Who Dat? Not A Saintly Cheer

The New Orleans Saints are very much the feel-good story of the NFL these days. Displaced by Hurricane Katrina just four years ago, their place atop the standings this season symbolizes the resiliency of their great city.

But as Andy pointed out to me the other day, Saints' fans' cheer of choice symbolizes something quite different. To those unfamiliar, Who Dat? might sound like a southern take on the common Whose House? cheer. It isn't. It is a line popularly used in minstrel shows. (If you think minstrel shows have something to do with nomadic lute players of yore, do some Googling to learn about the minstrel shows popular from the mid-19th to mid-20th century.) Although minstrel shows were popular across the U.S. and, indeed, Europe, they marketed a southern image, presumably for "authenticity." Claiming a connection to New Orleans was, perhaps, the most popular technique.


This is not a legacy anyone should be cheering. The claim that the cheer "celebrates" New Orleans is no more persuasive than the claim that the confederate flag can be used to celebrate southern pride without celebrating slavery and racism. The confederate flag represents the South because it evokes the decision by the southern states to secede in an attempt to perpetuate slavery. Similarly, Who Dat? represents New Orleans because it evokes the city's historic ties to minstrel shows. In either case, you can't reach the ultimate conclusion without the intervening racist imagery.

Think back to the tomahawk chop, as utilized by fans of any number of teams, but particularly the Atlanta Braves. The tomahawk chop is obviously problematic because of the unmistakable connection between the mascot of these teams and the deeply racist image of Native Americans as savages. No matter how sincerely the fans believe they hold no racial animus, the act alone perpetuates a racist caricature.

Who Dat? is no better, and perhaps worse. Although the connection between the cheer and its minstrel roots may be less obvious to the general public than that between the tomahawk chop and a Native American mascot, this only serves to illustrate the intentional selection of the cheer because of its unmistakeable connection to New Orleans; it can't be coopted by another team in another city. Who Dat? is the Saints' cheer because New Orleans has a uniquely strong association with the minstrel shows that popularized the cheer originally.

Saints' fans are rightfully proud their team, but they should not be proud of this cheer. As the Saints march on toward the Super Bowl, more and more people will hear the cheer and wonder what it means. If they take the time to find out, I hope they will justifiably be embarrassed for the Saints.

A sad thought at a time when we should be so proud New Orleans, its people, and its football team.

Toddler Audibles

Every Saturday and Sunday during the fall and winter, American TV sets feature quarterbacks changing the play at the line of scrimmage. "Blue 42!" or something similar, they bark out, changing the play for their teammates.

I'm reminded of this phenomenon when I hear Katie learning to count out loud. As she reaches the limit of what she remembers, she gets creative.

"Five . . . Six . . . Yellow. . ."

Michael Phelps v. Mark Spitz

Tonight, Michael Phelps equaled Mark Spitz's 1972 record for Olympic productivity, winning his seventh medal of these Olympic games.

Of course, it's unfair to compare Spitz's performances to those of today's Olympians. Spitz was forced to swim through water as viscous as an oil slick wearing a 3-piece woolen suit, and today's Olympians swim downhill both ways and have suits made of fish scales.

Still, it bears noting that Spitz's gold medal winning times would barely win the women's events today.

Race	Spitz's Time	Current Women's World Record	Current Men's World Record
100m freestyle	51.22	Libby Trickett 52.88	Eamon Sullivan 47.05
200m freestyle	1:52	Federica Pellegrini 1:54.82	Michael Phelps 1:42.96
100m butterfly	54.27	Inge de Bruijn 56.61	Ian Crocker 50.40
200m butterfly	2:00.70	Zige Liu 2:04.18	Michael Phelps 1:52.03
4×100m freestyle relay	3:26.42	Netherlands 3:33.62	US 3:08.24
4×200m freestyle relay	7:35.78	Australia 7:44.31	US 6:58.56
4×100m medley relay	3:48.16	Australia 3:55.74	US 3:30.68

See Also:
Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records
Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records — Part II

Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records — Part II

Following up on last week's post comparing current women's world records in track & field with historical men's world records, here's a graph to illustrate what I see as a trend (To get a larger version, click on the image):

The y axis is the year that the historical men's record eclipsed the current women's record. The x axis is a logarithmic scale showing the distance of the various events in meters. I'm no statistician, but I see a clear trend here.

Simply, the longer the event, the more impressive the women's best is relative to men's historical performances. Whereas the world's fastest men have been running faster than Florence Griffith Joyner's (somewhat disputed) 10.49s in the 100m since Charlie Paddock ran 10.4s in 1921, it took until 1958 for the world's fastest male marathon runner to go any faster than Paula Radcliffe's current world best of 2:15:25.

Why might this be the case? I can think of a few reasons.

First, the longer distance events – and the training required to excel at them – appear to have not been taken very seriously by athletes at the dawn of the last century. Wikipedia notes that the winner of the first modern Olympic marathon in 1896 thought it wise to stop at an inn for a glass of wine mid-race.

Second, it may be that whatever athletic advantage men have due to human sexual dimorphism, this advantage is reduced when it comes to the traits that make for successful long distance runners. Men may have an insurmountable advantage over women in the creation of fast twitch muscle fibers that make for successful sprinters, but may have a much smaller (or nonexistent) advantage in the development of slow twitch muscle fibers and cardiovascular fitness that make for excellent marathoners.

Previously:
Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records

See Also:
Michael Phelps v. Mark Spitz (comparing Spitz's performance against today's female records)

Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records

Unable to find a webpage that had all this material easily available, I decided to make one.

The table below contains track & field world record information taken from Wikipedia. On the left is the current women's world record. On the right is the first historical men's world record that surpassed today's best female performance. (The list is limited to those events that have a world record progression page on Wikipedia.)

Current Women's Record		Historical Men's Record
100m Florence Griffith Joyner 10.49	1988	Charlie Paddock 10.4	1921
4 x 100m East Germany 41.37	1985	United States 41.0	1924
800m Jarmila Kratochvílová 1:53.28	1983	Ted Meredith 1:51.9	1912*
1500m Qu Yunxia 3:50.46	1993	Jules Ladoumegue 3:49.2	1930
1 Mile Svetlana Masterkova 4:12.56	1996	Paavo Nurmi 4:10.4	1923
3000m Wang Junxia 8:06:11	1993	Gunder Hägg 8:01.2	1942
5000m Tirunesh Dibaba 14:11.15	2008	Taisto Maki 14:08.8	1939
10000m Wang Junxia 29:31.78	1993	Emil Zátopek 29:28.2	1949
Marathon Paula Radcliffe 2:15:25	2003	Sergey Popov 2:15:17	1958
High Jump Stefka Kostadinova 2.09m	1987	Lester Steers 2.10m	1941
Long Jump Galina Chistyakova 7.52m	1988	Peter O'Connor 7.61m	1901*
Triple Jump Inessa Kravets 15.50m	1995	Daniel Ahearn 15.52m	1911
Pole Vault Yelena Isinbayeva 5.01m	2005	John Pennel 5.05m	1963

* There is no men's record on the Wikipedia world record progression page that would be defeated by today's female world record holder. The entry listed is the first world record recognized in the world record progression page.

Subsequently:
Modern Women's World Records vs. Historical Men's World Records — Part II


See Also:
Michael Phelps v. Mark Spitz (comparing Spitz's performance against today's female records)

This is Why Relegation is Awesome. This is Why Relegation is Terrifying.

The Great Escape of 2008 is complete. 30 minutes ago, Fulham defeated Portsmouth, 1-0, to outpoint Reading (which defeated Derby, 4-0) to remain in the English Premier League.

I am completely shocked. As the commentators on Fox Soccer Channel noted, Danny Murphy's goal in the 76^th minute means £50 million for the Fulham ownership. For me, it means that I get to cheer for Fulham in the EPL in 2008-09 — something that just blows my mind, considering that I wrote the team off for dead 5 weeks ago.

Go Fulham!

Previously:
Hoping for the Chance to Eat Relegation Crow
The Fifth Stage of Relegation Grief

More on Relegation:
Why I am a Fulham Fan (...and Why You Should Be, Too) — Part I
What if MLB Had Promotion & Relegation?

Update (5/14): It's three days later, and I still think back to Fulham's escape and smile. This breakneck migration from the lowest low to the highest high feels better than any championship win I've ever celebrated.

Hoping for the Chance to Eat Relegation Crow

Following their crushing defeat to Sunderland one month ago, I wrote that Fulham – the EPL team nearest my heart – was "mathematically certain[]" to be relegated down to the League Championship of English football. This Saturday, we'll see if I was wrong.

Following my April 5^th relegation obituary for the squad, Fulham – a team that had not won an away match since September 2006 – promptly won two away matches at Reading and Manchester City. Yesterday, the team won a vital game at home, pushing Birmingham further into relegation territory. More importantly, this victory temporarily pushes them out of the relegation zone — the team is currently tied with Reading for the last slot, but is ahead of Reading on points. If the season ended today, they'd escape relegation by the narrowest of margins.

Next weekend is the final weekend of the season, and Fulham has the chance to survive. (Note: As I mentioned in my original EPL post last June, the final relegation slot was also determined during the last weekend of the 2006-07 season.)

If Fulham wins and Reading wins by less than a truly historic blow-out (the goal differential between the two is +6 Fulham), Fulham is in.

If Fulham draws, Reading draws or loses, and Birmingham draws or loses, Fulham is in.

If Fulham loses and both Reading and Birmingham lose, Fulham is in.

In all other circumstances, Fulham will be relegated.

Fulham plays at the somewhat-mighty Portsmouth next weekend. Birmingham plays at home against the game Blackburn Rovers. Unfortunately for Fulham, Reading goes up against Derby County. It doesn't really matter that it's an away game for Reading — Derby is statistically the worst team to ever play in the English top league. Even if Derby beats Reading, its 14-point total for the season is the worst in the history of the English game.

So it looks like Fulham has to win. I'll be traveling during the game, which will help ease my anxiety as the team battles for its EPL life. Go Fulham!

Unconscience Error

I don't read many articles on car racing, but I like it when they contain wonderful malapropisms. Here's a bit from an ESPN article on Indycar's attempt to woo Dale Earnhardt, Jr. into the driver's seat for one of their races:
If Earnhardt's conscious wouldn't let him accept the contract, but his conscience would still permit it, then I suppose Mr. Gossage should only negotiate with his counterparty when the latter is unconscious or subject to subconscious influence.

On a Purely Parochial Note...

...I wish the Stanford Women's Basketball Team would hurry up and win the national title so that ESPN can get back to telling me how AWESOME the women's teams are from Tennessee, Connecticut, and Rutgers.

It's almost rude for Stanford to interrupt ESPN's adoration of women's basketball teams east of the Mississippi.

The Fifth Stage of Relegation Grief

Twice within the pages of this blog I have praised the European system of relegation and promotion in professional sports.

Last June, I cited relegation as one of the reasons that the English Premier League ("EPL") of soccer/football was interesting. At the time, I said that relegation was the "awesome Shiva of sports, destroyer and transformer." Last September, in one of the more heavily commented posts on this blog, I argued that adding relegation and promotion to major league baseball would result in a more dynamic and interesting league.

Well, these chickens have come home to roost. With today's embarrassing 1-3 home loss to Sunderland, it looks like all but a mathematical certainty that Fulham, the EPL team that I root for, is going to get relegated.

A quick review for those of you who don't know what relegation means. Here's the relevant bit from my post in June on the topic:

England (like many a soccer-addled country) has multiple professional soccer leagues. Relegation means that the bottom 3 EPL teams are sent to the 2nd flight league, the Championship, and the top Championship teams rise to the EPL. This happens serially, with each league sending their best teams up and their worst teams down.

The result is something like Darwinism for sports. Good teams are rewarded, bad teams are punished. You don't have the Milwaukee Brewers — a profitable team that will never, ever do anything meaningful in the top US baseball league. Since team owners are not monopolistically locked into their leagues, and since the lower league teams aren't farm teams, owners of EPL teams simply cannot field a mediocre product year-in-and-year-out and count on reaping profits from an over-loyal fanbase.

With 5 games left in the season, bottom-dwelling Derby County is a distant 20th place, mathematically assured of relegation (and is in hot competition with the 2002-03 Sunderland team for the worst point total in English football history). 18th place Bolton looks like it could close the gap with 17th place Birmingham. 19th place Fulham? Well, it's going to finish in 19th place.

Time and again this season, Fulham has seized defeat (or at least a draw) from the jaws of victory. They have given up a late goal to their opponent in the waning moments of the match more times than I care to recall. Although seven teams in the EPL lost the same number or more games than Fulham (17), it's Fulham that will be relegated knowing that it has a chance to lead the league in ties (12). Most of those ties could have been wins, but for the final 10 minutes.

So it's Fulham to the Champions League League Championship. What am I to do?

Well, I certainly can't pick a new EPL team — most certainly not yet, not one year after deciding to root for Fulham and not while Fulham has a chance to make a quick return to the top flight for the 2009-10 season. I'll go back to enjoying the EPL on Fox Soccer Channel in the same blasé, disinterested manner I did before I cheered for a single team. I'll simply go back to watching football because I like watching football, even when I don't know much or care much about who is playing whom.

And I'll be a Fulham fan in the way that all remote fans followed their favorite teams in the days before extensive television coverage. I'll follow the box score. (Although almost half the EPL games in a given week are televised in the US, it's impossible to get Champions League League Champsionship games on your TV without purchasing a separate and expensive channel.) I'll read about Fulham competing against a new round of names that sound strange to me. Just when I got used to the Hogwarts-esque Tottenham Hotspur and Aston Villa, the Champions League League Championship will bring me Fulham against Crystal Palace and Sheffield Wednesday.

And I'll hope that Fulham stays the Fulham I like: a team overloaded with Yankee players, owned and mismanaged Mohamed Al-Fayed, and a team that battles for survival and makes you cheer like a crazy person when they actually win the big one.

Go Fulham.
Update (5/14): How wrong I was.

Et Tu, Monty?

I do not like noncompete clauses in employment contracts. You see, I tend to agree with legal theorists who argue that the relative nonenforceability of noncompete clauses in California has helped create Silicon Valley, creating a legal competitive advantage over other tech clusters.

Still, I'm not exactly thrilled to see the Stanford's still-much-beloved former coach Mike Montgomery is slated to coach Stanford's rival Cal. I feel like an implied, purely emotional covenant not to compete has been violated.

In professional wrestling, when a Good Guy becomes a Bad Guy, they say he turns heel. Stanford basketball fans were already in a weakened state after hearing the (not too surprising) news that Robin Lopez would join his brother Brook in the NBA draft. Catching us dazed and stumbling around the wrestling ring, it now appears that Monty is ready to finish us off with a suplex.

Any Given Sunday

New York @ 10:36 pm on Super Bowl Sunday, celebrating a shocking NY Giants victory: Cars honking & people yelling.

New York @ 10:36 pm on a normal Sunday: Cars honking & people yelling.

Way to go, Giants!

CSTV's New Basketball Gametracker Interface: The Finest Sports Ticker Tape Yet

As an out-of-market fan of Stanford basketball, Nebraska football, and Fulham football/soccer, I'm accustomed to "watching" games online via dramatizations of game statistics. It can be pretty dull stuff, since you're merely watching statistics like 10:25 Free Throw GOOD by STAN's Lopez, Brook being stitched together via a dynamic web interface.

There's only so much drama that you can inject into the snippets of game information some poor drone is feeding into the information service that ESPN et al. use for these displays. Familiar with the general un-watchability of these screens, I'm STUNNED by one that I just discovered. As far as basketball goes, CSTV's new basketball interface raises the bar. Obviously, the action still has the Morse Code pacing of erratic statistical blurbs, but the representation is beautiful and flowing:


It's nearly watchable.

Seeing is believing. Watch a bit of a game yourself. Good job, CSTV.

So What'll It Be, Oklahoma City?

Last night, the group that owns the Seattle SuperSonics announced its intention to move the Sonics to Oklahoma City. Although Seattle certainly would lament losing its basketball team, Oklahoma City did show itself deserving of an NBA team through its rabid support of the New Orleans Hornets during the two seasons that team played in Oklahoma after Hurricane Katrina.

If the Sonics move to Oklahoma City, the main question I'll have is what the name of the team will be.

The Sonics began in 1966 and were named after the Boeing 2707 airplane, a supersonic plane to be built in Seattle to compete with the European-made Concorde. Environmental concerns and federal budget cuts led to the cancellation of the Boeing 2707 in 1971, before a single plane was manufactured. Thus, the Seattle SuperSonics are named after a plane that was never manufactured. [If other cities followed this example and had sports teams named after things that were never built, I guess we'd have the Chicago Mile-High Buildings and the New York Expressways (or, arguably, the Cathedrals).]

So what are the Sonics going to do with a name that is only relevant if it is in Seattle? Well, they've got a number of examples to follow.

The Region-less Name
First, most relocated franchises aren't in the position of the Sonics. It's not too confusing when the aforementioned Hornets decide to retain their moniker after moving from Charlotte to New Orleans, since no one exclusively associates flying pests with North Carolina. In baseball, the Athletics have marched from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland and (it appears) now to Fremont without changing their name.

The Abandoned Regional Name
If the Sonics dump their current name, they'll follow in the footsteps of the former Houston Oilers.

Before they rebranded their team the Tennessee Titans, the former Houston Oilers played one season as the Tennessee Oilers. Although this franchise (quite bitterly) held onto the rights to the name "Houston Oilers" (preventing Houston from following in the footsteps of Cleveland and returning the Houston Oilers to the field down the road), they escaped to a different (if not more relevant) name the next season.

The Retained Regional Name
If the Sonics retain their current name, they'll join a strange group of teams whose names hearken back to an abandoned geography.

Two of these regionally confused teams are in Los Angeles. What are the Los Angeles Dodgers dodging? Trolleys in 19th century Brooklyn, of course. What lakes are the Los Angeles Lakers talking about? Well, that'd be the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota, back when they were the Minneapolis Lakers.

Finally, the gem of relocated franchise names: What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Utah? Jazz music, perhaps? Mormons in Utah get to swing because the Utah Jazz played five seasons as the New Orleans Jazz before moving to Salt Lake City in 1979.

So what'll it be, Oklahoma City? Are you keeping the Sonics – and with it a Seattle-centric reference to a plane that was never built – or are you going in a different direction?

My advice? Go with a truth-in-advertising name. Giants, Titans, Chargers — these mythic names are generic, for all their braggadocio. I like my teams named after an occupation that is associated with the region: Packers, Steelers, Brewers. (I guess gambling on this theme is what got the Sonics in trouble.)

Since Oklahoma City is home to two of the nation's largest energy companies, how about a name along those lines:

• The Oklahoma City Drillers or Oklahoma City Pumpers (probably too much playground taunting with these two)
• The Oklahoma City Carbon (a name Al Gore would love)
• The Oklahoma City Wranglers (too close to Cowboys?)

Stanford vs. U$C, October 6, 2007 Greatest Las Vegas Upset of All Time

It's been about a year since I last posted anything about Stanford athletics and about three-and-a-half years since I've posted my reaction to a Stanford victory. Sparse discussion of Stanford athletics has something to do with a conscious attempt to avoid reliving college in print, but it's also fueled by Stanford's inability to seriously compete in football or basketball these past few years.

Well, last night Stanford really competed.

In 2003, Forbes magazine estimated that somewhere between $80 to $380 billion is illegally gambled annually on sports in the United States. And although ESPN's website maintains a link to the Las Vegas odds on various sporting events, the network likes to pretend that gambling doesn't exist. Since they largely ignore gambling, here's a statistic about Stanford's 24-23 victory last night over #2 USC that you won't hear repeated ad nauseum on SportsCenter:

(According to the Aspergerians running Wikipedia) Stanford's 24-23 victory over USC was the greatest football upset in the 60-year history of spread betting. Stanford entered the game a 41-point underdog.

What if MLB Had Promotion & Relegation?

I've mentioned before in this blog that the system of promotion & relegation in European league sports is the "awesome Shiva of sports, destroyer and transformer." US sports leagues are worse for not having promotion & relegation; however, even with 24/7 coverage of sports in this country, most sports fans have no idea what promotion & relegation are and how they'd change their favorite sports.

O Dear MLB Fan, if your sport had promotion & relegation like the European soccer leagues, the bottom three teams in the MLB would move down to the AAA league, and the top three teams in AAA would move up to the majors. The end of the season wouldn't merely mark a battle for the wild card spot: It'd be a life-and-death battle to stay in the MLB and we'd all be glued to our televisions.

If the baseball season ended today, and MLB/AAA promotion & relegation operated the same way it does in the English Premier League, the Nashville Sounds (89W/55L, .618) of the Pacific Coast League and the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees (84W/59L, .587) of the International League would be promoted to the MLB. Playing a 4-team mini-tournament for the final slot would be Sacramento River Cats (.583), the Toledo Mud Hens (.573), the Durham Bulls (.599), and the Iowa Cubs (.549).

As it currently stands, 6 MLB teams – the Chicago White Sox (.433), the Kansas City Royals (.433), the Pittsburgh Pirates (.427), the Baltimore Orioles (.427), the Florida Marlins (.427), and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (.414) – are seriously at risk of finishing in the bottom 3 slots for the year. Relative to other teams in the league, these teams are horrible. And because we have a system where they're locked into the top flight professional baseball league, they can get away with being horrible.

Under a system without promotion & relegation, the players for these teams will simply go through the motions for the rest of the season, playing their remaining games lackadaisically. The best of these teams, the White Sox and the Royals, are 25.5 games out of playoff contention: What do they care who wins or loses the remaining games?

Under a system with promotion & relegation, these players would be playing like madmen. Presently, sportswriters are shocked when teams that have had a rough season play their best at the end of the season. If we had promotion & relegation, this would be commonplace, as each threatened team battled to stay in the top league.

Owners would be forced to invest in their teams or risk falling out of the league — you wouldn't see them employing a penny-pinching strategy of running a wildly profitable but unsuccessful team (See Bud Selig or (outside of baseball) the Golden State Warriors).

What do we get instead of relegation & promotion? We get a Congressionally-sanctioned monopoly for major league baseball. We get meaningful games at the end of the season only for those teams at the top. We get a farm system where the teams are locked into their divisions and financially dependent on their big-league paymasters. We get less.

7 of the Chicago White Sox's final 14 games this season are against the Kansas City Royals. The team that wins the majority of these games will move up the table. The team that loses the majority will probably end the season in the bottom three teams.

Without promotion & relegation, you don't care about these games and nobody else does, either.

With promotion & relegation, you'd care, the players would care, the owners would care, and you can rest assured that the people of Chicago and Kansas City would care.

Why I am a Fulham Fan (...and Why You Should Be, Too) — Part III

(Check here for Part I of this post, and click here for Part II.)

Part I of this post argued that the EPL is worth your time and attention. Part II helped guide you away from 19 EPL teams not quite worth your fandom. Now, it's time for me to convince you, probably-a-Yankee blog reader, why you should be a Fulham fan.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit up front that my wife's friend's boyfriend plays for Fulham. Naturally, you understand that this 3-degrees-of-separation relationship makes it more difficult, not easier, for me to be a Fulham fan.

First, football players move around a lot, and there are no guarantees that this guy will be playing for Fulham in the fall. Because of a new global television deal, EPL teams will receive a massive influx of cash next year. As a result, Fulham – like many other teams in the league – is cleaning house in anticipation of purchasing players away from other domestic leagues. He's still a Cottager (Fulham's stadium is called Craven Cottage, and thus the players are sometimes called "Cottagers."), and I expect him to be a Cottager in the fall. But I won't hold my breath.

Second, rooting for a sports team because your wife's friend's boyfriend plays for them sounds an awful lot like a man crush. With professional male sports leagues standing as the last conspicuous bastion of rank homophobia within mass culture, fandom based on a foundation of mancrushery simply would not do.

Now that you've waded through pages and pages of preamble, it's finally time for the final list of...

Reasons You Should be a Fulham Fan

1. They Have the Most Americans of Any EPL Team. Sorry, international readers, but this article presumes a Yankee audience, so this is point #1. US players Brian McBride and Carlos Bocanegra anchor the Fulham team. Clint Dempsey joined the team in January from the US's MLS league, and provided the goal against Liverpool that kept Fulham in the EPL. Although he's from New Zealand, reserve midfielder Simon Elliott attended college in the US and played in the US's MLS afterward.
   
   Because of all these US ties, commentators will occasionally refer to Craven Cottage as "Little America." Between regularly playing Americans and featuring team colors that are red, white, and black, Fulham is one hue away from looking like a US team in international play.
   


2. They Have the Right Kind of Tycoon Owner. Many EPL clubs are owned by eccentric people of gigantic wealth. Chelsea is owned/ruled by Russian oil oligarch Roman Abramovich. Manchester United is owned by Malcolm Glazer, a US food executive despised by ManU fans. Liverpool was recently acquired by US investors George Gillett Jr. and Tom Hicks in a move that has Reds fans on edge.
   
   Compare this motley crew with Fulham's owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed. Yes, that's the same Al-Fayed who owns the Harrods department store in London, and whose star-crossed son Dodi was alongside Princess Diana that fateful night in 1997. Some might find Fulham's association with Al-Fayed to be off-putting, but when forced to choose between Al-Fayed and a Russian kleptocrat or a bunch of American conglomerate executives, I'll pick Al-Fayed any day.
   


3. The Underdog Factor — They're Not Even the Best Team in Their Neighborhood. As noted in Part II of this post, I'm averse to picking a team at the top of the EPL table. You should pick a good team, but not a great one, and Fulham is on the cusp of good-ness (A 10-game winless streak from February 4 through May 4 of this season argues against them being good right now.) When Fulham wins a game, it's because they really labored at it. Maybe I just like the struggle.
   
   According to Google Maps, Fulham's stadium is less than 2 miles away from Chelsea's stadium, Stamford Bridge. (For comparison, the closest MLB ballparks are New York's Yankee and Shea Stadiums, which are nearly 10 miles apart. ) This kind of close proximity to big, fancy Chelsea lends middle-of-the-table Fulham with a kind of hardscrabble legitimacy.
   


4. Your Friends Will Say, "Fulham Who?" Once you get to the point where you recognize the jerseys of EPL teams when you see them on the backs of people walking around in the US, you realize that 99% of these jerseys are either Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, or Arsenal jerseys.
   
   ...but when you start rocking a Fulham jersey, your friends will ask "Which team is that?" After explaining that it's Fulham, they'll ask you why you're a Fulham fan.
   

...and you'll launch into a 3-part narrative explaining your allegiance, a move that will wear down their resolve and simply force them to order the next round of beer.

Go Fulham!

Why I am a Fulham Fan (...and Why You Should Be, Too) — Part II

(Click here for Part I of this post, click here for Part III.)

Now that you've decided the EPL is worth your attention, it's time to choose your team. We start with 20 teams.

Why the Other 19 EPL Teams
Don't Quite Deserve Your Support

1. You cannot start out your EPL fandom rooting for the Goliaths: Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal, or Liverpool. For purposes of illustration, imagine this conversation:

   New Fan: "Hey, I picked my favorite baseball team."
   You: "Oh yeah? What team did you pick?"
   New Fan: "The All-Star Team"
   You: "..."

   These teams have better players and spend drastically more than the rest of the league. The result is that they are too good relative to the other squads and should be promoted to some kind of intergalactic football league. Cheering for them is like cheering for Goliath.
   
   16 teams remain.


2. Forget about rooting for newly-promoted Sunderland, Birmingham, or Derby. Choosing a favorite team without a preexisting geographic affinity skirts dangerously close to poseur-dom. To choose newly-promoted teams – teams you couldn't possibly have watched on TV, ever – would ring hollow.
   
   13 teams remain.
   


3. You're not taking a vacation to Newcastle, Greater Manchester, Portsmouth, Liverpool, or Middlesborough and thus cannot support teams based there. Bill Simmons applied this rule, and it makes sense. Having chosen a team, you'll eventually want to experience the real thing and go to a game or two. A family vacation to post-industrial England or the Northern English coast? Not happening.
   
   Sorry Newcastle United, Middlesborough, Wigan Athletic, Bolton Wanderers, Blackburn Rovers, Everton, Portsmouth, or Manchester City.
   
   5 teams remain.


4. Reading is not ready for you. I want to root for Reading. They were promoted this season and had an awesome year, finishing in the top half of the table. They play with admirable reckless abandon. Yet Reading's high crime rate recently earned it the title of Worst Place in Britain to Raise a Family. Also, Reading has not been granted city status by Queen Elizabeth, a snub that leads me to suspect that Reading lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. A certain joie de vivre. ...and a bunch of other pouty French phrases that presently escape me.
   
   4 teams remain.


5. You're not going to root for a team with colors that belong on a pastry. You're not rooting for Aston Villa or West Ham. With West Ham narrowly escaping relegation this past season, the EPL has two teams clad in a magenta and sky blue color scheme. Whatever else they are, these squads are a garish visual insult.
   
   2 teams remain.


6. Tottenham Hotspur is a solid choice, but Fulham's a better one. It's tempting to root for Tottenham Hotspur, if for no other reason than it sounds like it belongs in Hogwarts with Gryffindor, Slytherin, and the other magical houses.
   
   Tottenham's logo includes an homage to cock-fighting. They're in London, so you might actually see a game. The team's record is good, but not great, so you're not just picking a favorite. Yet, whatever positives Spurs have encouraging you to root for them, you'll see in Part III that Spurs don't compare with Fulham.

Why I am a Fulham Fan (...and Why You Should Be, Too) — Part I

(Check here for Part II of this post, and click here for Part III.)

This time a year ago, I couldn't have told you that it's a sleepy time of the year for soccer/football fans. I would have only the vaguest idea that the English Premier League – arguably the best domestic football league in the world – had wrapped up its games for the year. I probably couldn't have told you that there won't be many games until the domestic leagues start back up in August (this being a non-World Cup year).

You see, I'd been Tivoing the occasional English Premier League ("EPL") game for the past 4 years, but I didn't really care. Kind of like having a baseball game idly playing on the TV or radio during the summer, I found these games to be pleasant background noise while fussing about the house, doing chores. When I'd hear the fans roar as I was taking out the recycling, I'd come back to the living room to replay the goal.

Something changed this season and I became vastly more interested in English soccer than previously. I'm not sure what prompted this bout of johnny-come-lately fandom. Perhaps this phenomenon is merely the flourishing of my long-budding Anglophilia, a condition nurtured by law school's frequent reference to the English heritage underlying our legal system. Whatever the cause, I'd Tivo all 5 live games available on the straightforwardly named Fox Soccer Channel, hyperwatching them on fast-forward later. I battled a restless night or two by perusing Wikipedia, learning about the various teams and traditions.

Halfway through this past season, I determined that this diffuse interest in the entire English top league would not do, and that I'd need to actively root for one team above all others to enjoy the sport more fully. A friend referred me to a piece written by the popular and silver-penned sportswriter Bill Simmons, who guided his readers on a similar journey at the start of last season (I won't spoil it by revealing his choice). Simmons (whose column on ESPN.com is probably the most widely read sportswriting in the US) prompted other web denizens to offer their odes to the EPL. This is my ode.

Yet, before I advance the argument made clear by this post's title, let me explain for a minute why you, probably-a-Yankee blog reader...

Why You Should be Enthusiastic About the EPL at All

1. This sport is the most popular sport in the world. Occasionally you'll hear that the Super Bowl is the most watched event globally, or that such-and-such cricket match is where it's at. These are silly distractions. Soccer/football is the mama of all sports. Billions and billions of Elvis fans can't be wrong. Give it a chance.
   
   Of the domestic leagues, the EPL is globally the most popular and uniformly attracts the best players from the top of the table to the bottom. An Anglophobe? France's Ligue 1, Germany's Bundesliga, Italy's Serie A, and Spain's La Liga are also quite good, but I can't help you much with any of these.


2. The winner of the regular season wins the league, unlike US sport leagues, where the winner of a season-end tournament wins the league. No tournament = no lucky team to win the league at the end of the year after a forgettable season. You're rewarded for consistent play all season long. Somehow that seems more fair.
   
   The downside of lacking a year-end tournament? Sometimes a lopsided league winner will be determined a few weekends or a month before the end of the season. Combating the ennui of a long-determined winner is...


3. The Wonder of Relegation. Relegation is the awesome Shiva of sports, destroyer and transformer.
   
   England (like many a soccer-addled country) has multiple professional soccer leagues. Relegation means that the bottom 3 EPL teams are sent to the 2^nd flight league, the Championship, and the top Championship teams rise to the EPL. This happens serially, with each league sending their best teams up and their worst teams down.
   
   The result is something like Darwinism for sports. Good teams are rewarded, bad teams are punished. You don't have the Milwaukee Brewers — a profitable team that will never, ever do anything meaningful in the top US baseball league. Since team owners are not monopolistically locked into their leagues, and since the lower league teams aren't farm teams, owners of EPL teams simply cannot field a mediocre product year-in-and-year-out and count on reaping profits from an over-loyal fanbase.
   
   Winning the league – as Manchester United did this year – is great, but a string of victories resulting in a league cup lacks the life-or-death urgency of those clubs locked in a struggle to stay afloat in the league. This year, the final relegation slot came down to a duel between two bottom teams on the last weekend, exacting such an emotional toll that both the winning and the losing managers quit after the game. That's crazy, tense, exciting stuff. Compare that to the games at the bottom in US leagues once teams have been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. Those games are so boring and lifeless that admission should be free.

It should be easy to get excited about the most popular sports league on earth. More difficult is deciding which of the 20 teams deserves your allegiance, your hopes and your heartache. For guidance on this daunting task, and to read about why you should be a Fulham Football Club fan, check out Part II of this post.

Changing the NACDA Directors' Cup Scoring System to Change the Winner?

In 1993, the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) established the Directors' Cup to reward the best overall NCAA Division I (other divisions & the NAIA were added 1995) athletic program in the country. North Carolina won the first Directors' Cup in 1993-94; however, the twelve subsequent Division I cups have been won by my alma mater, Stanford University.

On November 1, the NACDA announced a new scoring methodology for the contest. At first glance, the new rules – scoring both indoor/outdoor track, scoring all sports for which the NCAA/NAIA offers a championship (a change required by a new Program Philosophy) – do not seem to harm Stanford's chances of continued dominance in this contest. However, I can't help but wonder why the NACDA would change the rules other than to unseat Stanford University (and Williams College, which has won 10 of 11 Division III cups) from the top of the standings. (Also, note that UC Davis would likely still be winning the Division II award had it not started migrating sports to NCAA Division I in 2003.)

The original sponsor the Directors' Cup, Sears, ended its sponsorship of the contest in 2003. The present sponsor is a much less high profile organization (The U.S. Sports Academy). Although I don't know why Sears terminated its relationship with the program, the annual standings for the contest tell the tale: No one cares about the Directors' Cup, for the end result is almost always the same. Since the contest appears practically predetermined, the media ignores it. Why would a retailer throw advertising dollars at a contest sponsorship when ESPN et al. do not amplify those dollars through coverage of the contest?

Don't get me wrong: I'm a Stanford partisan, and I grin a big, provincial grin whenever Stanford wins any contest. Yet, whether it be through a rule change or a rough year, it's clear that their string of consecutive Directors' Cups cannot last. If Stanford & Williams continue their dominance unabated, I wouldn't be surprised to hear one day that the NACDA has decided to stop expending energy and resources on tabulating a contest that is not a contest.

A Parting Note: The reality is that collegiate athletic programs change very little from one year to another, so it's not surprising that the same affluent school, interested in investing in teams in each and every arcane varsity sport, would win every year. Maybe the NACDA is taking advice from U.S. News & World Report, whose overall collegiate rankings appear to be based on a methodology that changes every year, even if the data measured (the excellence of one school compared to another) do not.