Coyote Blog

Les Miles will remain as coach of the LSU football team (at least for a while) despite being wooed by Michigan.  (LSU must wonder what's wrong with their coaching job - they have won two national championships this decade but can't get a coach to stay).

In order to keep Les Miles, LSU inserted this clause in his contract:

Should Miles win the BCS championship [ed:  which he now has accomplished] his contract states he has to be
among the top three paid college coaches in the nation, which would
bump him to the $3.5 million range.

This is not uncommon language now in sports contracts.  For example, players with a franchise tag in the NFL must get a salary equal to or greater than the average of the top five players at that position.

So here is my question.  What happens if three other college coaches, say Pete Carrol, Jim Tressel, and Urban Meyer (who have all won national championships in the last 10 years) were to demand that they too should be guaranteed a salary that puts them in the top three coaches?  Don't things start getting real recursive at this point?

Postscript: Yeah, I know, the language generally says they get bumped to a top X position on the day of a certain event, like winning the BCS or having the franchise tag applied, which circumvents the circularity problem, mostly, by not being an open-ended reset.   It is still funny to think about.   There is nothing to stop 4 coaches from negotiating a clause with an open-ended reset such that their salaries would spiral to infinity.  Even Solomon might struggle with that one when it went to court, though the Gordian Knot solution would be to just run one of the four through with a sword.

I wonder if this has ever happened, say with two CEO's that had contracts that guaranteed that each would, at any given time, be the highest paid CEO in the Fortune 500.

The most important college football poll of the year is out, and the top five are as follows  (rank, team, #1 votes record so far, total points):

The rest of the list is here.

Many of you might notice that all of these teams have a record of 0-0.  So you might ask, "Coyote, are you crazy, why did you call this the most important poll of the year?"  Well, since I answered that last year, I will go back a year ago and quote myself:

In theory, voters in the college football polls each week come up
with their current ranking of teams, which in theory could be very
different from how they ranked things the previous week.  In practice,
however, voters start with their rankings of the previous week and then
make adjustments up and down for individual teams based on that week's
game results....

In effect, the college football rankings are a bit like a tennis ladder. Each
week, losers drop down 3-8 spots and all the winners and no-plays move up to
fill in the vacated spots. Sometimes a team will leapfrog another, but that is
rare and it is extremely rare to leapfrog more than 1 or 2 spots. In this sense, the
initial football poll is the most critical, since only those in the top 10-15
have any chance of moving up the ladder to #1.

In
effect, the pre-season poll is the baseline off which all future polls
start.  I haven't done the research, but you could probably refine my
statement in the previous paragraph to a set of rules such as:

• A three-loss team can never win the championship
• A two-loss team can win but only if they start in the top 5 of the pre-season poll
• A one-loss team can win but only if they start in the top 15
• An undefeated team can win even if they were left out of the
  initial top 25, but only if they play in a major conference.  A minor
  conference team, even undefeated, will not ever end up #1 unless they
  started the season in the top 25.

Again, the numbers in these rules may not be exactly right, but I
think they are directionally correct.  This is what I call my theory of
College Football Calvinism (the religion, not the cartoon character)
since one's ultimate fate is in large part pre-ordained by the polls
even before the season is born.  So, if your alma mater has any shot at
the title, you should hope your AD is out there in the summer lobbying
the writers like hell to up their pre-season poll standings. Every spot
you gain in the pre-season poll is one you don't have to win on the
playing field.

I have had experience on several occasions attempting to bring private solutions (at no cost to the city government) to certain municipal problems.  The general approach to such offers, which seems to be similar in every city I have lived in, is to get together a meeting of every single government authority that could possibly have some tangential jurisdiction over the particular problem (e.g, city, county, state, highways, parks, water, environment, etc. etc.).  In this meeting, the discussion goes around the table, with every single participant adding another reason why the proposal is a problem and/or another roadblock or required approval.  This is not an exaggeration - I can't remember one person in such a meeting try to fix a problem or make something happen.  Everyone in government has an incentive system, it seems, that revolves around avoiding risk and preventing change. 

That is why I know that this story is typical of government, not an aberration:

LSU hospital officials began planning for a temporary network of
neighborhood clinics in early November 2005, barely two months after
Hurricane Katrina knocked Charity Hospital out of commission and threw
health-care services for many of the city's uninsured into disarray.

Eight months later, in late June and early July, FEMA delivered the
trailers to New Orleans, with the $761,000 bill picked up by the
federal government.

It wasn't until last week that the New Orleans City Council agreed
to temporarily waive the city's zoning code to allow the trailers to be
located at six schools around the city -- three on the east bank and
three in Algiers -- for two years.

In between fell more than 100 meetings and dozens of e-mails about
the issue involving LSU executives and officials at the city, state and
federal levels. And the journey is not over. The zoning waivers still
need approval from Mayor Ray Nagin, which cannot occur until next week
at the earliest, as well as permits from the city that could take up to
six months to acquire.

If you didn't see it on Instapundit, LSU professor Jeffrey Sadow has a great post on the huge corrupt porkfest that is being proposed in Louisiana:

The $250 billion [in proposed federal aid] is not far behind the $350 billion
estimated spent on the military aspects and their aftermath of the war
of terror since Sep. 11, 2001 "“ which means in reconstruction terms
(leaving out the actual war-making expenses), Louisiana actually is
asking for more than countries with 10 times its population which face
far more damage.

The $40 billion [in proposed Corps of Engineering spending for Louisiana] is ten times the annual
Corps budget, and 100 times the annual amount typically received by
Louisiana which gets more such funding than any other state.

Also, it is nearly three times the size of the entire request for coastal restoration efforts in the state.

He concludes:

So, let's get this straight. Louisiana, from some of her federal officials through some state officials all they way down to city and other local governments,
countenanced negligence from benign to irresponsible in ensuring proper
flood protection and in dealing with hurricanes. And now these same
people have formulated a plan wanting the country to pay an incredible
sum of money to the state controlled by people from the state to deal
with the aftereffects and, apparently, Louisiana's past inability to
utilize our resources efficiently in other areas?

The rest of the country is going to look at this and think we're still stuck on stupid.

Glenn Reynolds also has a long post with other good links on the topic here.  I particularly liked this bit he quotes from John Fund:

Put bluntly, the local political cultures don't engender confidence
that aid won't be diverted from the people who truly need and deserve
it. While the feds can try to ride herd on the money, here's hoping
folks in the region take the opportunity to finally demand their own
political housecleaning. Change is past due. Last year, Lou Riegel, the
agent in charge of the FBI's New Orleans office, described Louisiana's
public corruption as "epidemic, endemic, and entrenched. No branch of
government is exempt."

Louisiana ranks third in the nation in the number of elected
officials per capita convicted of crimes (Mississippi takes top prize).
In just the past generation, the Pelican State has had a governor, an
attorney general, three successive insurance commissioners, a
congressman, a federal judge, a state Senate president and a swarm of
local officials convicted. Last year, three top officials at
Louisiana's Office of Emergency Preparedness were indicted on charges
they obstructed a probe into how federal money bought out flood-prone
homes. Last March the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered
Louisiana to repay $30 million in flood-control grants it had awarded
to 23 parishes

Update: Lots more at Porkopolis. 

Louisiana population is 4,468,976, not all of which was
affected by the hurricane. A reasonable assumption is to say that half the
population was in the path of the hurricane. That would be about 2,234,488,
but to keep calculations simple we'll round up the affected population to 2,
500,000. That 2.5 million of affected Louisiana residents will make for an easy
calculation

$250 billion divided by 2.5 million affected residents
results in a disaster relief request of.....(drum rooooooooooll)...$100,000 per person!

And these juicy details:

• $100 million for "psychological trauma response early intervention,
  prevention, and disorder treatment by culturally competent counselors and mental
  health professionals for children who are 0 to 5 years of age; see page 38, line
  1.
• $100 million for mosquito abatement; see page 39, line 12.
• $1 billion "shall be used for a program to aid the travel and tourism
  industry"; see page 45, line 17
• $5 million for Project Serv under the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and
  Communities Act; see page 49, line 13
• NOAA weather radio for every eligible person; see Sec. 526 .

Occasioning this statement:

"It's all vital," said Landrieu. "There's not
anything in here that we would consider a wish list or pie in the sky. This is
what we really believe is essential."

This is just the macro-scale version of this, business as usual in Louisiana:

Police found cases of food, clothes and tools intended for hurricane
victims in the backyard, shed and rooms throughout the home of a chief
administrative officer of a New Orleans suburb, officials said
Wednesday.

Police in Kenner searched Cedric Floyd's home Tuesday because of
complaints that city workers were helping themselves to donations for
hurricane victims. Floyd, who runs the day-to-day operations in Kenner,
was in charge of distributing the donations.

The donations, including lanterns, vacuums and clothes with price
tags attached, had to be removed in four loads in a big pickup truck,
Kenner police Capt. Steve Caraway said.

"It was an awful lot of stuff," he said.

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