The United States is the only country in the world that weds higher education and amateur athletics inextricably together. The University of Michigan, to most of us, is not just an elite post-secondary research institution, but a football team, the home of Denard Robinson, famous rival of Ohio State. If I type "michi" into Google, auto-complete suggests "Michigan Football," "Michigan State Football," and "Michigan Football Schedule." Somehow, this doesn't strike us as odd.
A narrow view of the phenomenon suggests that football is primarily a marketing mechanism. Schools like Michigan attract both perspective applicants and alumni donors by virtue of having a competitive and successful football program. Defeating rivals, landing in major bowls, and fielding exciting players are all a boon to the University as a whole because, like any good marketing, successful football leads to more visibility and more positive emotional associations with the school on the part of donors and prospectives. All of which is true. Football, in particular, is a wonderful way for American colleges and universities to promote their brand.
Branding alone, however, does not account for the phenomenon as a whole. Any given university may want a great football program - or a great athletics program broadly - for branding and marketing reasons, but does the system on the whole really benefit higher education all that much? While the University of Michigan may be better off with a great football team than with a bad one, is the entire state university system better off by virtue of their football programs? I don't have an answer for that question, but it's worth posing.
Now, it's well-nigh impossible to imagine American higher education without competitive athletics. College football won't be going away, even if we could somehow prove that college football is bad for universities and colleges. That said, a better understanding of where sports fits into the ecology of higher education in the United States might help us think about hot-button issues in college athletics, including the debate over whether or not athletes should be paid.
The argument over paying college athletes - and especially big-time football and basketball players - has been hashed and rehashed in popular media. In short, the argument for paying players is, essentially, that they are making tons of money for their schools (and for media companies) with almost no compensation. The argument, at its heart, is capitalistic: college athletes do not get to participate in the free market for their services and skills, and that is unfair because there is a substantial market that others are participating in (coaches, ADs, ESPN, etc) built upon those very skills. The argument against paying college athletes is, broadly, that college sports are supposed to be an amateur endeavor, and that colleges and universities are primarily geared towards educational missions. Enrolling in a university - even on a football scholarship - means that you are a student first and foremost. Paying athletes for playing college sports, then, would further degrade the educational mission of the university. At its heart, what this argument really says is, "colleges and universities are not a capitalistic free market; they're a socialized public service."
Now, I'm not going to weigh in on either of those arguments, because the debate seems to me to be taking place in the wrong arena. There's no question that college athletes ought - in a capitalist system - to be compensated at market value for the benefits they bring to their institutions. There's also no question that colleges and universities do not by-and-large operate in anything resembling a true capitalist system. The reality is, both sides are right because neither is willing to admit the systematic and philosophical assumptions of the other.
The debate, however, is academic, because the route we're traveling down is unequivocally the capitalistic one. So what is that likely to look like?
In a purely capitalistic, free market higher education system institutions would have to pay their own players according to their market value. Instead of offering a scholarship to a desired recruit, a football program would have to offer a scholarship plus a salary or contract. In essence, college athletics would become professional, and colleges and universities would create professional athletics teams that operate alongside the University. Realistically, a great many of the current D1 college athletics programs would not be able to afford the competition this would create, and so we'd be left with a small number of elite athletics programs at wealthy schools that can afford to fund not only athletic scholarships, but also player salaries. As a result, the little money that travels from athletic departments to other parts of the university - in the form of both media contracts and donations - would almost certainly disappear (hence athletics would truly be "alongside" and not really "part" of the university).
From the athlete's perspective, there's nothing particularly wrong with this. He is likely to be better off in this system than in the current one. Unless, of course, he is a she. Or plays a sport other than basketball and football. Or isn't quite good enough to warrant anything beyond a scholarship. In our current system, very few athletic departments are profitable, thanks in large part to the many sports that college athletes play but no one watches. In a system with increased payouts to athletes in high-profile sports, it seems unlikely that those unprofitable sports programs would continue. And in a free market, that's as it should be. If women's volleyball can't turn a profit - or at least break even - it shouldn't exist.
Now, all of my analysis here is built upon the assumption that colleges, and not media outlets or other companies, will be paying student-athlete salaries. I think that's a safe assumption, but someone might argue that an elimination of the amateur status of college athletes would have little effect on institutions themselves, as very very few college athletes would warrant exorbitant salaries that schools could not afford. Rather, they might say, companies like ESPN or Nike or whoever would be the real payees in the form of sponsorships and commercial spots and so on. That's a fair assumption, but free agency in other American - and international - sports leagues suggests to me that institutions overpaying for marginal players is a more likely outcome.
As for the educational missions of institutions of higher learning in the truly free market system, it seems to me that they will be little changed. The biggest change is happening already anyway: less and less public money would go towards colleges and universities, which in turn would search for new revenue streams, including, most importantly, increased tuition and decreased financial aid. Professionalization of college athletics might infuse new revenues into the higher education system, but those revenues would almost certainly be dedicated primarily (or exclusively) towards funding the professional athletics programs. More and more universities would have to adopt the D3 sports model, where every player is a walk-on and no athletic scholarships are awarded because of how expensive it would be to field a competitive (and therefore economically viable) athletics program.
There is a good argument for this kind of system: it would allow the great majority of institutions the chance to essentially do away with one of their biggest expenses (both in terms of money and human capital). In a free market, if the University of Hawaii cannot really afford a D1 football program (let alone D1 basketball, baseball, volleyball, etc), it simply won't have one. In the end, that might actually be better for the university.
It's not hard to see, of course, that this is the direction we're going. The super-conference phenomenon is a consolidation of the most economically robust football programs into a bloq that effectively excludes the University of Hawaiis of the world from the most meaningful and, therefore, lucrative events like big-time bowl games and high-profile rivalries. It is probably only a matter of time before athlete compensation becomes a reality, and college sports is professionalized, as the institutions that can afford to pay their football players will already have divided themselves from those that cannot. The end of the whole process is, ultimately, that college sports will be an extremely visible part of higher education, with very little actual bearing on the educational missions of those schools.
While the professionalization of college athletics may not have too direct a bearing on the educational missions of colleges and universities, the underlying trend towards increased capitalization will. That's it's own post, but some of the results are already apparent: increased tuition, more and more course content moving online (though frequently with only dubious credentials, if any at all, available to graduates), an increasingly large access divide among socio-economic classes (that is, rich white kids who can afford tuition go to elite states schools or liberal arts colleges, while poor minority students go to vocational schools or online for-profits), and an ever-growing student debt bubble. Which all raises a significant question that the sports debate largely ignores, but shouldn't: what is the purpose of college education, both for the student and for society at large?
Showing posts with label College Football. Show all posts
Showing posts with label College Football. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Sample Size and College Football
If you didn't watch Boise State's simultaneously epic and tragic loss to the University of Nevada last night, you've probably heard about it already. Chances are, you've also already hear the arguments: this proves that Boise didn't belong in the National Title conversation in the first place, or this proves that even the WAC teams still have to compete every week, and Boise's dominance meant it was extremely worthy of its ranking.
The truth of the matter is, the vast majority of people have chosen a side in the AQ versus non-AQ argument already, and are not at all interested in trying to think objectively. That a game like Boise's loss to Nevada can affirm either position just goes to show that most people - and probably most people on both sides the argument - don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about. The challenge, however, is not remaining objective, but rather finding appropriate evidence to determine whether a team like a Boise State or a TCU deserves national recognition and, in the event of an undefeated season, a possible chance to play for the National Championship.
The issue here is sample size. I've been accused, before, of being too baseball-centric in my thinking about football, but I think that just tries to brush off the bigger issue. The reality is, football - and college football in particular - is a sport of small sample sizes. A full season is only a dozen games, there's no balanced schedule, and even the very best teams might lose thanks to a bad bounce on a fumble, a mistaken penalty call, or a missed chip-shot field goal. What's more, a football team is not a single entity, playing in a vacuum. It might very well be that Nevada is better than Boise State, but Boise is better than Hawaii, and Hawaii is better than Nevada.
What I mean is this: Nevada might be "better" because their roster is perfectly adapted to defeat Boise State's, and so on. Match-ups are everything in football, and gameplans the rest. It is almost certainly true that Alabama and Auburn have better players than Oregon, and Oregon has better players than TCU or Boise. I don't doubt that for a minute. What I do doubt, however, is that just as Oregon would struggle in the SEC, Alabama and Auburn would struggle in the PAC-10. The reason? The match-ups are different, the styles are different, the gameplanning is different.
I don't know any of that for certain, but it's a suspicion I have from the aggregate of small samples I've seen. I would add, however, that I do put some stock in computer rankings. Yes, the very same rankings that the media loves to disparage for their nonsensical orderings of teams and conferences (Sagarin, into this week, and if you let him keep scoring margin as part of the equation, which the BCS doesn't, ranks Oregon 1, Stanford 2, Auburn 5, among other things). Of course the media doing the disparaging here has their own ranking system which is entirely subjective, and heavily weighted to the most recent result.
Given football's small sample sizes, you've probably heard that you have to consider a team's "entire body of work." You have to consider strength of schedule, and prestige of opponents, and other intangible factors. The thing is, most of that is not only tangible, it's quantifiable, and the computers do a much better job of actually considering a team's whole body of work than even the most well-informed voter does. The computer can seamlessly consider games played, opponents played, strength of schedule to two or three or four tiers, and overall conference strength. The different computers weight all of those things differently, of course, but that the BCS uses a variety of rankings and drops the best and worst is a mark in its favor.
There is heavy resistance to computer rankings because they often don't pass the alleged smell-test, just like fielding statistics that say that Derek Jeter isn't a great fielder. Oh wait.
In all seriousness, though, the computers here are constrained by sample size in a way that advanced baseball statistics generally are not, but the analogy is a strong one. We have our old statistics - Won-Loss record, conference and conference standing, opponent lists - and we have new, more advanced statistics that take into account score differential and opponent's opponents, and so on. The problem is, when the more advanced, harder-to-calculate statistics show that Auburn is #5, or when they show that a one-loss Stanford is better than an undefeated Boise State and TCU, we scoff at them because they don't align with our subjective, entrenched, traditional approaches.
Of course, as I've said before, the biggest problem here isn't even sample size or public perceptions or the media or the stickiness of tradition. No, the biggest problem is cognitive dissonance: the notion in our head that one team must be better than another. The idea that we can quantify football team quality at all. Is Boise State a 93 or a 94 out of 100? Does their kicker's misses yesterday drop them all the way to 83? Is it maybe true that they would crush Oregon, but be crushed by Auburn (or vice versa)? Is it maybe true that, even for a full season, they could compete in the SEC (because a full season is still a small sample)? Is it maybe true, on the other hand, that they would go 3-9 playing Alabama's schedule?
It's impossible to say, and, what's more, it's irrelevant. Most of those questions are predicated on the notion that there's a simple answer to the question "Which team is better?" There's not. There never is. And, even if there was, the samples we're working with in football are too small to answer the question. All we have, then, is the drama of single games, of missed field goals and overtime wins. The point of college football is not to crown the best team in the nation, but to crown a Champion.
The truth of the matter is, the vast majority of people have chosen a side in the AQ versus non-AQ argument already, and are not at all interested in trying to think objectively. That a game like Boise's loss to Nevada can affirm either position just goes to show that most people - and probably most people on both sides the argument - don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about. The challenge, however, is not remaining objective, but rather finding appropriate evidence to determine whether a team like a Boise State or a TCU deserves national recognition and, in the event of an undefeated season, a possible chance to play for the National Championship.
The issue here is sample size. I've been accused, before, of being too baseball-centric in my thinking about football, but I think that just tries to brush off the bigger issue. The reality is, football - and college football in particular - is a sport of small sample sizes. A full season is only a dozen games, there's no balanced schedule, and even the very best teams might lose thanks to a bad bounce on a fumble, a mistaken penalty call, or a missed chip-shot field goal. What's more, a football team is not a single entity, playing in a vacuum. It might very well be that Nevada is better than Boise State, but Boise is better than Hawaii, and Hawaii is better than Nevada.
What I mean is this: Nevada might be "better" because their roster is perfectly adapted to defeat Boise State's, and so on. Match-ups are everything in football, and gameplans the rest. It is almost certainly true that Alabama and Auburn have better players than Oregon, and Oregon has better players than TCU or Boise. I don't doubt that for a minute. What I do doubt, however, is that just as Oregon would struggle in the SEC, Alabama and Auburn would struggle in the PAC-10. The reason? The match-ups are different, the styles are different, the gameplanning is different.
I don't know any of that for certain, but it's a suspicion I have from the aggregate of small samples I've seen. I would add, however, that I do put some stock in computer rankings. Yes, the very same rankings that the media loves to disparage for their nonsensical orderings of teams and conferences (Sagarin, into this week, and if you let him keep scoring margin as part of the equation, which the BCS doesn't, ranks Oregon 1, Stanford 2, Auburn 5, among other things). Of course the media doing the disparaging here has their own ranking system which is entirely subjective, and heavily weighted to the most recent result.
Given football's small sample sizes, you've probably heard that you have to consider a team's "entire body of work." You have to consider strength of schedule, and prestige of opponents, and other intangible factors. The thing is, most of that is not only tangible, it's quantifiable, and the computers do a much better job of actually considering a team's whole body of work than even the most well-informed voter does. The computer can seamlessly consider games played, opponents played, strength of schedule to two or three or four tiers, and overall conference strength. The different computers weight all of those things differently, of course, but that the BCS uses a variety of rankings and drops the best and worst is a mark in its favor.
There is heavy resistance to computer rankings because they often don't pass the alleged smell-test, just like fielding statistics that say that Derek Jeter isn't a great fielder. Oh wait.
In all seriousness, though, the computers here are constrained by sample size in a way that advanced baseball statistics generally are not, but the analogy is a strong one. We have our old statistics - Won-Loss record, conference and conference standing, opponent lists - and we have new, more advanced statistics that take into account score differential and opponent's opponents, and so on. The problem is, when the more advanced, harder-to-calculate statistics show that Auburn is #5, or when they show that a one-loss Stanford is better than an undefeated Boise State and TCU, we scoff at them because they don't align with our subjective, entrenched, traditional approaches.
Of course, as I've said before, the biggest problem here isn't even sample size or public perceptions or the media or the stickiness of tradition. No, the biggest problem is cognitive dissonance: the notion in our head that one team must be better than another. The idea that we can quantify football team quality at all. Is Boise State a 93 or a 94 out of 100? Does their kicker's misses yesterday drop them all the way to 83? Is it maybe true that they would crush Oregon, but be crushed by Auburn (or vice versa)? Is it maybe true that, even for a full season, they could compete in the SEC (because a full season is still a small sample)? Is it maybe true, on the other hand, that they would go 3-9 playing Alabama's schedule?
It's impossible to say, and, what's more, it's irrelevant. Most of those questions are predicated on the notion that there's a simple answer to the question "Which team is better?" There's not. There never is. And, even if there was, the samples we're working with in football are too small to answer the question. All we have, then, is the drama of single games, of missed field goals and overtime wins. The point of college football is not to crown the best team in the nation, but to crown a Champion.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Guilty Pleasures, Sports Edition
One of the fascinating things about sports is how uppity they can make people. It's always, "LeBron James this, Cameron Newton that, F--- those guys!" I'm guilty of it, too (as in, f--- the Giants). Nevertheless, I always loved the Onion's classic t-shirt that said, "The sports team from my metropolitan area is superior to the sports team from your metropolitan area." That just about sums it up, really, as far as fans are concerned. Add in a dash of George Bernard Shaw's classic line about patriotism,* and you've got it covered.
* "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."
With that in mind, I want to talk about three little things that secretly please me in modern sports. These three things, I think, you will probably hate. Odds are, if you listen to any sports radio, watch any ESPN, or talk to anyone at the local bar about sports, you're going to be shocked at what I'm about to say. So here it goes.
1) I'm glad Derek Jeter won the Gold Glove.
Seriously, I am. I love it. A healthy part of that love is irony, of course, but I still think it's awesome. I mean, I'm an advanced statistics nut, and I know in my heart that either Alexei Ramirez or Cliff Pennington actually deserve the award. But I don't really care. Going into an off-season where the single biggest mythological figure in modern baseball - the guy fifty years from now everyone will talk about in the way they talk about Joe DiMaggio now - has to sign a new contract with the single biggest mythological team in all of sports, there's something fitting about redeeming a sub-par season with a Gold Glove.
Really, the Gold Glove has been a meaningless award for a long time. Rafael Palmeiro won one in a year where he played DH some 120 games. Who cares who wins the Gold Glove? Derek didn't win it for fielding, he won it for being Derek Jeter, and I respect that. No, I love that.
2) I'm rooting for the Miami Heat this year.
That's right, the Miami Heat, starring the most hated trio in basketball: LeBron James, Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade. You know what, though? I've watched a couple Heat games so far this year - more than I've watched Nuggets games - and just love watching these guys. Oh, they'll have (already have had) their problems, but it's so much fun to see so much talent on the floor all at once. The NBA is such a silly league already, so I'm not particularly worried about the Heat "ruining" the game. On the contrary, I find this experiment - putting three superstars together and seeing what happens - fascinating and engaging. I want to see it work. I want to see the Heat win 70 games, and romp all over the Lakers in the NBA Finals. I don't think that will happen, but wouldn't it be cool if it did?
Now most people will say no to that. They want the Heat to lose, and lose hard. They want LeBron to pay for his treachery and his admittedly absurd TV special. But why? Why do we have to hate athletes who make bad PR decisions? Does it really matter? Are they really role models for our kids (if so, are we really that bad as parents)? I don't think so. I, for one, don't watch sports for moral lessons. Rather, I watch so I can see LeBron throw a perfect pass to Dwayne Wade for an oop from mid-court. I watch to see a team rise up and win (and win big) even though everyone is booing them. What better drama is there than that? And how disappointed would even the most fervent Heat hater be if they failed to make the Finals? Just like the Yankees World Series win in 2009, sometimes the bad guys have to succeed, because otherwise it's just bland old Lakers versus Celtics every year.
3) I like the BCS.
This is the worst one of all, but it's true. If Auburn and Oregon meet in the Championship Game this year, I'll watch, and I won't shed a tear for Boise State or Texas Christian. Don't get me wrong, I think those teams would be deserving foes, and could easily be the best teams in the country. But the BCS isn't about figuring out who's best, it's about crowning a champion. The exact same is true of a playoff. If playoffs were looking for the best team, they'd be run very differently. Rather, they're looking for a winner, the luckiest team, the team that does the right thing at the right time.
What I like about the BCS is how much more interesting it has made the last few weeks, and how interesting it will make the next few. In a playoff system, no one would care whether Boise or TCU was 3 or 4. Sure, there would be intrigue at the cut-off point, but isn't intrigue better at the top anyway? In a playoff system, too, we often see inferior teams knock off better ones. Isn't it a truism that the NFC and AFC Championship Games are usually better than the Super Bowl. Isn't the World Cup Third Place game usually better than the Final? So why make Oregon play Pittsburgh or Auburn play Virginia Tech? Why not just cut to the chase? Why not put everything on the table to start it out?
Moreover, I love the current Bowl system because it makes for fascinating matchups that last a whole month. Hawaii vs. SMU, for example, would be so cool. And, with a playoff, so irrelevant. For all I care, we could get rid of the Championship Game and just do the old-fashioned matchups and end up with shared titles. To me the point of college football is not who's Champion, but the process of getting there. To me, the presence of 120 or so teams means that finding a single Champion is an exercise in futility anyway. To me, the point is what happens on one play, in one game, and as a fan I don't ultimately care if that matchup is Oregon vs. Auburn, TCU vs. Alabama, or Boise vs. LSU.
I know I'm in an extremely small minority, and I readily acknowledge and agree with all of the complaints people have about the BCS. They're a bunch of money-grubbing bastards, it's true. But you still watch. I still watch. The whole country still watches, and, what's more, you love to complain about it, to speculate, to criticize.
Ultimately, I think all three of these guilty pleasures come down to the same thing. We love to hate Derek Jeter (except Yankees fans, who love to love him), we love to hate the Heat, and we love to hate the BCS. It seems to me, though, that the trip from "love to hate" to "love" is a short one. It's just a matter of perspective, a matter of culture and counter-culture, a matter of seeing the bigger picture. And hey, once you take a step back, take a deep breath, and think about it a little, you might find that your guilty pleasures are the same as mine.
* "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."
With that in mind, I want to talk about three little things that secretly please me in modern sports. These three things, I think, you will probably hate. Odds are, if you listen to any sports radio, watch any ESPN, or talk to anyone at the local bar about sports, you're going to be shocked at what I'm about to say. So here it goes.
1) I'm glad Derek Jeter won the Gold Glove.
Seriously, I am. I love it. A healthy part of that love is irony, of course, but I still think it's awesome. I mean, I'm an advanced statistics nut, and I know in my heart that either Alexei Ramirez or Cliff Pennington actually deserve the award. But I don't really care. Going into an off-season where the single biggest mythological figure in modern baseball - the guy fifty years from now everyone will talk about in the way they talk about Joe DiMaggio now - has to sign a new contract with the single biggest mythological team in all of sports, there's something fitting about redeeming a sub-par season with a Gold Glove.
Really, the Gold Glove has been a meaningless award for a long time. Rafael Palmeiro won one in a year where he played DH some 120 games. Who cares who wins the Gold Glove? Derek didn't win it for fielding, he won it for being Derek Jeter, and I respect that. No, I love that.
2) I'm rooting for the Miami Heat this year.
That's right, the Miami Heat, starring the most hated trio in basketball: LeBron James, Chris Bosh, Dwayne Wade. You know what, though? I've watched a couple Heat games so far this year - more than I've watched Nuggets games - and just love watching these guys. Oh, they'll have (already have had) their problems, but it's so much fun to see so much talent on the floor all at once. The NBA is such a silly league already, so I'm not particularly worried about the Heat "ruining" the game. On the contrary, I find this experiment - putting three superstars together and seeing what happens - fascinating and engaging. I want to see it work. I want to see the Heat win 70 games, and romp all over the Lakers in the NBA Finals. I don't think that will happen, but wouldn't it be cool if it did?
Now most people will say no to that. They want the Heat to lose, and lose hard. They want LeBron to pay for his treachery and his admittedly absurd TV special. But why? Why do we have to hate athletes who make bad PR decisions? Does it really matter? Are they really role models for our kids (if so, are we really that bad as parents)? I don't think so. I, for one, don't watch sports for moral lessons. Rather, I watch so I can see LeBron throw a perfect pass to Dwayne Wade for an oop from mid-court. I watch to see a team rise up and win (and win big) even though everyone is booing them. What better drama is there than that? And how disappointed would even the most fervent Heat hater be if they failed to make the Finals? Just like the Yankees World Series win in 2009, sometimes the bad guys have to succeed, because otherwise it's just bland old Lakers versus Celtics every year.
3) I like the BCS.
This is the worst one of all, but it's true. If Auburn and Oregon meet in the Championship Game this year, I'll watch, and I won't shed a tear for Boise State or Texas Christian. Don't get me wrong, I think those teams would be deserving foes, and could easily be the best teams in the country. But the BCS isn't about figuring out who's best, it's about crowning a champion. The exact same is true of a playoff. If playoffs were looking for the best team, they'd be run very differently. Rather, they're looking for a winner, the luckiest team, the team that does the right thing at the right time.
What I like about the BCS is how much more interesting it has made the last few weeks, and how interesting it will make the next few. In a playoff system, no one would care whether Boise or TCU was 3 or 4. Sure, there would be intrigue at the cut-off point, but isn't intrigue better at the top anyway? In a playoff system, too, we often see inferior teams knock off better ones. Isn't it a truism that the NFC and AFC Championship Games are usually better than the Super Bowl. Isn't the World Cup Third Place game usually better than the Final? So why make Oregon play Pittsburgh or Auburn play Virginia Tech? Why not just cut to the chase? Why not put everything on the table to start it out?
Moreover, I love the current Bowl system because it makes for fascinating matchups that last a whole month. Hawaii vs. SMU, for example, would be so cool. And, with a playoff, so irrelevant. For all I care, we could get rid of the Championship Game and just do the old-fashioned matchups and end up with shared titles. To me the point of college football is not who's Champion, but the process of getting there. To me, the presence of 120 or so teams means that finding a single Champion is an exercise in futility anyway. To me, the point is what happens on one play, in one game, and as a fan I don't ultimately care if that matchup is Oregon vs. Auburn, TCU vs. Alabama, or Boise vs. LSU.
I know I'm in an extremely small minority, and I readily acknowledge and agree with all of the complaints people have about the BCS. They're a bunch of money-grubbing bastards, it's true. But you still watch. I still watch. The whole country still watches, and, what's more, you love to complain about it, to speculate, to criticize.
Ultimately, I think all three of these guilty pleasures come down to the same thing. We love to hate Derek Jeter (except Yankees fans, who love to love him), we love to hate the Heat, and we love to hate the BCS. It seems to me, though, that the trip from "love to hate" to "love" is a short one. It's just a matter of perspective, a matter of culture and counter-culture, a matter of seeing the bigger picture. And hey, once you take a step back, take a deep breath, and think about it a little, you might find that your guilty pleasures are the same as mine.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Why Baseball Doesn't Need a Salary Cap
In the wake of the 27th World Series title for the New York Yankees, baseball fans all over are crying again that the sport needs a salary cap. How dare the Yankees spend their way to victory year after year? How dare baseball allow the poor Royals and Pirates to be little more than AAA teams for their big market competitors in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago? Baseball, the argument goes, needs to be more like basketball and football, which have great competitive parity because of their salary caps. Except, that's not really true. There are a number of holes in the "MLB-needs-a-salary-cap" argument, and I hope to point out as many as I can here, but perhaps the most obviously absurd is the "basketball and football have a salary cap, and therefore have parity" argument.
Consider the NBA. Since 1999-2000, there have been 10 winners of the NBA Championship. The following teams have won the NBA Championship:
Los Angeles Lakers - 4 times
San Antonio Spurs - 3 times
Detroit Pistons - once
Miami Heat - once
Boston Celtics - once
The Lakers have also lost the Championship twice, meaning they have represented the Western Conference 6 times in the last 10 years, and as you probably noticed, San Antonio represented the West 3 of the other 4. Parity? I know that the Western Conference in the NBA is considered extremely strong, every year, but that does not mean there is much parity. Conference Championships may be a crude measure, but the larger point holds, I think: the salary cap does not stop the Lakers from being a force almost every year.
Lets look at the NFL, too. Since 2000, again, there have been 9 Super Bowl winners. They are:
New England Patriots - 3 times
Pittsburgh Steelers - 2 times
Indianapolis Colts - once
Baltimore Ravens - once
Tampa Bay Buccaneers - once
New York Giants - once (beat New England)
Even without the numbers, I think it's pretty easy to look back and think about the "good teams" of the last ten years in the NFL. New England has been competitive repeatedly, despite the lack of a salary cap. It is notable, of course, that there have been many good NFL teams that come from small markets (unlike in the NBA, where being a big-market team is, interestingly, almost as important as it is in baseball), but the main point here is that a salary cap does not ensure parity. Consider, in the NFL, the other side of the equation as well. More and more teams are habitually terrible, much like in baseball. The Detroit Lions, for example, have been a laughingstock for almost a decade.
Why is there not, actually, parity in these major sports? The salary cap is almost a non-entity in the equation, and in the NBA, in particular, it actually serves to help large market teams. How is that possible?
Basketball, like baseball, generates a huge portion of its revenue from ticket sales and local TV coverage. That means that, once a large market team gets rolling, it stands to make way more money than a small market team. The Minnesota Timberwolves may be successful for a year or two - and were - but it was unsustainable because there simply aren't enough T-Wolves fans out there to allow the franchise to rake in the dough from advertisers. The Lakers, on the other hand, have an enormous fan base, and their success translates not only into slightly higher ticket sales, but massively higher advertising revenues from local TV coverage.*
*Actually, in basketball, the import of TV money is even greater than in baseball. Baseball stadiums are huge by comparison, and each venue hosts 81 games in a season. Basketball has a shorter season, with fewer games, and much smaller arenas. That means more TV viewers, plus a schedule that emphasizes night and weekend games to ensure fans can watch a much higher percentage of the season than the baseball faithful can.
Why is TV revenue so important in a sport with a salary cap? Because higher revenues means higher profit, which means more money to invest into the team. Because the salary cap restricts the amount of money that can be invested directly into players, that extra money gets invested into facilities, better trainers, superior scouting departments, high-tech gizmos, and - if they happen - shady dealings. The Lakers, because they cannot spend more on their roster than the Thunder can, reap instead the huge advantage of spending more on supporting their roster. In a salary-capped league, this also means that player retention is better: who would want to leave the perks of Lakertown for Oklahoma City, especially when OKC can't pay you any more than the Lakers can, anyway?
In the NFL, this is less of an issue because revenues are more equalized (by virtue of weekly national coverage). Nevertheless, there is an important lesson in the lack of parity there, too, because it shows how important non-player personnel can be. Management - especially general managers and scouts - play a vital role in the success of a baseball team. This is also true of NFL teams, where the Head Coach has tremendous influence on the outcome of a game. Consider the Patriots: are their players so superior to those of other NFL teams, or is their success more a result of Bill Belichick? The analogy with baseball is imperfect, because baseball managers contribute very little to a team's success, but the point is that there are places other than players to spend money.
Were baseball to adopt a salary cap, there would be two major outcomes. The first is that the massive profits that baseball teams enjoy would be directed into the hands of owners, and away from players. Players are an easy target, and we often decry how awful a society must be to pay these whiny 20-somethings millions of dollars to hit a ball with a stick, but that misses the point. A salary cap doesn't change the amount of money that goes into the MLB, it just changes who sees that money at the end of the day. If players can only make so much, owners make that much more, and if there's anything worse than a society that makes millionaires of men who hit balls with sticks, its a society that would rather make billionaires of the men who hire those millionaires.
The second result of a salary cap would be a redirection of the resources of a team like the Yankees into other markets. Already the Yankees enjoy a tremendous advantage in amateur development, facilities, training staff, and foreign scouting. Imagine if they could spend only $100 million on player salaries, and could re-direct that extra $100 million they'd be saving towards their minor league teams and foreign scouting departments. Imagine the clubhouse they could build for their players. Imagine the vast competitive advantage they would enjoy in almost every other aspect of the game. It's impossible to know just how a salary cap would actually work, but if the NBA is any indication, a salary cap would not keep the Yankees from enjoying the same kind of dynastic power that they already do, and that the Lakers enjoy in the NBA.
Of course, the Yankees already are a perennial power - along with their huge-market cohorts, the Boston Red Sox, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim, I'm told) - which is what has everybody so up in arms. The illusion of parity in baseball is really just the parity of the playoffs. A seven game series is too short to determine the superior team in baseball, where a superior team may win 55% of the time (compared to, say, in the NBA, where the superior team wins 70% of the time). The Yankees and Phillies could have played their recent World Series 100 times, and the Yankees may have won 60 of them. Now add in two more rounds of the playoffs, including a 5 game long series at the start (which increases the odds for an inferior team). It's no wonder the Yankees hadn't won the World Series since 2000. But remember that they made the playoffs every year in between but one.
This, it seems, is the problem that gets everyone so worked up, the problem that a salary cap would, in theory, fix. But whether parity is even desirable or not is an important question that many sports fans forget to ask. While a competitive game is certainly fun, how much would College Football fans enjoy the sport if UNLV and Mississippi State had as good a chance to win the National Championship every year as USC, Florida, or Ohio State? I would argue that - because of graduation - College Football has more parity than almost any other major sport in this country, and yet it is the lack of parity sport wide (or the parity, you might say, at the fairly large upper tier) that makes the sport so engaging. That and the allegiance every alumnus has to his respective alma mater. But TCU graduates still like watching the National Championship, even if they never expect to get there.
Of course, we expect better of baseball, where every team is supposed to "have a chance." This isn't top-heavy European soccer, after all, where the top leagues are dominated by a small handful of elite teams, and the rest fight to avoid relegation. Baseball is about hope and justice and the American way, and stuff, right? Except it's not, really. Baseball is largely about money - at least on the National scale - and it is good money for the league if the Yankees are competitive each and every year. So let them be! Baseball, for the true fan, isn't about World Series victories anyway. It's about summer afternoons at the stadium, rooting for the home team whether they are 60-30 or 30-60, up by four runs or down by eight. It's about a hot dog and a beer in the bleachers, a heckler insulting himself more than the opposition, the drama of the pitcher and the batter, and the wonderful statistics all of that produces. It's about arguing with the guy in the row behind you who you've never met whether Seth Smith is better than Brad Hawpe (he is), and whether the Rockies are a better pitching team than hitting (they are), and whether Clint Barmes sucks, despite all his home runs (he does).
Baseball is too long a haul, each season, to be about championships. The Yankees fans for whom a season without a World Series is a failure are missing out on something. There can be tremendous joy in watching your team exit in the first round of the playoffs, simply because it was a good season. There can be tremendous joy in finishing last, too (just look at the '93 Rockies). I don't mean to deny that there is frustration in losing, and I wouldn't suggest that you want your team to be a failure, but real baseball fans show up in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and Kansas City every year even though they know their teams aren't any good. Why? Because they want to watch baseball, pure and simple. Wins and losses be damned. Baseball is the closest sport to poety there is, and poetry is as much about losers as it is winners anyway, if not more so.*
*Consider this Tennyson poem, for example. Or anything Greek.
If there is something wrong with baseball - with the Yankees and the Red Sox - then a salary cap is a terrible solution. I don't know what the 'solution,' is, but I do know that it has to address, not the output of the Yankees, but the intake. Creative, intelligent people will always know how to use their superior resources - should they have them - to their advantage, and no amount of restricting that resource usage will stop the Yankees. Eliminating the resource advantage? Sure, but how are you going to do that? And do you want to anyway? On some level, I was glad the Yankees won the World Series this year; there's something right about it. Let them win five more in the next decade, let them be champions, and be desperate and incredulous when they aren't. Just let me watch baseball, and I'll be happy.
Consider the NBA. Since 1999-2000, there have been 10 winners of the NBA Championship. The following teams have won the NBA Championship:
Los Angeles Lakers - 4 times
San Antonio Spurs - 3 times
Detroit Pistons - once
Miami Heat - once
Boston Celtics - once
The Lakers have also lost the Championship twice, meaning they have represented the Western Conference 6 times in the last 10 years, and as you probably noticed, San Antonio represented the West 3 of the other 4. Parity? I know that the Western Conference in the NBA is considered extremely strong, every year, but that does not mean there is much parity. Conference Championships may be a crude measure, but the larger point holds, I think: the salary cap does not stop the Lakers from being a force almost every year.
Lets look at the NFL, too. Since 2000, again, there have been 9 Super Bowl winners. They are:
New England Patriots - 3 times
Pittsburgh Steelers - 2 times
Indianapolis Colts - once
Baltimore Ravens - once
Tampa Bay Buccaneers - once
New York Giants - once (beat New England)
Even without the numbers, I think it's pretty easy to look back and think about the "good teams" of the last ten years in the NFL. New England has been competitive repeatedly, despite the lack of a salary cap. It is notable, of course, that there have been many good NFL teams that come from small markets (unlike in the NBA, where being a big-market team is, interestingly, almost as important as it is in baseball), but the main point here is that a salary cap does not ensure parity. Consider, in the NFL, the other side of the equation as well. More and more teams are habitually terrible, much like in baseball. The Detroit Lions, for example, have been a laughingstock for almost a decade.
Why is there not, actually, parity in these major sports? The salary cap is almost a non-entity in the equation, and in the NBA, in particular, it actually serves to help large market teams. How is that possible?
Basketball, like baseball, generates a huge portion of its revenue from ticket sales and local TV coverage. That means that, once a large market team gets rolling, it stands to make way more money than a small market team. The Minnesota Timberwolves may be successful for a year or two - and were - but it was unsustainable because there simply aren't enough T-Wolves fans out there to allow the franchise to rake in the dough from advertisers. The Lakers, on the other hand, have an enormous fan base, and their success translates not only into slightly higher ticket sales, but massively higher advertising revenues from local TV coverage.*
*Actually, in basketball, the import of TV money is even greater than in baseball. Baseball stadiums are huge by comparison, and each venue hosts 81 games in a season. Basketball has a shorter season, with fewer games, and much smaller arenas. That means more TV viewers, plus a schedule that emphasizes night and weekend games to ensure fans can watch a much higher percentage of the season than the baseball faithful can.
Why is TV revenue so important in a sport with a salary cap? Because higher revenues means higher profit, which means more money to invest into the team. Because the salary cap restricts the amount of money that can be invested directly into players, that extra money gets invested into facilities, better trainers, superior scouting departments, high-tech gizmos, and - if they happen - shady dealings. The Lakers, because they cannot spend more on their roster than the Thunder can, reap instead the huge advantage of spending more on supporting their roster. In a salary-capped league, this also means that player retention is better: who would want to leave the perks of Lakertown for Oklahoma City, especially when OKC can't pay you any more than the Lakers can, anyway?
In the NFL, this is less of an issue because revenues are more equalized (by virtue of weekly national coverage). Nevertheless, there is an important lesson in the lack of parity there, too, because it shows how important non-player personnel can be. Management - especially general managers and scouts - play a vital role in the success of a baseball team. This is also true of NFL teams, where the Head Coach has tremendous influence on the outcome of a game. Consider the Patriots: are their players so superior to those of other NFL teams, or is their success more a result of Bill Belichick? The analogy with baseball is imperfect, because baseball managers contribute very little to a team's success, but the point is that there are places other than players to spend money.
Were baseball to adopt a salary cap, there would be two major outcomes. The first is that the massive profits that baseball teams enjoy would be directed into the hands of owners, and away from players. Players are an easy target, and we often decry how awful a society must be to pay these whiny 20-somethings millions of dollars to hit a ball with a stick, but that misses the point. A salary cap doesn't change the amount of money that goes into the MLB, it just changes who sees that money at the end of the day. If players can only make so much, owners make that much more, and if there's anything worse than a society that makes millionaires of men who hit balls with sticks, its a society that would rather make billionaires of the men who hire those millionaires.
The second result of a salary cap would be a redirection of the resources of a team like the Yankees into other markets. Already the Yankees enjoy a tremendous advantage in amateur development, facilities, training staff, and foreign scouting. Imagine if they could spend only $100 million on player salaries, and could re-direct that extra $100 million they'd be saving towards their minor league teams and foreign scouting departments. Imagine the clubhouse they could build for their players. Imagine the vast competitive advantage they would enjoy in almost every other aspect of the game. It's impossible to know just how a salary cap would actually work, but if the NBA is any indication, a salary cap would not keep the Yankees from enjoying the same kind of dynastic power that they already do, and that the Lakers enjoy in the NBA.
Of course, the Yankees already are a perennial power - along with their huge-market cohorts, the Boston Red Sox, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim, I'm told) - which is what has everybody so up in arms. The illusion of parity in baseball is really just the parity of the playoffs. A seven game series is too short to determine the superior team in baseball, where a superior team may win 55% of the time (compared to, say, in the NBA, where the superior team wins 70% of the time). The Yankees and Phillies could have played their recent World Series 100 times, and the Yankees may have won 60 of them. Now add in two more rounds of the playoffs, including a 5 game long series at the start (which increases the odds for an inferior team). It's no wonder the Yankees hadn't won the World Series since 2000. But remember that they made the playoffs every year in between but one.
This, it seems, is the problem that gets everyone so worked up, the problem that a salary cap would, in theory, fix. But whether parity is even desirable or not is an important question that many sports fans forget to ask. While a competitive game is certainly fun, how much would College Football fans enjoy the sport if UNLV and Mississippi State had as good a chance to win the National Championship every year as USC, Florida, or Ohio State? I would argue that - because of graduation - College Football has more parity than almost any other major sport in this country, and yet it is the lack of parity sport wide (or the parity, you might say, at the fairly large upper tier) that makes the sport so engaging. That and the allegiance every alumnus has to his respective alma mater. But TCU graduates still like watching the National Championship, even if they never expect to get there.
Of course, we expect better of baseball, where every team is supposed to "have a chance." This isn't top-heavy European soccer, after all, where the top leagues are dominated by a small handful of elite teams, and the rest fight to avoid relegation. Baseball is about hope and justice and the American way, and stuff, right? Except it's not, really. Baseball is largely about money - at least on the National scale - and it is good money for the league if the Yankees are competitive each and every year. So let them be! Baseball, for the true fan, isn't about World Series victories anyway. It's about summer afternoons at the stadium, rooting for the home team whether they are 60-30 or 30-60, up by four runs or down by eight. It's about a hot dog and a beer in the bleachers, a heckler insulting himself more than the opposition, the drama of the pitcher and the batter, and the wonderful statistics all of that produces. It's about arguing with the guy in the row behind you who you've never met whether Seth Smith is better than Brad Hawpe (he is), and whether the Rockies are a better pitching team than hitting (they are), and whether Clint Barmes sucks, despite all his home runs (he does).
Baseball is too long a haul, each season, to be about championships. The Yankees fans for whom a season without a World Series is a failure are missing out on something. There can be tremendous joy in watching your team exit in the first round of the playoffs, simply because it was a good season. There can be tremendous joy in finishing last, too (just look at the '93 Rockies). I don't mean to deny that there is frustration in losing, and I wouldn't suggest that you want your team to be a failure, but real baseball fans show up in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and Kansas City every year even though they know their teams aren't any good. Why? Because they want to watch baseball, pure and simple. Wins and losses be damned. Baseball is the closest sport to poety there is, and poetry is as much about losers as it is winners anyway, if not more so.*
*Consider this Tennyson poem, for example. Or anything Greek.
If there is something wrong with baseball - with the Yankees and the Red Sox - then a salary cap is a terrible solution. I don't know what the 'solution,' is, but I do know that it has to address, not the output of the Yankees, but the intake. Creative, intelligent people will always know how to use their superior resources - should they have them - to their advantage, and no amount of restricting that resource usage will stop the Yankees. Eliminating the resource advantage? Sure, but how are you going to do that? And do you want to anyway? On some level, I was glad the Yankees won the World Series this year; there's something right about it. Let them win five more in the next decade, let them be champions, and be desperate and incredulous when they aren't. Just let me watch baseball, and I'll be happy.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Cognitive Dissonance and College Football
I have to admit, from the very beginning, that this post isn't really about College Football. I am not currently in possession of a TV, nor do I have access to one, nor would I particularly have the time or motivation to watch one if I did. Therefore, I have watched only one college football game this season, and that was in person at Stanford Stadium (my second will be tomorrow, when the Cardinal play UCLA). I'm more concerned with expanding a little on this idea of "framing the discussion" (though that exact term won't show up here, the idea is present), since I've been thinking about it over the last couple days.
One of the purposes of asking questions, especially philosophical questions - and especially uncomfortable philosophical questions - is to broaden the spectrum of a conversation. We may all agree, in principle, how important education is, for example, but we are usually slow to consider what assumptions have lead us to that seemingly obvious conclusion (let alone to consider what we mean by "education" in the first place). Likewise, we may agree, in principle, in the value of a representational government without ever considering what the virtues and faults of such a government are, and how that form of government is influenced by outstanding circumstances like, for example, modern information technology. In general, most of what we do and think on a day to day basis is, ultimately, unexamined, even among the "well-educated." Ironically, we tend to become more automatic in fields that we know particularly well and use frequently. Driving, for example, is a fairly complex task that is essentially automatic, and how often do we contemplate the reasons for traffic laws?
That's a fairly mundane example, but the same goes for more intellectual pursuits, and more specialized fields of knowledge. Of course, one might say that PhDs of pure Philosophy avoid this by studying a question-oriented field, but that really seem to be the case, given the intense bickering and in-fighting that happens in Philosophy departments across the country (though limited funding and high competition for jobs might have something to do with that as well). Strong as the tendency to turn even the most complex thought-processes into repeatable and eventually unexamined habit is, the tendency to do so with already unexamined thoughts acquired merely by living in a society - that is, "conventional wisdom" - is even stronger. There are certain expectations that arise, not from any systematic decision that those expectations make sense, but by virtue of some long-lost and accidental situation, and these expectations dictate a substantial amount of our behavior.
The concept of cognitive dissonance, from what little I know about it, is something psychologists use to explain what happens when two of our ingrained intellectual habits come in conflict with each other. The basic idea is that, if you discover that something you really like (cheap prices) is closely related to something you really hate (draconian labor practices), your efforts to reconcile the two will lead to a compromise. As a result, you'll like or hate the objects in question just a little bit less, as you try to bring them somewhere closer together in your head.
There are plenty of examples of this concept at work, and if you pay attention, you might catch yourself doing it quite frequently (I know I do). The example I want to talk about is College Football polling. Cognitive dissonance is usually explained numerically, because a sliding, quanitative scale of likes and dislikes is an excellent heuristic tool. In the case of NCAA polls, however, the numbers involved are actual manifestations of the concept in action, albeit at a social and not personal level.
Since I now attend a Pac-10 school, I want to point to the dance that Washington, USC, and Stanford have participated in over the last few weeks. The perennial powerhouse USC lost to Washington - who went winless in 2008 - in week 2. USC had been ranked #3 (AP poll, that's the one I'm going to use), and Washington had understandibly been unranked. The outcome of that game was not enough to convince voters that USC is actually worse than Washington, but it was a kind of cognitive dissonance. As a result, USC dropped to #12 the next week, with Washington climbing into the top-25 at #24.
Unfortunately for the poll-voters, things are never that simple, and Washington was routed by the Cardinal last weekend, 34-14. Stanford is not ranked, and is not particularly thought to be that strong of a program. Of course, the voters took their cue here to drop Washington out of the top-25, but a few of them did - in a classic example of unexamined, reactive thinking - throw a couple of votes at Stanford, though not enough to breach the magical #25 barrier. The odd part about this is that USC jumped all the way back up to #7 at the same time. Extenuating circumstances aside, it's as if the voters decided that, really, USC isn't #12, and that they just kind of had a bad week in a tough stadium (Washington plays at one of the largest venues in the country). A little distance goes a long way in clarifying the real meaning of a terrible upset.
There's a similar example to step through involving California and Oregon, but we don't need to go there. Rather, the point is that there is a kind of unexamined assumption among fans of college football - an assumption originating largely from the way the sport is covered - that there is some mystical difference between a team that is #5 and a team that is #8, when in reality there is probably very little. The way that teams match-up against each other, where they play, who's injured, which coach has a better game plan, and whose kicker is hungover all have way more to do with which team wins a game - which team is "better" - than where teams sit in the polls. "Duh," you're probably saying, because we all see and hear about upsets all the time.
But my point isn't that upsets happen, or even that it makes sense that upsets should happen. My point is that, even though we all know that upsets happen and that's a part of the fun, we still buy into a ranking system that obviously does not and cannot function. Can you arrange 112 football teams linearly, from best to worst, in any meaningful way? Sure, we might all agree that USC is better than Louisiana Tech, but between USC and Louisiana Tech there are a bunch of teams that we don't agree about.* And that's the point; there is no meaningful and definitive way - even playing games - to determine which team is better than which. We complain about the BCS, but that's just a system for choosing two teams to play for a National Championship; if we chose four for a playoff, we'd have the same trouble, or if we chose eight, or sixteen. Even in NCAA Basketball, 65 isn't enough to satisfy people. And how often is the National Champion not, in reality, the consensus "best team?"
* (This is called a Posterisk - or at least, that's what Joe Posnanski calls it. Basically, it's an end note that doesn't happen at the end. Or maybe it's a footnote that occurs in the middle of the page because, really, there is no page for it to be at the bottom of.) For example, who's better, USC or Cal? Cal or Oregon? Oregon or Notre Dame? Notre Dame or Michigan? Michigan or Indiana? Indiana or Western Michigan? Western Michigan or Fresno State? Fresno State or Hawaii? Hawaii or Louisiana Tech? I don't follow the sport close enough to know of those are good examples, but I have a sense that you'd probably be able to argue both ways about each of those pairs, even though no one would argue that Louisiana Tech is better than USC.
The exercise is one in repetitive, habitual, and unexamined thinking. We feel the need to put things on a straight line because, really, that's just what we do. We see politics as being about left, center, and right. We see grades as being A to F. We see football teams as #1, #2, #3, and so on. We do all of this even though the reality we're dealing with - even in something as trivial and straightfoward as football - is way too complicated to fit in a single dimension (how much more so with politics or student assessment?). We open ourselves up to cognitive dissonance, and we let it work it's paradox-resolving sorcery, even though quick reflection would tell us that, just because Washington beat USC and Stanford beat Washington, that doesn't mean that Stanford should beat USC. So why should Stanford pick up votes? Is the subconscious that powerful? Is habit that strong?
It is quite common to hear about "thinking outside-the-box." In a way, we've even turned outside-the-box thinking into a linear phenomenon: "He's outside-the-box, but not as outside-the-box as she is!" We subject ourselves to the same vagaries of cognitive dissonance: "I thought he was pretty outside-the-box, but his solution to that problem was fairly uninspired, I guess he's not all that outside-the-box after all, and all that innovative thinking isn't all it's cracked up to be." Really, we don't need outside-the-box thinkers nearly so much as we need off-the-line thinkers. Right now, more often than not, we get stuck in one dimension. We'll deal with boxes once we get to three.
One of the purposes of asking questions, especially philosophical questions - and especially uncomfortable philosophical questions - is to broaden the spectrum of a conversation. We may all agree, in principle, how important education is, for example, but we are usually slow to consider what assumptions have lead us to that seemingly obvious conclusion (let alone to consider what we mean by "education" in the first place). Likewise, we may agree, in principle, in the value of a representational government without ever considering what the virtues and faults of such a government are, and how that form of government is influenced by outstanding circumstances like, for example, modern information technology. In general, most of what we do and think on a day to day basis is, ultimately, unexamined, even among the "well-educated." Ironically, we tend to become more automatic in fields that we know particularly well and use frequently. Driving, for example, is a fairly complex task that is essentially automatic, and how often do we contemplate the reasons for traffic laws?
That's a fairly mundane example, but the same goes for more intellectual pursuits, and more specialized fields of knowledge. Of course, one might say that PhDs of pure Philosophy avoid this by studying a question-oriented field, but that really seem to be the case, given the intense bickering and in-fighting that happens in Philosophy departments across the country (though limited funding and high competition for jobs might have something to do with that as well). Strong as the tendency to turn even the most complex thought-processes into repeatable and eventually unexamined habit is, the tendency to do so with already unexamined thoughts acquired merely by living in a society - that is, "conventional wisdom" - is even stronger. There are certain expectations that arise, not from any systematic decision that those expectations make sense, but by virtue of some long-lost and accidental situation, and these expectations dictate a substantial amount of our behavior.
The concept of cognitive dissonance, from what little I know about it, is something psychologists use to explain what happens when two of our ingrained intellectual habits come in conflict with each other. The basic idea is that, if you discover that something you really like (cheap prices) is closely related to something you really hate (draconian labor practices), your efforts to reconcile the two will lead to a compromise. As a result, you'll like or hate the objects in question just a little bit less, as you try to bring them somewhere closer together in your head.
There are plenty of examples of this concept at work, and if you pay attention, you might catch yourself doing it quite frequently (I know I do). The example I want to talk about is College Football polling. Cognitive dissonance is usually explained numerically, because a sliding, quanitative scale of likes and dislikes is an excellent heuristic tool. In the case of NCAA polls, however, the numbers involved are actual manifestations of the concept in action, albeit at a social and not personal level.
Since I now attend a Pac-10 school, I want to point to the dance that Washington, USC, and Stanford have participated in over the last few weeks. The perennial powerhouse USC lost to Washington - who went winless in 2008 - in week 2. USC had been ranked #3 (AP poll, that's the one I'm going to use), and Washington had understandibly been unranked. The outcome of that game was not enough to convince voters that USC is actually worse than Washington, but it was a kind of cognitive dissonance. As a result, USC dropped to #12 the next week, with Washington climbing into the top-25 at #24.
Unfortunately for the poll-voters, things are never that simple, and Washington was routed by the Cardinal last weekend, 34-14. Stanford is not ranked, and is not particularly thought to be that strong of a program. Of course, the voters took their cue here to drop Washington out of the top-25, but a few of them did - in a classic example of unexamined, reactive thinking - throw a couple of votes at Stanford, though not enough to breach the magical #25 barrier. The odd part about this is that USC jumped all the way back up to #7 at the same time. Extenuating circumstances aside, it's as if the voters decided that, really, USC isn't #12, and that they just kind of had a bad week in a tough stadium (Washington plays at one of the largest venues in the country). A little distance goes a long way in clarifying the real meaning of a terrible upset.
There's a similar example to step through involving California and Oregon, but we don't need to go there. Rather, the point is that there is a kind of unexamined assumption among fans of college football - an assumption originating largely from the way the sport is covered - that there is some mystical difference between a team that is #5 and a team that is #8, when in reality there is probably very little. The way that teams match-up against each other, where they play, who's injured, which coach has a better game plan, and whose kicker is hungover all have way more to do with which team wins a game - which team is "better" - than where teams sit in the polls. "Duh," you're probably saying, because we all see and hear about upsets all the time.
But my point isn't that upsets happen, or even that it makes sense that upsets should happen. My point is that, even though we all know that upsets happen and that's a part of the fun, we still buy into a ranking system that obviously does not and cannot function. Can you arrange 112 football teams linearly, from best to worst, in any meaningful way? Sure, we might all agree that USC is better than Louisiana Tech, but between USC and Louisiana Tech there are a bunch of teams that we don't agree about.* And that's the point; there is no meaningful and definitive way - even playing games - to determine which team is better than which. We complain about the BCS, but that's just a system for choosing two teams to play for a National Championship; if we chose four for a playoff, we'd have the same trouble, or if we chose eight, or sixteen. Even in NCAA Basketball, 65 isn't enough to satisfy people. And how often is the National Champion not, in reality, the consensus "best team?"
* (This is called a Posterisk - or at least, that's what Joe Posnanski calls it. Basically, it's an end note that doesn't happen at the end. Or maybe it's a footnote that occurs in the middle of the page because, really, there is no page for it to be at the bottom of.) For example, who's better, USC or Cal? Cal or Oregon? Oregon or Notre Dame? Notre Dame or Michigan? Michigan or Indiana? Indiana or Western Michigan? Western Michigan or Fresno State? Fresno State or Hawaii? Hawaii or Louisiana Tech? I don't follow the sport close enough to know of those are good examples, but I have a sense that you'd probably be able to argue both ways about each of those pairs, even though no one would argue that Louisiana Tech is better than USC.
The exercise is one in repetitive, habitual, and unexamined thinking. We feel the need to put things on a straight line because, really, that's just what we do. We see politics as being about left, center, and right. We see grades as being A to F. We see football teams as #1, #2, #3, and so on. We do all of this even though the reality we're dealing with - even in something as trivial and straightfoward as football - is way too complicated to fit in a single dimension (how much more so with politics or student assessment?). We open ourselves up to cognitive dissonance, and we let it work it's paradox-resolving sorcery, even though quick reflection would tell us that, just because Washington beat USC and Stanford beat Washington, that doesn't mean that Stanford should beat USC. So why should Stanford pick up votes? Is the subconscious that powerful? Is habit that strong?
It is quite common to hear about "thinking outside-the-box." In a way, we've even turned outside-the-box thinking into a linear phenomenon: "He's outside-the-box, but not as outside-the-box as she is!" We subject ourselves to the same vagaries of cognitive dissonance: "I thought he was pretty outside-the-box, but his solution to that problem was fairly uninspired, I guess he's not all that outside-the-box after all, and all that innovative thinking isn't all it's cracked up to be." Really, we don't need outside-the-box thinkers nearly so much as we need off-the-line thinkers. Right now, more often than not, we get stuck in one dimension. We'll deal with boxes once we get to three.
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