THURSDAY THOUGHTS: Responsibility and Integrity of the Game

What is the responsibility of a team to put out its best players for a regular season game, even when it's not otherwise in their best interest to do so?

It seems to happen in a game or two every year, regardless of sport. End of season, one team with something to play for, the other not so much - either because they've got their playoff spot locked up, or they're just biding their time having already been eliminated. (You see it in the NBA mid-year sometimes, when a coach will rest older stars after a tough stretch of games.) Does the second team have an obligation to put a competitive team out there in such a game - either "for the paying customers" or, more usually, "for the integrity of the game"?

As the last round of the AFL season approaches this weekend, there are a couple of games in which this very question arises. Fremantle, having already locked up home field advantage, has no statistical reason to play its stars, and every motivation to rest them for next week's critical opening playoff game. As many as ten of its best players may sit out Saturday's game against ninth place Port Adelaide; fortunately, this game ended up having no bearing on playoff positions, as Port cannot break into the top eight under any circumstances. It did change the betting line from a fairly even game in Adelaide to the current line of almost fifty points in Port's favor, though. Oddly, where it's going to have an impact is in the WAFL, where Fremantle's "minor league feeder team", the Peel Thunder, plays. Peel is in its opening playoff round this weekend...but needs to supply up to ten players to the Dockers to fill out their roster against Port, leaving it undermanned in a playoff game. Business is business, but that seems terribly unfair to the team you've partnered with!

The more punitive scenario this week happens in Melbourne, where Friday's Richmond/North Melbourne match has been sullied (my words) by North's decision to rest up to ten of ITS players this weekend in anticipation of playing the Tigers again next week in an elimination final. By essentially conceding this game (and foregoing, by the way, the potential possibility of moving up as high as sixth if Western were to lose big, and therefore earning a home game themselves!), North has also prevented the Adelaide Crows from the possibility of passing Richmond and thus earning themselves a home game next week, a fact which has the Crows management understandably incensed. The Kangaroos' defense hinges on the fact that they've had two short weeks of preparation in a row (Sunday to Saturday, Saturday to Friday) and the players have been impacted by that: a defensible argument, admittedly. Broadcaster and retired superstar Wayne Carey sported a frightening thought on afl.com.au's "Pick A Winner" broadcast Thursday:

"The Kangaroos now can put in 8-10 players that are not going to play finals footy. They can go out and maim Richmond players," Carey said on AFL.com.au's Pick A Winner.

"They can go hard, they can be told by Brad Scott 'Go out there, hit this side as hard as you can, because it looks like we'll be playing them again next week'.

"I think the AFL really opened up a can of worms here and watch this space."

Carey said the Roos resting players was "a completely different situation" to minor premiers Fremantle sparing up to 11 regular players a final round trip to face Port Adelaide, because the Dockers-Power clash won't affect finals positions.

"Whereas I think this does manipulate where the Kangaroos and obviously the Tigers and Adelaide (finish), so it does have some bearing on the finals," Carey said.

"This rule has to change, because now the one game that had something riding on it all of a sudden has been manipulated by resting players."

(By the way, Carey was a North Melbourne player himself, so this isn't about bias...)

Another situation that happens along these lines is whether or not bottom of the ladder teams need to play their top line players at the end of the season when competing against sides that have "something to play for" or, as is generally accepted, run some youngsters through the mill after their own elimination from contention to see what the potential is for next year and beyond. Very few people question that use of a roster, and in fact if your first team isn't getting the job done, it's often the case that injecting that fresh blood into the lineup will improve the performance of the team anyway!

But what if you're in a system (like virtually every major professional sport is) where your draft order is determined by the reverse order of finish? Doesn't it behoove teams like Brisbane, Carlton, and Gold Coast in the AFL to lose as many games as they can to secure the highest draft position they can? In America, it's the NBA which has suffered under the strongest perception of this tanking prospect (I can think of 76 situations off the top of my head...). and it's what drove the league into the lottery system thirty years ago - a solution which hasn't solved the problem. To their credit, it's hard to make an argument that any of the three AFL teams named has overtly tanked this last month or so - they're just not very good, to be honest. But how do you draw the line?

It brings to mind the high school basketball tournament where both teams tried to lose a game at the same time to avoid playing the top seeded team...and if you click on the link, you'll see just how comical it got. Justifiably, both teams were suspended and removed from the tournament.

But it goes back to sportsmanship, and how you choose to answer the question, "What do we as a team owe the sport, owe the league, and owe our own integrity?"

It seems everyone has a different answer. Many people feel completely justified in the Al Davis / Oakland Raiders approach, "Just Win, Baby!"...which, ironically, doesn't always include the need to try to win; as long as you're doing what's in YOUR best interest, that's all that matters.

I disagree.

There's a risk any time you take the field, yes, but you cannot "turn it on and off" like a switch - ask the Manning Colts in those years when they ran up those 13-1 records and coasted the last couple of games...and proceeded to lose game one of the playoffs to a team who was still in competition mode. If you have legitimately injured players, by all means, rest them. But NEVER tell your players to give less than their best on the field - that's when injuries occur. If you're charging full price for your tickets, your fans deserve a full price game. (Which brings up the travesty of charging full price for pre-season tickets, but that's a subject you can already tell which side of the fence we'll fall on...)

In the end, morals and good sportsmanship MUST win out. If other teams are depending on you to play a fair and competitive game, you need to do so - despite legislative opinion to the contrary, pro sports leagues are ONE entity, working out of a dozen or three franchises, and anything one does that hurts the entirety of the league is a mistake. If that needs to be "legislated" by a commissioner or governing body, you shouldn't be running a sports team: you haven't learned the basics of "sports-man-ship" yet.

Some CFL news as the season there approaches - and it's Michael Sam!

Michael Sam, the defensive end from Missouri cut from the Rams before the season last summer, and famous for being the first openly-gay American football player drafted by the NFL, has signed a two-year contract with his Canadian Football League rights-holders, the Montreal Alouettes, for the 2015 season.

(Which begins in just five weeks, by the way, with Montreal playing Ottawa!)

The most interesting comment, I thought, was in the press release from the general manager, Jim Popp:

"With the signing of Michael Sam, we have become a better organization today," Alouettes general manager Jim Popp said in a release. "Not only have we added an outstanding football player, we have added even a better person that brings dignity, character, and heart to our team."

I find that interesting because there are two ways to take that: One, it's just PR to say how "hip" you are with gay people and he's really a great guy because he's gay...or Two (and having watched this saga the last 15 months or so, this is my feeling), he realizes that it's most likely the absolute truth. Sam has played every media opportunity correctly: not a self-promoter, not playing up or down his homosexuality, but simply being Christianly appreciative of the opportunities he's being given, as any non-star player should be. 

I may not be a fan of his "lifestyle", as we euphemistically call homosexuality, but I'm a fan of his. Good luck, Mr. Sam!  

PS - here's my fave tweet on the subject so far...

Siobhan Morris ✔ @siomo

Michael Sam has to be the first CFLer ever.....to compete on Dancing with the Stars. (right?)

9:56 AM - 22 May 2015

 

Footy news - 5/22/2015

Geelong whomped Carlton from the opening bounce Friday night (again, that's already happened in Australia) 140-63, increasing the pressure on the Blues to do something dramatic when, truthfully, no quick fix is going to change the fact that they simply don't have enough AFL talent on their roster. Firing legendary coach Mick Malthouse, now the winningest coach in history, in mid-season is cruel and would do no good; the calls from the sensible folks to announce that Malthouse will coach out the season and a new coach (and lots of new players!) would join the Blues for 2016 makes more sense at this point. (A story on afl.com.au's "Pick A Winner" show listed only SEVEN players who should by consensus in the Carlton ranks, and another half-dozen who might; the others aren't really qualified to play at the highest level yet. Legendary player Garry Lyon said Monday that only THREE players "deserved to wear their jumpers" (which are uniform jerseys, statesiders). THAT makes it tough to win when you have a 22-man roster of grown men AFL players on the other side of the pitch!)

Meanwhile, the AFL has revised the system for two draft day peculiarities that Americans aren't familiar with: the father-son connection and the academy priority pick. This year, for example, Isaac Heeney, easily one of the two or three best players in the draft, went to Sydney at choice number 18 because he had been "raised" and trained in the Sydney Swan Training Academy. There should certainly be some credit given to a club for doing the work which made the player great, but Melbourne was willing to draft him at 2 and never had the chance. Similarly, Joe Daniher went to Essendon a few years ago at pick 10, even though he was arguably the best player in the draft and would have gone #1 in the open market - however, since his dad played for Essendon, he had the right to declare himself a Bomber, and being highly rated that required the Dons to spend whatever their highest draft choice was on him. The new system is extremely complicated, but computer apps can handle those details and level out the playing field without depriving clubs of those advantages. (Wonder how long it'll be for a Giant or Sun to be drafted as a father-son!)

One of the funny occurrences in the Geelong game, especially for an AFL regular season game, was the request on the field after the game from winning team member Cam Guthrie, 23 years of age, to veteran two-time Brownlow Medal winner Chris Judd of Carlton for his jumper, ideally signed! The speculation, well-founded, is that Guthrie had grown up as a footy player idolizing Judd (a good choice, as footy role models go), and although Guthrie frankly had a better performance than Judd Friday night, he's simply "that kind of dude", as they called him in the radio booth! Judd obliged, but hesitated about taking Guthrie's Geelong jersey in return...

Here's a wild scheduling idea...and the AFL may just adopt it!

The Australian Footy League plays a 22-game season, with an 18-team league. That means you play 17 teams, and five of those teams, you play twice. Currently the AFL has a system of weighting where you take the final order from last year, and you divide it into three tiers of six (teams #1-6, #7-12, and #13-18). For those five duplicate games, each team plays three teams within its OWN tier, and one team each from the other two tiers, the idea being to keep the schedule as competitive as possible (and it has the additional advantage/disadvantage of giving teams which finish lower on the ladder a slightly easier schedule than those higher up). The duplicate games under this system always allowed for a second matchup of intra-city games (Brisbane/Gold Coast, Adelaide/Port Adelaide, etc.), and other rivalry games (Carlton/Collingwood, etc.), which may or may not help with equalization but kept fan interest high.

Well, there's now a move to change that system, and it's a change that I simply can't imagine American football putting up with (for reasons you'll see in a moment):

During the first seventeen games, each team would play every other team once, a pure round-robin. After seventeen games, the top six would be set. So would the middle six, and the bottom six. Then, the last five games would be a round robin within the groups of six. So, the top six would play for positioning within the first six finals spots, the middle six would fight for finals' spots seven and eight, and the bottom six would slug it out for draft positioning. Every game would connect two teams of relatively equal strength. This is being called the "17-5" model, for obvious reasons, and it seems fairly straightforward. BUT, you wouldn't know in advance what games you were going to get those last five rounds of the season - can you imagine U.S. television networks and football franchises going nuts over that? They scream about the "flex game" on Sunday nights - imagine if you didn't even know which weeks you had HOME games? (Although, I suppose that might be fixable...I can think of some unfixable problems, though...)

Another possibility is simply going to divisions or conference setups - maybe you start with three conferences, and they play each other twice and everyone else once, and you know ahead of time who your five duplicate opponents are. For ex., put the four western clubs from Perth and Adelaide in with, say, Western and Geelong? Then, take your four eastern clubs in Sydney and greater Brisbane, and add in, say, St. Kilda and Richmond? Finally, you leave the other six Melbourne clubs together, probably the ones with the most tradition together - Collingwood, Carlton, Essendon, Melbourne, North Melbourne, and Hawthorn. If you don't like my combinations, change them. I'm just making an example.

Personally, I like the conference idea better, but I would still place them in one large, eighteen team ladder. I'm very intrigued by the "17-5" model, but it feels a tad...I was going to say "unfair", but it probably isn't. "Weird"? Unusual, certainly, as I don't know of any other league who's ever done this. Nothing against trying something unusual, right? The AFL has tinkered with its playoff system so many times it's unfathomable - in fact, it's hard to believe they've kept this top 4-biased set-up for twenty years now! Why couldn't they try this next year?

Here's the preposterousness of the NFL Draft coverage...

First of all, the fact that's covered like this at ALL is preposterous! But let that go for now...

Listening to the NBC Radio coverage while running errands this evening and several things made me chuckle.

"There are only about 15 to 18 first round grades in this draft..." Wait. But there are 32 first round picks, and you knew that going in. What, did you just think the last half of the round would just PASS?

"See, the next 25 choices could go in any order - Who I like at one you may like at 25, and vice versa." Gee, glad you're going to stick your neck out and make some predictions - take a stand, danged talking head!

"Next on the clock, the Dallas Cowboys - ALWAYS an exciting moment in the draft!" Really, numbnuts? Didn't sound like anyone got that excited when they picked some nobody...

(When selecting a cornerback from Connecticutt) "Strengths - he should be great in press coverage because he pivots so smoothly... Weaknesses - he'll need to improve in press coverage..." Say WHAT?

And the WORST part of this whole thing? I was actually LISTENING to this pablum!

Do you feel a draft in here?

It seems appropriate to have an event named after an unwanted breeze take place in the Windy City... Chicago hosts the first round of the NFL draft tonight, rounds 2 and 3 tomorrow, and 4 through 7 Saturday. That's not because it takes them that long to choose between names they've looked at, researched, and figuratively dissected over the last few months... it's all for the media. "We" have to have time to dissect their dissections, it seems, because of course we do.

Here's an idea, NFL. You've got computers, right? Do this instead:

1) Each team submits a list of its top (7 times 32) 224 player choices to the NFL no later than the day before the announcement of the draft. 

2) All trades must be completed by, say, eight hours before the announcement.

3) The NFL simply goes through the 32 lists and as each team's draft choice comes up, they name the highest player remaining on that team's list that hasn't already been drafted.

4) Repeat 223 times. Done. No more "Tennessee is on the clock", no more "We're just looking for the best athlete available" interviews, no more stretching this God-forsaken event out to three bleep'n days!

So, Tampa's first? The first name on the list (probably Florida St's Jamies Winston) is drafted to the Bucs, crossed off all 32 lists, and then it's Tennessee's turn. If Winston wasn't first on their list, they get whomever was first; if he was, then they get whomever they had second on their list. (Marcus Mariota, I'll bet.) Mariota's crossed off everyone's lists, and we move to the number 3 team. And so on and so forth. 

A computer could do this in about five seconds, but if you need 32 NFL execs to do it instead, fine by me. It could still be over in four hours - a minute per choice, plus potty breaks!

Honestly, I don't get why the draft is such a big deal, but there's NO conceivable reason the process itself should be a star. Give us the entire list at once (or at least, the four hour version of "at once", although I'd still wait until the process was done before releasing it) and let the media hounds spend the next three months parsing it to a pulp. Don't make us sit through the parsing as it slowly emerges...

How STUPID are the combines?

Ryan O'Hanlon of Grantland nails it on the head with this "hypothetical" piece on the draft process and Oregon QB Marcus Mariota - a man who was the consensus BEST quarterback in the draft all season (you know, when they were actually playing games?), but now that we're playing with the numbers instead of watching them actually play football, it's more a Jamies Winston crowd out there. 

Let's write this down right now - February 10th, 2015: Mariota will have a better career than Winston. However you choose to define it - starts, yards, success, lack of arrests, whatever... As O'Hanlon points out, this is exactly what happened to Teddy Bridgewater last year (consensus #1 all season, fell to the bottom of the first round, was still the most successful of the rookie QBs last year) and Aaron Rodgers a few years back (same scenario, dropped to #22 and the Packers, and he turned out all right...).