Photo of the day

Really cool set of London at night from above (via Alan Taylor).  Now here’s some soccer fields for urban density:

Five a side football pitches, 20 Union Street, Manchester. (© Jason Hawkes)

 

Paying for college football

Interesting Bloomberg article on just how much Rutgers students subsidize their football team.  A little-known truth is that all but a handful of the most successful college football programs are a net drain on their university budget.  Rutgers has taken it to an extreme level, with the average student paying $1000/year to field a persistently mediocre football team.  Rutgers is not along, they are just the worst.  Bloomberg also put together a really interactive chart that looks at total support for the football team out of the university budget for public universities in major conferences:

Click here for the interactive version where you can see spending per/student when you move the mouse over a school.  Very please to see that the NC State subsidy is only $50/student.  Now, that seems more like it to me.  I’m sure its pretty high at Duke because it’s got to be expensive to compete in the ACC and Duke sure doesn’t bring in a lot of revenue.  As a private school, though, they don’t have to provide the financial data.  As for my graduate school alma mater, Ohio State’s football team is one of those lucrative few that is a net plus for the university.

Seriously?

So, I heard this story on NPR today while driving home and was incredulous:

While Ozzie Guillen apologized repeatedly in a news conference for his recent remarks that he admired the longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, the Miami Marlins also tried to undo the damage their manager had wrought by announcing that Guillen would be suspended for five games…

Guillen’s comments appeared in a Time magazine article, in which he said he “loved” and “respected” Castro, the longtime Cuban leader. Time reported that Guillen said: “I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years,” but Castro is still here, he added, referring to Castro as an expletive.

Call me naive but how in the world is that grounds for suspending the manager of your baseball team?  Yeah, I get that Castro is a dictator and the Cubans in Florida hate him, but calling for him to fired (as I heard on NPR) seems absolutely ludicrous to me.  I don’t really no a lot about Cuban politics in Florida, but I’m pretty sure they need to relax a bit on the Castro thing.

White men can jump (better than white women)

Nothing racial here, this Slate article about gender and dunking in basketball just reminded me of the 1992 film starring Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes as a couple of basketball hustlers.

Anyway, it’s not news that various physiological differences give males athletic advantages.  What was particularly interesting to me is that this difference is unusually large in the area of vertical leap.  Combine that with the rather significant height differences between men and women and it helps explain why the ability to dunk is such a rarity among women:

There are multiple dunks in every men’s game. Why are there so few jams in women’s basketball?

Leaping ability. The average WNBA player, atjust under 6 feet, is about 7 inches shorter than her male counterpart. (Average data for all collegiate female players isn’t available.) Height is only part of the problem, though—plenty of 6-foot male players can dunk. The gender gap in vertical leaping ability is also substantial. The average female college basketball player has a vertical leap of approximately 19 inches, compared with more than 28 inches for the average male player. Since you have to get your fingers about 6 inches above the rim to have a chance at dunking, a female player of average leaping ability would have to be around 6-foot-6 with a standing reach of 8-foot-11”—the approximate measurements for Michael Jordan. (His Airness reportedly had a 48-inch vertical leap.) Few female players are that tall, and none of those giants is exceptional leapers…

According to a 2004 study of medical students and their spouses, the average male in his 20s can out-jump 95 percent of females in the same age group. And men seem to have a peculiar advantage in jumping compared with other athletic pursuits. According to a study of world records for track and field events as of 2004, men had a 15 to 16 percent advantage(PDF) in high jump, long jump, and triple jump. The gender gap in running events was only 10 to 13 percent.

I wonder what percentage of women in my age group (40) I can out-jump.  Whatever it is, they’re not getting very far off the ground.

Photo of the day

I watched a lot of basketball the past few days.  Man did my Dukies let me down.  However, NC State came through this weekend in a big way, moving onto the Sweet 16.  After not even being in the tournament the past 5 years, this was especially gratifying.  Thus, today’s photo is in honor of the Wolfpack victory:

My bracket

So, finished filling out my bracket last night.  Don’t feel particularly good about it.  Relied primarily on Ken Pomeroy (love Pomeroy).  Tried to focus on teams that looked most likely to over-perform their seeds as based on primary ratings.  To some degree, also tried to use the principles from this classic Slate piece on bracket picking.

 

Do we actually need a West region?

Safe to say that the balance of power in college basketball is decidedly east of the Mississippi:

Messi

Jason Kottke makes a nice argument that one of the reasons that Lionel Messi is the world’s greatest soccer player is that– unlike most of his peers– he never takes a dive.  Here’s a great video of him staying on his feet:

Actually, what I really like is that he ultimately he relates this to the same concern I’ve always complained about with soccer–huge amount of space, but only one referree and two assistants.  The result is that soccer is easily the poorest officiated of any sport.  Anyway, Kottke:

To Americans who have grown up watching American football and basketball, it is also one of the most ridiculous sights in sports…these manly professional athletes rolling around on the ground with fake injuries and then limping around the pitch for a few seconds before resuming their runs at 100% capacity. I still dislike the players who go down too often, lay it on too thick, or dive from phantom fouls, but much of the time there’s only one referee and two assistants for that huge field and you’re gonna get held and tackled badly so how else are you going to get that call? You dive.

Except for Lionel Messi. It’s not that he never dives (he does) but he stays on his feet more often than not while facing perhaps the most intense pressure in the game…

By diving instead of staying on your feet, you usually give away that advantage (unless you’re in the box, have Ronaldo on your team taking free kicks, or can somehow hoodwink the ref into giving the other guy a yellow) and that doesn’t make any sense to me. If you look at Messi in that video, his desire to stay upright allows him to keep the pressure on the defense in many of those situations, creating scoring opportunities and even points that would otherwise end up as free kicks. It seems to me that Messi’s reluctance to dive is not some lofty character trait of his; it’s one of the things that makes him such a great player: he never gives up the advantage when he has it.

 

Hockey fighting

You know what I love about hockey?  The amazing speed, power, and skill on display as the players move up and down the ice.  And what I could really do without?  Interruptions so players can awkwardly slug at each other for a few minutes.  Judging by crowd reactions at NHL games, though, sadly, I’m in a real minority here.  When I took David to his first ever hockey game, he was actually amazed at both the fact that it was routine to simply stop the game for this nonsense, but even more so at the fan reaction.  For someone who has grown up watching only basketball and football, it really does seem crazy that this is basically condoned and celebrated.  Anyway, the good news is that at least at the junior league level, they are looking to clean up the game:

Viewing fighting as a safety issue in light of increasing concussion research, and unwilling to wait for the National Hockey League to propose changes, USA Hockey andHockey Canada are seriously considering rules that would effectively end fighting in nonprofessional leagues as soon as next season.

The rules would apply to dozens of leagues stretching from near the Arctic Circle to south Texas. Even the three top junior leagues in Canada, major fight-friendly feeder systems to the N.H.L., are considering immediate ways to make fighting a rarity, not an expectation.

“The appetite is there,” said David Branch, the president of the Canadian Hockey League, which oversees the Ontario Hockey League, the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League and the Western Hockey League. “The time is certainly right to move forward.”

Hockey has long been a rare team sport that widely condones the interruption of a game so two or more players can trade punches. But for boys starting at age 16 or so, from the rough-and-tumble junior leagues to the N.H.L., fighting has usually been minimally penalized (often with five minutes in the penalty box) and thus widely practiced, condoned, even celebrated.

That may change soon. The increased recognition of the long-term dangers of brain trauma, across all sports, has forced hockey’s leaders to consider ways to reduce blows to the head.

Hooray for them.  The article includes speculation about hockey’s ability to “survive” this.  I say, if hockey cannot survive without fighting, it’ s not worth surviving.  Though, in my opinion it is a much better sport without the fighting.

On sports fandom

Sometimes I feel a little silly getting so invested in a bunch of 18-22 year olds playing a game, just because they happen to attend the same college that I went to, but man, moments like this are simply awesome:

Yes, it is silly that I’m smiling a bit more and walking with a bit more spring in my step today because Austin Rivers hit this shot, but it does feel good.

Also, almost forgot to mention, that my favorite thing in all of sports is in college basketball when a shot leaves a players hand as time expires and if it goes in, they win; it goes out they, lose.  The ultimate in drama.  When Duke comes out on the good side of that, all the better.  Something like, oh, I don’t now, this:

Photo of the day

Great set from Alan Taylor of Australian Open Photos.   This one was actually my favorite (and quite appropriate today, to honor his semifinal victory over Nadal early this morning):

Rafael Nadal of Spain sits under a shade during a break in between games during his men’s singles match agianst Feliciano Lopez of Spain at the Australian Open, on January 22, 2012. (Reuters/Vivek Prakash) 

Should also mention, that for a long time, my post on “soft core tennis porn?” was far and away my most popular.  It’s long since been replaced by my post on Great Tits (the bird– get your mind out of the gutter).

Goal of the day

Instead of a photo, I’m going with this amazing video of the US National Team’s goalkeeper, Tim Howard, scorinng a goal for his club team, Everton.  Truly amazing.