TMQ Watch: February 4, 2014.

And thus we slog to the end of another NFL season, and the end of another TMQ season. Surprisingly (at least to us) TMQ avoids any discussion of unrealistic television shows, but there’s a lot of discussion of books. Speaking of which, did you know TMQ had a new book out?

After the jump, the last TMQ for the 2013 NFL season

Duck — because the pendulum is swinging, from offense back toward defense.

Did someone say “duck”?

(349 words down.)

(Heh. Heh. He said “down” after talking about ducks.)

(Of course you can’t get down off a duck. You get down off an elephant.)

In football safety news, for years this column has rolled the drums for the idea that although no football helmet can prevent concussions, newer designs reduce the risk.

But by how much?

Last week, Virginia Tech released the results of six years of real-world data comparing total head hits to concussions, by helmet types, at eight Division I college football teams. The finding: Correcting for incidence and severity of hits, a player wearing the Riddell Revo had a 54 percent lower risk of concussion than a player wearing a VSR4.

Okay. TMQ has made it clear he believes the Riddell Revo is inferior, in terms of reducing the risk of concussions, to the VSR4. But read that sentence carefully: the risk reduction of the VSR4 is relative to the Revo. By what percentage overall does the VSR4 reduce the risk of concussions?

For many years the NFL and NOCSAE have contended it is impossible to determine whether any particular helmet reduces concussion risk. Virginia Tech has now put hard data on the table.

But, again, TMQ has not provided any data on the overall risk reduction of the VSR4, just a comparison of performance against the Revo. We hammer this point because the last study we saw cited a risk reduction of 2.6%. If there’s new science out there, like the Virgina Tech study TMQ cites, that quantifies the overall risk reduction of various helmets, we’d love to see it. (And consider this: if a helmet reduces the overall risk of concussion by N%, isn’t it possible that players will engage in even riskier behaviors, thinking the additional safety factor of the helmet makes them safer? And thus eliminating whatever benefit they may get?)

Sweet: Doug Baldwin. Sour: Denver’s chicken-(salad) kicking. “Facing the league’s best defense, Denver needed to set an aggressive tone. Instead the Broncos set a passive, retreating tone.” But, apparently, TMQ did not write “game over” in his notebook. Mixed: Kam Chancellor.

TMQ continues to think that he’s “Regret the Error”. Then again, since we stopped reading “Regret the Error” when it moved over to the useless Poynter site, he may have a point here.

Said a documentary called “Mansome,” which is about metrosexual men trying to look handsome, was about serial murderer Charles Manson; and said a company that stages reality shows is called Psycho. Syco is correct.

We actually sympathize a wee little bit with the Paper of Record on that last one: we sometimes get calls from people who have our employer confused with a food service company.

State news: it has now been 18 years since teams from California or Texas, the centers of football culture, won a Super Bowl.

Creep. So Kassim Reed should have known snow was coming, based on the National Weather Service issuing a Winter Storm Warning. Is there anything he could have done about it? Seriously. We’re asking. Is there something the mayor could have done that he didn’t do? Any of our readers in Georgia care to weigh in?

Northwestern University football players are attempting to unionize.

Wouldn’t it be just wonderful if college athletes themselves were the ones to drive the nail into the coffin of NCAA institutional corruption?

Yes. Yes, it would.

Last week, Packers general manager Mark Murphy cryptically declared, “If the college players unionize, there will be more pressure on the NFL to establish a developmental league.” What he seemed to mean was: If they unionize they will demand actual education, and the big FBS conferences will cease being an unpaid junior league for the NFL. That would be great!

Yes, yes it would. And not just because it would get football out of higher ed: a developmental league would have to provide things like insurance coverage and stipends.

Suppose a potential FBS player has offers from, say, USC and Wisconsin. USC is dismal at 53 percent graduation, Wisconsin is strong at 72 percent. The smart recruit factors likelihood of a diploma into his choice.

But how does the smart recruit factor these things in? Likelihood of a diploma depends on various factors, including personal motivation to get one and the major you choose. No matter what the overall graduation percentage is, isn’t the “smart recruit” likely to consider himself an outlier?

“How Did Seattle Do It?” Yes, seriously, how did Seattle do it? We managed to miss pretty much the entire game. We were actually at the range, and later at dinner, with some friends of ours. And we tried to specifically pick a place that had no television; that didn’t quite work out, but the televisions at the place we did pick were mostly away from our view. Even though we didn’t care about the Pot Bowl, we were surprised when we woke up the next morning and found out how much of a blowout it was.

So why did this happen? Denver kept throwing short, even though that wasn’t working. Denver kept rushing sideways, even though that wasn’t working. Peyton Manning had a bad day. Chicken-(salad) kicking. “John Fox and the other Denver coaches seemed bored to be in the Super Bowl.”

Meanwhile, Seattle played excellent defense. And TMQ was right about “high-scoring offenses peter(ing) out late”.

“The two great highbrow publications of New York City, the New York Times and the New Yorker, seemed strangely uninterested in the Super Bowl in their midst.” Darn shame, that. We would have loved to see E.B. White’s Superb Owl coverage. Or James Thurber’s. Okay, we kid, but how about Malcolm Gladwell?

“The Times ran a fawning profile of Seahawks owner Paul Allen that never mentioned a man with a $15 billion net worth keeps almost all revenue from a stadium that cost Washington State taxpayers $425 million, adjusting to current dollars.”

TMQ himself fails to mention that Paul Allen is also a patent troll.

Having the Super Bowl come to your city seems big, so why did the New York Times and New Yorker not respond with enterprise reporting?

Wait, wait. TMQ has constantly been hammering on the fact that the Big Game was taking place in New Jersey, not New York City (or even the state of New York), so where does this “come to your city” come from?

“…Basically, it’s a class distinction thing. New York high society thinks football is for rubes in the boondocks.”

Most people don’t normally turn to sports columns for news on the migratory patterns of North American owls, though TMQ has been way ahead on the snowy owls story.

We know this is a repeat from last week, but we wanted to use this opportunity to link to a comment from last week by great and good friend of the blog lelnet.

It’s scandalous that the mega-profitable NFL has a tax exemption for its Park Avenue headquarters. But football surely is not the only offender when it comes to hiding behind tax exemptions.

We’re kind of sympathetic to TMQ’s argument that the College Board is “the College Board is fleecing students and parents”. Where does the money that the College Board collects go? Other than to salaries, that is. But there are some things that make us go “Hmmmmm”, other than TMQ’s continued claims about the NFL’s tax status.

Benjamin Tonelli, a senior at Garfield High School in Seattle, noted in last week’s Wall Street Journal that he and his parents have paid a total of $750 for the many SATs now administered by the College Board, plus another $534 for the Board’s Advanced Placement tests.

“many SATs”? We were under the impression that there was only one true SAT, which costs $51 to take. Assuming that Mr. Tonelli took it twice, that’s $102. Apparently, he also took some of the SAT “subject tests”. Those apparently run $24 for the initial registration plus $13 to $24.50 per test. So $750 minus $102 for the two SATs is $648. Subtract out the registration fee for the subject tests of $24 and you get $624. If Mr. Tonelli spent an average of $24 on each subject matter test, that’s 26 tests. There are only 20 subject matter tests, so perhaps he took some of them twice. That’s still a lot of tests.

High school students are encouraged to take the basic tests at least twice, to take at least two subject tests and to take several Advancement Placement tests.

Two basic SAT tests would be $102. Adding in the two subject tests takes us to $175. AP exams are $89. So how many AP exams did Mr. Tonelli take? The $750 quoted earlier doesn’t include the AP tests: that was another $534, which works out to six tests. (So was every class he was taking an AP class? Except PE or band?)

All this testing drives profits for the College Board: it pushes the Advanced Placement tests despite knowing that many colleges neither factor them into admission nor accept them as credits.

If this is true, shouldn’t high school guidance councilors be telling students this? Shouldn’t students and their parents be looking at university web sites to see if the AP tests are useful before taking them? If this is true, why is there a market for AP tests? College Board promotion, perhaps, but how far can that really go? Wpuldn’t someone have pointed out that this emperor has no clothes by now?

…were hit with a $11.25 charge for each college the scores were reported to, though this is done electronically at close to zero cost to the College Board.

Doesn’t that fee discourage applicants from spamming every college in the United States with their SAT/AP scores? If it was free, what keeps you from sending your scores to schools you aren’t serious about?

(Note that we don’t link to Mr. Tonelli’s WSJ article. Neither does TMQ. To be fair, it may be paywalled.)

Frankly, my dear, we don’t give a damn about “frankly”.

An industry analyst was quoted recently in the Wall Street Journal on why high-end cupcake sales are declining: “Quite frankly, people can bake cupcakes.”

Quite frankly, people could bake cupcakes before the rise of high-end cupcake sales, too.

So how was Jersey, TMQ? The trains were a fiasco, the buses were great, the horse flew in from Denver (did the hawk fly as well? Did the mascots fly first class? Who get their frequent flyer miles?), and the Denver cheerleaders were cold for the first quarter.

I couldn’t help thinking if Manning didn’t grant so many interviews and make so many commercials, there would not be a debate about his legacy, since he would not have flamed out so often in big games. His fellow Broncos must be pleased to have made the Super Bowl, whatever the result. One can’t help but wonder how they feel about being extras in the endless video clip that is Manning’s life.

Hmmmmm. Make the Super Bowl as an “extra in the endless video clip that is Manning’s life”, or not make the Super Bowl at all. Wonder how the Colts players feel about that.

Andre Reed is in the Hall of Fame now. TMQ is happy.

…Reed also threw his helmet in the Super Bowl, and it doesn’t matter that defensive pass interference should have been called on the play. That knuckle-headed moment cost him eight years of nail-biting waiting as a passed-over finalist — sort of Canton purgatory.

We doubt the helmet had anything to do with it. If you ask us, the reason it took Reed this long to get in is….Peter King.

No police escorts for football teams! We’re not sure what the point of that “leftover from TMQ’s notebook” item is. Perhaps it was a leftover because TMQ didn’t see the point either?

Hey, did you know TMQ had a literary agent? And they lunched during Big Game week? And TMQ apparently didn’t get a “wacky food” item out of his lunch?

Actually he said my chances of another book advance this year were strong, which was music to my ears.

Way to go, Mister One Percent.

…ever since Gutenberg, the book business has been in turmoil from innovation, and almost always weighed down by predictions of doom. Charles Dickens often said he believed he was part of the final generation that would write books. (Then the issue was lax enforcement of copyright law.) Electronic books have many virtues: you can carry a 1,000-page history book — or 20 1,000-page history books — when traveling.

Yeah yeah yeah.

Soon it should be possible to have the equivalent of the Great Library of Alexandria in one small device, and the contents of the Library of Congress won’t be far behind.

Arguably, we already do. It isn’t completely stored on your iPhone, but it is accessible from it.

Write a book that sells 55,000 copies (my best result, for “The Progress Paradox,” published 2003) and the royalty would be about $2 per hardback and $1 per paperback.

Interesting. So if we figure 2/3rds of the sales were the cheaper paperback, that’s a little over $73,000. That’s not bad money for what, a year’s worth of work around writing TMQ and whatever Easterbrook gets for being a contributing editor of the Atlantic and his other gigs?

Electronic books are easily changed, and this can be done remotely.

We get TMQ’s point here, and kind of agree with what he’s saying. But: while it is harder, physical books can be changed as well. Have you ever compared a paperback and hardback edition of the same book? Or a first printing of the paperback edition to a 10th or 20th printing? How many people sit down and compare printings to see what’s changed?

Books contain information the White House or some big company doesn’t want the public to know. What if those passages mysteriously disappear? (“We did it for the public’s own good,” the Justice Department may tell a judge in secret.) Books that upset some rich person: The person may hire lawyers, and the electronic publisher may cave rather than fight the suit, electronically altering the text.

Does TMQ think that this doesn’t happen now with printed books?

We’re not that much in disagreement with TMQ; almost all of his scenarios have precedent in the world of physical books. But as we often say, when you make something one or two orders of magnitude easier to do, you fundamentally change that thing. Database searches were much harder when “databases” were “index cards in a file” for example.

What scares us is the idea of hearing one day “Your current ebook library is incompatible with your new reader. You will need to purchase new versions of your ebooks. We can offer you a 25$ discount.” Far-fetched? We. Don’t. Think. So.

Houston: one of 13.

As usual at the end of the season, TMQ has a list of book recommendations. As usual, this is something we give TMQ a sizable pass on, as many of his book recommendations strike us as things we’d enjoy reading. Not so much Alter’s book about the Obama White House, but Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience sounds interesting, as do Churchill’s Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race and Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

Football as a sport engages me as much as it ever did, more perhaps, as with each year my understanding improves of both tactics and the culture of the game. The quality of football on the field is the highest it’s ever been — pro, college or prep. Audiences have enjoyed a decade-long run of close, competitive Super Bowls, including several instances of the best game of the season being the Super Bowl, allowing football to take its bow on a positive note. The sport itself never ceases to interest me.

Of course, that decade-long run came to an end this past weekend.

But as the years have passed and my understanding of the social impact of football has improved, I’ve acquired reservations about the harm football does to health, education and public finance. I don’t see football as the new cigarettes, as some people say — I see it as a fantastic sport with many positive social roles but also with many negatives that require substantive reform. (The core topic of The “King of Sports” is how to reform football.) Sportswriters and sportscasters tend to steer clear of the reform needs, giving football the smile-and-wave treatment. Pundits and intellectuals seem to scoff at football or give all athletics the “harrumph” treatment.

Truthfully, we have reservations about football, too. We’re one on-field tragedy from giving up completely on the game. There are elements of it that remind us too much of gladiatorial combat. And we’re glad TMQ and other people are discussing reform, even if we disagree with TMQ on some of his policy proposals. Our biggest complaint about TMQ this season isn’t his apparent lack of enthusiasm, or even his excessive digressions into subjects of questionable relevance, but the way he plays fast and loose with facts to advance his reform agenda. We are still hopeful that ESPN’s ombudsman will take up some of the issues with TMQ in the coming weeks.

Single worst play of the season: “Denver punting when down by 29 points in the second half of the Super Bowl” from the Seattle 39 yard line.

Tuesday Morning Quarterback folds its tent and steals off into the desert, though it will resurface briefly during the draft. As usual, I recommend you employ the offseason to engage in spiritual growth. Take long walks. Attend worship services of any faith. Appreciate the beauty of nature. Exercise more and eat less. Perform volunteer work. Read, mediate, serve others: Do these things, and you will feel justified in racing back to the remote, the swimsuit calendars and the microbrews when the football artificial universe resumes anew in the autumn.

“During a long and illustrious career, Clitomachus wrote an astonishing 400 treatises, which earned him praise from a number of prominent Romans. Besides his philosophical works, he reportedly addressed a work to his fellow Carthaginians after the destruction of their city, in which he opined that at such calametious times much comfort was to be gained from philosophy (a sentiment that would no doubt have been appreciated by his fellow citizens as they were murdered by maurading Roman soldiers or dragged into a a life of miserable slavery).”
–Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization

And thus ends the last TMQ of the season (though TMQ plans to return in April around draft time; this should be interesting, given that Houston has the first pick). This is not, however, the last TMQ Watch of the season; we’re going to make a push to finish our long delayed King of Sports review and get it up by next Tuesday, if the good lord’s willing and the roads don’t ice up again.

One Response to “TMQ Watch: February 4, 2014.”

  1. lelnet says:

    I can’t speak for now, but when I was in school, the test-taking rule was “start taking it as soon as you’re eligible, and keep taking it every chance you get until either you have a perfect score or it’s too late for new results to affect admission decisions”. (Except for the PSAT, which you only take once because only your first score counted toward your National Merit Scholar qualification, and it wasn’t good for anything else.) Of course, back then it was just SAT, ACT, and AP. The SAT didn’t have “subject” tests yet…hell, it didn’t even have a written portion, and 1600 was still a perfect score (and 20 years later, my mother’s still disappointed that I only made it as far as 1570).

    With the addition of subject tests, and the fees now? Yeah, I could see making it to $750 in fees.

    20 years ago, my mother was _weird_. Now, her sort of obsessive, single-minded determination to squeeze out every opportunity, at any cost, for any chance of any advantage in college admissions seems to be the norm, among families that are serious about their kids going to college. So no, if there’s any way at all that the arithmetic can work to get up to $750 in college board fees, it doesn’t surprise me that this kid’s family has paid that much, nor even that it’d be common to do so, nowadays.