Whipped Cream Difficulties

So it may be too early to speculate on the future of the Fiesta Bowl.

At least that’s what Bill Hancock, executive director of the BCS, says.

Oh, by the way…

Hancock said Wednesday that for at least five years, while attending Fiesta Frolic, he let the Fiesta Bowl cover his golf tab and accepted free gifts from Nike.

What is “Fiesta Frolic”?

The Frolic is an annual, multiday spring gathering the bowl stages for college-football officials at a Phoenix resort.

Hancock called the Frolic, which costs the Fiesta Bowl several hundred thousand dollars a year, a “remarkable business opportunity” for college-football executives to network. However, the Fiesta Bowl Special Committee’s investigative report noted that it recently changed its name to Fiesta Bowl Spring College Football Seminars at the request of attendees “to make the event sound like less of a ‘boondoggle.’ “

And the BCS has created a seven member task force to review the allegations against the Fiesta Bowl.

Its seven-member task force includes a member who for years let the Fiesta Bowl pay for his golf at a resort, and another who took a free Caribbean trip last year from the Orange Bowl, The Republic has learned.

Speaking of the report, I’m slowly going through it. There’s some stuff I haven’t seen reported yet. For example, someone seems to have been a gold bug: there’s an estimated $22,300 worth of gold coins (including $20 gold pieces “ranging in date from 1877 to 1924”) that are supposedly in the possession of the Fiesta Bowl. (I do not see anything in the report, though, that states possession of those coins was actually verified.) In addition, the bowl apparently paid for subscriptions to:

• The Fractal Market Report and The Fractal Gold Report.
• The Shadow Government Statistics newsletter.
• Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.
• Innovomark, which appears to be some sort of marketing consultancy.  “The central theme that links all of the products and activities of the company can be concisely described by the formulation of ‘Strategies’ and execution of the appropriate ‘Tactics’.” Yes, that’s a direct quote from their website. No, I don’t know why they put “strategy” and “tactics” in quotes.
• Le Metropole, “where the real gold story has been told for the past 12 years by Bill Murphy, the Chairman of The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA)”.

Note that all of these were personal subscriptions for former CEO John Junker, for which he was reimbursed by the Bowl (according to the report).

I’m also amused by the discussion of payments to someone identified in the report only as “Person X”. Mr. “X” was apparently being paid somewhere around $40,000 a year (the amount varied from year to year, but $40,000 seems to be a good average) plus six tickets to the game. And nobody knows what he did for that money. Literally. That’s a direct quote from the report:  “I don’t know what he does. Kelly doesn’t know what he does.” The Arizona Republic has managed to identify Mr. X.

The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is getting underway again this year.

But there’s been a change: the rodeo is no longer a Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association sanctioned rodeo. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a professional rodeo, or that there’s not money on the table ($1.75 million, according to the HouChron), just that winnings in the Houston rodeo aren’t officially counted by the PRCA, and don’t impact PRCA standings.

If I understand the story correctly, this doesn’t make Houston unique; some of the larger Canadian rodeos aren’t PRCA sanctioned, either, and it sounds like Houston may be trying to start up a competing rodeo circuit:

It already has signed a deal with Fox Sports to air the Super Series finals and Super Shootout, whereas past finals were aired only through the PRCA on pay-per-view. And bigger plans are in the works.

The goal is to become the top international invitational championship in the world.

It isn’t that I’m a huge rodeo fan (I’m not), but the situation is interesting. Lawrence made a good analogy to the whole CART/Indycar situation, which (as I see it) seriously damaged open wheel racing in the United States.

I have previously written about my interest in failure and failure analysis, so I feel compelled to link to this fine example of failure analysis:

Kirk Bohls and Randy Riggs on why the Texas Longhorns went 5-7 last season.

Some key points of failure:

• the team was consumed with a sense of entitlement.
• they lacked talent (or “on-field competence” as the Statesman puts it), and over-estimated the talent of the players they’d brought in.
• divisions within the coaching ranks.
• a head coach who withdrew from daily coaching.

(Speaking of bad Longhorn seasons, the question came up over the weekend: “What’s John Mackovic doing these days?” The answer to that is…weird, and kind of contradictory. His Wikipedia entry says he’s the head coach of “United States national American football team”, which apparently competes in something called the “American Football World Cup”. However, the Wikipedia entry for the “United States national American football team” shows Mackovic as the head coach for the 2007 team, and Mel Tjeerdsma as the coach for the 2011 team.)