Matt Yglesias

With $8 Million on the Line, People Should Be Paid For The Services They Perform

Nice report on the brass tacks implications of a missed field goal for Boise State:

“Eight million dollars would have come to the WAC if he makes the kick,” Benson said. “That’s the reality of it.”

The Rose Bowl, like other Bowl Championship Series games, touts a per-team payout of $17 million. For teams like Boise State and others in one of the five conferences without an automatic bid, the payout is $12 million, Benson said. Boise State figured to gain $3 million, the other WAC teams would have split $5 million, and the four other second-tier conferences would have split $4 million.

Instead, Texas Christian of the Mountain West Conference is going to the Rose Bowl. Boise State will get part of the $1 million payout in Las Vegas, and the WAC will get a fraction of T.C.U.’s reward.

And of course with all these millions of dollars on the line, the workforce expects to get paid. So the coaches do get paid. And the athletic directors get paid. And so do lots and lots of other people associated with the high stakes game of college football. So why aren’t the players paid? Well, because the schools have gotten together and formed a cartel that’s agreed that nobody should be paid. And if you want a shot at playing professional football, you need to play for the cartel first.

The Miami Turnaround

On November 15, I wrote:

What I actually think, meanwhile, is that Miami’s +9.4 point differential is tied with New Orleans for best in the league. So if Miami doesn’t step things up, we should expect them to assemble one of the best records in the league over the course of the next 72 games. What’s more, the currently injured Mike Miller is an underrated player whose return will help the team a lot.

So my prediction is that Miami will be fine, and by the end of the season sports pundits will be offering us a lot of narratives about the improved chemistry among the big three.

And here’s a screen grab from ESPN:

Right now their point differential is +8.7, which puts them third in the league behind Boston and San Antonio. Point differential based on a small sample size is an imperfect predictor of future performance, but it’s a much better one than win-loss record.

What’s Up With the Heat?

A reader asked me to comment on the surprisingly weak performance thus far of the 6-4 Miami Heat. The issue, obviously, is that the team has no chemistry. With Wade and James on the same squad, there’s no “alpha dog” player. And the lack of such a dog means the team lacks “killer instinct” and doesn’t inspire fear in its adversaries. These guys are friends, they came to Miami together because they wanted to play together. That’s nice, but there’s no friends in sports. A winning team is led by stone-cold assassins who want to beat the best players in the game, not chums who’d prefer to team up and hang out. Something like that.

What I actually think, meanwhile, is that Miami’s +9.4 point differential is tied with New Orleans for best in the league. So if Miami doesn’t step things up, we should expect them to assemble one of the best records in the league over the course of the next 72 games. What’s more, the currently injured Mike Miller is an underrated player whose return will help the team a lot.

So my prediction is that Miami will be fine, and by the end of the season sports pundits will be offering us a lot of narratives about the improved chemistry among the big three. It’s possibly the case that the return of Miller will play a role in this narrative, since him getting on the floor should in fact lead the team to get better. The fact that Miller is a white guy further militates in the direction of underrating his actual basketball abilities, but vastly overstating his ability to provide “veteran leadership” that provides his talented African-American colleagues with the “intangibles” they need to win.

NBA Season Preview

First off let me start by thanking Wizards owner Ted Leonsis for correcting my error in an earlier post. I wrote “Pollard family” when it should have been “Pollin.” The Pollins have been pillars of this community since long before I lived here, so I feel unusually bad about this typo.

More broadly, I’m afraid I’m going to have to say that the outlook for the Wizards as the NBA season begins is extremely bleak. Projections for this to be a somewhat below-average squad involve being (a) unduly optimistic about the recovery of Gilbert Arenas’ knees, (b) unduly optimistic about the performance of John Wall, and (c) probably too optimistic about how good Arenas ever was. Last year’s team was bad, and we’ve now lost a lot of players who were solid contributors. Wall would have to do something totally unprecedented to raise this team to anywhere other than awful. I should note that I say this not out of specific John Wall skepticism, but simply to note that now that very talented prospects don’t stay in college for very long rookies tend to be pretty bad. LeBron James and Kevin Durant both lived up to the hype—eventually—but as rookies were just guys who took and missed a ton of shots.

Beyond that, I agree with Arturo Galletti that the injury to Mike Miller is a bigger blow to the Heat than might be clear at first glance. The way this squad is put together there’s very little room for error. I think questions about LBJ, Wade, and Chris Bosh “coexisting” are overblown. The Eastern Conference playoffs will, however, give us a good look at how much matchups matter since I don’t see anyone on this team who’s going to defend Dwight Howard successfully.

The other thing I think people are kind of sleeping on is the Portland Trailblazers. This was a good team last year—fifty wins—and I don’t think their injury situation is going to get worse. What’s more, this is a squad that, if healthy, has the size and depth to match up with the Laker bigs.

We Are All Pointy-Headed Elites

Via James Downie, it turns out that not only is Charles Murray generally full of it, but elitism is on the rise as NASCAR ratings mysteriously plummet:

“The simple fact is that people just are not tuning in,” said Julie Sobieski, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions. “We’re looking at everything to find out why.”

Top ESPN executives, including president George Bodenheimer, traveled to Charlotte for the fifth race of the Chase, the Bank of America 500, and engaged NASCAR executives during several meetings. A team of ESPN’s top editorial staff, including Rob King, ESPN digital media editor-in-chief, and Glenn Jacobs, senior coordinating producer of SportsCenter, also attended the race and were given a three-day, behind-the-scenes immersion into NASCAR operations.

Obviously, Barack Obama’s sharia socialism is to blame here. Decent people worry that if they watch NASCAR, their parents will be sent off to the death panels.

Meanwhile, David Frum has a good post on Murray and the real American elite.

Nominal Wage Cuts in the NBA

The best way out of a recession is a combination of expansionary fiscal and monetary policy to bolster aggregate demand. Failing that, you need to have a grinding process of nominal wage cuts and unbalanced deflation that can take years to end and cause massive human suffering in the meantime. David Stern wants the National Basketball Association to do its part to make the dream a reality:

Stern said the league wants player costs to drop $750 million to $800 million. Deputy commissioner Adam Silver said the NBA spends about $2.1 billion annually in player salaries and benefits. [...]

Stern and [Deputy Commission] Silver spoke after completing two days of meetings with league owners, who are seeking major changes to the current CBA that expires June 30. Silver said the league has told the union that owners are in a “diseconomic situation,” with projected league-wide losses of about $340 million to $350 million this season.

Though season ticket sales are up, both insisted that no matter how well the league does at the box office, it won’t change the fact that an overhaul is necessary to a system in which the players receive 57 percent of basketball-related income.

“Even though we reported we have record season ticket sales over the summer and otherwise very robust revenue generation, because of the built-in cost of the system, it’s virtually impossible for us to move the needle in terms of our losses,” Silver said.

This kind of pleading always strikes me as unpersuasive on the merits. If I owned a business that was losing tens of millions of dollars a year, I’d be eager to sell the business for a relatively small amount of money. When the Washington Post Company put Newsweek up for same, for example, they were ultimately willing to part with the firm for $1 on the condition that the new owner assume Newsweek’s pension liabilities. Similarly, when General Motors and Chrysler were revealed to have an unsustainably high labor cost structure, nobody wanted to buy either firm at any price so the government had to step in.

By contrast, when Mikhail Prokhorov bought the New Jersey Nets—by no means the league’s most lucrative franchise—he paid $200 million for the privilege. Ted Leonsis bought the Wizards, a terrible team, from the Pollard family for over $500 million this past summer. The high price of NBA franchises strongly suggests that operating one is valuable even with 57 of basketball-related revenue going to player salaries. Part of the issue is that the teams themselves can be in some ways loss-leaders for businesses whose real profit center is an arena or a cable network. Accounting can be misleading, actual asset prices are telling you something.

Efficient Allocation of Quarterback Talent

Andy Reid attempts to head off a brewing quarterback controversy in the wake of 6 quarters of great football from Michael Vick after 2 quarters of bad football from Kevin Kolb:

“I think it’s a beautiful situation,” Reid said Monday. “I look at it a lot differently than other people look at it. I’ve got two quarterbacks that can play at a very important position. I’m a happy guy about it. There are a lot of teams that don’t have good quarterbacks, ones that they feel like they can win with, and I feel like we can with both of those guys.”

If it’s true that Kolb is that good, it’s true that having both Vick and Kolb on your roster is a good thing. But it’s also mighty inefficient. Whether or not Kevin Kolb is a better quarterback than Vick, I think it’s pretty clear that Vick is one of the top 30 QBs in the league. That means he’s worth more to someone else as a starter than he is to Philadelphia as a backup and the Eagles should trade him. It never really makes sense for a team to be carrying two different starter-quality quarterbacks.

The Impact of Managers

Scott Lemieux and David Brockington debate the question of whether managers “matter” in baseball. I don’t know much about baseball, but Brockington’s contention is very illogical:

These are superficial, anecdotal pieces of evidence; the sabermetric literature (that I am familiar with, I am now a couple years behind I’m afraid, although there is some interesting stuff here) has had a difficult time establishing that the field manager of a ball club has much measurable effect at all, and is negligible at best.

The link is to a research that indicates managers don’t have an impact on player performance. But insofar as some players perform better than others, and insofar as managers decide who plays and how much, I don’t see how sabermetrics could possible show that the field manager of a team has no impact on how many games the team wins. Say your team’s 8th-best offensive player is a slightly below-average defensive shortstop whereas your 12th-best offensive player is an above-average defensive shortstop. Who do you play? In what situation? Answering these kind of questions correctly seems incredibly important, and the importance of these issues is precisely why sabermetric research has been of so much interest. Or am I missing something?

Amare Stoudemire: Good for the Jews?

The world of Jewish sports fans has been roiled for a week now by speculation around New York Knicks acquisition Amare Stoudemire’s trip to Israel and Twitter-born hints of Jewish roots. The Wall Street Journal delivers the clearest explanation of the situation that I’ve seen:

Mr. Stoudemire said it was his family’s dedication to biblical scripture and his attendance at Sunday school that planted the seeds of an affinity to Judaism that he says has grown over the past decade. While he doesn’t consider himself religiously Jewish, he said he feels spiritually and culturally Jewish. [...]

Mr. Stoudemire’s interest in Judaism coincides with a stepped up relationship over the past three months with Idan Ravin, a private trainer who works with NBA players. Mr. Ravin says Mr. Stoudemire’s Hebrew comes from lessons in recent weeks with Mr. Ravin’s Israeli mother, a teacher in a Jewish school in Washington, D.C. Mr. Ravin, who accompanied Mr. Stoudemire on the trip, said Mr. Stoudemire is a quick read on foreign languages, and he speculates the skill is linked to his ability to decipher an opposing defense.

Not nearly good enough for the Law of Return, but should be good enough to serve as a marketing aid in the NYC market.

Implicit Leverage in the NBA

Arturo Galletti explains an under-understood element of NBA contract structure: “a typical NBA contract is structured around a base year salary and an 8% increase by Year. This means for example that a five year contract for $25 million (like the rumored Miller deal) only counts for 25 divided 5.8 or 4.3 million against the cap.”

One question to ask yourself is what underlying model of the economy justifies the idea that annual guaranteed 8 percent raises should be should be “typical”? It would make sense if you thought there was reason to project 8 percent nominal revenue increases for every franchise, but that doesn’t really make sense. Or if the players being signed consistently got better with every passing year. But that’s not the case. NBA player performance peaks, on average, at age 25 which means that with the exception of rookies signing their first contract extension you’re normally talking about purchasing a depreciating asset. The result is that teams time and again find themselves signing contracts that are fine for now, but turn into millstones within a few years.

Part of the issue, pretty clearly, is an agency problem. General Managers are likely to get fired now if their teams fail to improve. Consequently, dealmaking in both the free agent market and the trade market discounts the future at an irrationally high rate.

How Good Is a Bosh/Wade Duo?

With Chris Bosh joining Dwyane Wade in Miami, my first instinct was to say the pairing would be weak compared to the Wade/Shaq duo that won a championship in 2005. I looked it up, however, and I’m not sure that instinct was correct:

That’s pretty comparable. The difference, if there is one, would come largely on the defensive end. I haven’t seen Toronto play much, but Bosh’s reputation is as a weak presence in the middle.

Stoudemire and Lee

Don’t get me wrong, Amare Stoudemire is a very talented basketball player. But Knicks fans excited about signing him might want to consider that he’s about as good as David Lee, who’s now going to wind up leaving the team.

Lee takes 15.5 field goals per game and adds 4.1 free throw attempts, scoring a total of 20.2 points per game. Stoudemire takes 15.4 field goals and 7.7 free throws to add up to 23.1 points per game. In other words, STAT scores more points and does it because he’s a bit more efficient. On the other hand, Lee grabs 11.7 rebounds per game to Amare’s 8.9 boards. So if you switch Lee out for Stoudemire, you should expect the new team to score a few more ppg while grabbing a few more rebounds. You can make the case that this is an upgrade, but it’s a pretty small one and it’s possible that the team could have resigned Lee for less money.

Of course if signing Stoudemire persuades LeBron James to move to New York, then it’s a deal well worth making. But otherwise it seems like another case of an NBA team handing out a huge contract to a talented player who’s not talented enough to be worth the money.

Lakers Add Blake

With all the craziness in the NBA free agent market this offseason, it’s worth giving some acknowledgment to the kind of solid, modest move represented by a four-year, $4 million per year contract for Steve Blake to go to the Los Angeles Lakers.

Blake’s a solid contributor, he plays the position where LA is weakest, and the real value of the contract declines over time which is appropriate for a player of Blake’s age. It’s surprising to see something so sensible happen.

How Bad Will the Wizards Be Next Season

I don’t know anyone who’s optimistic about the Washington Wizards’ outlook for next season or who’s really looking forward to the Yi Jianlian Era. But the outlook in terms of Wins Produced is truly terrifying:

Based on last years WP48 numbers and the numbers for the average rookie, it is possible for next years Wizards to fail to employ a single above average player. I would be surprised if that happens, especially if Gilbert returns reasonably healthy. But even if Gilbert returns to his peak level of play, there is a very good chance this team will be the worst in the NBA. If they struggle with injuries, it is possible they challenge for worst in NBA history.

I think you’d have to say that with so many crappy players, somebody’s bound to start grabbing an abnormally large quantity of rebounds and end up doing better than their historical WP rating would indicate. But still, things are grim. It seems to me that the only thing that really matters for the franchise at this point is to avoid acquiring any bad contracts that extend beyond the life of Gilbert Arenas’ deal.

Spending on Sports vs Spending on Teaching

Here’s a great chart Chad Alderman pulled from a Knight Commission report taking a look at spending priorities in the SEC:

It’s important to note here that the vast majority of schools lose money off athletics. In 2008, less than a quarter of sports powerhouses made money off their athletics programs, and collectively these same institutions lost nearly $1 billion on sports. These funds must be made up by state taxpayers or student tuition bills. Find out how much your school spent with this handy database put together by researchers at USA Today.

The aggregate impact of all this on American educational attainment probably isn’t all that big, but it’s not nothing either. We pioneered mass higher education in this country, but more recently we’ve been falling behind, and our habit of combining the function of a college with the functions of a professional sports franchise isn’t helping.

Lakers Win

In a just world, the Lakers’ victory last night in spite of a brickeriffic 6-24 shooting performance from the “best player” in the league should give people some perspective on the Kobe Bryant legacy question. Robert Horry has seven championships with three teams, and Karl Malone has none but those are the breaks of the game not reflections of who was the superior power forward.

Fans of the losing team always complain about the refs, but I do want to note a complaint from a Celtics loyalist about “how the refs inexplicably decided to call touch fouls on the Cs in the 4th qtr leading to 21 laker FTs. That’s on pace for 84 FTs for the game.” I haven’t gone back and watched the tape or anything, but it was definitely my sense during the game that the officiating standards suddenly tightened in Q4 for no real reason. There are always a lot of complaints out there about the quality of NBA officiating, and I think they’re generally a bit overstated once you consider the inherent difficulty of the job. But it really is crucial that even if things sometimes get missed that people still feel there’s some kind of consistent theory of what the rules are, and I really don’t get that from the NBA.

The Kobe Canard

Kobe Bryant (Wikimedia)

Every time the Lakers win another big game, out come the Kobe Bryant partisans who want to argue that he’s not only a very talented basketball player but literally the best player in the league right now or one of the greatest players of all time. Preposterous comparisons get made to Michael Jordan. On the Jordan issue, I’ll just say again what I’ve said before—Jordan scored more points, did his scoring more efficiently, was a better rebounder, and dished more assists. The essence of being the best to ever play the game is that lots of very good basketball players (viz: Kobe Bryant) are substantially worse than you are.

Kobe’s just had an unusual career. The pre-Gasol Lakers were slightly worse than the Pau-led Memphis Grizzlies teams of those years. But Memphis is a small market and the Grizzlies have no franchise legacy, so Pau Gasol wasn’t a well-known player when he got shipped to LA to join forces with Kobe and return the Lakers to contention whereas Kobe was a “star.” And not just a star, but a star who’d already won multiple championship rings on teams led by Shaquille O’Neal but that made Kobe super-popular because perimeter players are always more popular than big men (during the heyday of the Yao-McGrady Rockets, it was McGrady who had the best-selling jersey in China) and thus was poised to reap the credit when his team improved.

None of which is to deny that Kobe is a good player. He scores a ton, and it’s pretty efficient. But he’s not dramatically better than any number of other wing players who just haven’t had the same career trajectory. Paul Pierce, for example, actually has very similar numbers but he’d never played on a really good team before teaming up with Kevin Garnett so people have a much better understanding of his status as a good player on a good team who’s still far worse than the Jordans and the Jameses of the world.

Lakers-Celtics: A Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever

I’ve gotten a bunch of inquiries as to why I haven’t written about the NBA Finals. The reason is pretty simple—I find the Lakers-Celtics matchup depressing.

I’m an NBA fan. But I resent the NBA aristocracy, the tendency of just a tiny handful of teams to monopolize all the championships. I thought it was really great in 2006 when the Heat played the Mavericks and we had a proletarian finals. And this year it seemed at various points that we had an excellent chance for an outsider team—Portland, Phoenix, Orlando, Cleveland—to win, or at least to create an exciting matchup in the finals. Then it didn’t happen. And it makes me sad. Here’s to hoping Greg Oden can stay healthy next year, and LeBron James steers clear of Chicago.

What Would Soccer Replace?

My colleague Max Bergmann is a big soccer fan, and he’s done a hugely entertaining Progress Report on the right-wing war on soccer. That said, I’ve come to be pretty skeptical that soccer will break through with the American public even if our national team starts doing better.

Or rather I guess what I wonder is what would soccer displace if it were to become more popular? It’s not like people are spending tons of time these days sitting alone on the couch playing solitare and hoping for someone to dream up a new sport to watch. The general trend has been toward creating more and more options and more and more fragmentation of the audience for just about everything. The TV networks are in decline, the record labels are in decline, the movie studios are in decline, everything’s in decline. Not because entertainment is in decline, but because we’ve never had more entertainment options. Under the circumstances, it seems to me less likely that soccer will break through and become as popular as basketball or hockey is today than that football and baseball will see their popularity ebb down to more NBA/NHLish levels as attention continues to fragment.

World Cup Fact of the Day

Richard Sandomir:

“If you ranked World Cup viewing by countries going back to 1998, the U.S. ranked 23rd,” said Kevin Alavy, director of Initiative Sports Futures, a London-based analysis firm. “In 2002, the U.S. jumped to 13th, and in 2006, it jumped again to 8th place. And we expect America to keep on jumping.”

Obviously that’s because many more people live in the United States than in the Netherlands, not because soccer is hugely popular in the United States. But one assumes that as the U.S. market grows in importance, scheduling decisions and the like become more likely to take the U.S. audience into account.

For my part, I think I’m a bubble member of the audience for World Cup soccer. I’m not really a soccer fan, but I am a sports fan and I don’t particularly care for baseball. I imagine that when the Cup comes to Brazil in 2014 and the games are in prime time I’ll be watching a ton of them. I definitely watched the US-England tie yesterday and am very interested in following our team.