In Which Sepp Blatter Is *Gasp* Wrong

Readers who follow the global politics of soccer know that when FIFA president Sepp Blatter opens his mouth, stupidity often follows. So it’s perhaps not a surprise that when Blatter turns his attention to Major League Soccer and its place in the American sports universe, he got it wrong.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Blatter said, in response to a question about the development of the game in China and the United States:

The problem in the United States is a little bit different. But don’t forget that soccer — as they call football there — is the most popular game in the youth. It’s not American football or baseball; it is soccer. But there is no very strong professional league. There have just the M.L.S. But they have not these professional leagues that are recognized by the American society.

It is a question of time. I thought, when we had the World Cup in 1994. … But we are now in 2012 — it’s been 18 years — it should have been done now. But they are still struggling.

Look, nobody’s going to mistake MLS from the English Premier League or Spain’s La Liga. Nor even for the NBA, NFL, or Major League Baseball. But it’s snuck up on pro hockey in the United States and, really, given that the league’s not old enough to drink yet, things are going pretty well. As the New York Times Goal blog puts it:

Perhaps Blatter forgets that Roma, like Rome, was not built in a day. Or that it’s been a while since anyone speculated whether M.L.S. would return the following spring. Or that more than half of the league’s 19 teams now play in new soccer-specific stadiums, and that a half-dozen cities are bidding to host the league’s 20th franchise.

In addition, the league’s gone from buying time from ESPN to get games on television to being paid for the honor. Hell, there was even a bit of a bidding war the last time around, with NBC swooping in to take the rights held by Fox Soccer Channel. Certainly, there’s more to do – my team DC United is basically in stadium limbo right now – but things are headed in the right direction.

Keep in mind, the NFL was founded in 1920, the NBA in 1946, and Major League Baseball dates back to at least 1876. MLS isn’t just a newcomer, it’s an infant by comparison.

So, Blatter’s completely wrong in this instance. In other news, water is wet.

This Is Not a Playoff

While the nation was focused on the Supreme Court and the fate of health care reform last week, another long simmering conflict came to a sort of resolution. As Fletch would say, it’s a smaller story, but I’m sure you were following it.

I’m speaking, of course, about the death of the Bowl Championship Series and the announcement of a college football “playoff,” to kick off in 2014:

Conference commissioners met with an oversight committee of university presidents and chancellors here Tuesday to approve the four-team seeded playoff, consisting of two semifinal games in bowls and a national championship game that will be put up for bid.

* * *

And the presidents endorsed the idea of a selection committee for the playoff teams, which would end the combination of computer and human polls that have been lightening rods for criticism since the BCS began.

* * *

The committee will rank playoff teams based on won-loss record, strength of schedule, head-to-head and if a team is conference champion.

I put “playoff” in scare quotes because, whatever this four-team arrangement is (and “better than the BCS” is probably one of them), it is not a real playoff or even a facsimile of one. It’s a small invitational tournament, nothing more. Perhaps that’s why, at the end of the day, there still will not be a true NCAA-sanctioned champion in big time college football.

In my mind, a key feature of any playoff system are objective criteria for selection of at least some of the participants, arranged in such a way that everybody who starts the season has a path to participation. The NCAA college basketball tournaments do that, but setting aside automatic bids for teams that win conference championships. A selection committee rounds out the field, but every team starts the season with a way into the tournament. If they don’t make it, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.

That allows for smaller teams, underdogs and such, to have as much a chance to win the prize as anybody else. That’s the essence of a true playoff. This arrangement doesn’t do that, as Stewart Mandel admits:

Not to be condescending, but of all the reasons college football fans have clamored for a playoff, fairness to the little guy was generally pretty low on the list. I've never sensed the same love affair with Cinderella in football as there is with March Madness. If anything, it's quite the opposite, as evidenced by how Boise State unwittingly became a national villain two years ago when pundits had the audacity to consider the Broncos a national title contender. First and foremost, people want to see a more conclusive ending to the season, which they're going to get. They want to see at least two more exciting, high-stakes games between the nation's best teams. They want to see Ohio State play Alabama or Florida play Texas. They don't want to see USC play Louisiana Tech in the Southwest Regional semifinal.

In other words, it’s not about the best teams competing, it’s about the most popular very good teams that can draw fans and TV audiences playing. That’s a fine principle for arranging an invitational tournament – see all the early season basketball tournaments, for instance – but it’s not a playoff.

Mandel gives the game away in another column, in which he tries to look at the 2011 season and figure out who would have wound up in the big six bowls (the selection committee will select the 12 teams that participate, as well as the 4 “playoff” teams). That field includes ACC champion Clemson, but not Big East Champion WVU. Remember, friends, that WVU embarrassed Clemson in the Orange Bowl last year, 70-33. Heaven forbid Louisiana Tech had the chance to do that to LSU.

Look, I’m not wedded to the idea of a playoff in big time college football. The bowl apparatus and tradition of settling things by consensus makes it unique. And let’s face it, fans like nothing better than a good argument about which team is better, which college football fuels more than any other American sport.

Let’s just not fool anyone into thinking that this new four-team shindig actually changes anything. Come 2014, the national championship will still be mythical and still be the result of informed opinion about who’s better than who. It’ll just work a little different and have a different name. And it will still be unlike anything else in American sports.

The Reason (If Not Rhyme) of 26.2

If you’re like me, you probably thought that the length of the marathon – 26.2 miles (you’ve seen the stickers on the back of runners’ cars everywhere) – was that peculiar for history reasons. After all, the race commemorates the feat of Pheidippides, who ran the 25 miles from Marathon to Athens to inform the citizenry of their victory over the Persians in 490 B.C. There were no gold medals for him, however – he dropped dead after delivering the good news.

Whatever actual truth might be buried in that legend, it would make sense if the length of the race run in honor of Pheidippides would be 25 miles long right?* In fact, it began that way in the 1896 Olympics in Athens, covering 24.85 miles. Likewise, the courses in Paris (1900) and St. Louis (1904) covered roughly 25 miles. It wasn’t until the 1908 Olympics in London that the 26.2 mile length became set.

Why the change? As with most things odd and British, the royals played a part:

For the 1908 Olympic marathon, the Princess of Wales watched the start, which began near the window of the royal nursery [at Windsor Castle] so that her children could watch, according to David Miller’s history of the Olympics, ‘Athens to Athens.’ Thus, Miller wrote, the marathon distance ‘was determined in a bizarre manner.’

* * *

It was about 26 miles from Windsor Castle to the Olympic Stadium in West London at Shepherd’s Bush. The original plan had the runners coming into the stadium at the royal entrance and running about 585 yards, circling the track counterclockwise and finishing in front of the royal box, Davis said. But the royal entrance was deemed unsuitable; instead the runners entered at the opposite end of the stadium and, to enhance the view for the Queen and others, ran clockwise for 385 yards to the royal box.

Thus, 26.2 miles. Now, it’s not for certain why the race started at Windsor Castle, but it did. And the last run ‘round the stadium produced a controversial finish (and an American winner – although the Italian who was disqualified got a song written about him by Irving Berlin) so it all worked.

And it shows the distance of the marathon isn’t set in stone, which is perhaps why some of today’s top runners think it should be lengthened. Says the current world record holder:

‘People are used to running’ 26.2 miles, [Kenyan Patrick] Makau said. ‘They run it like it is a short distance. Longer would be better.’

Sounds like what lots of drivers say about endurance races like the 12 Hours of Sebring or the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Still, nobody suggests making those longer – the 14 Hours of Sebring just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Nor does 30 miles. It’s much too round a number, compared to 26.2. Besides, do you really want all those car decorations to be obsolete?

* Real tough guys run another race in honor of Pheidippides’s earlier feats before the Battle of Marathon – the Spartathlon, which covers the 153 miles between Athens and Sparta.

A Few BCS Thoughts

Tonight, Alabama and LSU will lock heads in the BSC Championship Game. Not only do they both come from the same conference (the same division, in fact), but they’ve already played this year, LSU downing Alabama in overtime in what was either a brilliant defensive game or a crushing bore, depending on which side of the 9-6 final your team was on.

Like many college football fans, I’m not really a fan of the rematch in the title game. I’ve always been of the opinion that if you don’t win your conference, you don’t play for the national title. But, again like most college football fans, I’ll tune in tonight and watch. The game’s like a drug and I’m a junkie, I’ll admit. Besides, the buzz of WVU’s crushing Orange Bowl win last week is about to wear off. Stewart Mandel has more on the conflicted feelings of fans here.

I will say this for the BCS – it is blatant about trying to do what no other championship game in the world really can, match the two best teams against each other at the end of the year. Think about it. Any playoff system only works in getting close to that matchup if all the favorites win and all the underdogs lose. But what we love about playoffs is that they are unpredictable. One year, a NFL wild-card team can win the Super Bowl. The next, all the wild-card teams get eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. In a BCS setup, Greece never wins the 2004 European Championship because they never even play in the final. At the end of the day, it’s what makes playoffs worth playing.

So the BCS is bucking the trend, which is admirable. But the errand they set for themselves is a fool’s one. How on earth can you pin down the “top” (whatever that means) two teams out of the 120 that play through the season? If two, and only two, teams wind up unbeaten during the regular season, that might be helpful, but doesn’t deal with the strength of schedule problem. And what about seasons like this one, where only LSU made it through unscathed? You play the same game with the 1-loss teams (see here for a good argument about Alabama and Oklahoma State filling that role). And what if the unthinkable happens – Alabama upends LSU, but only barely, and nobody ends up undefeated? It might be fun just to see what happens.

For the record, my biggest beef with the BCS is there is no way for any team to say “if we do X, Y, and Z, we will play for the national championship.” The best bet is to be undefeated, but even that doesn’t guarantee anything. At least in the NCAA basketball tournament each team as a path to automatic qualification. Something more objective would be a good thing (my setup: a playoff involving only conference champions and the highest ranked independent).

In the end, the current system, while obtuse and completely fucked up, is the one that college football fans largely deserve. It gives us the one big game to decide it all, the focal point of all American sports (even the World Series or Stanley Cup Finals we want come down to a do or die game seven, right?). But it does it in such a way that everybody is free to argue about it until they’re blue in the face, often without any real mooring to the undisputed facts.

Damn it, it’s an American tradition! Sort of like presidential elections. I’ll be watching those until the end, well past my bedtime, too.

Explanation of Origin, But Not Persistence

I won’t lie, I’m not a huge hockey fan. On TV, at least, it’s too damn hard to follow what’s going on (I’ve never seen a game in person, so maybe that’s different). Besides, the NHL season goes on way the hell too long before it gets to the Stanley Cup playoffs, which basically everybody gets into anyway. I tend to get into things like the Olympic tournaments, but mainly for the same reason people jump on the USMNT bandwagon during the World Cup – naked patriotism.

That caveat aside, I’ve never understood why fighting is such an inherent part of the game. Yes, hockey is a violent sport in and of itself, but so are sports like football and rugby. Neither of those tolerate, or even celebrate, the kind of fighting that goes on in hockey. The old joke, of course, is that “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.” How did it get to be that way in the first place?

This article (the end piece to a long series in the New York Times about the death of a hockey enforcer) suggests it has to do with the ethnic rivalries inherent in the game’s early days:

The first organized hockey games were played here [in Montreal] in 1875 by English-Canadian rugby players looking for a winter sport. For the first 20 years or so, the players were mostly members of Montreal’s English and Scottish elite; French Canadians joined in the 1890s, when the Catholic Church in Quebec started to drop its resistance to sports. Montreal’s Irish, as English-speaking Catholics, occupied a kind of middle ground between the Protestant Anglo-Scots elite and the Catholic French majority.

They all had their own hockey clubs, some of whose names are still etched on the Stanley Cup: the Scottish, represented by the thistle on Montreal’s flag, had the Victorias; the English, with the rose, had the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association; the Irish had the Shamrocks; and the French, of the fleur-de-lis, had the National and the Montagnards. The Shamrocks often allied with French clubs against the English and the Scottish in disputes over who would be allowed into the top leagues.

The theory goes that ethnic rivalries spilled out onto the ice, where they were dealt with using the violence of the game. In other words, a punch out on the ice was one that didn’t happen on the street. It’s an interesting idea, but other researchers haven’t found any evidence that there was a whole lot of fighting in early hockey in the first place. Violent play, particularly whacking other players with the hockey stick (as got one player convicted of assault in 2000 when he clonked an opposing player on the head), was reported, but not game stopping fights.

Regardless of the origins, fighting is fairly endemic in the modern game:

By 1960-61, the N.H.L. averaged one fight every five games, but the rate rose steadily until 1987-88, when the average game had 1.3 fights. Then the rate dropped, and today the league averages one fight every two games.

But why? And why don’t we see the same thing in other sports? After all, football is more inherently violent and there are soccer teams out there who have served as proxy armies in racial, ethic, and religious rivalries for decades (ask anyone in Glasgow about the Old Firm). What makes hockey different? One theory is that fighting developed as a kind of safety valve after more violent play was cracked down upon.
I’m not sure how far that goes, however, given attitudes like this:

Calls for stricter rules against fighting in hockey have been heard for decades to little effect.

‘You can no more ban fighting in hockey than in any other sport,’ [writer Adam] Proteau said last month. ‘But you can punish it more appropriately, starting with a game misconduct and ejection for any fight, and a sliding scale of fines/suspensions for repeat offenders.’

To an outsider, that sounds an awful lot like a rationalization. If you define “ban” only to mean “completely prevent at any time in the future,” then, yes, you can’t ban fighting in any sport or any other walk of life. But compare the aftermath of this weekend’s Cincinnati/Xavier college basketball brawl with a hockey game. Why is extracurricular fighting a part of one game but not the other?

If fighting really isn’t a part of hockey, seems pretty easy to clamp down on it. First offense? Half-season suspension. Second offense? Full-season suspension. Third offense? Banishment from the game. That would cut down on the problem pretty quickly, yes? Unless, of course, it’s not really a problem at all.