After a decade of success relying on Peyton Manning, Marvin Harrison, and for awhile Tony Dungy, the Indianapolis Colts are sitting undefeated through 14 games.  Manning is still there, but Dungy and Harrison are not.  With Manning still having several good years left in him, Reggie Wayne and Dallas Clark in the prime of their careers, and high quality young players like Pierre Garcon and Anthony Gonzalez, they look set for years to come as a continuing powerhouse of the AFC. 

Their President of course is Bill Polian, who has held that position since 1998 and as far as I know remains the primary decisionmaker when it comes to the team’s personnel.  Prior to Polian joining the team, the Colts were basically awful.  Since he joined the team, they have made the playoffs every year except for his first.  Yes, obviously Peyton Manning has had quite a bit to do with that, but football is too much of a team sport for one player to be enough to get you to the playoffs year in and year out.  And, of course, Polian drafted Manning when he could have just as easily drafted Ryan Leaf, probably the biggest bust in NFL history. 

This says nothing about Polian’s track record prior to joining the Colts, when he was the General Manager for the then-expansion Carolina Panthers, and made the personnel decisions that allowed them to become the fastest-ever team to reach a Conference championship game.   He left the Panthers after just two seasons when the Colts made him an offer he could not refuse. 

Of course, before Polian was with the Panthers, he was the architect of my Buffalo Bills’ four consecutive conference championships (sadly, the Super Bowl was not held between 1991 and 1994, so no greater success was available to the team than a conference championship).  Polian had taken the helm of the Bills as general manager after the 1985 season, when the Bills had developed a reputation as a truly abysmal franchise.  Which is pretty much what they are now, come to think of it.   By 1988, he was the NFL’s Executive of the Year, an award he would again win four times in the ensuing 10 years. 

At the end of the 1992 season, with the Bills 3/4 of the way through their run of conference championships (thanks to St. Frank Reich’s performance in the Greatest Comeback of All Time), Polian was mysteriously and bizarrely fired by owner Ralph Wilson.  Why?  Because he didn’t get along with the team’s Treasurer.  Yes, the bleeping Treasurer.  Not Marv Levy.  Not His Holiness Jim Kelly or Bruce the Magnificent.  Not even Ralph Wilson himself.  No, the Treasurer.  While I understand that ultimately, pro sports are a for-profit enterprise, the ability of a franchise to turn a profit would seem to hinge far more on its ability to consistently win games by attracting quality personnel at a reasonable price than on anything over which a team’s Treasurer may have control.  I am also quite certain that one can find many adequately competent Treasurers; one cannot, however, find many adequately competent evaluators of talent. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but since 1988, Bill Polian has been the GM or President of a playoff team in all but five seasons, two of which he was not overseeing a team in the league, and two of which were his first seasons overseeing his respective team’s football operations.   In the overwhelming majority of those seasons, his team also won its division.  Only once since 1988 has a Bill Polian administered team failed to make the playoffs after his first year (2001, when the Colts went 6-10). 

Even more remarkably, he has done this while at the helm of small market franchises.  Despite their small market, the Colts are now in the top half of NFL teams in terms of their value according to Forbes.

Ralph Wilson (for whom I have actually quite a bit of respect) has spent the last several years complaining about how it is impossible to be competitive and to run a profitable franchise in a small market like Buffalo.  Unfortunately, it seems that the single biggest reason the Bills have been uncompetitive and only marginally profitable in the last decade plus has been Wilson’s decision to fire the single greatest personnel man in NFL history over what was apparently little more than a personality conflict with a non-football employee. 

One can only speculate as to what the NFL landscape would look like in 2009 had Wilson not made such a mystifying decision in 1993.  Perhaps Polian would have left for the Panthers in any event, lured by the promise of greater pay and greater control.  Or perhaps he would have remained in Buffalo.   One thing is for certain, though – the Bills’ unbelievably persistent futility over the last decade would not have been nearly as terrible had they had the type of consistent quality in personnel decisionmaking that Polian offered.  What is also certain is that the Colts’ unbelievably persistent success over the last decade would not have been nearly as remarkable had they not had the type of consistent quality in personnel decisionmaking that Polian offers.

The MLS cup final was twice as entertaining as the Bears-Eagles game.

Peter King, being snide:

There are many reasons why I like the Patriots, but the biggest is that all the statisticians of the world got together the other day and ran all the Pats/Jets numbers through a computer the size of Niagara Falls, and this is the score that came out. And if the last week of Belichickian analysis has taught me nothing else, it’s that football games really are played on paper, not in real life.

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…which, for football purposes, includes South Florida. 

In 2005, the Big East – long a basketball-heavy conference – lost three of its five traditionally strong football programs to the ACC, while one of the remaining two, Syracuse, had fallen on desperate times.  To remain a viable football conference (and retain its BCS status) the league was forced to raid Conference USA and managed to land three basketball-heavy schools with football programs.  In the case of Louisville, the football program was even pretty strong, coming off an 11-1 season in 2004.  Still, the conventional wisdom at the time was that South Florida, Louisville, and Cincinnati were far-from-adequate replacements for Virginia Tech, BC, and Miami and that the Big East’s days as a BCS conference were numbered.  Meanwhile, the ACC was expected to be entering a period of dominance with its new additions that would make it every bit as strong a football conference as the SEC.

This is now the fifth season since that realignment occured.  The first season, 2005, went pretty much as everyone expected, with 2 ACC teams in the final top 10 of the BCS rankings, and West Virginia the highest ranked Big East team at 11, and only Louisville joining it in the final top 25.  But in all but one of the four years since then, the Big East has not only consistently demonstrated that it is a strong football conference, it has even arguably been better than ACC, especially considering its substantially smaller number of teams. 

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Seriously, this should be a bigger deal. The NFL is literally making shit up about the long-term impact of player collisions: [Read more →]

No one is above the outrage cycle. We have now, in our culture, synthesized the two worst elements of pre-9/11 and post-9/11 media: the pre-9/11 obsession with meaningless bullshit; and the post-9/11 obsession with filling every story with apocalyptic portent and over the top, tween-girl-at-a-Jonas-brothers-concert hysteria.

We still care too much about J-Lo’s dress and the Summer of the Shark. Now, we get around the idea that we are shallow for giving a shit about such things by infusing them with pseudo-political importance and our current national drug of choice, outrage. Everything is an outrage. Everyone is outraged. Every turn of the news cycle gives us a new opportunity to pound the table. Every item that crawls across the newsfeed at the bottom of our screens is an excuse to stab one’s finger into one’s chest and declaim, solemnly and with vast consequence, “I, for one, am sickened.” This is how a shallow culture convinces itself that it is deep.

-Freddie DeBoer

So Rush Limbaugh is not going to be able to own a piece of an NFL team.  Let us all rejoice.  Or whine about the outrageous politicization of the bastion of innocence that is professional sports.   What is important is that we all either rage against the coming apocalypse this portends or celebrate the saving of the world at the zero hour that it means.

Sure, the idea of bringing in a man who accuses blacks of wanting to re-impose segregation to be a significant minority owner of a team in a league that is 65% African-American made about as much business sense as having Al Sharpton sponsor a PGA Tournament.  It is outrageous and offensive to every racially sensitive American that such a man would even be considered for such a socially meaningful position as minority owner of an NFL franchise so sacred that Cleveland, Los Angeles, Anaheim, and St. Louis have all claimed it as their own over the last 70 years.  And goddammit, the delicious irony of a man who proudly proclaims himself a stalwart of limited government owning a piece of a brazenly rent-seeking and taxpayer subsidized professional sports team simply cannot be so much as imagined in this era of humorless, self-congratulatory outrage.

Of course, the outrage of allowing such a man to be included as a minority partner in a group that may someday decide to c0nsider making an offer on a blessed professional sports franchise is exceeded only by the far greater outrage of suggesting that Limbaugh might not be someone with whom the not-at-all image-conscious NFL wants to associate.  Never mind that Limbaugh is an extraordinarily polarizing figure whose views are well-known to wide swathes of the NFL’s fan base (and players), and might therefore be a bit of a drag on the league’s profits.  No, instead it is truly outrageous and offensive that a profit-seeking enterprise would choose profits over granting an opportunity for a much-oppressed radio talk show host to join its Good Old Boys club.  Even more outrageous is that people would object to such a kind soul being invited to maybe someday decide to consider making an offer on the Holy St. Louis Rams after one of the dozens of racially-charged statements this man has made in recent years turns out to be of dubious sourcing.  After all, it was clearly that dubiously-sourced quote, and only that dubiously-sourced quote, that drove profit-seeking NFL owners to object to Limbaugh’s entry into their prestigious club after decades of discrimination against wind bags.

These outrages, however, are not enough to satisfy our craving.  What is necessary is to demonstrate how they are evidence of an even bigger, undebatably apocalyptic outrage.  Clearly, that outrage is our state-controlled media,* and the punishment of speech.

So sally forth and be outraged.  Or not.  Just so long as you were outraged yesterday or today or will find something new to be outraged about tomorrow, and understand that today the Single Most Important Thing In The World is whether Rush Limbaugh will be invited to be reinvited to maybe join in some way a group that may someday soon decide to propose to buy the St. Louis Ronald Reagan Rams of the United States of America, Puppies, Babies, and All That Is Good and Holy In This World.

*Seriously – “state-controlled media”?  Rush has reached the point where he is indistinguishable from Alex Jones.  How long until he starts making daily rants about the Bildebergers, fluoridated water, and Roswell?

I think it’s safe to say that former NFL player Pat Tillman – an Army Ranger killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan – was the first hero of the War on Terror.  Like many, I assumed his death was a tragic accident. I was wrong: [Read more →]

Contra Bill Simmons, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article isn’t 2009’s best piece of sports journalism. In fact, it’s not even the best article about football-related concussions. For that, you’ll have to go to GQ’s “Game Brain,” an absolutely frightening look at the long-term consequences of on-field collisions.

I’ve always enjoyed football, but I never really considered the physical repercussions of repeated head collisions. The visceral, bone-crunching stuff you see on TV – the big hits, the punishing sacks – immediately bring to mind broken legs and dislocated shoulders, and sure enough, the NFL has its fair share of both. But concussions don’t really get talked about. Unless, of course, it’s in the context of a star player getting concussed and walking back on the field two weeks later, no questions asked. This is almost universally lauded in glowing terms like “playing hurt” or “being a warrior” or “fighting through the pain.”

It turns out, however, that concussions are just as bad – if not worse – as broken bones. Here’s GQ on the heartbreaking post-football career of Mike Webster:

Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. “Iron Mike,” legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons. His life after football had been mysterious and tragic, and on the news they were going on and on about it. What had happened to him? How does a guy go from four Super Bowl rings to…pissing in his own oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth? Mike Webster bought himself a Taser gun, used that on himself to treat his back pain, would zap himself into unconsciousness just to get some sleep. Mike Webster lost all his money, or maybe gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.

Mike Webster, dead at fifty. The hall-of-fame centerpiece of perhaps the most storied football dynasty of all time, driven insane by undiagnosed brain injuries. Needless to say, this sort of thing doesn’t get heavy rotation on the league’s back-slapping highlight reels. But not only has the impact of sustained head injuries failed to penetrate the public conscious, the type of plays that lead to concussions are positively celebrated by the media and fans. How many times have you heard a commentator praise “hard-nosed, old-fashioned football?” Or a “hard-hitting, blue collar game plan?” These cliches appear more frequently than any combination of “grizzled,” “gunslinger” and “Brett Favre,” which says something important about the level of tacit acceptance for incredibly violent on-field collisions. Last year’s Steelers-Ravens playoff clash, for example, featured an orgy of commentary praising both teams for their physical style of play. The injury time-outs, the big hits – these were taken as validation of a certain approach to football, not warning signs about the players’ physical well-being.

It’s particularly dispiriting because as former players, many sports commentators know what goes on in locker rooms across the country. Here’s an astonishing admission from Merril Hoge, an ESPN analyst and former Steelers running back:

“I got a concussion in Kansas City, then another one six weeks later when we played in Chicago . . . I read to my 3-year-old daughter – her books were about all I could read. I had to learn all over again.

“When I started working at ESPN, I would stay up all night practicing my lines. But when I’d do the shows, I couldn’t follow the conversation. Thank the Lord most of my shows we taped.”

Hoge always comes off as a genial guy on camera. But lurking underneath that calm, studio-friendly exterior is a former player who was hit so hard so frequently he literally had to learn how to read again. That’s absolutely shocking.

Having read the GQ article in full (I encourage you to do the same), here are three inescapable conclusions:

1. Head injuries are a real (and under-reported) problem at all levels of football.
2. With the speed and force of the modern game, there really is no practical solution to players’ vulnerability to head injuries.
3. As an institution, the NFL is completely unwilling to even acknowledge the problem, much less do something to address player concussions.

Which, from a fan’s perspective, raises more than a few difficult questions. I watched and enjoyed the Jets-Dolphins game last night. But I admit to wincing a bit more than usual each time the players collided. It’s hard not to wonder which hard-hitting defensive back, offensive lineman, or tight end will become the next Mike Webster a few decades down the road. It’s also hard not to wonder how many potentially fatal head injuries are being brushed aside or otherwise overlooked by team medical staffs in the course of a tight game.

If players were aware of the dangers associated with head injuries, I might be less concerned. They are, after all, star athletes, paid millions of dollars annually to run into each other at great risk. But the NFL’s “see no evil” mentality also pervades all levels of football. Concussions simply aren’t understood as potentially life-threatening injuries, which is why coaching staffs in high school, college and the NFL simply ignore them.

Boycotting the NFL probably isn’t in the cards, but we can stop glorifying hard-hitting collisions as some sort of iconic symbol of all that is good and right about American football. This season, I’d prefer to see less injury time-outs, less stretcher-bearers and less self-congratulatory references to a “hard-hitting, physical style of play.” Instead, it would be nice if ESPN and the rest of the football-industrial complex showed some awareness of the severity of players’ head injuries.

After an unbearably over-hyped build-up, Barcelona’s 2-0 victory over Manchester United was pretty darn anti-climactic. Adding insult to injury, the match forced casual or otherwise unaffiliated fans to choose the lesser of two (great) evils. Barcelona has gradually become the Iberian equivalent of Steinbrenner’s Yankees, and not since the Vandals crossed the Pyrenees has a side so thoroughly ravaged Spain. Lead by the grim Scott Sir Alex Ferguson and flopper-in-chief Cristiano Ronaldo, Manchester United isn’t much better, though at least the Premiership remains a bit more competitive than its Spanish counterpart.

The triumph of unbridled capitalism over European football has left the continent’s leagues incredibly top-heavy, with a few elite clubs absolutely dominating the rest of the competition. Not only has this contributed to the downfall of many storied older franchises (Newcastle United was just exiled from the Premiership, which would be roughly equivalent to the New York Knicks getting sent to the D-league after a few rough seasons), but any nouveau riche competitor can now buy its way into contention (I’m looking at you, Manchester City).

As recently as ten or fifteen years ago, Western Europe’s national leagues enjoyed a certain amount of parity. Top players like Zinedine Zidane or Jürgen Klinsmann could (and would) play a substantial portion of their careers in their respective national leagues without suffering the indignity of competing in a professional backwater. Now, however, the financial lure of big contracts from the Premiership or the Spanish or Italian leagues have hollowed out many of the older powerhouses, and the result has left the sport much worse for wear. The once-proud Dutch, German and French national leagues are shadows of their former selves. A few global franchises have created a football oligarchy.

Am I exaggerating for effect? Absolutely. But I think it’s undeniable that European football has become a lot more top-heavy over the past several years, and I lament the fact that so many older clubs are being left behind. I don’t have an answer to soccer’s current woes, but the sport’s plight does raise a few interesting questions.

First, has any European league seriously considered instituting a salary cap? It would be nice, for once, to find a Premiership champion outside the “Big Four”. However, I don’t know if the top clubs would agree to a salary cap, and I also suspect that any proposal would have to overcome a collective action problem. Namely, if one national league implements a limit on total compensation, elite players would still be able to skip across the border to command top dollar. As the de facto headquarters of (American) football, baseball and basketball, the United States’ domestic leagues have never faced a similar problem when structuring players’ salaries (though that may be changing).

Second, are European soccer analysts developing their own brand of sabermetrics? The logical response to being grossly outspent by one’s competitors would be to maximize resources through better player evaluation, which is precisely what small-market baseball franchises have done over the past several years. Soccer is presumably more difficult to analyze because unlike baseball, play can’t be broken down into discrete individual events. Despite facing a similar problem, basketball stat gurus seem to be catching up, so I wonder if soccer is far behind.

I admit I’ve drifted away from the beautiful game of late, so perhaps I’m simply ignorant of recent football-related developments. Anyone out there got answers for me?

I thought they put up a damn good fight, and it made for an incredibly intense Super Bowl.  Alas, my team could not quite pull it off tonight…still, we in Arizona are proud of the way they played.  The Steelers played a good game too, but that personal foul by James Harrison was disgusting and they deserved to lose for that alone.

Next year, maybe…