Long time readers know that I am a Northwestern alum and football season ticket holder for nearly 20 years. I am very happy when they win, disappointed when they lose. However, despite a dismal collapse that took my Wildcats from Top 25 ranked to out of the bowl picture entirely, I’m still really proud of the current team, especially soon-to-be-graduating senior quarterback Kain Colter.
Football players at Northwestern have requested representation from a labor union. Ramogi Huma, president of the National College Players Association, filed a petition on behalf of Northwestern players that would essentially recognize college athletes as employees. Reportedly, Colter reached out to Huma, a former UCLA linebacker, last year, and Huma met with Northwestern players last weekend. What is important is that Northwestern being a private university, they can move forward with this action, whereas the National Labor Relations Act does not effect public institutions.
In a statement, NCAA Chief Legal Officer Donald Remy said the Northwestern players’ efforts to unionize overshadow the academic focus of a student-athlete’s college career. This union-backed attempt to turn student-athletes into employees undermines the purpose of college: an education. Student-athletes are not employees, and their participation in college sports is voluntary. We stand for all student-athletes, not just those the unions want to professionalize.
Many student athletes are provided scholarships and many other benefits for their participation. There is no employment relationship between the NCAA, its affiliated institutions or student-athletes.
This is the old “we’re giving you an education, be happy with that. However, the players are spending many hours generating BILLIONS of dollars for these universities and the get no payment. They can’t even have a job, which is why the larger universities may end up leaving the NCAA so that they can pay stipends to players which the small schools can’t afford to do.
The players have filed with the National Labor Relations Board, which is going to have one helluva task before it: decide whether Student-athletes can unionize.
Once the NLRB rules, which could be months or years down the line, there will also be various legal challenges as well. The key question is whether a student-athlete, especially a football player at a Division I school, is more like an employee than a student. Some of the aspects that will be considered will be the burdens and obligations of being a student-athlete on a D-I football team: Hours spent in team meetings, travel, revenue that’s being generated, commercial obligations, etc. The entities that would be reviewing this would look at whether student-athletes are in an academic position or a commercial position.
The university says that they are proud of their athletes and proud that the filing is not an indictment of any failings at the university, but the school does not think that they should be allowed to unionize.
In light of the potential head injuries that these players face, plus the millions of dollars the universities receive as a result of the players, it is the next inexorable step in ending the college sports business model as it stands now (Northwestern and many other D-1 schools no longer sell jerseys with players names on them since the players could receive no monetary benefit).
I continue to be proud of my football team, never more so than today

A few months ago, I posted a rant here about how tired I am of getting constant snail mail from charities that I support begging for even more money. Now, I’d like to speak about political contributions.
Long time readers know that I am VERY liberal and consider myself a Democrat only on my most conservative days. I admit that I have given them some money over recent years abd I have been a member of the ACLU for decades, which sells/grants access to their member list for every liberal cause imaginable.
I have news for the Democratic National Committee – ratchet down the begging a bit please. Almost every day there are e-mails from local and national politicians asking for money. Now my wife and I have decent jobs, but we are not going to put ourselves in the poor house responding to even half of the solicitations that we get.
Further, these e-mails try to stir up outrage like a junior Fox News (just fighting fire with fire, I guess). Every day, nefarious Republicans are attacking some liberal cause and SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE ABOUT IT IMMEDIATELY!! Well, I have no doubt that Republicans are definitely undermining the common people in the name of the uber-rich, but I don’t have the time or the money to watch them constantly. Plus, almost every e-mail stresses some deadline to give money before something happens. “We have to have (some number) dollars before midnight tonight to send a message to the Republicans.” What deadline? If I was to give you money at 12:01AM, I think you’d take it.
Finally, let’s talk about the “message” that we are supposedly sending to Republicans, especially House Speaker John Boehner. The man with the George Hamilton tan obviously doesn’t listen to anyone except the racists and morons in his own party, so even if we sent him a petition signed by every person in the United States who wasn’t in Congress or the evil Koch Brothers, would he suddenly change his tune and start compromising? Perhaps decide that acting the people’s interest is the best course? Suddenly start working with the half-African-American President? (That last one will never happen because the entire Republican Party has tried to sabotage the country just so that the black guy gets no credit ever, for anything.)
The verbiage that somehow my $3 donation with millions of other people’s $3 is sending a message to anyone is ridiculous. You mean to tell me that suddenly these old, white, generally rich, doddering idiots like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum are going to listen to anyone other than the voices in their heads that comes with severe mental illness?
I’ll give money when I have a couple of extra bucks and when I’m ready. It may be once a year, perhaps twice. I would be more inclined to contribute if my e-mail box wasn’t swamped every day.

Even hearty Chicagoans are grumbling about this very cold, snowier than usual winter, but there are probably no more discontented people in Chicago than Cub fans.
After suffering 197 losses in the past two seasons, Head of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein fired Manager Dale Sveum, but was unable to lure Yankees manager, former Cub and Northwestern alum Joe Girardi to the North Side. Sun-Times sportswriter Gordon Wittenmyer has written a scathing series of articles on the financial woes the team is suffering because of a high debt load the Ricketts family assumed with they purchased the team five years ago. These financial woes are in part the reason the club has been very quiet in winter meetings and free agency negotiations, with the exception of trying to woo Japanese pitching sensation Masahiro Tanaka who the Cubs lost to, who else, the Yankees.
Last week, the team was the laughingstock of the sport when they unveiled the team’s first ever mascot, Clark the Cub, which looked suspiciously like pizza/indoor game chain spokes-rat Chuck-E-Cheese. While the team said that market research showed that the team needed a more family friendly image, many pundits (including myself) said that it looked like another attempt to distract fans from the losing product on the field and the fact that the Cubs have the fifth highest priced ticket in the game.
Of course, signing Epstein away from the Red Sox was supposed to improve the on-field product, but most of the improvements appear to have been made in infrastructure like Latin American and spring training facilities. When Epstein was in Boston, he had an almost unlimited wallet to spend, but the debt has hamstrung Epstein’s best efforts.
Attempts to improve cash flow have been slow in coming. The team severed its decades-long relationship with WGN television and radio in hopes of getting more money elsewhere (of course, the money the team gets from broadcasting weren’t as vital when the Tribune Company owned the Cubs and the broadcasting stations). It is unclear what broadcaster would want to broadcast the games, and how much the Cubs will earn. On top of this, the new revenue stream will not be in place until 2015 or 16.
The biggest new revenue was to come from new advertizing on Wrigley Field including a new video scoreboard. The money was also supposed to help renovate the team’s venerable 100-year-old ballpark Wrigley Field. However, disputes with the neighbors who have built rooftop suites on top of their buildings (and charging money for it and only paying a small percentage to the club) over the new obstructions, supposed settled a few months ago have now broken down.
In fact, it appears that the sides are about to sue over the renovations. This will slow the needed renovations by perhaps months or even years. Without that money, the quest for money to improve the NL club suffers. Already projections are that attendance for the upcoming season are expected to by 2.3 million, a 30% drop from last year and well below the glory years of 3-4 million annual fan attendance a decade ago.
The fans are grumbling. While not as vocal as White Sox fans are known to be at their fan convention, things weren’t as sunny at the recent Cubs convention, despite the presence of Clark. One has to ask how long Epstein will want to work for a team with 105 years of futility and counting, and ownership over their heads in experience and underwater in debt?
Things are not looking positive in Cubs Nation.

One of the biggest stories of baseball’s hot stove offseason has been the wooing of Japanese pitching sensation Masahiro Tanaka. With the success of Texas’ Yu Harnish, Japanese pitchers have made the transition to Major League Baseball very effectively, and Tanaka mowed through the Japanese league. If he was nearly as successful as he was in Japan, he would be Cy Young Award material.
Tanaka was 24-0 with a 1.27 ERA, 0.94 WHIP and 183 strikeouts in 212 innings in leading the Rakuten Golden Eagles to the Japan Series title last season. In seven professional seasons in Japan, he was 99-35 with a 2.30 ERA and a 1.11 WHIP. Several teams were in contention including the Dodgers, Cubs, White Sox and Diamondbacks, but at the end of the day, he signed with the Yankees.
Reportedly, the 25-year-old Japanese ace signed a seven-year, $155 million deal with the Yankees.. He can opt-out of the deal after the fourth year, and the Yankees will also pay Rakuten a $20 million posting fee. Apparently, the Tanaka deal will put the Yankees well above the $189 million luxury tax for next season, meaning they will continue to pay 50 percent in tax on every dollar spent over that amount, but if the Yankees don’t have to pay Alex Rodriguez this season, they just pay a different player then same money. Plus, the Yankees don’t give a damn about the luxury tax – they just put it in their budget each year.
My point is that if Tanaka was just going to sign with the Yankees, why put the other teams through the effort of trying to woo him? It’s the same issue that so many NBA teams had when LeBron James made “The Decision” of going to Miami. The deal was already done before the teams even made their pitches.
Of course, I don’t think fans will harbor the type of hatred toward Tanaka that they do James (but of course, there was no ESPN special surrounding Tanaka’s signing and no city feeling betrayed like Cleveland unless you count the Japanese town).
Still, if I was in the front office of one of the jilted clubs like the Cubs’ Theo Epstein or White Sox GM Rick Hahn, I’d have a voodoo doll in my desk that looked like Tanaka.

To many sports fans, player agents are the lowest form of human life: pimps/con men/lawyers who use any means necessary/available to negotiate huge contracts for their clients and get 10-15% of the big contracts. (Of course, to most fans, the owners of sports teams are perhaps slightly higher on the evolutionary scale as the agents.)
That said, how much faith can you put in the words of a super agent? Scott Boras and Leigh Steinberg are two of the highest profile and disliked agents in the sporting world, and Steinberg, the model for the title character in “Jerry Maguire” has written a memoir that has the NFL talking about a plot that backfired.
The Indianapolis Colts came into the 1998 NFL draft with the first overall pick, and there was a question as to whether to select Tennessee quarterback Peyton Manning or Washington State quarterback Ryan Leaf. Of course, the Colts chose Manning, who is leading Denver to the Super Bowl while Leaf was one of the biggest busts in NFL Draft history.
The popular version of events is that Leaf showed up for the scouting combine overweight and claimed that he’d be heading off to Las Vegas if he was taken first overall. Manning, meanwhile, told the Colts that he’d spend the next fifteen years kicking their butts if he went anywhere else, and as a result then-Colts GM Bill Polian and then Head Coach Jim Mora selected Manning.
At least, that was the story until an excerpt from Steinberg’s new book, The Agent, was released this week. Steinberg was Leaf’s agent back then, and he now says that his client preferred to play in San Diego, whose Chargers had the second pick. So, according to Steinberg, agent and player hatched a devious plan to dissuade the Colts (quoted on SI.com).
Leaf said that there was “no way” that he wanted to play in Indianapolis. Leaf preferred San Diego because of the weather and laid-back lifestyle. Steinberg wrote, “’That’s fine,’ I warned him, ‘but the way to achieve this is not exactly going to help your image. You’ll get a lot of criticism.’ Ryan didn’t care about his image, though, only his destination.”
“(Steinberg) told Ryan it would do no good to approach Colts GM Jim Irsay. Irsay saw the sport the same way he viewed his other passion, rock ’n’ roll. Just as musicians tended to be a bit eccentric, so did football players, and that did not stop him from drafting Jeff George or trading for Eric Dickerson….. Instead, the case needed to be made to the Indianapolis coach, Jim Mora, and it couldn’t come from anything Ryan said. It had to come from what he did, or, rather, did not do. ‘If you go to the combine,’ I told Ryan, ‘but fail to show up for a meeting with Mora, that should do it. Jim is a real prideful person who has a tendency to explode. I am not recommending you do this, but if you are desperate to go to San Diego, this is the way.’” (This makes sense based on the famous Mora clips from his press conferences.)
Leaf blew off the press conference, which pissed Mora off as expected. The Colts took Manning and led to a Super Bowl title and 10 consecutive years of playoff appearances, and Leaf sucked. Perhaps the most incendiary claim Steinberg makes is that he “first cleared the idea with Chargers general manager Bobby Beathard, lest San Diego also question my client’s reliability. Beathard went along with the ruse.”
But Polian vehemently disputed Steinberg’s account of this plan when he spoke with ESPN, “agents cannot manipulate anything in the draft. Leigh and other agents for years and years have told kids that they can get players drafted by a certain club at a certain spot, and nothing could be further from the truth. That assumes that we on the club side are idiots, that we’re able to be manipulated, that we don’t do our homework, that we don’t watch the tape, that we don’t go all the way back to the junior high school coach and high school principal, teachers, doing our due diligence. It’s just the kind of hubris that existed among agents years ago where they told kids flat-out, ‘I can get you taken here, I can get you taken there.’ Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Polian did confirm that Leaf missed a meeting, and that Steinberg lied about the reason after the fact, claiming that he and Leaf had been given the wrong time for the meeting. Former Chargers general manager Bobby Beathard, who drafted Leaf with the second pick, said in response that “we absolutely wanted to draft Peyton,” and that when Leaf showed up to play, he was so out of shape, he couldn’t even complete the warmup jog around the field.
On February 2, Peyton Manning will be leading the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl . Leaf was out of pro football for good after the 2001 season and may be watching the game from his current residence – prison where he’s serving a seven-year prison term for burglary and controlled substance charges. So, in some way, karma won – Leaf got what he wanted, but he paid a bitter price for it.
Of course, Leigh Steinberg and his monumental ego and wads of money will be prepping another group of college players for the draft and negotiating for current players, leading to more money. You’ll forgive me, but Mr. Steinberg doesn’t need my money so I’ll pass on his book. If I want to read pure bullsh#t, I’ll buy one of Bill O’Reilly’s “history” books.

I admit that I am old fashioned when it comes to sports rules. Sometimes I take a wait-and-see approach as I did with the elimination of the two-line pass in hockey (which is more exciting with the possibility of long passes and breakaways); sometimes, I’m just against it.
This week, I had both reactions. I was first completely against reports that the NFL is considering eliminating the extra point after touchdowns.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell told the NFL Network that the Competition Committee might eventually get rid of extra points in favor of a revised scoring system. “The extra point is almost automatic,” Goodell said. “I believe we had five missed extra points this year out of 1,200 some odd. So it’s a very small fraction of the play, and you want to add excitement with every play.
The Commissioner seems to like one proposal. Teams would automatically get seven points for a touchdown, but teams could elect to go for an eighth point like today’s two-point conversion, but if the attempt fails, the team would lose a point, getting six for the touchdown.
At first I said – “get rid of the extra point? That’s eliminating tradition, wrong and anti-American and all that.” But when I saw the eighth point and the penalty for it, I am in the “try-it-and-see” camp. Today’s extra point is 99.9% successful, and is just another chance for lots of television commercials. At first, I thought the NFL was just getting rid of the extra point, but Goodell’s idea still allows for coaches to make a decision and gets rid of the nearly perfect PAT. The drawback is that the extra points that were missed were almost always blocked, so defenses would not get the opportunity to make a play, plus there would be no chance of bad snaps, bad holds, missed kicks despite the fact that it happens rarely.
So, let’s try it in exhibition games and see what happens, Mr. Commissioner.

As I wrote here a few days ago, Alex Rodriguez made no friends among his fellow players when he sued both Major League Baseball and the Players Association as a result of the arbitrator’s decision to uphold a major portion of Rodriguez’s suspension for alleged PED use in the Biogenesys affair. Rodriguez claims that the system was rigged against him; baseball was biased; and the union did not defend him vigorously enough.
This week it was reported that Major League Baseball Players Association player representatives tried to kick A-Rod out of the union. In a 90 minute conference call on January 13th, the same day that the Yankee third baseman filed suit, outraged player reps voiced their desire to expel Rodriguez. According to Yahoo! Sports, union leaders said the move was not legal, but the reps continued to push the issue and not one player defended Rodriguez.
I think that there’s little chance that a Federal Court will overturn the arbitrator’s decision, and so, there will be little reason to believe that Rodriguez will be playing in 2014. However, if he ever does return to baseball, he may see a lot of pitches aimed at his head.