Whipped Cream Difficulties

Somebody asked me last week, “Why do you do this?”

“This” meaning the TMQ Watch, not the Safety Dance:

It isn’t an unfair question. As I explained in the very first TMQ Watch,

Sometimes, Easterbrook does good work; he spent much of last season discussing the NFL’s response to head trauma among pro athletes, and I felt he was right on target. Sometimes, he uses his column to argue for things like increased Federal vehicle mileage requirements, and I think someone needs to respond to those arguments. Sometimes, he uses his column to go off on various SF TV shows for their lack of plausibility. And sometimes, Easterbrook just goes completely off the damn rails.

I realize that may not be the best possible explanation, but look at it this way: I haven’t found anyone else who’s doing responses to TMQ, and the comments section on ESPN.com almost certainly inspired an XKCD comic. Somebody has to do it; why not me? My regular readers who don’t care about sports, or Easterbrook’s sometimes eccentric beliefs, can skip over these entries. For my irregular readers, I recommend Ex-Lax; Dr. Pepper and, believe it or not, Cherry Coke Zero are also helpful.

Shall we begin?

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TMQ’s proposed solution to the concussion problem this week is…helmets with the padding on the outside, as worn by Mark Kelso and Steve Wallace during their NFL careers.

In other news, this is apparently TMQ’s annual basketball column: “Since Tuesday Morning Quarterback believes basketball is 1 percent as interesting as football, annually I devote 1 percent of column length to basketball.” Easterbrook starts off with his standard complaints about college sports in general: coaches who cheat prosper, the only thing that matters is winning, and college coaches don’t try hard enough to graduate their players.

Suppose this simple rule were added to college football and men’s basketball: Unless at least 80 percent of a team’s players graduate, the coach is suspended for one year. That would add what’s missing — an incentive for coaches to care about education.

That’s a great supposition, but WCD believes the odds of a rule like this being imposed are worse than the odds of the Chicago Cubs playing in the World Series.

Christina of the Broncos, who works in the Department of Justice’s “Environment and Natural Resources Division”, can check our environmental compliance anytime.

Sweet and sour plays: Tampa – Oakland, Favre – Packers, Philadelphia – Tennessee, New England – San Diego.

Is it possible for a player to have negative value? In the NBA, it is.

More creep. Gregg, I’m sorry, but this is getting tiresome.

“…if Earth will become like Venus in the future, was Venus like Earth in the past?” Could a dying Venusian civilization have seeded life on Earth?

Adventures in officiating: you saw it coming from a mile away, didn’t you? Yes, Miami – Pittsburgh. “On a fumble or onside kick, if a player with his knee down and in contact has the ball for even a second, the play should end. The whistle should sound, and the mad struggle to rip the ball away should not continue.”

Broad enforcement of the “unnecessary roughness” rule “would go a long way toward changing the mindset that viciousness for its own sake is OK.” As TMQ notes, though, “unnecessary roughness” is not clearly defined, and left up to officiating discretion. If this rule was “broadly enforced”, do you think the NFL head office would feel compelled to issue “clarifications” about what constitutes “unnecessary roughness”?

Okay. When the Texas Rangers got into the World Series, WCD was pretty sure that was one of the first signs of the Apocalypse. Now we have our second sign: Gregg Easterbrook, a known liberal, calls for an end to public funding of NPR (or, as he calls it, “National Thought Police Radio”) over the Juan Williams affair. Plus, passing mention of the pointless NYT article about the Chamber of Commerce promoting their political opinions (by donating to candidates) and the pointless WSJ article about the AFSCME promoting their political opinions (by donating to candidates).

Martz madness.

Fake punts. The curse of the “Tuesday Morning Quarterback Non-Quarterback Non-Running Back NFL MVP” award.

TMQ responds to the arguments by former players against the new NFL policy. Highlights:

• Don’t say “They can’t change the game.” The game is always changing.
• Don’t say the James Harrison fines were “criminal”. If Harrison wants to play, he has to do it by the rules.
• “…because horrible things happened when the former players were in the NFL, we should accept that horrible things will continue. We should not accept that.”
• Former football players who are NFL commentators are good looking, clever, and charming. Because the networks don’t hire people like Earl Campbell, this sends a distorted message.

“Instead of allowing each school 13 one-year basketball scholarships annually, the NCAA should allow a total of 13 four-year basketball scholarships. If a player only sticks around for a year, the school is stuck with three years when it can’t use that scholarship (with an exception for players who transfer but remain in college).”

Uh, yeah. See the argument about coach suspensions above, and call me when David Letterman’s “Cold Day In Hell Special” shows up in your TIVO program listing.

Buffalo. The Tennessee Volunteers only graduate 38% of their men’s basketball players, but the university regents and NCAA don’t care. “But an unauthorized bratwurst — OMG!” Wouldn’t “Unauthorized Bratwurst” be a great name for a band?

Where is NOCSAE on the helmet issue? WCD missed the Schwartz article when it was published; good on you, TMQ for linking to it. And why won’t the NFL mandate advanced helmet designs for everyone?

Undrafted free agents. Replace Roger Goodell with Madden 11. Chicken-<salad> punts: Oklahoma (where the wind comes sweeping down the plains) – Missouri. “Stop Me Before I Blitz Again”: Dallas – Giants.

Easterbrook presents his yearly argument for raising the minimum NBA draft age to 21. I’d suggest that if drafting teenagers is as bad for teams as Easterbrook thinks it is (and he does give quite a few examples of teenage busts) the NBA wouldn’t need to raise the minimum draft age; teams should just stop drafting under-21 players on their own. Indeed, that seems to be the core of J.A. Adande’s argument; ignore the draft, preserve cap space, and sign free agents who someone else has already developed.

Holiday creep. Crabtree curse. Boo birds in Seattle. “C’apn, the submarine cannot detect Scotland!” Drew Gooden has been with nine NBA teams in nine seasons, “including changing teams three times in 2010”.

Make the University of Kentucky an NBA franchise. If you’re going to go that far, Gregg, go all the way; eliminate college sports period, and let the NFL and NBA establish their own minor league farm system.

University of Indianapolis 6, Northern Michigan 5. Bonus intentional safety! Kean 29, William Paterson 2.

Reader comments: concussions, concussions, concussions, though WCD does like the point that “big hits” are also “examples of poor tackling fundamentals.”

Worst performance of the season – so far: the Saints offensive line.

That’s a wrap for this week, folks. Tune in next week, when if we’re lucky, TMQ will give us his thoughts on baseball.

At last, the concussion column.

WCD comes up with a total of 3,041 words out of a 9,479 word column (or about 32%) devoted to the concussion problem in the NFL. Easterbrook’s points:

• The incentive structure for coaches at the high school, college, and pro levels is skewed. Coaches benefit by winning games, but aren’t penalized if their players are harmed. WCD actually disagrees somewhat with Easterbrook on this; if a player dies from a heat stroke during practice, for example, you can bet that coach will suffer. (Look at l’affair Mike Leach for another example.) The problem with concussions is that they don’t have immediately visible harmful effects. By the time the damage shows up, the coach has moved on down the road to the next joint, or probably retired.
• The NFL’s policy on concussions is toothless, as shown by Stewart Bradley. Agreed. Until the NFL starts benching coaches, this policy will be ignored.
• Football practice needs to be rethought and reformed. The problem with concussion risk is that it may not be just one hit that does the harm, but the cumulative effect of a whole bunch of smaller hits – the kind you get in practice.
• Better training in recognition and management of concussions, especially at the high school level.
• Properly fitting mouthguards (as in, fitted by a dentist) should be a requirement at all levels of play.
• More legislation.
• Properly fitting helmets. Easterbrook has been pushing concussion reducing helmets for quite a while. WCD doesn’t necessarily think these are a bad idea, but we’d like to see some controlled studies showing these helmets work before making them mandatory. We also wonder if concussion reducing helmets would result in even more risk-taking behavior during tackles. Peltzman effect, anyone?
• Announcers excessively praise “big hits”. Easterbrook quotes some chilling dialog from MNF, where the three announcers basically minimized the 2008 Eric Smith – Anquan Boldin hit during a game. (Boldin’s jaw had to be surgically rebuilt; Smith was suspended for “flagrant violation of player safety rules”; both sustained concussions.)
• Testing of players before the season starts, in order to establish a cognitive baseline and track post-concussion recovery, is a good idea. WCD agrees, but wonders: who is going to pay for this? In TMQ’s cited example, the school has an association with a local children’s hospital. Would someone like the Dell Children’s Hospital be willing to do baseline testing for every football player in the Austin Independent School District? And the Round Rock ISD? And the Westlake ISD? What would the per football player cost be? What would the data storage requirements be? Are there privacy concerns that need to be dealt with? (Who would have access to the player’s baseline information, and who would make the decisions?)
• This is not a point that TMQ makes, but one worth asking about and discussing: would requirements for things like baseline mental testing and concussion-reducing helmets end up pricing football programs in smaller, poorer districts out of existence? If so, would this be a bad thing? Is it okay for poor kids to risk their long-term neurological health because they can’t afford proper protective equipment?
• It comes as something of a surprise to us, given Easterbrook’s point of view, that he actually expresses some skepticism about the Alan Schwarz profile of Owen Thomas.

(Editor’s note: The last two bullet points were actually pulled from a separate section of TMQ, much lower in the column, “Two More Concussion Points”. In order that readers might better follow the logical flow of Easterbrook’s arguments, we collapsed those points and Easterbrook’s initial arguments into one section.)

We wanted to highlight this “Stat of the Week”: “The Dallas Cowboys have lost both opening games at their new $1.3 billion stadium.”

Serita is just kind of okay looking. We can’t tell for sure, but we suspect she has sharp knees.

Sweet and sour plays. “Stop Me Before I Blitz Again!” highlights the Texans-Redskins game, arguing that Washington blew a comfortable 3rd quarter lead by going blitz-wacky.

Wacky disclaimer: the iTunes store.

Adventures in Officiating: DeSean Jackson, Calvin Johnson, and the catch/no-catch rule. If the former head of NFL officiating can’t understand the rule, isn’t it too complex? And (recurring trope) why is the NFL officiating manual not public?

TMQ on fashion: “Apparently the perfect New York City couple would be a very thin woman in a dress that makes it impossible to walk, squired by a metrosexual wearing a snorkel.”

Adventures in Announcing: exaggerating the blitz (another recurring trope). I’m not sure what Buffalo’s poor draft choices have to do with announcing.

“Maybe It’s Not Such a Good Idea to Cut Your Starting Quarterback on the Eve of the Season”. Arizona, TMQ is looking at you. Also, preposterous punts.

In keeping with TMQ tradition, “The Town” is…wait for it…wait for it…unrealistic! My God! Can we no longer trust Hollywood to give us depictions of reality, like “Casablanca” or “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”? Good work here by Easterbrook, though, in linking to Maggie Lloyd and her article about actual bank robbery statistics. (This has nothing to do with TMQ, but WCD absolutely loved Where the Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World, co-written by a former FBI agent who worked on the bank robbery squad in LA.)

Preposterous punts, college edition. The football gods frown on your shenanigans. Crabtree curse. Manning Bowl. Wasteful spending on bodyguards (special guest appearance: Rick Perry).

Christmas creep.

Malone 69, Anna Maria 0. Citadel 26, Presbyterian 14.

Reggie Bush didn’t do anything “ethically wrong”, he just violated NCAA rules. NCAA rules that he agreed to abide by before playing football for USC. Isn’t there something “ethically wrong” about breaking an agreement? Meanwhile, O.J. Simpson is still in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. That’s the Pro Football Hall of Fame, in Canton, Ohio. Not the “College Football Hall of Fame” (which actually exists, in South Bend, Indiana; yes, O.J. Simpson is in that Hall of Fame as well). While WCD thinks Simpson is a scumbag, we fail to understand the relationship between his conduct (which took place after his retirement from football) and that of Mr. Bush (which took place while he was playing for USC).

Reader comments: East Carolina-Tulsa and deconstruction of the celebration penalty. Thucydides did it first. Cupcakes in I-AA. Michael Caine. And police escorts for PeeWee football teams.

That’s a wrap for this week. Tune in next week, when we’ll hear the tastefully named Gregg Easterbrook complain that “Citizen Kane” is an unrealistic portrayal of a media tycoon’s life.