evidence that environmental factors are the cause. It’s not just that it clouds the research into head trauma, but i pollutes the research into ALS. It’s a fraud on the public that can have real costs to real people in medical danger.

Wisdom of the Crowds

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I’m not a fan of democracy as a form of government. I think the Founders had it about right. For a country like ours, a republic is the way to go. State legislatures pick their senators, the people pick their congressmen and the Electoral College picks the president. The people should be consulted, but mob rule is no way to run a country or even a state. Society needs leadership and it needs executive action.

That does not mean there’s no room for democracy. In small groups, democracy is a great way to adjudicate the issued effecting everyone. Small towns or even cities can work just fine with a health dose of democracy. As long as you accept there will be a dumb fraction that insists on getting a ballot, you can make it work. You just have to set the rules so the dumb do not derail the project. A good example of that is the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Yesterday, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and Frank Thomas were elected to the Hall after missing a few times. All three are good candidates as they were elite players of their generation. As is always the case with elections, there is a parade of whiners who think the system must be defective simply because they did not like the result. These people tend to make silly arguments though. Jeff Passan is a good example:

Because, hell yes, it’s shameful that writers who demand openness from those they write about can hide behind some self-administered cloak of anonymity and cast votes with no merit. And you’re damn right that if 50 percent of the 10-man ballots were stuffed and voters copped to wanting to vote for Biggio except he was No. 11, the process deserves – demands – to undergo a thorough vetting and reconsideration. There are problems in the voting, no question, and in his explanation at Deadspin, Le Batard did a poignant job at pointing them out and forcing the BBWAA to ask itself how to remedy them.

Obviously, he struggles with the difference between the role of a reporter as a reporter and his role as a voter. Only a simpleton would demand these people post their ballot for president, but, sports writers are kind of dumb. The best example of this is Dan LeBatard, the ESPN personality who sold his ballot to a scandal site. The guy can be entertaining on TV, but he is otherwise a dullard. It takes a special skill to be funny and clever on TV, but it is not the same as general intelligence. Dumb people make the best clowns.

What has these people worked up is the absence of the cheaters. The voters can’t bring themselves to vote for the guys everyone knows cheated to make a name for themselves in baseball. The voting suggests guys like Bonds, Clemens and others will never get in through the ballot. Instead, they will have to appeal to the veterans committee in a decade or so in order to get into the Hall. The veterans are notorious for being protective of the Hall, but they have rectified past mistakes so it is a nice check on the whims of the voters.

What we are seeing with the Hall and the steroid users is democracy at its best. It is messy and seemingly incoherent, but the result is very wise. The players who deserve to be in, despite their transgressions, will get in eventually, but they will be made to wait as a form of punishment. Once no one cares enough to keep up the punishment, they will be voted into the HoF. It’s not perfect, but this is pretty close to the ideal of democracy, but it can only work at the small scale and when the stakes are very low.

Coaching While Black

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Charlie Strong, the head football coach at Louisville, will be the next head football coach at University of Texas. The Longhorns are part of college sports royalty, maybe even the top of the list of elite programs. They generate more revenue than any other school. They have the biggest facilities, the biggest fan base and the biggest egos. Other big state schools like Ohio State and Michigan can claim to be the top of the list, but most people consider Texas the NY Yankees of college sports.

Their decision to hire a black guy obviously has cultural meaning, mostly because the mass media is obsessed with race. In fact, the media will care more about the race angle than the fact Strong has a very good resume and is actually qualified for the job. Coaches tend to kick around for 20 years as assistants and head coaches at small programs. Eventually, they get a shot at a major, but not elite, program to show they can compete with the best. If they win, they get a shot to man one of the elite programs.

Strong has done all of those things. The fact that he is black should be an enormous asset to him, but that has not been the case. Instead, he struggled to get his first head coaching job.  The rumor was college presidents fretted over his race, thinking the fans would not embrace a black man as coach. Even after he got the job at Louisville and there were no white riots, the attitude among college presidents persisted. They were sure their racist fans would burn the school down if they dared hire a black to coach the football team.

In fact, that’s been the argument for decades now. There’s no evidence the fans care about the race of the coach. They just want to win. Boosters, who fund a lot of this stuff, would embrace a space alien if he could win games. If Strong was a bisexual, transvestite black Nazi, the Louisville fans would cheer him anyway. It’s fair to say sports are why America has as much racial peace as it does. White sports fans care more about winning than the realities of race, so they overlook it in order to have their sports.

Despite this, white college presidents still think their fans hate blacks. There are a growing number of black athletic directors, who would be eager to hire black coaches, but the number of black coaches remains very low. The fans actually think black coaches are a benefit dealing with black players. Again, the boosters just want to win so that leaves the school presidents as the primary obstacle to hiring clack coaches. That and the fact it is a long apprenticeship and blacks tend to have very high time preference.

These presidents are overwhelmingly white and liberal. They live and work in the least diverse parts of America. Anyone thinking the campus is diverse has never been to a McDonalds in the South. They also live and work in the most radically left-wing parts of America. Yet, they walk around thinking they are the friend of the black man and those others, those rowdies in the stands, black and white, are the bigots. It is a remarkable bit of cognitive dissidence. These people are strangely delusional.

It should also be noted that it is the southern schools that are leading the way with the hiring of black coaches. Here is where winning trumps all else. Vanderbilt is paying their black coach $3 million a year. Mississippi State had a black coach a decade ago. Charlie Strong started in the SEC and then went to Louisville. Miami had a black coach a few years back. The assistant ranks are ghostly white the further north you go, while the sidelines in the South have much more vibrancy.

Of course, the cognitive dissidence is not limited to the lily white leadership of American colleges and universities. When the Left sees all of these black coaches at southern schools, they believe it due to their heroic efforts to fix those bad whites in the south, even though the schools in the north remain ghostly white. It’s a reminder that for bad whites, race is a real issue to be dealt with in a serious way. For good whites, race is entirely about moral posturing in juxtaposition with the bad whites they detest.

NHL Overtime Math

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For a long time now the NHL has settled ties, after a suitable overtime period, with a shootout. The reason they went to this format is the typical American fan hates a tie result and they hate seeing games go on for hours with no result. At least they think the fans hate ties. For some reason soccer fans seem to be OK with ties, but then again soccer fans are not really sports fans. There’s also the television factor. The TV people want the games to last a predictable length of time in order to sell ads

Regardless, the motivation for adding the shootout was not due to some practical issue of accounting. The NHL managed just fine for decades without the shootout. It was an attempt to address what they thought was a concern of casual fans and it was a way to add some excitement. Shootouts are fun, even if you think they are stupid. It’s not hockey, but it is a competition, one with something at stake. That’s the appeal of sports, seeing men match wits, skill and strength with one winning and one losing.

The thinking way back when was that teams would seek to avoid the shootout and take risks in regulation and overtime in order to avoid the luck of the shootout. Hockey people think of the shootout as random chance. Elite scorers will beat elite goalies more often than not. It is really not a test of the goalie’s skill. It is more random chance. Even if that is not true and skill plays some role, the players and fans think it is chance. Therefore, the players should be desperate to avoid it. That’s was the thinking.

The trouble is it did not work out that way. At first it seemed to, but it has settled into the same old routine with the road team playing for a tie late in regulation and overtime, figuring the odds favor them. They get the point for the tie and a 50/50 chance of getting the shootout point. It is quite rational if you do the math. Playing for the tie means a 90% chance of getting one point. It also means a 50% of getting the additional point. A little math means that approach is worth 1.4 points.

Throwing caution to the wind and going for the win means the game ends in a loss 50% of the time (let’s assume). That’s one point – 50% of 2 points for a win. For the “go for the win” strategy to make sense, you would need a win chance of greater than 70%, which is unlikely, even for the top teams. Obviously, if you had such an advantage, you would not be headed into overtime often enough to care. You would win 70% of your games and the risk of losing in overtime would not matter very much.

Turns out hockey teams are not that dumb after all.

Now the NHL is thinking about changing the rules to get rid of the shootout. The main motivation is that it is stupid to decide games this way. After that, they are finding that NHL teams are doing the simple math I described above and responding to risk in a rational way. Modifying overtime by taking a skater off the ice will change the math. The teams with better skaters will have some new advantages. It’s an effort to add more risk to over time in order to encourage risk take by certain teams in regulation.

The other thing they could do is change the points. A win should be three points and the ties one point. Let’s do the math again. Playing for the win, assuming the same 50/50 probability, results in 1.5 points while the tie is just a point. Add back in the advantages and disadvantages of 4-on-4 hockey and you get a lot more teams either winning in OT or desperate to avoid OT, thus playing to win in regulation.  The result could lead to more exciting finishes and far fewer ties. The teams will figure it out and act accordingly.

No Country For Men

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It’s increasingly difficult to be a normal man and engage in the general culture. One reason is the people in the content business, especially the news business, seem like they are from another planet. They say things that are so at odds with daily reality you wonder if they ever go outside. Of course, most of what they write and say is propaganda. They don’t think of it that way. They are just enthusiastically repeating the articles of faith of their class. The news is just a hallelujah chorus for the cult of modern liberalism.

A good example is the brouhaha over the Miami Dolphins drama. The sports press, despite not knowing any details, has crafted this elaborate narrative into which they are going to force the participants. The “culture in the locker room” is one element. All of those terrible alpha males, you see. Of course, the white guy is pure evil because he used the magic word, despite doing in front of black guys who were laughing and egging him on while everyone is partying. The semi-black guy is the victim, despite no one on his team coming to his defense.

One reason for this weird disconnect is that the sporting press is dominated by beta males who find traditional male behavior threatening and distasteful. There’s a class element too. Football players may have gone to college, but football is decidedly working class. You don’t excel in the sport without being a physically tough man. To be a physically tough man means rejecting a central part of modern liberal culture. Like cops, football players accept the human condition at face value, which means accepting the biological diversity.

Another reason for this is Progressive culture is feminine. Women can be ruthless, but they don’t have the same hierarchical view of social organization as males. Men compete to establish the pecking order in the group. Women compete for the attention of males. That’s how the general culture operates now. George Bush once said, something along the lines that if one person hurts, government must act. That’s the general view of the over class. It is not winners and losers, it is just losers. As long as there are losers, no one can be a winner.

That’s why sports reporting is so weird. Normal men look at this story and just assume the one guys is a pussy and the other guys are assholes. Every normal man knows the world is divided into predators, victims and the men who make the world run. At the fringes, like a locker-room or a prison, the predators attack the weak.  So many of the people in the sports media grew up as victims of the playground bullies, they can’t understand what they are covering.

The Cruelty of Men

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Anyone who has played sports, committed crimes, belonged to criminal organization, served in the military or been to prison knows that males can be violently cruel. On that list, two are considered honorable activities, while the other three are counted as dishonorable. Yet, the qualities one needs to thrive in all of them are the same. You have to be tough minded. You have to be willing to use violence to establish your place in the group. You have to overcome physical fear and take physical punishment.

In all cases, you will be confronted by other males who want to dominate you, sometimes in extremely unpleasant ways. In every locker room, there are guys trying to push around other guys. You earn respect from your teammates by pushing back. In prison, you better be willing to kill that guy or you’re going to be his punk. Men can be horrible to other men, but modern times and a feminized culture push this truth to the fringes. Still, it is an immutable part of the human condition.

Once in a while it creeps into view. A current example is the case of Miami Dolphin’s lineman Richie Incognito. Reportedly, he harassed a teammate to the point where the guy quit the team and went to get psychiatric help. I’m quite sure that every player on the team knew what was going on and many participated in it. The victim was probably despised by everyone because he was taking it. No man respects another man who will not fight back.

The over-class can preach the contrary in TV and movies, but no one respects a wimp, a pussy or a punk. That’s why no one came to the guy’s aid. Incognito is a horrible human being, by all accounts, but as far as the other players were concerned, he was the better man. It’s terrible and it is cruel, but it is the way men are to one another. This poor sap will get help, but he will never play football again. Like the Ned Beatty character from Deliverance, he can never look another man in the eye again.

Incognito has been suspended and will face some sort of punishment. As long as he can play the position, he will get work and be welcomed by other players. They may think he is a bad guy, but they will respect him. That’s the other side of this sort of thing and why campaigns against bullying are pointless. Men, by nature, respect the bully more than the bullied. In the evolution of man, being counted on to fight is an important asset. When the other tribe is coming for your women, the wimp is a liability.

The End of Black Colleges

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The seemingly endless reshuffling of the college football conferences is usually explained as a function of money. Football is the big revenue sport, with men’s basketball a distant second in college athletics. Everything else is way down the list and therefore not all that important to the decision makers. Therefore, whatever promises to increase football revenue is done, even if it harms the other sports. As a result, the major football schools have been consolidating their hold on TV money by creating super-conferences.

Steve Sailer suggests there may be a different issue at play, one no one is allowed to discuss, even though everyone knows it exists. Colleges are reorganizing to corner the market on smart black athletes, which helps them boost their diversity. Put another way, the demand for smart black guys, who can play a revenue sport is expanding due to the quest for diversity. This is the driving up the price for black athletes, so the schools are consolidating their hold on the market by realigning.

That increase in price is reflected in the cost of maintaining high level sports programs, so while the pie gets bigger, the number of slices get smaller, as the big schools take bigger slices of the pie. It is certainly true that the pool of qualified applicants keeps growing, but the pool of the preferred applicants is not growing, at least not organically. It’s why elite colleges love African students. Barak Obama was highly sought after by elite schools, despite being mediocre, because he ticked a lot of important boxes.

It is an interesting observation and not entirely false, but if the best athletes were Chinese, the conferences would still be consolidating. The main reason is the cable monopolies are state sanctioned tax farmers. They get to tax people though their cable bill. Those revenues get directed to approved things and the big state colleges have figured out to get a taste of the skim. Federal grant money also plays a role as these colleges get billions in federal grants. By pooling together they increase their grasping power.

That said, the demand for competent black athletes is an example of how diversity has changed the college business. The historically black colleges used to field competitive sports teams and attract the talented ten percent of black youth. Once sports integrated, the best black players went to the big state programs. High IQ black athletes would end up at programs like Notre Dame, Boston College and Northwestern. As a result, the great black programs like Grambling and Southern have fallen on hard times.

That still left room for a Spellman and Morehouse to be the Black Ivies, but now the Ivies and “new Ivies” are desperate for black students. A smart black kid whose parents and grandparents went to Howard, for example, is getting offers from all of the elite colleges, so he has no reason to attend an historically black college. Just as American is skimming the best and brightest from the undeveloped world via immigration, the top colleges are skimming the best out of the historically black colleges and prep schools.

Inevitably, this will be reflected in the administration. As the quality of student declines, the quality of administrator will decline. Condoleezza Rice is not teaching at one of these colleges when she can work at Stanford. Talented black administrators follow the talented students, often working in the same schools from which they graduated. Ironically, the celebration of non-whites, as a vehicle to expand diversity, is killing off one of the better parts of black culture in America. The historically black college is dying.

Fixing Baseball

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Pretty much the only major sport I watch and enjoy is baseball. Post-season baseball is a lot like post-season hockey. You have the best teams, and usually the best pitchers, competing under pressure. There’s plenty of dramatic moments, which is not always the case with regular season games. In July, an elite pitcher on his game will have the other guys swinging freely late in games as they just want to get over with quickly. No one says it, but it happens. The umps will expand the strike zone late in games too.

The problem is the games take too long. Game one of the ALCS took four hours. Game three took almost four hours and it was a 1-0 game. After every pitch the batter wanders off to scratch himself and adjust his gloves. Pitchers stare in for the sign like they are cracking the zodiac code. If a runner gets on we see ten throws to first, a few visits to the mound and, of course, more scratching and adjusting. It get ridiculous. When a half-inning lasts over 20 minutes, the games are taking too long.

There’s no way TV held an audience for the great Sox comeback in game two. I bet ten percent of the starting audience was up to see it. What’s the point of watching a game if you know you will not be up to see the end? If fans like me find it too taxing to watch these games, the causal fans are not watching. At best, they are tuning in and out while watching other shows. That seems like a sure way to lose your audience. Those people tuning in and out eventually just tune out and stop being fans.

The most obvious way to speed up the games is to expand the strike zone. That way you have have pitchers throwing strikes, which means the hitters have to swing. It also makes it more difficult for hitters to bad defensively. the narrow strike zone allows hitters to lay off a lot of pitches and just train to handle the narrow strike zone. Good hitters can work a count and sit on the pitches they can hit. Giving the high strike back to the pitcher would force hitters to swing at tough pitches. That should speed up the game a bit.

That would probably reduce offense initially, but good hitters would adjust in time so it would not result in the death of offense. In fact, it would probably bring back the contact hitter as a weapon. In the old days of huge ball parks, slap hitters would just put the ball in play to get on base. The small parks of today reward the sluggers, so the contact guys has faded from the game. The the most likely result is soemthing like the 1970’s where a lineup has a mix of sluggers and contact hitters.

People can tolerate a 2-0 game if it lasts two hours. Making fans sit and watch for three and half hours, you better have some offense. The trade-off for lower scoring would be shorter games. The other way to do it and something that would fix the playoffs is to keep the hitter in the box. Give the hitter one time out. Otherwise, the ump calls the batter in and the pitcher can throw until the ump calls time out. If the hitter needs to scratch himself, he has to do it in the box in-between pitches.

United Good

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Certain people in the media are promoting this as a great idea. Ever on the lookout for their next crusade, they have decided that giving highly privileged teenagers more money for playing a game is their next Civil Rights Movement. Every week a chattering skull is demanding (demanding!) the NCAA pay players. Never mind that the players are being paid, in the form of tuition, room, board, training and promotion.

It’s a great example of how gesture politics works in a secular theocracy. There’s no analysis of the proposal or skepticism about it being possible. There’s not even the natural instinct of people making a living off of college sports, wondering if it will harm their interests in some way. It’s simply assumed to be good, because everyone in the hive seems to think it is good. Therefore, everyone in the media makes the grand gesture in support of it. It’s rule by gesture consensus.

You also note the choice of language. If the players were demanding a free market for their services, something that somewhat exists, but could be expanded, the media would not be enthusiastic for it. The handful of performers who play the libertarian role in the mass media would be required to speak on behalf of it, but otherwise it would get no traction. The fact that the players are “united” is what titillates the media. United is always seen as good, while divisive is bad. Boo divisive!

It’s a strange thing about the modern ruling class. It is the confluence of totalitarian sensibilities of Puritanism and the Jewish hatred of exclusivity. That means on the one hand everyone has to believe the same things, no matter what. At the same time, there better be no barriers to entry anywhere within society. That’s no who we are! It really is a nutty secular religion, in that it is everything it claims to oppose.

As far as the condition of college athletics, we see the same sorts of weird contradictions we see in official dogma. The universities are run by Progressives and all the players are black. yet, we’re repeatedly told that the players face all sorts of racial barriers. The lack of black coaches is blamed on alumni who write six figure checks, no questions asked, to the very liberal university leaders, who then never hire blacks.

At least everyone is united though.

Lessons From The Tebow Experience

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The New England sportsball team cut Tim Tebow yesterday, which resulted in celebration form every Progressive warren in the nation. It was not just cultists, but their bourgeois bohemian fellow travelers. The usual suspects on the Left have hated Tebow from the start, because of his overt Christianity and his decidedly southern sensibilities. The cold civil war, as John Derbyshire calls it, will always be with us and play out in a myriad of little ways. Northern whites, then as now, scarcely see southern whites as American.

Those racist, science hating rednecks are what hold the nation back from progressing into a glorious future! On the other side, southern whites see northern whites as God hating, self loathing lunatics enslaved by a radical European religion bordering on a cult. There’s no room for compromise when both sides see the other as the problem. Through no fault of his own, Tebow is emblematic of this rift and therefore too much of a distraction for NFL teams, given his talents. Therefore, his career now appears to be over.

Of course, the main reason Tebow was cut from the sportsball team is that he is not good at sportsball, at least not at the position he seeks to play. Professional sportsball is a merciless business. There are millions on the line and therefore no one can let their emotions get in the way of winning the sportsball contests. If Tebow could help a team win at sportsball, he would have a job, even if he was murdering people on the side. These leagues are loaded with criminals and deviants who are good at sportsball.

That’s not why the lunatics were cheering, of course. They hate him for cultural reasons, so they wanted to see him fail. Now, it is not just the cold civil war stuff. That certainly plays a role in Progressive thinking, but a growing aspect is the general hatred of maleness, particularly white maleness. In the Progressive hierarchy of evil, white males are slowing moving to the top, taking the place of mythical bad guys like Nazis and Klansmen. The Pale Penis People will soon be enemy number one.

Tebow is pretty much the emblematic white male. He’s not sitting around reading books or worrying about his privilege. He plays sports and likes hanging with his bros on the sportsball field. Then there is the religious aspect. His faith leads him away from the sorts of vices the ruling class likes to peddle to young white males. That makes Tebow a real problem if he manages to succeed at sportsball. Just imagine the comparison between him and the typical sportsball player. it raises a lot of uncomfortable truths.

That’s probably the main lesson from this. Even if you don’t care about sportsball, it is a part of the popular culture, so it is wise to pay some attention to it. The deliberate africanization of basketball and football is a foreshadowing of the browning of America that is planned for us by our betters. The subtle hatred of Tim Tebow, quintessential white guy, will one day soon be common in the culture. Today they hate this guy because he is a Christian, but tomorrow they will hate all white men for being white.