We were trying to come up with a clever introduction to the return of Tuesday Morning Quarterback (and, thus, the TMQ Watch) but we couldn’t. On the other hand, we were also suffering from a bad case of 70s nostalgia (brought about by many things, but exacerbated by the death of Bert Lance). So we thought we’d throw some vintage music your way before cracking open this week’s TMQ after the jump. Oddly enough, it turns out to be fitting for reasons we’ll see later on…
You’re welcome.
“But it is fair for the NCAA to say to Manziel and others like him, ‘If you want to use our system to become famous, you must follow our rules.'” You can now skip the first 875 words of this week’s column, but we want to dig a little deeper into this.
“…only NCAA sales have been sidelined; college sales continue. Want a Johnny Football replica jersey? Texas A&M will sell it to you for $65. The school will sell you an authentic team helmet for $300. You could wear it to the office.
Wouldn’t all this nonsense end if the players were paid? Or perhaps allowed to charge fees for autographs and public appearances, and to do so openly. Millions of people must be thinking that right now.”
Actually, no, Gregg, we don’t think that. If Manziel were allowed to collect appearance fees and charge for autographs, we feel pretty certain that Texas A&M would still be selling jerseys and helmets. They might have to cut Manziel in for some of the profits, but we frankly don’t see the cause and effect relationship Easterbrook sees here.
If NCAA strictures on player income were dropped, the winner-take-all aspect of athletic economics, already a problem, would become extreme. A small number of collegiate stars would roll in money from age 19 on, while the overwhelming majority of collegiate players would receive pocket change or nothing at all.
But isn’t the NFL very much like this? A relatively small number of players who are big stars and roll in money, and a lot of guys who play for the league minimum? Does this kind of inequality harm the NFL? And would it harm college football? Easterbrook thinks so; we’re willing to consider the possibility, but Gregg hasn’t convinced us. Indeed, even without players being paid, isn’t there already considerable inequality at the college level? Some guys are huge stars who win awards and are sure to get drafted; other guys will never play again after college. Will money necessarily make this problem even worse?
Under a deregulated free-market system, perhaps 95 percent of college football players would not attract any payments, nor have any bargaining power, since they are so easily replaced.
How does this differ from the way things are now?
But if college athletes could sell themselves while in school and live like kings, a small number of stars would benefit tremendously while declining public interest in college sports might harm all other NCAA athletes.
It seems to us that Easterbrook is begging the question by assuming that paying college athletes would result in “declining interest in college sports”. Does the average Texas A&M fan care if Manziel gets paid or not?
Each year, football scholarships put about 25,000 young men through college essentially free, and all but a handful have no hope of a pro sports paycheck. A diploma is their reward.
Unless they suffer an injury. Or get crosswise with the coach.
Screwed up as the system is, it does confer most of its benefits on average athletes.
And there’s something to be said for that. We agree with TMQ that paying college players is not going to be the panacea many people think it will be. We just don’t find TMQ’s assertions in this column totally convincing.
TMQ has some questions about the economics of The Great Gastby (specifically, the recent movie version). We have some questions about TMQ’s source for the assertion that “At the time, bootleg spirits were $2 or so a bottle.” Really, that doesn’t strike us as absurd; $2 in 1925 dollars works out to $26.70 in 2013 dollars, and you can buy a fairly decent bottle of something for $27. We would just really like a source for that $2 figure.
George Karl. Jacob Lew.
TMQ goes after Penn State. Highlights: you can’t defame the dead, Paterno and Spanier are public figures and thus have a very high burden to meet, and “It is hard to see how the estate of a deceased person has standing to sue a private organization over administrative rules agreed to by a third party.”
TMQ seems shocked that the government is irresponsible with government property. Welcome to our world, Gregg.
The country’s No. 1 TV show, source of what must have been, by Norwegian standards, lively watercooler conversation, discussed different ways to chop firewood.
Our father would have loved that show.
Mostly good news on concussions, including the fact that there’s an app for that.
Sunny projections, improving economy — what terrible news!
On a completely unrelated note, it appears that you can watch all of the 1960 Pollyana on YouTube.
Rubbery ducky, you’re (glub) (glub) (glub). “…pundits who act confident and speak loudly are more likely to be believed than pundits who admit they don’t know everything.” GM stock is outperforming Facebook stock (perhaps Facebook needs a government bailout? Or perhaps it should be treated as a critical national resource and nationalized?) Teachers cheating. Blind obedience to GPS. What year was The Way, Way Back set in? Flooding in Lourdes. Snow in Arizona. Truly, the end times are upon us.
This is nicely said, as is TMQ’s point about 1984. But then TMQ has to go ruin it by asking “…will Edith Windsor pay her back taxes?” And:
“How do the not-wed feel as the married of any sexual orientation congratulate themselves on the front page? There’s an aspect of self-flattery to the wedded boasting of their status.
We, as members of the not-wed, are happy for anybody who gets married to someone they love – straight, gay, human-dolphin, etc. If someone is getting married, we think that’s one time in their life that they have a right to brag, whether it be on the front page of the Statesman or the wedding announcements of the NYT. What is TMQ trying to get at here?
The financial, emotional and social concerns of those who either couldn’t or didn’t wish to join the ranks of the wedded should matter.
Perhaps his point would be more clear if he named some of those “financial, emotional and social concerns”, and explained how they directly impact the not-wed.
Space aliens are watching. And speaking of aliens, TMQ actually has something nice to say about a Star Trek episode. Of course, it is from 1992, and he ties it into gay marriage…
Peanuts contain nuts.
It looks like this is TMQ’s annual basketball column, though he doesn’t explicitly say that. So we get a rundown of “goofy” NBA trades.
NYT hysteria over “hooking up”.
Noted without comment:
Stephanie Stradley reports that an opera about Bum Phillips is on track for a New York City premiere in 2014.
The NCAA announced, then abandoned, their plan to require “higher SAT or ACT scores for high school seniors with weak GPAs”.
Byliner sounds interesting. But wasn’t this what Grantland was supposed to be?
“It Was That or Use the Photo Weiner Texted,” the Web Designer Explained
We note this as an example of TMQ trying to be funny…and succeeding, for once.
Back to basketball: the gangs that couldn’t shoot straight.
We applaud TMQ’s attention to detail here.
This NFL draft brought to you by the letter “J”. Creep. Know your Carolinas. Who doesn’t like cupcakes (other than TMQ?)
Illinois, for example, enters the season with an all-time gimmicked cupcake sked. Eight home dates, four away; four consecutive home games to start the season; opener at home against lower-division Southern Illinois, which last season lost by 21 points to lower-division Eastern Illinois, which lost to Central Arkansas and Tennessee-Martin.
More basketball:
San Antonio has not had a lottery pick since 1997, and came within a botched overtime no-call of winning its fifth championship. In the same period, the Washington Wizards have had eight lottery picks and have won — we’ll get back to you on that.
“Why is it we don’t type the terms ‘classy’ and ‘NFL’ in the same sentence more often?” It might be because TMQ doesn’t have a Word AutoKey macro set up for that.
We sort of get TMQ’s point about Standard and Poor’s and the White House. But if we were TMQ, we’d be much more concerned about the abuse of the legal system to put political pressure on a company that disagrees with the government.
Congrats to the Yale hockey team and the Amherst College men’s basketball team.
Physical delivery of newspapers is declining, but exposure to newspapers is increasing. In 1993, the 830,000 customers who paid to make a Washington Post go thunk in their driveways were the entirety of the Post’s audience. Today only 475,000 pay for the printed edition, but many more around the nation access Post content — including from pocket devices that didn’t exist 20 years ago, when a newspaper could be read only at home or at a desk…
…Bezos didn’t buy the Washington Post out of nostalgia for the days of hawkers yelling “Extra, extra!” He bought the Post because he saw an asset with a lot of upside available for a distress price.
We agree with this, which is why we think the whole “this is a Jeff Bezos purchase, not an Amazon purchase” thing is the wrong way to look at it.
Gee, that old LaSalle ran great. Shocked, shocked we are that “Argentine government officials” can be bribed “with high-end perfume.” Isn’t “Gerard Depardieu” fun to say? Try it. “Gerard Depardieu”. And hey, how about those Clippers?
We might have to start watching “Blue Bloods”. Our television diet is currently at zero, with the cancellation of “Cops” and the endless PBS pledge drive on our local station. But it wouldn’t be TMQ without Easterbrook pointing out that “that TV crime shows overstate both the frequency of homicide and the effectiveness of police work”.
That sound you hear is us frantically biting our tongue, lest we wind up like our great and good friend TJIC.
The notion of walking a mile in another person’s shoes traces to Matthew 5:41, in which Jesus instructs, “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” Roman law allowed soldiers to compel civilians to carry military supplies for one mile; carrying the packs further was a way of turning the other cheek. “Go also the second mile” is oft-quoted in churches. Rarely mentioned is what Jesus said next: “Give to everyone who begs from you.” How many Bible-thumping televangelists follow their Redeemer’s instruction to hand money to the poor on the street?
1. We’d guess not many, Gregg, as there are some pretty sound reasons not to hand money to the poor on the street, but instead give it to charitable organizations that help get the poor off the street (and in the process, make them poor no more).
2. It is interesting that in his discussion of “the second mile”, TMQ doesn’t mention perhaps the most famous use of that phrase.
“Like your camel grilled, baked or poached in sauterne?” Actually, Gregg, it was cooked into a tagine. You’re welcome. We’re trying to figure out the economics of selling real fur as fake fur: is real fur that cheap these days? Why? Is it undesirable? If so, wouldn’t fake fur be equally undesirable?
We missed the Eddie Jordan story, and we’re not sure how. Maybe it didn’t make FARK?
We’d just like to jump off a TMQ point here, and note that frankly, we’re tired of the zombie fad (especially in the firearms world) and hope to see it end by this time next year. And yes, we gloated over the “Do No Harm” cancellation, too.
Like many big-college sports programs, UNC Charlotte engages in a legal fiction of pretending sports admissions are donations to the college, and therefore tax deductible. That means average people who can’t afford PSLs subsidize them. This hidden public subsidy to NCAA sports needs to end. Not only are average people subsidizing the special seats of the affluent, money that might have been become a donation to the academic mission of a college instead is diverted to athletics.
Ah. We see that once again in the off-season, TMQ failed to learn the difference between a “subsidy” and “letting people keep more of the money they earned with the sweat of their labor”.
Big sugar. Ghost opera. Hair team. Poisoned mice.
After the media spotlight on the GSA scandal faded, the executive to blame, whom Barack Obama said was “fired,” quietly got his job back.
German plagiarism and fake Malaysian doctorates. And the coaching merry-go-round hasn’t broken down yet.
Thus ends the first TMQ of the 2013 season, and the first TMQ Watch. Geez, this sure seemed like a long one.
Tune in next week for the TMQ AFC preview, and whatever WCD pulls out of our hat.