The Monkey Cage

The University of Georgia’s mascot, Uga VI (Uga for University of Georgia, VI because he was sixth in the line of Ugas) has died of congestive heart failure at age ten. Uga VI, extremely handsome (a veritable matinee idol by bulldog standards), was the son of Uga V, the only college mascot to have graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. I don’t care about Georgia’s basketball or football teams, but I used to look in on their games in hopes of catching a glimps of Uga. While I was growing up, my family had two bulldogs, and they were “really” mine and, of course, my mother’s. Bulldogs are a noble breed, and although their looks scare off some people they’re wonderful companions if you can put up with all their snorting, drooling, and gas-passing, which I could. But they do tend to die young.

Long live Uga VII!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 06:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The old “stirrup theory” of history held that the introduction of the stirrup, by enabling armed forces to mount attacks from horseback, fundamentally shaped the course of human history — an idea that always struck me as interesting but perhaps a bit overblown — sort of like the bird that flaps its wings in Brazil and sets in motion global forces.

Anyway, it’s now being argued that the bicycle was to women’s liberation as the stirrup was to warfare. I tend to take bikes more seriously than stirrups. Read about it here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In a wide array of sports, there’s a marked home field advantage. When you’re playing at home, you’re much more likely to win than when you’re on the road.

Why is this? It’s easy to come up with explanations — sleeping in your own bed and eating home cooking, not having to get stiff and worn out from travel, being cheered on by supportive fans instead of booed by hostile ones, having officials who are intimidated by the home crowd, knowing how to cope with the idiosyncrasies of the playing field itself (the Green Monster at Fenway, the ivy at Wrigley [pictured above]) and so on — and the multitude of possibilities has been grist for the mill of thousands of discussions in sports bars and on sports-talk radio.

As it happens, there’s actually some systematic research on this very question. Not that it makes much difference, because almost everybody “knows” the answer already and isn’t really interested in the facts, and because, as is so often the way with social science research, many of the research findings point in different directions. Anyway, Jonah Lehrer recently did a nice overview of such research for the Boston Globe, here. It’s worth a look.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Those of us who reside in the nation’s capital are reveling at the very idea of having “our” team, the Washington Nationals, playing in brand-new stadium (pictured above). The team is lousy and the fans are staying away in droves, but at least we can bask in the civic glory of having financed a dandy new playpen for the ballplayers. And now our mayor, who opposed that project while he was a member of the city council, has bought into the idea big-time, having signed onto a plan to spend $125 million or so to help build a new soccer stadium just across the Anacostia from the new ballpark. He’s also said to be flirting with the idea of erecting a new football stadium to try to lure the Washington [insert unmentionable profesional football team name here] back into the District from the crummy 91,000-or-so-seat house that Jack Kent Cooke built just a decade ago out in suburban Landover (nee Raljohn).

The local success story here that everyone is trying to repeat is the Verizon (nee MCI) Center, the basketball arena over on Seventh Street where the local Wizards and Mystics play. They, like the Nationals and the [insert unmentionable professional football team name here], aren’t very good, but the new downtown facility has sparked considerable redevelopment in a previously run-down part of town. That’s great, but what more generally can we learn from it?

Not much, it turns out.

There’s a fairly substantial research literature on this very question, and the results (though inevitably being somewhat mixed — this is social science, after all) give little aid and comfort to all the local developers and civic boosters whose idea of progress stems from an over-active Edifice Complex. Here is a nice piece by Dennis Coates, an economist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, that splashes cold water all over developers’ claims about the benefits of public financing of sports facilities.

[Hat tip to Scott Adler]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

That’s Michael Avery, an eighth-grader from Lake Sherwood, California. Like many kids his age, Michael likes to play basketball.

After high school, Michael is going to play basketball in college. Not only that: He’s going to play at a perennial basketball powerhouse, the University of Kentucky.

Note that I didn’t just say that young Michael wants to play basketball in college, let alone at the University of Kentucky. I said he’s going to. In fact, he’s already accepted the scholarship offer that Kentucky coach Billy Gillespie extended to him earlier this month.

Now, I’m a close follower of college basketball. But this development — recruiting kids who are still in junior high — takes me completely off guard. I guess I just haven’t been paying attention, but I had no idea that it had come to this.

It shouldn’t have taken me off guard, because it turns out that this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Within the last couple of years, Southern Cal’s coach, Tim Floyd, has inked two middle school students, and Arizona’s Lute Olson has offered schollies to two kids who hadn’t even started eighth grade yet. And the same week that Michael Avery accepted his offer, Gillespie got another commitment for Kentucky, albeit this time from a veritable grey-beard — ninth-grader Vinny Zollo from Greenfield, Ohio. A recruiting analyst is quoted in Sports Illustrated as saying “It’s like an arms race. You’ve got to offer first.” Apparently this is now becoming standard operating procedure in the cutthroat business of recruiting for big-time college sports.

With so many successful programs pursuing this strategy, it occurs to me that academic departments should consider following their lead. If it”s good enough for the athletics department, then why not for the political science department, too? In fact, in my department there’s a very productive married couple who have two young daughters. These girls obviously have the political science genes and they’re growing up in an academically-oriented home. So why wait? Let’s sign ‘em up as faculty members before Columbia or UCSD hears about ‘em!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Every year the NCAA publishes a financial analysis of intercollegiate sports programs. Every year there is much bad news. The newly released NCAA report contains even more bad news than usual. Unprecedentedly bad news, even.

Is this because 2006 (the year on which the new report focuses) was an unprecedentedly bad year for intercollegiate sports? Not really. What happened is that this time around the NCAA tightened up on the reporting criteria and definitions. For example, in reporting gross revenues, many programs had previously thrown in what they received from within the institution (aka “internal revenue”), in addition to the revenues they received from outside via ticket sales, TV contracts, etc. (aka “generated revenue”). Thus, if you were losing big bucks and the school had to bail you out, the bail-out funds would show up simply as revenue. Via such accounting legerdemain, many schools looked like they were balancing their books or even turning a profit, when in fact they were living on subventions from central administration.

Now, though, athletic programs have to distinguish between internal and generated revenue. And guess what? Yup: The dismal economics of big-time college sports just got even more dismal, which is very dismal indeed.

Here are the core findings of the report, as summarized in Inside Higher Ed:

Sports program budgets are growing quickly, as are institutional subsidies. For the 119 universities that compete in the NCAA’s top competitive level, the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly known as Division I-A), total revenues grew by 25.5 percent from 2004 to 2006, slightly faster than the 23 percent growth in expenses. But in the more important category — generated revenues, those actually earned by athletics departments, excluding other institutional support — rose by only 16 percent over the two-year period.

In the 2006 fiscal year, the latest of three examined in the study, only 19 of the 119 Football Bowl Subdivision institutions had positive net revenue, while for the rest, expenses exceeded generated revenues. (For the entire three-year period, only 16 athletics department turned a net profit.)

The median net loss for all 119 I-A programs in 2006 was $7.265 million. But for the 16 programs that generated more than they spent, the average new revenue was $4.3 million, while the average loss of those with negative net revenue was $8.9 million. That $13 million difference suggests a widening gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” in big-time college football, as the equivalent gap in 2004 was about $11.3 million.

At this point, somebody’s going to pipe up and say, “Okay, but sports programs generate big bucks for their school because of all those alums who relate to the it by following their teams.” That sounds good, but I’ve been following (and occasionally contributing to) the research literature on such issues for many years, and there’s just not much evidence that it’s true and there’s lots of evidence that it’s not. Sports teams — almost invariably men’s teams, and almost invariably football and basketball teams, and especially the ones with the best records year in and year out — do generate big bucks, but the main recipient of those bucks isn’t the school’s general operating fund or the French club or (sigh) the political science department. Rather, it’s the intercollegiate athletics program itself. Which, in a perverse sort of way, is sort of okay, because it saves the school the trouble of sending even more bail-out money over to the athletics folks.

For the full Inside Higher Ed story, click here. If you’re really interested, you can link to the full NCAA report via that story.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

..Cleveland, according to an analysis on the Sports Illustrated website (click HERE for a ranking of all 30 major league stadiums).

And if you go to Cleveland, you can do the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame the very same day. This is too good to pass up. Let’s all meet in Cleveland!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a quick follow-up to Henry’s post, here is some polling data on whether various nations should boycott the Beijing Olympics.

Denmark: 50% favor the boycott, 39% oppose it, 11% don’t know

France: 41% favor; 55% oppose; 4% don’t know. (53% would favor a Sarkozy boycott of the opening ceremony.)

Canada: 37% favor; 56% oppose; 7% don’t know.

United States: 31% favor a boycott; 48% favor a boycott of the opening ceremonies by elected officials. [NB: Zogby on-line poll]

Posted by John Sides at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dan Drezner and Steve Clemons argue it out over whether or not the US should boycott the Beijing Olympics (Steve says no, Dan says that it would be no harm if the West uses the threat of non-attendance to squeeze some concessions from the Chinese). For me, the interesting question is why the Olympics are so politically important, and how their importance seems to be changing. International relations scholars don’t have much to say about the politics of the modern Olympics (there’s a book by Christopher Hill, but that’s about it), but it’s surely an important international institution; as we can see from recent events, states pay a lot of attention to it. This was true of the original Olympic festival in Greece too; Martin Wight identifies the festival as one of the key institutions binding together the Greek city-state system (although the original Olympics had a military truce attached to it, so it was obviously more important in the ways that IR scholars usually measure importance.

The current debacle though seems to mark an important change in the politics of the Olympics. As best I understand it (I am open to corrections if wrong), in the past, Olympics politics have concerned inter-state rivalry, and have been driven by decisions on the part of traditional political elites. The US boycott of the Soviet games in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 resulted from a decision by Jimmy Carter, and the tit-for-tat boycott by the Soviets and their allies of the LA games in 1984 resulted from a top level decision too. The dynamic driving the Beijing Olympics seems to me to be rather different; what we are seeing is that the politics of boycott is being driven by mass-publics, and most recently by protestors, rather than by political leaders. In the absence of the public unrest that has culminated in the recent protests in Paris, I doubt very much that Western political leaders would be muttering about not showing at the opening ceremonies - the geopolitical stakes of market access etc are likely more important to them than the fate of Tibetans. But given the widespread public reaction in the West, even leaders like Gordon Brown, who obviously want very much to attend, are having to insulate themselves from public pressures by taking other actions liable to annoy China (such as meeting with the Dalai Lama). In short, I think we are seeing how public opinion and organized cross-national opposition can create significant constraints on the ability of leaders to respond to what they see as the geostrategic necessity of keeping China happy. This is, as best as I am aware, a new phase in the development of the Olympics.

Posted by Henry at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Thinking about attending the NCAA Final Four this year, but don’t have tickets and don’t want to pay scalpers’ prices, which sometimes run up into the thousands of dollars? Help is on the way, in the form of (yet another) futures market. For a small fee, you can buy “reservations” to follow your favorite team to the Final Four in the event that they make it. After you purchase, you can, if you wish, sell your reservations if the team’s fortunes are rising as the field narrows down to four, and score a nice piece of change. If your team falls short and you’ve held onto the reservation, you’re out the nominal cost of the reservation, but that’s it. Or if you’re a steadfast fan and have held onto the reservation and if your team turns out to be one of the charmed four, then off you to to cheer them on to victory, with tickets you’ve purchased at face value plus the reservations charge. On the other hand, if you didn’t purchase a reservation in the first place, you can enter the reservations market and purchase one at whatever someone is willing to sell it for at that moment — and that will entitle you to buy the tickets themselves at face value.

Pretty sweet, eh? Well, yah. But, hmm, doesn’t this sound a little like, er, ticket scalping, and isn’t that illegal in most places? Or maybe it’s not scalping — just plain old gambling? Hmm, I can’t decide. So who’s running this ticket-scalping-or-is-it-gambling operation? Why, it turns out to be a money-making deal for that self-righteous overseer of the morality of college athletes, the NCAA itself. If the NCAA catches an athlete consorting with gamblers or if it finds a player’s complimentary tickets in the hands of scalpers, it’s bye-bye time for the player’s college hoops career, and it’s public humiliation for the transgressor. But let the NCAA itself run the show, and it’s just free enterprise, and who could object to something as all-American as that?

Read all about it here.

[Hat tip to Scott Adler]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Do the test. (And look out for cyclists.)

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I’m a biker.

No, I’m not that kind of biker. I’m this kind of biker:

(Okay, that’s not me. Notwithstanding the amazing resemblance, it’s actually Mario Cipollini, The Lion King, the most stylish cyclist in the history of the world. My role model.)

Anyway, I’m a “cyclist.” And a racer at that. Why, quelle surprise!, here I am, so very splendid in my red team kit — though not quite so splendid, I am forced to concede, as Mario Cipollini.

(More pictures and the headlined scary video are below the fold.)

Continue reading "The Joy of Bike Racing -- A Photo Essay with a Scary Video at the End" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Those who read this post a couple of days ago will be aware that the fate of the U.S. economy was riding on the outcome of yesterday’s Super Bowl game. Fortunately, God watches over small children, dumb animals, and the USA.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Those of us who detest professional football nonethless have a vested interest in the outcome of the upcoming Super Bowl. A victory for the New York Giants should line our pockets with money — or at least help keep our TIAA-CREF accounts solvent.

That, at least, is the implication of the Super Bowl Predictor of Stocks, which has correctly called the direction — up or down — of the following year’s Dow Jones Industrial Average 33 of 41 times, an 81% success rate.

The logic of the predictor is simple: If a team from the original NFL wins, the market is destined to go up; if one of the old AFL teams wins, the Dow is about to sink.

The Patriots of New England, one of the old AFL teams, are heavily favored. Even though I’m a devout non-fan of the sport, I’ll be pocketbook-cheering for an upset.

[Via William Power, “Win for the Patriots Is Win for ‘Da Bears,’” Wall Street Journal, 29 January, p. C2]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This morning’s Wall Street Journal contains a round-up of recent research by economists (here, full access gated) about various aspects of football and basketball, focusing on papers being presented at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association in New Orleans, which is going on right now. (The AEA meeting, as it happens, is being held at the same hotel where the LSU players — in town for tonight’s national championship game against TOSUFF (click here for an explanation) — are staying.) Justin Lahart’s article contains, among other things, descriptions of papers (whose authors include the inevitable Steven Levitt and the increasingly inevitable Justin Wolfers) about the advisability of going for it on fourth down (don’t) and the manner in which sports bettors take new information into account (rapidly but in a biased manner). A nice overview, at least for the capitalists among you who subscribe to the Journal.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Among sports fans, everyone seems to have an opinion about everything, including some of the more arcane strategic aspects of the game — whether the team should have punted on fourth and short or gone for it, whether it should have worked the ball into the post or sent up a barrage of three-pointers, whether it should have hit-and-run or gone for the long ball. Bill James makes a nice living doing the numbers on issues like these in baseball, and Jamesian modes of analysis have spread into other major sports as well.

In college football, a team’s chances for end-of-season glory raise another set of strategic issues about which conventional wisdom speaks confidently — so confidently, indeed, that it almost seems like a waste of time to check things out systematically. Sometimes, though, what is widely regarded as fact turns out, upon closer inspection, not to be true at all.

The pieces of conventional wisdom under consideration here arise because in big-time college football the final national standings are determined by poll rather than directly by on-field performance. That being the case, every year controversies flare about why certain teams end being ranked higher than other, ostensibly equally deserving teams. And every year, too, pundits and everyday fans trot out the same tired pieces of conventional wisdom.

In a recent paper, economist Trevon Logan (a faculty member at, appropriately, TOSUFF [The Ohio State University Football Factory]) puts this conventional wisdom to the test. His conclusions?

Continue reading "Football Schedules -- The Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong Again" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If, when I was a twelve-year-old growing up in a small midwestern town, you’d have told me that eventually I’d live within a few miles of two major league baseball teams, I would have been unimaginably happy. If you’d also told me that I would take no interest in these teams or, for that matter, in baseball itself, I wouldn’t have believed you. Baseball was that important to me. Now it’s not. Last season I watched, in person on on TV, a grand total of zero games, and this season I probably will do the same.

My current lack of interest in matters pertaining to the National Pastime explains why until yesterday I knew nothing about Bill James’s “Hall of Fame Monitor.” Bill James, for those who don’t already know, invented and is the foremost practicioner of sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of baseball records. It turns out, according to a Wall Street Journal article by Allen St. John, that James has been ranking today’s major leaguers in terms of their prospects for being granted entry to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, where the sport’s greatest players are enshrined. I don’t know exactly how he does this, but in principle it sounds pretty straightforward. One could, for example, fit a logistic regression model for past players, using their single-season and/or lifetime records to predict whether they were subsequently granted admittance to the Hall; then one could substitute into the model the records of current players to determine the probability that they, too, would get in. Of course, in such an exercise certain assumptions come into play — perhaps most crucially, the assumptions that pertinent factors haven’t been left out of the model and that future selections will be based on the same considerations that have prevailed in the past. Those assumptions may prove to be inaccurate. For example, highest-ranked among today’s players is the embattled Barry Bonds, who would be a shoo-in based on his stats but could get blackballed based on his steroid-related misdeeds and, for that matter, his dour demeanor.

A player who scores at least 100 points on James’s scale has a 50-50 chance of making it into the Hall; those who score 130 or above are considered very serious contenders.

Here’s the list of leaders among position players:

Continue reading "Decking the Hall, Sabermetrically" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)