Love Children

TSLP's personal favorite, Tom Brady, appears soon to become the proud father of a child with his former girlfriend, the actress Bridgette Moynahan. I read today that another TSLP favorite, young Lebron James, will soon be parent to his second child, who will also be born outside of wedlock. Babies everywhere in our sports world, but not so many marriages. What's going on with our contemporary athletes? (I guess the answer is obvious.) Normally TSLP avoids such controversial topics, preferring to argue in favor of gambling and against drug testing. But the huge moneyed interests and fabulous wealth that bankroll this blog have demanded that I address even this touchy subject.

My thoughts on the love children of our pro superstars.

1. Why is everyone so afraid of this subject? We'll stick a microphone in any athlete's face and hound him around the clock if there's even the slightest whiff of a drug issue. Gambling scandals have always been good press. Nowadays, our rough-talking athletes are even being held to the standard of contemporary political dogmatism, not the standard of the locker room, in their speech. (I've talked about Tim Hardaway and Michael Irvin. Just today comes news that former Celtics great Cedric Maxwell is in trouble for cracking that NBA referee Violet Palmer should "go back in the kitchen".) My point is, no behavior or comment of a prominent athlete goes overlooked by the aggressive media or omniscient commissioners, except for one thing: the athlete's mating habits. Why can a pro athlete run around and father children by multiple women all over the country with barely a mention, but let him pause in his love-making to utter some politically insensitive comment and certain public interests and commentators (and maybe me) will take turns telling us how upset we are with his behavior? Why is the fearless press so reticent?

2. There are a lot of athletes I'm criticizing here, at least it seems so to me. The "news" that an athlete has fathered children casually, or by his girlfriend, appears so commonplace that it hardly rises to the surface. TV announcers or magazine article writers will so easily, even glowingly, mention that an athlete is proudly expecting a child by his unmarried paramour that, in my mind, it becomes as much a comment or reflection on the commentator as it is on the athlete. Doesn't anyone realize or care to bring to mind that a child born into an unstable marital situation or incomplete home life starts out with a significant hurdle to overcome? That irresponsible sex is, well, an act of substantial irresponsibility? That kids, at least whenever possible, deserve to have the benefit of a well-grounded family situation? The ideal is not always possible, of course, and children can and do overcome this deficit, and do so regularly. But no one's going to say that on average having estranged, unmarried parents is better for children. Even a dad who is rich and famous and on television every week, but from one thousand miles away, is not likely to be the equivalent of a regular dad getting paid by the hour and coming home every night.

3. A lot of debate crops up from time to time on whether or not it is appropriate for people to regard athletes as "role models," or indeed even for athletes to think of themselves in this way. The professional leagues, however, seem of a single mind on this question, expecting their players to represent the league in both their on- and off-field conduct. Morals clauses in the standard player contracts, coupled with the suspension power of league commissioners, reflect the leagues' concern. So why are players and others corrected for verbal insensitivity or recreational drug use, while the rest of a player's conduct goes unaddressed? Which is more harmful, saying bad words in public (or smoking some marijuana) or fathering children around the country toward which one has no plausible expectation of being a decent parent? At least the victims of insensitive words can defend themselves.

(4. Even when it comes to athletes who abuse their wives or lovers, the leagues take a step back. The commissioners refuse to punish an athlete for his spouse abuse unless and until he's convicted in a court of law. Why is that the standard? Why is the moral obligation of a league commissioner to police the game delegated to an anonymous jury? Commissioners have investigative authority. They should use it, and if it's determined that some athlete did in fact commit the crimes against a spouse that are alleged, then that athlete should be suspended in proportion to the seriousness of the conduct.)

5. I'm not saying athletes who father children should be suspended. But when such conduct, especially if it's adulterous, comes to the attention of the commissioner, it needs to be addressed as a serious, irresponsible matter. I realize that male pro athletes, unlike law professors, are particularly subject to the attention of beautiful young women, and that the long hours on the road leave plenty of time and energy for romantic pursuits. But we commonly claim that people in the public arena must be held to a higher standard that comes with the decision to seek such celebrity. Why not here? Maybe if athletes were less promiscuous the frequency with which young women made themselves available to them would diminish. Perhaps a certain amount of protection of the player from fans needs to be considered. Sound unduly paternalistic? Our professional leagues take many steps to keep athletes away from drug dealers, bookmakers and gamblers; they police what the players wear to games and what they say to fans. Requiring NBA or MLB hotels to keep adoring bar patrons away from visiting athletes would not be much of a step.

6. Maybe the unions are active on this front (unbeknownst to me), but this is also a financial issue. I doubt too many athletes are thrilled to find out they are financially responsible for a child of a woman with whom they had only a fleeting relationship.

7. I realize that many pro athletes are themselves products of unions outside of wedlock. But so what? I don't buy the argument that this fact of birth makes them unable to live life differently. These are men: young men, but not infants and not animals. They can make decisions and are plenty smart enough to see that sex (even "protected") can have serious consequences. Self-control is always an option. Young people should be encouraged to choose it. The commissioners and union leaders should use their offices to help athletes make the right choices, especially when those choices are not easy.

Book Notes: Seven Seconds or Less

Seven Seconds or Less: My Season on the Bench with the Runnin' and Gunnin' Phoenix Suns, by Jack McCallum (2006)

All sports books come in one of four categories, and "Seven Seconds" is not in the category I prefer to read. But after I expressed an interest in this book, it arrived at my office doorstep. Got to love free. I'll read (a little) of almost anything stuck in front of me, for at least 100 pages. Since that was about half the book (and a quick 100 at that) I went ahead and finished it. Not to imply I'm slumming. This book was pretty fun, and nothing wrong with a quick, light read to relax away the evening hours.

Just in case your books don't arrive gratis, here are a few thoughts to consider in spending your book budget:

1. Just how many times can the "F" swear be used in a conversation/book/film until we're totally inured to its scatological effect? Do people really use this swear so often? Have American schools (I'm referring to the recess part) diminished so much that kids know no other swears or other terms to express emphasis? I mean, what the f---? Anyway, McCallum fills his book with F bombs. The Suns' coaches use them, the players use them, so many people were using them I didn't know who was f'ing who. I suppose this is the (cheap) way a writer infuses his book with gritty realism, allowing the reader to hear the unfiltered frankness of talk in certain walks of life. I also suppose this is the language of youth, and that such language allows middle-aged coaches to appear youthful (albeit probably pathetically) to the young people they work with every day. The coaches at least should be mature enough to find some other adjective.

2. So on the one hand the book shares the gritty realism of frank locker-room talk. On the other hand is the utter banality of most of what the people quoted in the book had to say. Minus approximately 1000 swears, almost everything the people said could have been reproduced in a newspaper without major repercussions. Where was the real frank talk, not the swearing, but the "everyone hates that guy" or "he can't coach" revelations? Either one of two things happened.

3. The first is compromise. McCallum asked for and received a season-long insider's access to the Suns, hanging around at practices, in the locker room, and on road trips. The book discloses nothing in the way of censorship, so I'll take it that McCallum could relay everything he witnessed of interest. If not an explicit agreement, was there an unspoken contract to refrain from yielding company secrets? Or did the writer's own sense of propriety or desire to be invited back filter his book? If so, where was that sense of propriety when he was typing all those expletives? If so, where was the limitation on reportage or conflict of interest disclosed? If player privacy was to be protected, the reader should have been told (maybe even on the book jacket).

4. The alternative explanation is more dismal: maybe the players don't have anything much to say other than the banalities one reads in the newspaper, except with a swear or two added in. Should players or coaches express much publicly in the way other than a banality, they risk trouble, even big trouble. So players learn, quickly, to express platitudes, to compliment teammates and opponents, to say nothing even slightly derogatory about their coaches or general managers. To quote the poet Rasheed Wallace, "It was a great game. Both teams played hard." If what these players learn to say is a bunch on banalities, pretty soon they're thinking in banalities. Maybe they don't have much else to say, no opinions to express other than the post-game cliches that find their way into the morning stories. It would be better if they had opinions, even repercussion-free opinions. I recently re-watched the football movie "Any Given Sunday" (plenty of "F" bombs there too) and the star, a headstrong, young black quarterback, went on some interview show and proceeded to issue a series of interesting opinions on the state of the game and the particular role of the black athlete and black quarterback within it. His comments were debatable, and I found myself moved to debate them. Wouldn't it be nice if our real athletes similarly shared their opinions, assuming they were encouraged to cultivate them? I think someone like Rasheed Wallace, who strikes me as thoughtful and engaging, might have something to say.

5. One fact needs to be made clear. As the book title suggests, the writer spent the season on the bench with the Suns: he was allowed to join the coaching staff. Thus, like any coach, his access to the stars of the game was limited to a certain extent. From what I could detect, he saw the players during practice and games and during certain interactions while traveling. I would assume players would generally be on their best behavior around the coaches, especially on a team like the Suns where the head coach (Mike D'Antoni) functions also as the team's personnel manager, empowered to make trades and set salaries. As a result of this season "on the bench," the focus of the book is the coaches, particularly the assistants. They seemed interesting enough, but their role on the team is limited to advice-giving to millionaire players and the head coach. Second bananas, yet they're the ones with whom McCallum hung out. I'm not blaming McCallum (he hangs with a better crowd than I do), but still, it is a limitation and should be made evident.

6. The book was well done overall, a story well-told by a well-known Sports Illustrated writer, one of my favorites. But here's my beef. I read the book (free or not) for one reason: I wanted to know how they do it. How do the Suns teach NBA players to play the up-tempo running offense for which the Suns have rightly become famous? So many teams promise their fans a running team (I'm a Boston fan, still waiting for the vaunted Celtics fast break to start); yet the Suns, almost uniquely among NBA teams, run a real up-tempo offense. I'm not just talking about shots early in the shot clock, which a number of teams accomplish. I'm talking about old-school fast breaks, with the ball seldom hitting the floor, where layups and dunks result off of made baskets, where (in a modern twist) open lane penetrators kick out to waiting wing shooters, where the team is just fun to watch. The Suns are about the only team (besides the Celtics or Blazers, my two losing favorites) that I'll scan the channels looking to find. So how does D'Antoni and his staff inculcate this amazing offense? How does he take rookies, free agents and players off of other teams' rosters and teach them the Suns style? McCallum even poses the question: is Steve Nash great because D'Antoni and the Suns are great, or are the Suns great because they have Steve Nash? But what's the answer? The book doesn't offer an answer. Couldn't McCallum have spent his season on the bench getting to the bottom of the central question of our time, NBA-version? Yet about all we hear from D'Antoni is pre-game "let's go" speeches and repeated exhortations to his players to run. Is that it? [Could the Celtics win as many as the Suns if only Tommy Heinsohn returned to the bench? (Inside joke for Celtics fans.)] Surely there's more to the Suns special offense than "everybody run, spread out and make incredible passes to each other"? McCallum was with the team from pre-season camp to the very end. What's the insight? How does D'Antoni teach the offense? Realize that most NBA players were stars in high school and college, where they probably dribbled and shot the ball more than anyone else on the team (think Kobe Bryant or Paul Pierce). How does the Suns coach get these ball hogs to play so unselfishly? What is his special theory of offense that has produced such a remarkable and aesthetically pleasing approach to the game? How does a coach engineer an offense that will produce a open shot for a good shooter in a mere seven seconds? You would think a year on the bench would have suggested an answer.

7. Sorry to seem ungrateful. Thanks for the book.

Tim Hardaway and the Language of Rights

What Tim Hardaway had to say about homosexuals, and the reaction to it from the popular media and the NBA, provides a lesson for us all. Unfortunately, the chief lesson it provides is not the one most people are drawing. The common lesson is that Hardaway's comments evidence continuing hostility by athletes toward gays, particularly in some of the more vigorous team sports. To a lawyer interested in sports, however, the lessons are a little more elaborate.

1. Part of Hardaway's problem is that he believed it when someone told him that Americans enjoy a right to free speech. Maybe some high school teacher read it in a textbook and repeated it to the class. No competent lawyer would ever so advise a client. Speech is not free, not in the eyes of the law. A person's speech can result in his paying compensatory damages for any harm his words cause. Even punitive damages or a term of imprisonment can result from one's exercise of his speech rights. All for mere words. Politicians and news commentators shed tears over the right to free speech, but really they're referring to a legal standard which they may well not understand. Lawyers seldom even use terms like "right": it's inexact and not very helpful. All the "free speech" part of the first amendment means in legal terms, which may be all it means in any terms, is "no prior restraint." In other words, what the amendment actually prohibits is the imposition of an injunction against the making of speech. (And even injunctions can be disobeyed, if one is willing to pay the price in contempt.) So that's it. All the "free speech" talk is belied by the legal reality that the sole legal effect of the first amendment's clause is to eliminate one remedy from the menu of remedies available to a judge responding to unacceptable speech. Dry your eyes, everybody; there is no right to free speech, not one worth mentioning, not in legal terms.

2. (Oddly, the one remedy a potential speaker might actually want a court to impose is the injunction, the very remedy the first amendment precludes! The injunction stops the speaker before he puts his foot in his mouth. Wouldn't it be nice to know ahead of time if the speech one plans to make will subject the speaker to punitive damages, for example, which are specifically designed to punish him so he never speaks such words again? Gee, judge, couldn't you let me know ahead of time? No, say our wise judges, putting their fingers on the first amendment. Go ahead and speak freely, and we'll bankrupt you or imprison you later on. It's in the constitution.)

3. So the free speech protection is of very little value, legally speaking. It is, instead, ultimately a political term. Its place in the constitution and its veneration over the generations has raised "free speech" into the American collective perspective. It's a motto more than a legal term of art. That's not to say it's unimportant. The motto helps create room for toleration of each other's opinions, helps to create a culture of skeptical inquiry and intellectual honesty, and helps to send soldiers off to war with something in mind worth fighting for. Law is stingy. The right to free speech is culture and politics, not law.

4. Yet the politics have changed. The culture has disintegrated. The unspoken latitude which we allowed each other, within the ample margins of free speech, has given way to the narrowness of the dictatorial mind, which polices the tight borders and boundaries of writings, conversations, and even thought itself. It's not a pretty sight. The call for tolerance by those who won't tolerate dissenting, even hateful, perspectives. Tim Hardaway could spend the rest of his life building hospitals for children, yet his negative comments about having a hypothetical homosexual teammate will be repeated in his obituary. We live in dark times where free speech seems reduced to its bare legal requirements, and no further. Soldiers won't go into battle to prevent trial judges from ordering injunctions.

5. Here's what I object to: those reporters who say they disagree with Hardaway, yet defend his right to voice his opinion. Well, if you are defending his right, why do you feel the need to say you disagree with him? Must we all stand up and be counted on this issue just because a former player, looking to sell a book, tells the world he's gay and he used to play in the NBA? If you are defending Hardaway's right to have an opinion, even his right to dislike another person because of that person's lifestyle or sexual orientation or appearance or what have you, then why do you feel the need to stick microphones in the face of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Curt Schilling and ask them their opinions on controversial political/cultural issues? What does it mean to have a "right" to an opinion, even this extra-legal right I've described, if not the opportunity to hold and, if one wishes, give voice to an odd or even antagonistic opinion and let it be overlooked as what it is, just one man's opinion? The singer for The Dixie Chicks says she hates the President of the United States, and she wins a Grammy. Tim Hardaway expresses his hatred for gays and he'll be ostracized from the NBA for the rest of his life. Now I like our president and I like the Dixie Chicks. How do I reconcile myself to the fact that this wonderful singer voiced an opinion I found very disagreeable, as much as I found Hardaway's? Free speech. People will say the darnedest things sometimes.

6. I love how we regularly see Tiger and other stars of the sports world castigated by the media for not using their public platforms to speak out on social issues and political causes. Is the media's hubris boundless? Do they really think all these athletes, just because they seem like nice people with big smiles, agree with them on political questions? This presumptuous world view thinks that all nice people agree with me, and only evil people could ever think the opposite. Well, look what happens when one of these athletes, asked to comment on a political issue, here the desirability of a gay teammate, and, thinking this is America, gives voice to his genuine opinion: he hates gays. If Tiger Woods came out tomorrow and preached about saving the whales or whatever, he'd be praised for finally using his platform for public betterment. But if he said, please vote against gay marriage, well, I suspect we'd see a slightly different reaction.

7. So let's give athletes credit for knowing the score. There is no free speech, not in any practical sense, not any more. Certainly there is no free speech practiced in any form that a person like Tim Hardaway would ever enjoy.

Little Monsters of the Little League

Recently I was asked about returning again to coach the local little league baseball team. Coaching can be a lot of fun, but (luckily for the league organizers) the passage of time since the season ended last summer can diminish some of the less appealing memories. But I'm trying to remember the bad with the good, all sifted through the lawyer's mind.

So, for all you parents who are contemplating employment as a volunteer youth coach, I thought that the basic underpinnings of legal philosophy might be of worth consideration. Society hopes that people will act rightly and will also obey the law (ideally those two should not often conflict) out of a sense of moral obligation, without concern about legal consequences. But the law cannot assume such goodwill; instead, it usually presumes a certain level of mischief, and so arrays penalties in order to shore up its otherwise toothless commands.

I was thinking about such mischief and how it affects youth sports just the other night. I was watching with my boys some exciting movie about alien invasion. During the dull moments (full of them) my mind drifted to the baseball coaching decision I have to make.

Here's how it all came together:

1. The movie story involved a peaceful, fun-loving American family whose otherwise nondescript existence was abruptly interrupted by an alien invasion. After much resourceful fighting, and a large dollop of improbable movie luck, the panicked humans were able kill the last of the homely alien critters and, presumably, return to their normal lives. But I was disappointed to see that the humans’ first reaction to the aliens’ arrival had been to fight. Why start a war with the little green monsters without first considering the likely benefits and costs of the planned action? In short, why didn’t this wildly impulsive human family first consult their lawyer, to take advantage of the lawyer’s trained habit of considering all possible aspects of any problem?

2. If aliens did launch an invasion of the Earth, the first question I’d ask is, why not let them come aboard? They only want a colony, after all. Why must we always presume that one alien colony will inevitably lead to a complete takeover? In most of the alien invasions I’ve seen, there’s only one interplanetary “mother” spaceship, and maybe a few zippy little attack vehicles. Even allowing for chronic over-crowding, how many creatures do most mother spaceships hold? Plus, the newbies are from another planet. Shouldn’t we inquire about their comparative preferences before we start sending futile attack fighters after them? If we took the time to get to know them, we might be surprised. Sunny river valleys with cool summers might be highly distasteful to our new friends. The sparsely inhabited, vegetation-free moonscape of western Idaho, on the other hand, might be just the thing to make our strange fellow Americans feel right at home. “Oh, it’s the high desert you want,” we’d craftily say to them. “We’ve been saving that special land for future generations of very wealthy people. We love those freezing winters and the constant winds from Canada. But, since you green thingies seem so nice and all, we’d be willing to let you have these picturesque acres, for a suitable price.” Plus who knows what alien bodies, consisting of non-biological inert matter, might be hungry for: styrofoam, soiled baby diapers and rocks, not grain and wheat, might be alien dietary staples. This is exactly the stuff we’re trying to get rid of! After a short interim, states would begin to compete for alien colonies, offering tax breaks and unlimited access to landfills as lures.

3. Obviously we could make a ton of money off bewildered alien invaders unfamiliar with the twists and turns of American capitalism. But there could be a few social problems. One small problem might be just coexisting in our crowded urban centers with the aliens in this movie, whose bodies consisted of large blobs that lacked skin and had to count on unreliable energy fields to remain conterminous. Imagine the inevitable workplace issues, as co-workers got covered with slime from diaphanous beings. Plus human labor wages might begin to lag if these super-aliens outperformed us. Social relations will create even trickier situations: what will we say when the precious apple of our eye falls in love with a one-eyed scaly creature sporting tentacles, antennae and no audible means of communication? “Daddy, I know it will take some getting used to, but Zorg and I love each other."

4. But Americans are famously accommodating to newcomers, so I suppose we'd make room for the alien colonies. What I don't think we'd bend on, however, is our sports. Alien offspring, those green mini-monsters, would put our young boys and girls on the bench. (And how would the age and size restrictions that permeate youth sports be applied to weightless beings who live for light years?) Maybe I'm cynical (like I said, I've coached), but here's where we'd draw the line and fight.

5. Which brings me to coaching youth baseball. Last year's team, like all the many other years I've coached, began the season with twelve happy young boys. The children laughed, competed, and for much of the season had a great time on their way to finishing third in the league. Not so the parents. All the parents of the kids temporarily on the bench wanted their superstars in the game, if only in the outfield; all the outfielders’ parents demanded their boys play the infield, those of the infielders to play catcher, the catchers’ to pitch, and the parents of the pitchers, to pitch more. The parents were miserable, and their misery eventually infected their children, who became, well, little human monsters. (Only my son was happy. He got to pitch nearly all the time.)

6. So I understand why we defend the Earth. We must keep the alien invaders off the planet to protect our youth sports. (Even our usual legal remedy against losing out at sports, self-interested legislation or, in a pinch, activist judicial usurpation, would be unavailable. Anticipating the Earthlings’ resort to political machinations or judicial redress, the aliens would engage in vigorous pre-election alien cell division, producing millions of voting offspring to seize control of our state and national legislative, executive and judicial bodies. That’s not a big deal, of course; someone has to volunteer for distasteful public service. But once alien political control resulted in overturning our brand new “humans-only” sports laws, the aliens would dominate all sporting contests. Immediately, human-Americans would take to the streets, rioting, forming factions and revolting, just like James Madison figured. Madison’s boy played third base.)

Quarterbacks Are Underpaid, Left Tackles Overpaid

Our hearts go out to NFL quarterbacks, trying to keep the wolves at the door on their meager salaries. They are underpaid. We could compare linemen or defenses, but it strikes me the major difference in NFL teams comes down to the play of the quarterbacks. If we had put a Bears' helmet on Peyton Manning, the Bears likely would be the Super Bowl champions. Consider the New England Patriots: a bunch of mediocre offensive players, a decent, veteran defense, and one outstanding quarterback. Despite its general mediocrity, the team consistently competes for titles in the tough AFC, sells out its home games, makes tons of money from merchandise sales, and has become one of the league's most profitable franchises. All this, and Tom Brady makes about $10 million per year. How much would he be paid if he were a free agent and were compensated according to the revenue he produces?

Which brings me to left tackles. Michael Lewis' book The Blind Side points out the sharp increase in pay for NFL left tackles over the past decade or so. Lewis looks for, and finds, a few football-related reasons for this increasing importance of and consequent demand for the extremely large, agile players who are assigned to this position. But for TSLP? I look to law. What has changed in the legal environment over this period that suddenly makes left tackles so important?

Simple: left tackles are being paid out of the quarterback's salary.

1. The NFL, unique among major sports leagues, features a "hard" salary cap tied to league revenues. This hard cap rather strictly limits the total compensation available to players as a whole. One consequence of a cap is that money gets spread out more among the players. A team would have difficult competing if most of its capped money were allocated to a few star players, leaving little to compete for better players at other positions. So competitive teams have to pay their stars less in order to pay quality non-stars more.

2. The NFL and NFLPA (the players' union) agreed to propose the hard salary cap to the players in order to settle the antitrust battles of the early 1990's (the Freeman McNeil and Reggie White law suits, both battling vestiges of the old "Rozelle Rule" that required compensation for lost free agents). The settlement was bitterly opposed by veteran players, who understood that the cap would eventually limit star-level compensation. Nevertheless, the majority of the union approved the settlement, perhaps for the same reason.

3. Regardless of salary differentials, quarterbacks contribute to team victory or defeat far more than does any one player at any other position. NFL teams routinely rotate players are every position, even the "glamour" positions like running back and receiver, and throughout all the defensive positions. The Patriots especially seem able and willing to substitute players at all positions, and of late have notably refused to pay to acquire or retain "stars" at any position, but one. Instead, the Patriots prefer to hire a roster full of quality players, not stars, producing a team with few All-Pros but with remarkable depth. There is only one star on the Patriots, and that's the quarterback. Tom Brady never comes out of the game.

4. But the hard NFL salary cap precludes the Patriots from paying Tom Brady according to the revenue he produces, simply because he alone produces revenue that comprises most of the team's revenue. Money comes from wins, at least in large part. The salary cap ties total player compensation to about 60% of total revenue. What percentage of credit for the Patriots' winning seasons (and merchandise sales and general popularity) would you attribute to Tom Brady? I'd put it pretty close to the total percentage available to pay the entire team. But the Patriots cannot remain competitive if Brady were paid what he's worth. They have to pay somebody else Tom's money. So it goes to the players who are most important in complementing the quarterback, among them the left tackle protecting the quarterback's blind side. Notice how the pay scale for left tackles has undergone a meteoric rise coincident with the implementation of the salary cap.

5. Lewis attributes the rise in compensation for left tackles to the game and the game's rules. Left tackles are more important today than in times past because pass rushers, especially linebackers on the quarterback's blind side (to his left) are faster and rules changes have facilitated the passing game. I'm skeptical of the first reason; the NFL has long featured very fast rushers playing defensive end (which player the linebacker essentially replaces in the 3-4 defense in which Lewis finds his "new" fast linebackers). The second development, the rules liberalization, is as much a reason to increase the compensation of the quarterback or blitzing linebacker or pass-rushing defensive end as it is the left tackle.

6. Yes, left tackles are worth more today than they were in the days before the salary cap, but they are not worth anywhere near the multiples in pay that they receive as compared to their teammates on the offensive line. They are only a little more valuable (in terms of contributing to team victories) than the right tackles, guards and center. But they are paid a lot more simply because they contribute slightly more to the production of the quarterback, and the quarterback produces most of the team's money, whether he's receiving it in compensation or not.

7. Want to really save money on left tackles? Hire a left-handed quarterback. The right tackle, playing on the lefty quarterback's blind side, will come much more cheaply due to less demand. I've read several intelligent commentators suggest that the "test" for Lewis' thesis on the importance of left tackles would be to find out if similar importance is given to right tackles, or to find out if left-handed quarterbacks perform less effectively because right tackles are less skilled. This is no test at all. Right tackles are just as skilled as the left tackle; they're just paid less because they don't complement the quarterback quite as much. With a left quarterback, a team would rationally hire a highly skilled (yet cheaper) right tackle, producing the same level of quarterback success.

8. Think salary caps don't redistribute income? Obviously you're not a college football coach (am I right? What a guess.) The NCAA has a neat little salary cap of its own: each player gets to earn just about zero. So how should a college athletic department spend all that revenue? On the man whose performance best enhances that of the players: the coach. That lucky devil gets paid far in excess of any revenue he produces. Some of us in life get paid less than the value we produce (think educators, just like TSLP). For lucky left tackles, they get more.

Super Observations

Since I killed the better part of a day watching the Super Bowl, I'd better have something useful to say about it. I don't. But with a huge full-time staff, traveling expenses, entourage, legal fees, etc., I have a lot of bills to pay here at The Sports Law Professor blog, so a few thoughts nonetheless:

1. I look forward to the day when we won't mention the skin color of the man who coaches the Super Bowl winner. Wait a minute, I think we're there. I couldn't help but notice how Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy had pat, stock answers to the "first-black-to-win" question. Their answers were reflective and had a sense of history, at least they seemed so the first time they were provided. The newspaper accounts had a similar dull repetitiveness, as if the article writers had little to add but had to write anyway (I guess they have to keep the lights on too). The sheer repetition of the observation reduced the entire point to banality; the stories were made even less compelling by the fact that it was a foregone conclusion some two weeks ago that a black man would coach the winning team. (TSLP knew it would happen!) When the point becomes entirely banal, then I guess that means we've reached a place where it's no longer interesting or newsworthy to mention the skin color of the winning coach. We're cured! Congratulations, America.

2. The Bears are probably the fourth or fifth best team in the NFL right now. I'd put the Colts, Patriots, and Chargers all in front of them for sure, and we could argue about the Ravens and, of course, the Seahawks. The Bears are a good team, but several offensive weapons short of the top three teams. Sorry Chicago (from my Google Analytics, I don't have many readers there anyway, so I'm not too sorry). Not counting the linemen (and no one does, so why should TSLP have to start counting them? Let some other blogger worry about the linemen), I don't think there's even one offensive player on the Bears who for sure starts for the Chargers or Colts. I think Muhsin Muhammad starts at receiver for the Chargers (probably) and for the Patriots (for sure), but anybody on the waiver wire can start there for the Patriots, so that's not a big credit to the Bears. The Bears kept complaining that no one gave them a chance against the Colts, and they were right: they had no chance.

3. How is it that the Patriots are not in this game? Why aren't those two bogus penalties called against the Pats' defense held up as the the controversial reason that the Colts, and not the Patriots, are in the big game? The first bogus penalty was the pass interference call against a Patriots' defensive back that gave the Colts the ball on the one-yard line, setting up the easy tying touchdown. Pass interference? The defender never touched the receiver! The television announcer acknowledged there was no contact but termed the defender's conduct illegal "face-guarding." But even TSLP, a casual fan, knew to a moral certainty (yes, I'm often morally certain about football penalties from the comfort of my sofa) that face-guarding was no longer illegal in the NFL! The rule was changed several years ago. You would think the announcer would know the rules. And friends, despite what these ex-jocks in the booth tell you, the rules are really not all that complicated or all that lengthy. There's even a somewhat abbreviated version for fans, in digest form right here. Take a few minutes to read the rules and become more expert than the guys who are paid tons of money to think and talk about nothing other than football. I've seen the networks carrying golf telecasts have on staff a rules expert to chime in on rules issues, even though in professional golf rules questions seldom arise. Given the comparative multitude of NFL replay and rules issues, shouldn't CBS have employed a similar rules expert, or even better, an experienced lawyer? TSLP is available for all future Super Bowl telecasts, and promises to laugh like a drunken fool at all the lame studio jokes.

4. The second bogus call was the fifteen-yarder for "roughing the passer" that resulted from a blitzing linebacker running past Peyton Manning with his, the blitzer's, hands in the air (to deflect the pass or to wave to his family, I wasn't sure which) and one of those hands grazing, merely stroking, almost tenderly, the side of poor Peyton's helmet. Not even the gifted thespian Manning felt enough contact to go into his customary "I'm shot!" act. Yet the referee called the serious penalty, propelling the Colts deep into New England territory, setting up the final winning touchdown. Two outrageous calls that should be prominently mentioned every time the Colts are referred to as the 2006 NFL Champions. These were the most controversial officials' decisions since, umm, the Tuck Rule was invoked at some historic moment in the distant past that TSLP cannot now bring to mind. This paragraph is becoming too long. Let's move on.

5. The NFL made a big point to keep this Super Bowl from being watched in places other than homes and bars. For instance, the NFL has used its copyright over game broadcasts to bully a number of churches, which had planned to host Super Bowl parties as fun social events and fund-raisers, into canceling their plans. See this story here, from the L.A. Times. Bad move, NFL. The Super Bowl has become so lucrative for the league precisely because fans have made the event into an excuse for a national party day. That's why the television network gets over two million dollars for a commercial spot! Do the TV folks like the idea of the NFL telling viewers to turn off their sets?

6. The moment Tony Dungy elected, in the final minutes of the game, not to kick the easy field goal to add three points to the margin of victory, the people at my party reacted in one of two ways. It was a couples party, by the way. Exactly one-half of those present (the half that watched the half-time show, and that's about all) said, in effect, "how nice of that coach not to add meaningless points." The other half of the room (the ones who had spent the afternoon yelling at the television set) quickly starting asking each other about the point spread and other betting angles. I'm not making anything out of this, just making a small anthropological observation for the benefit of science. It does amaze me how people watch the same event and so often see such a different thing.