Moon Tea

Long time readers of this column know that my favorite topics are a) college football traditions, b) bashing the BCS, and c) weather and the change of seasons.  Since I am writing this by the light of the harvest moon, the week’s episode is firmly focused on the latter. 

The Harvest Moon is the name for the full moon nearest the Autumn equinox (this year on September 22).  It is so named because traditionally it provided light for farmers to continue their harvest well into the night.  If it seems a little brighter or a little more prominent than most full moons, there is a reason for that.  At this time of the year in the northern hemisphere, the elliptical (the path the sun and moon seems to follow through the sky) has a very acute angle with the horizon.  Normally, there is a lag between sunset and the rise of a full moon when everything gets dark.  At the harvest moon, this lag happens to be at a minimum so the full lights the sky as soon as the sun sets.  Earthsky.org, one of my favorite websites, has a great article explaining this. 

As you gaze into the beautiful blue or orange moon rising in the east, it may seem bigger than normal.  Trust me- its not.  This is just an optical illusion; the moon always looks bigger near the horizon.  But the brightness thing is sort of real, all because of the angle of elliptical.  Do you know the special significance of the constellations that lie in the elliptical?  They’re called the zodiac!  Wicked cool, huh?

My daughter and I are fascinated with stuff like astronomy and phenology (the study of animal/plan adaptations to seasonal change, not to be confused with phrenology, the pseudoscience of making judgments about people by their skull shape).  This week, as an experiment, we decided to make moon tea.  What’s moon tea?  You’ve heard of sun tea; leaving out a jar of water with tea bags in the hot sun and waiting for it to cook into tea.  Well, moon tea is the same idea, but instead of the sun’s rays heating the water, you allow the magical silvery moonlight to infuse the tea with its mystical energy. 

Ok, now I’ve lost some of you.  Lets give it some context.

My daughter loves JK Rowling and JRR Tolkien almost as much as I do.  Her favorite films are by the famed Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, especially My Neighbor Totoro.  So when I told her we would try to use the power of the full moon to capture some magic in the water, she was bouncing off the walls with excitement. 

So we tried a little experiment.  We bought three clear jars and added water.  The first we labeled 0% and kept in a closet away from any light.  The second we labeled 50% and exposed to a half moon last week for a night.  And the third with “100%” sits outside in the glory of the Harvest moon.  Then we will conduct a taste test to see if the full moon’s team has absorbed more power than the others.  (spoiler alert: thanks to the placebo effect, it will).

I know what you’re thinking.  Hans, that’s not science.  This trial should be double blinded instead of labeled and it should be conducted in multiple sites to minimize measurement bias.  And you’re right.  Why do you think I am describing my material and methods to a friendly band of colleagues stretching from the Philippines to Sweden (yes, the Underdog Contest is international!).  You can repeat my experiment and confirm my findings.

And what are my findings?  That I have a happy little girl who still believes in magic. 

Back to the magic of the gridiron next week.

Fight on,

Hans

PS: The friendly people at Fresno State will be collecting donations at the Colorado-Boise State game this week.  Very cool.  Please give to the Red Cross to help.

Going Pro

I’m sorry I haven't written in a while but I've been very busy.  I look forward to getting back on track with the weekly blog; there is so much to say this season and we are only two weeks in. 

By far the most anticipated matchup of the year gets underway this weekend when the Texas A&M Aggies host National Champion Alabama Crimson Tide.  September 14th has been circled on the calendars for both of these teams since the Aggies upset the Tide in Tuscaloosa last year. There are so many storylines here: Alabama celebrity coach Nick Sabin complaining about up tempo offenses and lobbying for rules changes, the Game Day crew visiting College Station, and the Aggies being a factor in the SEC conference race in only in their second year.

But the one storyline we could never get away from all spring and summer long was the continuing saga of Johnny "Football" Manziel. (by the way, I dictated this essay into my iPhone and the obviously self-serving device autocorrects Johnny Football to Jony Ive!  If you understood that joke consider yourself a total Apple nerd!). From Johnny Football at the casino to Johnny Football tweeting to Johnny Football ditching the Manning family Academy

, we never heard the end of it.  And with torrid detail, the media kept yearning for more.  To these off-season hijinks I say good riddance and I am happy to get back to watching him play. 

But there is one Johnny Football story from the summer that is worthy of further discussion: the now infamous incident of signing memorabilia.  Manziel was punished and suspended for one half of the Rice game for not doing everything he could to prevent someone from profiting from his likeness.  NCAA athletes are not permitted to profit from their likeness this by selling T-shirts, signing footballs for money, trading signatures for tattoos, etc.  When the story broke about Manziel and other big-name college football athletes signing memorabilia for profit in Miami in January, Yahoo’s Dr. Saturday blog pointed out that the NCAA was selling jerseys of Manziel and other star players on their website.  The site allowed you to search for a jersey by the player’s last name.  Immediately after this was publicized the NCAA removed that search function and later removed the shirts for sale from the website. 

Until the NCAA was exposed for their blatant hypocrisy, it felt free to profit from the player’s likeness while restricting the players to do the same.  Which then begs the important question, who owns the player’s identity?  The universities who provide a free education?  The NCAA who attempt to regulate the administration of college sports?  The alumni boosters who pay for shiny new stadiums and state of the art workout facilities?

Uh, no.

The players who are 18 or older own their own likeness.  Period.  And right now, the class action lawsuit led by UCLA grad Ed O’bannon lawsuit seeks to hold the NCAA accountable to that standard.  Judging by the reaction of the NCAA, this case has real merit.  In the past few months, they closed their on-line store and ended their license agreement with EA Sport’s video game (as did the SEC).  At a recent conference I attended on Sports and Society, half of the presenters made some reference to the O’Bannon lawsuit and the changes it may bring to the game. 

So where do we go from here?

Until the O’Bannon suit runs its course, the NCAA is welcome to continue its charade of maintaining the spirit of amateurism.  And, perhaps in the spirit of fairness, there is some value in all students playing by same rules, from Johnny Manziel to the 3^rd rower on the women’s crew team.  My brother Kurt posted some very well-written articles supporting amateurism and make a cogent argument against paying college athletes.  I prefer to think of it this way: if you decide to pay your stars because they sell tickets and merchandise, how will you stop with the quarterback?  Then you will pay the offensive lineman who will never play a day in the pros.  And since Title IX clearly requires equal treatment, payments will be extended to an equivalent number of female athletes, etc. 

See how this gets messy?  A full ride scholarship at a major university is ample compensation for every athlete’s time, whether they are prepping for a career in the NFL, training for the 2016 Rio Olympics, or those who go pro in something other than sports.

But speaking of Olympics, there is another option- the so-called “Olympic Model”.  Don’t pay the athletes.  But allow them to use their own talents and ingenuity to sell themselves if they so desire.  We don’t restrict non-athletes from running a hot dog stand on campus, why should athletes be denied free enterprise?  If softball pitching superstar Jenny Finch can get some money for endorsing a softball glove, good for her.  And that third rower on the crew team might be a complete unknown to us but she’s a big celebrity in her hometown of Ottumwa, Iowa.  And if Johnny Manziel wants to take a little money for signing some footballs, so be it. 

Fight On,

Hans

PS.  I did not address the latest growing paid-athlete scandal in the SEC; I will watch that story as it unfolds and comment in the near future.  Also, yes, its true, Lane Kiffin sucks.  

Trust Issues

As we all settle onto the couch this Sunday for the last game of the last day of another glorious football season, its hard to know what to feel: satisfied about another season full of triumph and surprises?  Or just exhaustion and a sense that we’re glad its all over.

Unless you live somewhere around Tuscaloosa, Baltimore, or San Francisco, it’s hard to feel good about how the year turned out.  But I don’t just mean the wins and losses (in the case of USC that’s plenty), but the last few weeks has brought a flurry of revelations about some of the most discussed figures in the sport.  And it seems that the football world could use a huge dose of ethics right about now. 

Before we get to football, let’s set the stage with the unmasking of the biggest lie in all of sports: Lance Armstrong’s institutionalized cheating in the Tour de France.  For seven straight years he dominates the pinnacle event of cycling and we all hold him up as something superhuman; a demi-god in spandex.  As the titles get racked up, rumors fly.  Numbers one through three were stunning.  As he passes four, rumors turn to accusations.  Lance responds with libel suits.  Four turns to five, then six.  Now a “whistleblower” appears and his ridiculed and harassed by Lance’s lawyers.  Finally the seventh title arrives and the demi-god bikes off into the Texas sunset.  But the net of silence begins to unravel.  Teammates are caught, some finally confess and point fingers at Lance.

And through it all, Rick Reilly of ESPN and Sports Illustrated stands by Armstrong.  For more than a decade, Reilly passionately defends the “most tested athlete” ever; he must be clean.  (It is true that he is the single most studied human subject in all of medical science.  Dozens of Exercise Science articles have been written about his body and physiology.  He got away with doping during the Tour because he used Epogen, a natural agent that boosts red cells, and transfusions of blood, which are virtually undetectable) 

As we passed through the final act of the Lance Armstrong saga this month, with his extremely belated public admission, we have been forced to reassess the human we believed to be something more.  Of all the interviews, editorials, and discussions I have heard on this subject, nothing tops Rick Reilly’s expression of shock and betrayl.  Check it out here: http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/8852974/lance-armstrong-history-lying

Lance Armstrong’s deceit was professional and legendary.  But a number of personalities in college football demonstrated ethical lapses recently.  Did Bret Bielema's jump from Wisconsin to Arkansas catch you by surprise?  It sure caught Athletic Director Barry Alvarez by surprise.  And he's that guy that worked in the next office down the hall from Bielema.  Alvarez had no idea and heard about Bielema's leaving first when the news hit ESPN.  It is customary when a team poaches another school’s personnel to notify the AD that they are interested.  The AD would then keep that information confidential until the interview process is complete.  Apparently that level of courtesy is not expected in Fayetteville (which is odd, because as I have written in this column many times before, our visit to Arkansas was one of the most courteous road trips I have ever experienced, only exceeded by Nebraska).  One would think that the number of 0’s on Bret’s check was enough for him to forget his Midwestern roots and sense of Iowa nice (he has a Hawkeye tattoo on his leg).  His increase in salary works out to be about $400,000 ($480,000  if you factor in the cost of living change, as Fayetteville is about 20% cheaper than Madison as per bestplaces.net).  Which is nice, but hardly astronomical.  Why did he make the change?  Wants a new challenge?  Winning in the Big 10 was getting too easy?  The SEC is just that more cool?  And why did he bolt from a Rose Bowl bound Wisconsin in such a bridge-burning fashion?  We’ll keep an eye on this story going forward.

When you talk about the SEC and burning bridges, you have to be talking about Lane Kiffin.  It took great restraint, but I managed to avoid writing another entire column on how much I am embarrassed by our coach.  But I need to vent for at least a paragraph.  He starts the year by blocking USC hero and Hawaii head coach Norm Chow from using the coliseum field before the first game.  Then he tries to cheat with jersey switching against Colorado (really, we need help to beat Colorado?).  Then an assistant deflates balls before the Oregon game and takes the focus off one of the most entertaining defeats I have ever experienced.  After sliding into the Sun Bowl, he can’t control his players complaining about El Paso, pisses off Georgia Tech by standing them up for a banquet, and finally a fight breaks out in the locker room after the embarrassing loss.  OMG.  When will it end?  Pete Carroll’s legacy at USC is no longer controversial.  Uncle Pete instilled a sense of pride and respect with his players.  His sideline charisma shined.  “The visor” hides behind his laminated spreadsheet and cant get out of his own way with his poor play calling. 

Ok, let’s all say it together now: “Yeah, but he sure can recruit.”  True enough.  Which makes you wonder, what does he tell these kids to get them to commit to his dysfunctional family?  Does his sense of unethical behavior extend to recruiting?  You bet your sweet ass it does.  The latest embarrassment is a story about USC pulling the scholarship of Kyle Fitts, a recruit from Redlands, CA. (http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaaf-dr-saturday/recruit-decommits-usc-lane-kiffin-pulls-scholarship-three-165651928--ncaaf.html)  The kid commits to Kiffin, finishes his high school requirements early, gets packed up to enroll at USC this Spring, then learns just days before starting that Kiffin has reneged and doesn’t have a scholarship for him yet after all.  It is a direct result of the draconian 75 scholarship limit imposed by the NCAA, but the way it was handled was, in a word, unfortunate.  Now, Kiffin will face a extra level of distrust by recruits.  Crap.  Maybe we can get a new coach. 

Like Oregon!  Chip Kelly’s jump to the NFL was the most highly anticipated coaching change of the off-season.  But after flirting with Cleveland for . . . um . . . all year, Phil Knight of Nike opened his checkbook to entice Kelly to stay in Oregon after all.  Oh well, that means that Kelly will ravage the Pac- 12 for another .  . . wait . . . what?  Kelly left for the NFL?  Where?  Philadelphia?  Uh . . . OK.  If you have a strange sense of schadenfreude, check out the “most commented” articles on the website of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  They all relate to Chip Kelly!  Just when Clevelanders were starting to get over the great traitor LeBron James, they found a new sports personality they can love to hate. 

Just when I was getting my head around this string of betrayals and mis-truths, along came the weirdest, most amazing, most captivating, sexiest, most confusing sports story I can ever remember: Manti Te’o’s imaginary girlfriend.  The story is too convoluted to summarize here.  And, considering all the airtime it has eaten up, we all know the details by now.  What I will say is that I believe Te’o when he says he was fooled and he had invented his own details to make Lennay Kekua more real.  But coming on the heels of lie after lie after lie, this one really blew my mind. 

There are 207 days from the Super Bowl until USC opens their season at Hawaii. 

So from when I am writing this, there are 211 days, 21 hours, and 36 minutes until Hawaii!

Fight On,

Hans

PS: After depressing you with pages of guilt and lies, I would like to leave you with a better taste in your mouth for the off-season.  I found this delicious article on possible realignment for the Big-10. (http://espn.go.com/blog/bigten/post/_/id/70523/b1g-ads-geography-could-drive-divisions )  Some sort of movement within the divisions is likely to occur before 2014, and I am so pleased that geography will be considered.  Rutgers, Maryland, and Ohio State are all within an easy drive of Penn State.  Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Illinois schools are a short drive from Iowa.  It just makes more sense for all the non-football sports to do it this way.  My favorite part of the article is about the competitive balance in football despite geographic alignment: 

“But as many fans have pointed out, the Big Ten still could maintain competitive balance with a more geographic split. Ohio State and Michigan could form an Eastern bloc of sorts, but Wisconsin has won three straight Big Ten titles, Nebraska played for one last year and other programs like Michigan State and Northwestern have emerged.” 

 Does this sound familiar?  It should – I wrote something similar in August 2010!  (http://underdogcontest.blogspot.com/2010/08/ready-for-autmun.html)

Here’s to shedding the ridiculous Legends and Leaders division names. 

Down ticket problems

A few miles past I-39, just outside of Aurora, IL, our full bladders are greeted by a welcome sight: the Dekalb oasis. On our occasional weekend trips to Chicago, this tollway complex has everything a road traveler could need: clean bathrooms, convenient gas, a McDonalds, and the finest Land of Lincoln themed souvenirs this side of Peoria.

It also happens to be the most I've ever seen of Northern Illinois University.

NIU sits just north of the interstate near the Dekalb oasis and I hadn't thought much about the school. Until yesterday. Now I learn that this little west- Chicago commuter school will playing in the Orange Bowl against Florida State. (Pat Forde of Yahoo Sports came up with a great stat- NIU is obligated to buy 17,500 tickets for the Orange bowl. They average only 15,670 per home game!)

Naturally, NIU's crash of the BCS party is the big headline. But a quick look at the rest of the BCS matches tells us that the current system has outlived it's usefulness. The BCS is always quick to point out that their goal is to achieve a number 1 vs 2 final (and this year's game is looking epic, despite my misgivings about a certain despised team from South Bend) and it is not to ensure the 8 best teams in the country get to play in the premiere bowls. But maybe it should be.

NIU made the BCS because they are ranked in the top 16 and are ranked higher than a BCS qualifier. The current press continues to mention only Big East champ Louisville, yet in fact, they are ahead of two teams- Wisconsin, the Big 10 champ, is unranked.

Georgia, Oklahoma, and Texas A and M are top quality teams that will not appearing in the BCS. Instead, we get to watch NIU- Florida St and Florida- Louisville. Ugh. (Ok, the Fiesta bowl is going to be pretty cool with up-tempo offenses Kansas State and Oregon). The Rose looks good on paper with Stanford - Wisconsin, but that 5 losses and unranked status takes some serious shine off of the Badgers.

Down the ticket from the BCS, things get worse. USC horrendous season comes to a merciful end in El Paso- where they meet 6-7 Georgia Tech! No less than 13 6-6 teams are going bowling. Unbelievable.

What happened? ESPN encouraged the proliferation of bowls by bankrolling the TV broadcast of a game, ensuring a bowl's profitability even if it can't sell enough seats to fill a section much less a stadium (I'm looking at you, Beef O Brady's bowl). And conference realignment shifted the best teams to couple a conferences, limiting BCS participation due to the 2 team limit rule.

The playoff can't come soon enough.

Fight on and Beat the Yellowjackets,

Hans

Open Letter to Steve Sarkisian

Reporting from Pasadena, CA

Dear Coach Sarkisian,

Greetings. I hope you are enjoying the dreary weather in rainy Seattle. We had a good dose of gentle Pacific showers all day today in Pasadena. I am sure your hard work and moderate success with rebuilding the Washington Huskies football program has distracted you from such petty nuisances as the local climate.

Allow me to get right to the point; we miss you in Los Angeles. We Trojans have many fond memories of your days as Pete Carroll's QB coach and Assistant Head Coach, when you drew up plays for Matt Leinart and Mark Sanchez that lit up the scoreboard. Your departure in 2008 that saw you and Defensive Coordinator Nick Holt leave for the University of Washington marked the decline of the Pete Carroll era at USC. We wished you well and knew the Huskies were in good hands. Your enthusiasm and innovation has been rewarded in Seattle, where you took a 0-12 Huskies team and went 5 - 7 your first year. Now, you have them on pace for a nine-win season only 4 years later.

As you are well aware, your "partner in crime" on offense during the Carroll days, Lane Kiffen, has been USC's head coach for the last 3 years. Since you worked so closely with Lane, you understand what drives him. You will recall, in a heedless attempt to achieve his career goal of a head coaching job, he enthusiastically pursued every available opening. He even accepted the disastrous Oakland Raiders position that you wisely declined. It was clear to us that you were patiently waiting for the most ideal opportunity while Lane was ready for anything that moved him up the coaching ladder.

The next year, when you were hired at Washington, Lane was fired by the Raiders and landed in Tennessee. His ability to recruit both players and coaches (including the impressive addition of his father, Monte, the genius behind the Tampa 2 defense) was well on display. But his ethics, first publicly questioned by the late Al Davis in being labeled a "liar" on his way out the door in Oakland, became more problematic in his stint with the Volunteers. He antagonized other coaches and repeatedly made minor, yet technically illegal, recruiting violations.

Tempers that were flared by Lane's antics in Knoxville became enraged just a year later when he bolted for USC to replace Pete Carroll. You certainly must respect the level of cajones Lane showed by leaving Tennessee so soon and stepping into a program facing a then-unprecedented volume of NCAA sanctions. USC AD Pat Haden later described how Lane came to him with a entire notebook filled with his 5 year plan to weather the sanctions. And, remarkably, his plan seemed to be working as USC continued to recruit the best players and managed to separate the bowl ban from the scholarship reductions, effectively halving the impact of the sanctions on the long term success of the program. Alumni dollars followed and the seats the Coliseum remained (mostly) full.

Lane is a remarkable recruiter. And his long term plan for the Trojans is impressive in execution. But aside from his ethics, there is another aspect of his coaching that was never stellar: his sideline coaching. Obsessed with his charts and percentages, Lane spends every moment of the game buried in a giant laminated play card. He remains so disconnected from the game rhythms and his player's emotions. Furthermore, his play calling is questionable at best. When he left for the Raiders and you moved from Quarterbacks coach to Offensive Coordinator, we could see the Trojan offense act more dynamic and more innovative. Under Lane Kiffen, USC looks predictable, slow, and static.

The continued ethical problems this year push us towards a change. Not letting our former hero and your Mentor Norm Chow walk the field before the Hawaii game? Disguising the kicker as another player against Colorado? He condones a culture of poor decisions; How else to explain how a graduate assistant believed it might be ok to let the air out of the footballs when they we played Oregon?

This year began with such promise. The degree of failure of this team is literally historic (only 4 teams in history started the season number 1 and lost 4 or more games). We are ready for a change.

Please come back to your hometown of Los Angeles. You are ready to take the next step in your career and show the world what your ingenuity, charisma, and dedication can do with the pool of talent in the coliseum. The Pete Carroll glory days would return.

Signed,

The Trojan Family.

Fight on,

Hans