Coyote Blog

Apparently transgender athletes are starting to dominate in high school and college women's sports.  I don't have much passion on this issue one way or another.  My only intercollegiate competitive experience was in duplicate bridge, in which all human beings of any gender compete together in one division.

However, it does strike me that this is a godsend for college administrators as it solves one of two problems for them:

1. If separate women's sports persist, college coaches of women's teams will increasingly seek to recruit transgender athletes.  This is a much more comfortable situation for college administrators, who have of late been embarrassed by the number of admissions spots that are given to athletes.  Now, they are not recruiting unwoke athletes, but super-high-intersectional point transgendered persons
2. If this is taken to its logical extreme, it may well start to end separate women's athletics (though if we still have totally meaningless divisions for men and women in chess, who knows what will persist).  But women's athletics have always been a major pain for college administrators.  They seldom generate any money and it is hard to maintain enough participation in smaller schools to avoid Title IX problems (at least in terms of equality of outcome, ie pure athlete and sports team counts by gender).  A whole class of headaches could go away.

Bill rode Virginia all the way to the championship.  Congratulations.

With 3 games to play, we still have three possible winners. Jeff Charleston (if memory serves a long-time coyote bracket leader), Bill Pearson and DontFollowMyAdviceImADummy.  Best of luck to everyone

We got 72 entries this year, which is pretty good given that I got started late setting it up and promoting it.  Many contestants eschewed the obvious choices -- for example only a third picked Duke to win and barely half had Duke getting to the Finals.

Robert in Chicago is in the lead, but many are close.  The scoring system favored picking upsets but there just were not that many big upsets in the first 2 rounds

But 42 different people still have a chance to win, including all the top 20 and 20+ more besides.

Good luck to everyone this weekend.  You can see all the rankings at https://www.pickhoops.com/tslatslaq/

In a tradition that goes back well over  a decade on this blog, it's time for our 2019 just-for-fun bracket challenge.  You know how it works -- fill out your bracket for the NCAA men's basketball tournament before noon Eastern this Thursday.  First prize  is lots of adulation and a 1 year free subscription to Coyoteblog.  Second prize is a two-year subscription.

We are using the usual scoring method -- 1 point for each correct pick in the first round, then 2 points in the second round, then 4, 8, 16 and 32.  This gives each round the same number of possible points.  In addition, there is a bonus for each game you correctly pick an upset equal to the difference in the two seeds, so there is some incentive to take a bit of risk with your picks.

This year's theme is the ongoing battle of Tesla bulls and bears ($tsla and $tslaq respectively).  You don't have to be part of that mess to play, but if you want to self-identify with a side, put it in your team name. If you need anonymity, you can use a fake name and make sure to check the box not to show your email address publicly.

It is totally free to play (I have paid the fees) and you can sign up and find our bracket here.  

http://www.pickhoops.com/TSLATSLAQ

In a tradition that goes back well over  a decade on this blog, it's time for our 2019 just-for-fun bracket challenge.  You know how it works -- fill out your bracket for the NCAA men's basketball tournament before noon Eastern this Thursday.  First prize  is lots of adulation and a 1 year free subscription to Coyoteblog.  Second prize is a two-year subscription.

We are using the usual scoring method -- 1 point for each correct pick in the first round, then 2 points in the second round, then 4, 8, 16 and 32.  This gives each round the same number of possible points.  In addition, there is a bonus for each game you correctly pick an upset equal to the difference in the two seeds, so there is some incentive to take a bit of risk with your picks.

This year's theme is the ongoing battle of Tesla bulls and bears ($tsla and $tslaq respectively).  You don't have to be part of that mess to play, but if you want to self-identify with a side, put it in your team name. If you need anonymity, you can use a fake name and make sure to check the box not to show your email address publicly.

It is totally free to play (I have paid the fees) and you can sign up and find our bracket here.  

http://www.pickhoops.com/TSLATSLAQ

Several years ago my knees started hurting a lot and eventually I was diagnosed with somewhat early but not bad osteoarthritis in both knees.  After years of running, I decided that my career was almost over, so I geared up with some cortisone injections and ran my first and last marathon.  The doctor may have said it was not severe yet but my knees hurt like hell for the months afterwards.

But I missed running.  Yes, many of you think running is stupid and boring.  Which is fine.  I think weight-lifting is a boring chore, but others love it.  Anyway, I love running not just for activity but to enjoy a nice day or explore new places.  I tried biking and an elliptical scooter and neither scratched the same itch.

But for almost a full year I never ran once.  I did a lot of hiking, and when that seemed to not be active enough I started adding my old textbooks to a day pack until I was walking and hiking with a 40+ pound pack and felt great.  So I was tempted to run again but knew I had to change something up to make it work.

At first I tried that old man marathon runners gate, which looks like a fast walk.  It worked OK but it was not that fun.  Then I read something about barefoot running, which I still think is dumb.  But the article talked about different sorts of strides and how they land differently -- some heel first, some toe first.  Apparently a benefit of barefoot running is it supports toe first landing, which some think is more beneficial.  Mostly I wrote all this off, as runners forums are jammed with people who have these pet theories that don't really stand up to study.

Anyway, the learning for me was that toe first landing even existed.  I started thinking about it and experimenting, and found that I had a strong heel first landing that was so forceful it was pile-driving my knees and spine.  What if I got off my heels?  I had already noticed that my knees seldom hurt running up a steep slope, and I realized I was on my toes doing so.  Couldn't hurt to try.

Well, changing your running gate after decades of running the same way is just as hard as you might expect.  The first few outings must have looked stupid.  Basically I was trying to run on my tip toes, as if I was doing the high-stepping tire exercise you see football players doing.

The breakthrough came with some practice and when I read somewhere that 1) toe first landing is about toe first, not toe only and 2) you have to sort of lean out a bit over your skis to run toe first.

Over time, it has gotten more natural and my knees feel great.  My progress was delayed a bit as I really was exhausting something in the back of my calves, but more practice and a more natural gate and some strengthening and I am back where I can run 3-4 miles at my old pace.  Actually a bit faster, as I think I was never leaning forward enough and wasting a lot of energy.

So we shall see.  This may all be temporary.  Heck, it may all be a placebo (readers who spend too much time in the comments trying to undo the placebo effect by convincing me it's a placebo will be blocked -- just kidding, in 15 years I have never blocked anyone).

By the way, I am not a doctor and PLEASE do not take any medical advice from me.

Via the New York Post".  This is just disgusting:

Naomi Osaka, 20 years old, just became the first player from Japan to win a Grand Slam.

Yet rather than cheer Osaka, the crowd, the commentators and US Open officials all expressed shock and grief that Serena Williams lost.

Osaka spent what should have been her victory lap in tears. It had been her childhood dream to make it to the US Open and possibly play against Williams, her idol, in the final.

It’s hard to recall a more unsportsmanlike event.

Here was a young girl who pulled off one of the greatest upsets ever, who fought for every point she earned, ashamed.

At the awards ceremony, Osaka covered her face with her black visor and cried. The crowd booed her. Katrina Adams, chairman and president of the USTA, opened the awards ceremony by denigrating the winner and lionizing Williams — whose ego, if anything, needs piercing.

“Perhaps it’s not the finish we were looking for today,” Adams said, “but Serena, you are a champion of all champions.” Addressing the crowd, Adams added, “This mama is a role model and respected by all.”

Incredibly, much of the media and powerful celebrities have rallied around Ms. Williams to claim that she is actually the victim. She claims she was a victim of sexism in the match, but she was playing (and getting beat) by another woman.  She claims she was a victim of racism in the match because she is a woman of color, but she was not playing a white woman.  She claims to be a victim of the tennis establishment when in fact she is the most powerful person in women's tennis (maybe ever) and wields far more wealth and power than anyone on that court that day -- a power and privilege demonstrated by the fact that all the other powerful and privileged rallied to her side immediately after the match.

It is incredible to me that we still fetishize amateurism, which in a large sense is just a holdover from British and other European aristocracies.  Historically, the mark of the true aristocrat was one who was completely unproductive.  I am not exaggerating -- doing any paid work of any sort made one a tradesman, and at best lowered ones status (in England) or essentially caused your aristocratic credentials to be revoked (France).

The whole notion of amateurism was originally tied up in this aristocratic nonsense.  It's fine to play cricket or serve in Parliament unpaid, but take money for doing so and you are out.  This had the benefit of essentially clearing the pitch in both politics and sports (and even fields like science, for a time) for the aristocracy, since no one else could afford to dedicate time to these pursuits and not get paid.  These attitudes carried over into things like the Olympics and even early American baseball, though both eventually gave up on the concept as outdated.

But the one last bastion of support of these old British aristocratic privileges is the NCAA, which still dedicates enormous resources, with an assist from the FBI, to track down anyone who gets a dollar when they are a college athlete.  Jason Gay has a great column on this today in the WSJ:

This is where we are now, like it or not. College basketball—and college football—are not the sepia-toned postcards of nostalgia from generations past. They’re a multibillion dollar market economy in which almost everyone benefits, and only one valve—to the players—is shut off, because of some creaky, indefensible adherence to amateurism. Of course some money finds its way to the players. That’s what the details of this case show. Not a scandal. A market.

Don’t look for the NCAA to acknowledge this, however. “These allegations, if true, point to systematic failures that must be fixed and fixed now if we want college sports in America. Simply put, people who engage in this kind of behavior have no place in college sports,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said in a statement that deserved confetti and a laughing donkey noise at the end of it.

I am not necessarily advocating that schools should or should have to pay student athletes, though that may (as Gay predicts) be coming some day.  But as a minimum the ban on athletes accepting any outside money for any reason is just insane.   As I wrote before, athletes are the only  students at a University that are not allowed to earn money in what they are good at.  Ever hear of an amateurism requirement for student poets?  For engineers?

When I was a senior at Princeton, Brooke Shields was a freshman.  At the time of her matriculation, she was already a highly paid professional model and actress (Blue Lagoon).  No one ever suggested that she not be allowed to participate in the amateur Princeton Triangle Club shows because she was already a professional.

When I was a sophomore at Princeton, I used to sit in my small dining hall (the now-defunct Madison Society) and listen to a guy named Stanley Jordan play guitar in a really odd way.  Jordan was already a professional musician (a few years after he graduated he would release an album that was #1 on the jazz charts for nearly a year).  Despite the fact that Jordan was a professional and already earned a lot of money from his music, no one ever suggested that he not be allowed to participate in a number of amateur Princeton music groups and shows.

My daughter is an art major at a school called Art Center in Pasadena (where she upsets my preconceived notions of art school by working way harder than I did in college).  She and many, if not most of her fellow students have sold their art for money already, but no one as ever suggested that they not be allowed to participate in school art shows and competitions.

I actually first wrote about this in Forbes way back in 2011.  Jason Gay makes the exact same points in his editorial today.  Good.  Finally someone who actually has an audience is stating the obvious:

In the shorter term, I like the proposals out there to eliminate the amateurism requirement—allow a college athlete in any sport (not just football or basketball) to accept sponsor dollars, outside jobs, agents, any side income they can get. The Olympics did this long ago, and somehow survived. I also think we’ll see, in basketball, the NBA stepping up and widening its developmental league—junking the dreadful one-and-one policy, lowering its age minimum, but simultaneously creating a more attractive alternative to the college game. If a player still opts to go to college, they’ll need to stay on at least a couple of seasons.

If you still think the scholarship is sufficient payment for an athlete in a high-revenue sport, ask yourself this question. There are all kinds of scholarships—academic, artistic, etc. Why are athletic scholarship recipients the only ones held to an amateurism standard? A sophomore on a creative writing scholarship gets a short story accepted to the New Yorker. Is he or she prohibited from collecting on the money? Heck no! As the Hamilton Place Strategies founder and former U.S. treasury secretary Tony Fratto succinctly put it on Twitter: “No one cares about a music scholarship student getting paid to play gigs.”

 

I achieved my goal and completed my first (and last) marathon on Sunday, roughly in the time I expected.  I wasn't going to actually discuss the time (to people who ask my time I usually answer "daytime"), but upon reflection I think it would be good to do so to encourage others who might be slow but considering running a marathon.

I ran the race from first to last almost dead-on 13 minutes a mile.  That is pretty damn slow, even for an amateur, but for me given I was suffering from osteo-arthritis in both knees and pretty bad plantar fasciitis in my right foot, it was about what I expected.  I was more proud that I kept on pace for the whole 26.2 miles -- my second 13 miles was 1 minute faster than my first 13, and my last mile was faster than the first.  This was a big change from half-marathons I have run in the past when I pretty much died in the last 20% of the race.

The real difference was Galloway's run-walk-run method.  I used 3-minute cycles where I would run at about 10-1/2 to 11 minute mile pace for 2 minutes and then walk for 1 minute.  I stuck with the program for the whole race, and as a result I was passing a lot of people in the last few miles who passed me in the first few.  At one low point around mile ten a 13-year-old girl in a wonder woman outfit zoomed past me, but I ran her down around mile 24 and beat her to the finish line.  A very satisfying triumph.

In terms of managing my body problems, there were surprising positives and negatives.  The cortisone shots I had two weeks before the race on my knees worked fabulously and my knees were never an issue.  My plantar fasciitis was mostly kept in check by the arch support I was wearing, though it hurt like bloody hell the next morning when I woke up.  I never did find the perfect solution to my underlapping toe and I had to stop twice to take my shoe off and re-tape my toes.  I did not have the hunger pangs I experienced on earlier long runs -- the carbo loading for several days in advance really helped and I ate two of these on the way and they were a surprisingly good food for the purpose.  The real problem I had in the last 4-5 miles was that my back started to really hurt.  Oh, and I also had to resist temptation as I ran past several frozen margarita stands in the last 2 miles (though at the finish I saw a fair number of folks had stopped and bought a cocktail for the last mile).

That last point brings me to some encouragement for those thinking about doing this but who are intimidated by being too slow.  It took me over 5-1/2 hours to finish and I finished in the top half of all finishers and the top half of all men.  I was something like finisher 9,500 out of 20,000.  People were still crossing the finish line 2 hours after I finished.  Oddly, the only subgroup I did not finish in the top half of  were men 55-60, as there seems to be an odd dynamic in these distance races such that there are not very many older folks, but the ones that are there are very serious and on something like their 50th marathon.

Some of this prevalence of slow runners is due to the fact it is a Disney marathon and you get a certain crowd for RunDisney events, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same kind of numbers did not obtain in races like the PF Changs.  In fact, I can't recommend the Disney races enough.  They are well-organized, low-key, and full of interesting distractions along the way such as characters and bands and of course running through theme parks.  And the medals are way better at Disney than other amateur races, and you get the fun of many runners in costume.  In this race there is even a tradition of having a roller coaster in operation (Expedition Everest) at the halfway point for runners who can jump on the coaster for a ride and then jump back off to finish the race.

Postscript:  The one problem with the Disney races is that they start at 5:30 AM, though my corral seldom gets to the start line until about 6:00.  In this race, the temperature at the start was about 40F, which is super cold for this Arizona boy, and was about 65F at the finish, which means I donated about 4 pieces of clothing along the way as I had to strip as I ran.

So, five days to my first and last marathon.  Some progress (and setbacks):

• Got the cortisone shots in my arthritic knees.  They feel about as good as I could hope
• Had my plantar fasciitis come back in my right foot.  I ran 16 miles on it at its worst so I can do it but it was not fun.  Tried the night boot again and it really helps but I just can't sleep in that thing (imagine sleeping in a ski boot).  But it turns out this sock does almost as good of a job at stretching the foot out in my sleep and I can sleep with it.  The combination of that sock at night with this arch support in the day has almost licked it.
• Once I started going past 16 miles my small toes on my right foot really started hurting.   I had not had this pain in these toes since I used to snow ski.  I thought it was just the shoe being too narrow and pinching the toes.  But I finally discovered that the fourth toe was crossing under the third toe.  As you can imagine, that hurts.  All these years and I had never figured out what was causing this pain -- just thought ski boots were all uncomfortable.  Apparently this is fairly common since I see a zillion toe spacer products on Amazon.  But all I needed was a bit of athletic tape -- taping toe 3 to toe 1 and 2 and toe 4 to toe 5 totally solves it.  Amazing to solve a problem so simply after so many years.
• Have a sore back after packing up Christmas decorations yesterday, but am hopeful that will be gone by Sunday.
• Training almost irrelevant at this point.  I know I can do the miles, even if not that fast.  As you can see from the above, more an issue of trying to hold my body together.

In retrospect, this is a pretty amazing cover from 2014.  They even had the MVP right.

I will admit to some bias, having grown up in Houston, but I have always loved that striped Astros uniform.

Game 5 was the most entertaining baseball game I ever saw, but probably not the best.  The best probably would have to have things like pitching and defense too.  The best game I ever saw was probably game 7 between the Yankees and the Diamondbacks back in 2001.

When I was a senior at Princeton, Brooke Shields was a freshman.  At the time of her matriculation, she was already a highly paid professional model and actress (Blue Lagoon).  No one ever suggested that she not be allowed to participate in the amateur Princeton Triangle Club shows because she was already a professional.

When I was a sophomore at Princeton, I used to sit in my small dining hall (the now-defunct Madison Society) and listen to a guy named Stanley Jordan play guitar in a really odd way.  Jordan was already a professional musician (a few years after he graduated he would release an album that was #1 on the jazz charts for nearly a year).  Despite the fact that Jordan was a professional and already earned a lot of money from his music, no one ever suggested that he not be allowed to participate in a number of amateur Princeton music groups and shows.

My daughter is an art major at a school called Art Center in Pasadena (where she upsets my preconceived notions of art school by working way harder than I did in college).  She and many, if not most of her fellow students have sold their art for money already, but no one as ever suggested that they not be allowed to participate in school art shows and competitions.

And then there are athletics.

 A football player for the University of Central Florida has lost his place in the team, and hence his scholarship, due to his YouTube channel. UCF kicker Donald De La Haye runs "Deestroying," which has over 90,000 subscribers and has amassed 5 million views, thus far. It's not the channel itself that cost him his scholarship, though -- it's the fact that he has athletics-related videos on a monetized account.

The NCAA saw his videos as a direct violation to its rule that prohibits student athletes from using their status to earn money. UCF's athletics department negotiated with the association, since De La Haye sends the money he earns from YouTube to his family in Costa Rica. The association gave him two choices: he can keep the account monetized, but he has to stop referencing his status as a student athlete and move the videos wherein he does. Or, he has to stop monetizing his account altogether. Since De La Haye chose not to accept either option, he has been declared inelegible to play in any NCAA-sanctioned competition, effectively ending his college football career.

I just thought this chart was interesting.  The source reported it as evidence that ESPN's strategy of being more explicitly political and skewing Left makes no sense given its audience.  I don't particularly care if ESPN skews Left or Right, it is their decision to add political content of any sort to all their programming that has turned me off. (source)

Forbes produces an annual list of the market value of various sports franchises.  If I were a grad student, a great study would be to try to figure out what percentage of these valuations came from public funds (free stadiums, tax abatements, direct subsidies, etc).  I bet the number would be high.

In the case of the Phoenix Coyote's hockey team, the percentage would actually be over 100%.   The team is worth barely $100 million, at best, but has received hundreds of millions in subsidies.  About 13 years ago the city of Glendale, AZ (pop: 250,000) built them a $300 million stadium.  Almost immediately after that, the team started to threaten to leave, and the pathetic city of Glendale city counsel voted subsidy after subsidy, paying the team $10 million a year in direct subsidies.  When the Goldwater Institute successfully sued to end this practices, the city found creative ways to hide the subsidy, for example giving the team a management contract for the stadium whose price was inflated by the amount of the subsidy (the contract was for $15 million a year but when it was finally competitively bid, it came in at $5 million).

After all that, the team apparently has no shame is coming back to the trough yet again:

The Arizona Coyotes and National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman on Tuesday threatened to move the franchise out of Arizona if the Legislature does not approve $225 million in public financing for a new arena in downtown Phoenix or the East Valley.

Bettman sent a three-page letter to state Senate President Steve Yarbrough and House Speaker J.D. Mesnard encouraging them to push through a public-financing bill that is stalled in the Senate amid a lack of support from lawmakers. The struggling NHL franchise wants out of Glendale, saying it's not economically viable to play there even though that West Valley city financed its 13-year-old Gila River Arena specifically for the Coyotes.

"The Arizona Coyotes must have a new arena location to succeed," Bettman wrote. "The Coyotes cannot and will not remain in Glendale."

Good God, what brass!

Postscript:  I was immediately embarrassed to see that I had use maw's instead of maws.  I make stupid grammar mistakes but this generally is not one of them I make that often.  Unfortunately, on the road, I had no way to fix it. Fixed now.

This is a really niche post, but I had a good experience last week running and wanted to share.   First, I have never been a fast runner.  Generally I can get into a steady pace, though, and keep turning miles.  Even when I was much younger, at 40 (about 15 years ago) I tended to run half-marathons (13.1 miles) in about 11 minutes per mile (which for the uninitiated is slllooowww).  Since that time, as I have aged and I have developed mild arthritis in my knees, my times have suffered.

I was always too snooty to try run walk run.  Even if I was slow, I took pride in just being able to keep running for 2-1/2 (or 5 for a marathon) hours continuously.  However, I noticed a while back that even a brief stop, say walking through a water station in a race, really provided a lot of recovery to my sore joints.  So for the last 2 months I have been training with run-walk-run.   After some experimentation, I created a pattern of 2:40 running followed by 1:00 walking.  I don't have to stare at a clock, I have an app (there are zillions of them) on my phone that once programmed with the time just tells me in my ear over my music when to start running and when to start walking.

At first, I did not expect a lot of improvement, probably because I didn't understand how jogging along and then walking could be faster.  But the point is that even a one minute walk is very refreshing and I tend to burst out of each walk with new energy and run the next section much faster than my usual jogging pace.   The theory is then that -- for running pace R > jogging pace J > Walking pace W -- R+W combined will be faster than all J.  And this certainly turned out to be the case for me.  Last weekend I ran in the Disney Princess Half Marathon (this is my favorite race and my daughter and I started running it years ago) and finished at a pace just a hair behind where I was 15 years ago, a full 2 minutes per mile faster than I was running before doing run-walk-run.

The one downside is that this can be tremendously irritating to other runners, particularly on a crowded course.  Races group people into start corrals by time, so that everyone in a certain part of the racecourse should theoretically be running about the same pace and not bumping into each other.  Run-walk-run folks screw this up.  But at this point, so many people are doing run-walk-run that I no longer feel a lot of guilt.

By the way, we generally run the Disney races in costume, so I used my Ironman running costume I did for the Marvel race and added a fetching matching tutu.  Here I am running through the Magic Kingdom.  The tutu is a little worse for wear by mile 6.

...Is that Julio Jones's catch may be forgotten.  Best reception I have ever seen in a lot of years of watching football.  Video here at NFL site

PS-  Run the ball three times after that catch, kick a field goal, and the Falcons would be your Superbowl champions.

A while back, I implied that Colin Kaepernick's refusing to stand for the National Anthem may have been in part a strategy to avoid being cut from the 49ers.

I apologize.  Even if that were true -- and it was pure speculation on my part -- he has done everyone in this country a favor.  Until a month ago, there was no ceremony much more empty than the pro forma singing of the National Anthem at sporting events.  As I wrote before,

I am not a big fan of enforced loyalty oaths and patriotic rituals, finding these to historically be markers of unfree societies.  For these sorts of rituals to have any meaning at all, they have to be voluntary, which means that Kaepernick has every right to not participate, and everyone else has every right to criticize him for doing so, and I have the right to ignore it all as tedious virtue-signalling.

In the past, people stood for the national anthem because that is what you do.  Mindlessly.  It was, for many, a brief ritual before you got to the good stuff.  It was singing happy birthday before you got the cake. (I am speaking for the majority of us, I know there are folks who have always approached the anthem as a deep and solemn rite).

But this weekend, suddenly, and perhaps for the first time at a ball game, everybody who stood up for the National Anthem at an NFL game likely thought about it for a second.  They were not standing just because that was what everyone else was doing, they were standing (or sitting) to make some sort of statement, and what exactly that statement was took a bit of thought.  Standing for a ceremony that has 100% dutiful participation means zero.  Standing for a ceremony with even a small number of folks who refuse has a lot more meaning.

So thanks, Colin.

Years ago, in Ventura County California (where I am thankfully no longer doing business), a loyal employee approached our manager and told her of a meeting that had been held the night before for our employees at a local attorney's office.  The attorney was holding the meeting mainly because he was trying to drum up business, brainstorming with my employees how they might sue the company for a variety of fanciful wage and hour violations.  Fortunately, we tend to be squeaky clean on labor compliance, and the only vulnerable spot they found was on California break law, where shifting court decisions gave them an opening to extract a bit of money from the company over how we were managing lunch breaks.

Anyway, in the course of the meeting, the attorney apparently advised our employees that if they ever thought they were about to get fired, they should quickly accuse someone in the company of harassment or discrimination or some other form of law-breaking.  By doing so, they made themselves suddenly much more difficult to fire, and left the company open to charges of retaliation if the company did indeed fire them.   In later years, we saw at least two employees at this location file discrimination or harassment claims literally hours before they were to be terminated for cause.   Since then, I have seen this behavior enough, all over the country, to believe that this is a strategy that is frequently taught to employees.

This terrible advice is obviously frustrating not only because it makes the firing process harder, but also because these charges all still have to be investigated seriously, a time-consuming process that has to involve me personally by our rules.   On at least two occasions that I can remember, we delayed a firing for cause by several weeks to complete investigations into what turned out to be bogus charges, only to have the employee do something really stupid in a customer reaction during these extra weeks that had substantial costs for the company.

Anyway, I was thinking about this in the case of Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback currently employed by the 49ers but expected by many to be released (ie fired) in the coming weeks.  Last weekend he stirred up controversy when he refused to stand for the national anthem to protest treatment of blacks in America.   Personally, I barely noticed, as I am not a big fan of enforced loyalty oaths and patriotic rituals, finding these to historically be markers of unfree societies.  For these sorts of rituals to have any meaning at all, they have to be voluntary, which means that Kaepernick has every right to not participate, and everyone else has every right to criticize him for doing so, and I have the right to ignore it all as tedious virtue-signalling.

I mostly yawn and change the channel over all this, but it did make me wonder -- Kaepernick has to know that he is potentially on the chopping block.   Many folks believe that his performance last year was not good enough to earn a job on the 49ers this year.  It has been discussed on national TV for weeks, and probably for months in the local San Francisco market.  If he were to be cut, it would likely be in the next 7 days or so by the schedule the NFL sets for finalizing rosters.   So I wonder if part of Kaepernick's action the other day was to make it harder to fire him.   He and his supporters can now portray his firing as retaliation for his support of Black Lives Matters, something that would be an uncomfortable perception for any high profile organization in America but particularly in San Francisco.

There appears to be no rational way to explain Ryan Lochte's bizarre need to make up a story about being the victim of an armed robbery.  The media seems to be pushing the notion that he made up the story to cover up his own vandalism at a gas station, but that makes zero sense.  He had already defused the vandalism incident with a payment of cash to the station owner.  The rational response would be to just shut up about the whole thing and let it be forgotten.

But instead, he purposely made a big deal about the incident, switching around the facts until he was a victim of an armed assault by men posing as police officers, up to and including harrowing details of a cocked gun being jammed into his forehead.  The incident, likely ignored otherwise, suddenly became a BIG DEAL and subsequent investigation (including multiple video sources) showed Lochte to be a bald-faced liar.

The only way I can explain Lochte's motivation is to equate it with the lies by "Jackie" at the University of Virginia, whose claims of being gang-raped as published in the Rolling Stone turned out to be total fabrications.  Like Lochte, she dressed up the story with horrifying details, such as being thrown down and raped on a floor covered in broken glass.  The only real difference I can see, in fact, between Lochte and Jackie  is that the media still protects Jackie (via anonymity) from well-deserved humiliation for her lies while it is piling on Lochte.

I can sort of understand Jackie's motivation -- she was by all accounts a frustrated, perhaps disturbed, certainly lonely young woman who was likely looking for some way to dramatically change her life.  But Lochte?  Ryan Lochte has won multiple Olympic medals, historically in the sports world a marker of the highest possible status.  But in today's world, Lochte viewed victimhood as even higher status.

Update:  This is probably the fairest account of the whole incident.

No one loves local sports teams more than the local media.  I think they know, but probably won't admit, that they would lose a huge chunk of their remaining readership / viewership for their news products if they did not have local sports to report on.  So you will almost never, ever, ever see local media reporting reporting on the true cost (in terms of handouts of taxpayer money) to retaining pro teams.

My coverage of the Phoenix/Arizona Coyotes hockey team goes way back, including even to a mention in a George Will column.  I won't repeat all of that.  I just want to point to this article entitled "Glendale selects AEG to manage Gila River Arena; Arizona Coyotes' future unclear."

Glendale selected facilities-management company AEG Facilities to operate Gila River Arena, likely hastening the city's split with the Arizona Coyotes hockey team.

The telling thing about the article is that it never once explains to readers why this bid award might hasten the split with the Coyotes.  They mention that the Coyotes chose not to bid on the contract.   So why is this award a problem for them?  Do they hate AEG for some reason?  If you really were new to the issues here, you would have to scratch your head and wonder why the two issues were connected.

Oddly enough, everyone knows the reason, but the local media really wants to avoid mentioning this reason.  Here is the elephant in the room no one will recognize:  The Coyotes struggle to make money in this market, a fact made worse by the terrible location of the stadium at the far end of town from most of the potential corporate ticket buyers and wealthy people.   As a result, the team languished in bankruptcy for years, in part because the NHL (who took over the team) refused to sell it at a reasonable market price.

They finally found a buyer who agreed to buy it for an above-market price, but did so only because there was an implicit promise by the town of Glendale to subsidize them the $100 million difference between the actual and market price of the team..  The Goldwater Institute called foul on this subsidy and got it stopped.  So the town found a way around it, promising to award the team the stadium management contract for a price  $8-$10 million a year above market rates for the service.   The present value of this above-market pricing over the life of the proposed contract nearly exactly matched the earlier subsidy proposal Goldwater killed.  Various folks cried foul again, seeing through this sham, and got that stopped.

So the reason this award of the stadium management contract to AEG is so devastating to the Coyotes is that this contract represented the last hope of exacting a hidden subsidy from the city.  With this contract awarded to an arms-length third party at market rates, the last chance of making the Coyote's business viable on the taxpayer's backs seems to have escaped.

Update:  I am hearing now that another reason the Coyotes are done in Glendale is that they think the city of Phoenix or Scottsdale will build them a new stadium.  ugh.  Will it never end.

5 minutes ago the title of this post would have been "F*cking Cardinals" for giving up that hail mary pass to Green Bay -- didn't anyone watch the tape on the Detriot game, with the receiver backing into the end zone to make the catch?  This play was almost an exact duplicate.  I will, though, give credit to the Cardinals for blitzing the QB on that play -- I think that was smart and would have worked against most teams.  Only Aaron Rodgers could have gotten that throw off.

Anyway, Fitz was already beloved in Phoenix, not only as a great football player but as an awesome human being.  Now just more so.

NFL coaches hate Thursday night games, because their players have essentially only half the preparation and recovery time as they do on a normal Sunday game schedule.

So here is my (partial) solution.  Where possible, teams playing Thursday night should have their bye week the previous weekend.  For teams with the bye week the previous week, a Thursday night game is no issue -- in fact, it might even be a benefit, breaking up a single long-preparation period between games into two longer-than-average periods.

This is probably only a partial solution.  Only 8 weeks have bye weeks, and since for week 1 the Thursday game is no issue, this only solves the Thursday problem on 9 of the 17 regular season weeks.  I suppose we could extend by weeks to more weeks of the season, but even as they exist today a partial solution is better than none at all, right?