The beauty of taking the world’s first Sports Informatics class is that what was formerly a time suckage is now homework. I can play my fantasy sports and call it ethnography. I can pay more attention to ESPN and call it research. Life is good. Some thoughts on recent happenings …
Mike Davis is aggravated. Nothing new, nothing shocking. This coaching gig at IU is a match made is desperation. Davis can’t be faulted for grabbing the golden ring when it was offered, and shouldn’t have to gain blessing from former Coach Knight to do so. However, his acceptance of the job also came with full awareness that he could never completely settle in. Forget “Black Coach in Indiana” and “Former Assistant Breaks Out Of Knight Inner Circle” storylines. This is as simple as “Davis is Our Rebound Relationship.” My hope for this season was that success would return to IU and give Coach Davis the first-class ticket he deserves on his way to the NBA. Ideally, he’d land back in college hoops at Alabama or Auburn or someplace where he is more than a blind date. Winning the national championship isn’t going to change anything. Winning 2-3 won’t either.
Bob Knight is teaching again, this time for pop culture. Reality shows are generally lame with content now created by casting directors and editors instead of writers. With Buffy, Battlestar Gallactica and Veronica Mars as examples, there is something that makes me ill about that. But then again, is Beauty and the Geek any worse than War at Home or Joey? So with that thin acceptance of the new TV format, how could an Indiana resident not like the idea of watching Coach Knight shape a hundred-somthing hoops wannabes into a celebrity walkon? We’ll be Tivo-ing for sure.
Gonzaga’s chant is a new spin on old bad taste. The Hall of Fame poor sportsmanship award goes to the ASU fans who once taunted then Arizona player Steve Kerr with chants of “P-L-O” in reference to his father’s death in the Beirut. But it isn’t really a big step off pace to consider any number of home arena traditions among college students these days. The “Brokeback Mountain” taunts are less personal in their offensiveness than they are culturally ignorant (unless the subtle intent was to laud the Oscar-worthiness of the opponent’s foul-drawing acting job on the court). IU fans are less creative, but there is always the requisite “Bull****” to respond to a questionable or missed call by a ref and the poor logic of “Overrated!” when the home team has the audacity to soundly beat a ranked visitor. I’ve got some future plans to study fan participation using complex systems and agent-based modeling. Maybe some easy-to-understand activities generating cool communal effects is just what the doctor ordered. Then again, bad taste is universal.
That Bronco’s Fan is a bit of a whiner and probably overreacting, yet even if the story of his beratement at the hands of his Steeler-loving teacher in Beaver Falls is only a half truth it would represent an authority figure crossing a line. I thought the story was going to be more about creative expression and wearing a jersey in the first place — some wannabe fashion police in the sportswriting world are on some campaign to make adults wearing jerseys (like myself) socially unacceptable and worthy or ridicule — but it turns out to be about power-over abuse. I’d like to know the full context and would be willing to give the teacher some benefit of doubt, but in the end there should have been some program running in his brain that monitored how accepting this kid was of the teasing. Clearly, that app wasn’t getting the CPU it needed.
Former IU football star Antwaan Randle El is this era’s Walter Payton. Same heart. Same athleticism. Soon, hopefully, same uniform. I drafted Randle El high in my fantasy football league a couple years back because I couldn’t stand the thought of not having him on my team. Patiently, I waited for him to get a chance to start, only to see his offensive coordinator go conservative on him all season with the Champion Steelers. His Super Bowl pass, though, probably helped my personal cause to see him wind up on the Bears. His price just went up, and Pittsburgh isn’t likely to meet it. Antwaan is a Chicago native, so this seems like a no-brainer. (Unfortunately, that has historically been a property of Bears upper management: no brain.) Crossing fingers.
Emily Hughes looks a lot like Alyson Hannigan. Eerily so. If this Hughes turned out to be another Tonya Harding, I would expect her own Jeff Gillooly would be a spiky-haired vampire.
