“It’s Not Just About Sports”

by

Frankie Pavia

Season Categories Published
MP00 Life Sports

Feb 19, 2014


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I was still in a bit of a stupor the morning after the Super Bowl. Actually I was completely delirious. My voice was hoarse from screaming Richard Sherman quotes at passersby after the game. A Seattle team was world champions, in the most convincing fashion imaginable, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. I drunkenly stumbled around in a snowstorm at 10:30 AM trying to decide whether I was in any state capable of going to work. I then got an email from Sunil Gulati, co-instructor of the course I TA, saying that Casey Ichniowski had suddenly passed away.

When I arrived at Columbia three years ago, sports were everything. Growing up, my dream was to become a sportswriter. My friends and I started a copyright-infringing paper called “Fox Sports World” in second grade. I had written for my high school newspaper, a local sports blog, and a national NBA scouting website. The path to becoming a sports journalist was clear, bordered by lush vegetation and the scent of fresh flowers. A dense fog obscured all other paths.

The sports path became even more enticing my freshman year when I got a job with Casey Ichniowski, a labor economist and professor at the Columbia Business School. I began working as a research assistant on two projects. The first project sought to quantify the effect a player’s March Madness performance had on where he would be picked in the NBA Draft. The second project sought to establish whether star players on relatively weak national soccer teams made their teammates better.

Of course, I was just excited to be doing research on sports. My goals at this point were shifting from journalism to the front office – to be general manager of a sports team. I tried to shift my academic interests towards advancing that end. There was just one problem – I simply did not enjoy economics classes. During my sophomore year it became readily apparent that my academic passion was earth science, not anything related to sports.

My meetings with Casey became more frequent during that year as the paper about March Madness approached completion. In early March, the paper was submitted and released to positive reviews from fellow economists, but a tepid response from those in the basketball industry. I relayed some of the negative comments from basketball writers and scouts the next time I met Casey and received a surprising response.

He told me, “It’s not just about sports.” He explained what I’d known all along, but never truly grasped about the basketball and soccer projects I’d worked on – the research was about something bigger. Sports were just a medium Casey used to answer fundamental questions about labor economics. In the basketball paper he found that executives use rational decision-making processes when evaluating employees. In the soccer paper he found that peer effects are hugely important in the workplace, that “Hiring high talent workers has spillover effects.”

Casey and I, it turns out, had blazed similar paths. Our athletic careers ended in high school, but our love for sports never waned. Our academic interests deviated from sports, but we kept them in our lives nonetheless. The past two years, Casey and I worked together to develop a sports management course for MBA students at Columbia. The first edition of the class, last spring, was a success, though an incredible amount of work. We met every week, sometimes getting distracted and talking about sports, sometimes rigorously planning our next steps to improve the course. No two meetings were the same – the only constants were his impeccably groomed mustache, thirty years in the making, and the fuss of hair that migrated from on top of his head to the front no matter how often he fixed it.

At that point, Casey and I were the only remaining members of the sports group that had once bustled with undergraduate research assistants. The course we were planning was six years in the making, but had never gotten off the ground. I like to think the class finally happened because Casey wanted to keep sports an active part of his life. His children had all entered college; his time coaching youth sports was over. The basketball and soccer projects had mostly concluded. The course was the link back to what he loved so much. It was certainly that way for me – working on my thesis in oceanography, spending almost all my time in the lab, meeting with Casey in his office was my escape back to my purest love.

The course was off to a strong start this semester. With a year of experience and improvements under our belts, the first class went swimmingly. It seemed that Casey, Professor Gulati, and I had created an exceptional class. Then Professor Gulati’s email came, Casey was gone from our lives, and my world had been jolted into disequilibrium. The week after the Super Bowl was extraordinarily difficult. I struggled to balance the exuberance of winning the Super Bowl with the sorrow of losing one of my closest mentors.

I attended Casey’s funeral the Saturday after the Super Bowl to pay my respects. Casey was always there for me – he talked me about my academic path, my career goals, and my general interests. He was the first person I talked to about my mom receiving chemotherapy, the first person to give me perspective and hope about the situation. We talked about our families a lot. I had only met his wife and one of his children briefly, but Casey made me feel like a member of his family, and I tried to make him feel like part of mine.

“It’s not just about sports” is the most important advice I have ever received in my life. It drove me to seek out a path in earth science, which provides fulfillment in a way sports never could. I could have easily followed the first path presented to me and worked for a sports team, with the highest priority making an owner more money – even winning is simply a conduit for that. But Casey helped me see that there was more to the world than that – that I could make a bigger impact somewhere else and still be just as passionate.

The course was how we both connected back to the sports world. It was a bond we shared that was forged by our mutual love for it. The course is continuing on after Casey’s death, with Casey, as Professor Gulati eloquently put it, “working remotely.”

At his funeral, I listened to speaker after speaker share their memories with Casey. Everyone in his life relished the moments they spent sharing their love of sports with him, how strong a connection they were able to develop over that one topic.  I thought about how excited I’d been to talk about the Super Bowl with him, for him to share my joy in the Seahawks winning, to hear him talk about the greatest sports teams of his lifetime.

The week after the Super Bowl, my greatest joys, my favorite moments, came from watching the videos of Seahawks celebrating afterwards. Seattle fans felt personal, emotional connections to the individual players in a way I have never seen before in sports. We danced to Bay Area rap with Marshawn Lynch. We screamed at opposing fans with Richard Sherman. We got chills every time Pete Carroll referenced the impeccable connection the players had with “The 12s” in locker room speeches because we knew it was true. I was unable to share my joy with Casey, but I could share it with the team itself – I coped with Casey’s loss by watching and rewatching the Sound F/X videos of Seahawks players mic’d up during the games. I’ve listened to the same song Marshawn listened to in the locker room, Philthy Rich’s Ready to Ride Remix, hundreds of times on repeat. Doing these things created abstract tie points in my life chronology that connect otherwise disparate events – they allowed the joy of winning the Super Bowl to spill over and counteract the sorrow of losing one of my mentors and idols.

Casey’s mantra “It’s not just about sports” never rang truer than during these moments after the game. I was excited that the Seahawks had won the Super Bowl because I wanted to share my happiness with all my friends, with the Seahawks players, with all my fellow Seahawks supporters, and with everyone who knew the joy that a Super Bowl win would bring Seattle fans. Sports do have true value. It’s not just about sports – it’s about the people who share your experiences with, the community of fans, players and sports lovers around you, and there is nothing greater than that.

What the 2012 Seahawks Meant to Seattle

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP00 Sports

Jan 15, 2013


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Two days ago, on the 14th play of an 80-yard drive, Jason Snelling took a shovel pass from Matt Ryan and waltzed into the end zone, giving the Atlanta Falcons a 27-7 lead over the Seattle Seahawks with 2:11 left in the 3rd quarter. It was their 5th score in 6 drives. At this point, a theoretical Seahawks victory would be one of the greatest playoff comebacks of all-time, by any calculation.

As a Seahawks fan watching alone on my computer in my room, I was distressed, but never in despair. I knew this game was not over. I had watched the Seahawks make the absurd look ordinary all season. Observe:

  • Week 4: Down 12-7 to the Packers with 7 seconds left, Russell Wilson heaves a Hail Mary to Golden Tate, giving the Seahawks a controversial 14-12 win.
  • Week 6: Down 23-10 to the Patriots with 13 minutes left, the Seahawks defense forces two punts and the offense scores the go-ahead TD with 1:18 on the clock to give the Seahawks a 24-23 win.
  • Week 13: Down 14-10 at Chicago with 3:40 left, Wilson engineers an 97-yard TD drive to give the Seahawks a 3-point lead with 24 seconds on the clock. After the Bears miraculously kick a field goal at the end of regulation, Wilson leads an 80-yard game-winning drive on first possession of OT.
  • Weeks 14-16: Seahawks bust 58 points on the Cardinals, 50 on the Bills, and then 42 on the 49ers.
  • Wild Card Round: Down 14-0 after the 1st quarter, the Seahawks outgain the Redskins 371 yards to 74 the rest of the way and win 24-14.

Clearly if there was ever a team who could make up a 20-point deficit in 17 minutes on the road in the playoffs, it was the Seattle Seahawks. And so I welled with pride as I watched my team fight back on both sides of the ball. Quick touchdown. 27-14. Earl Thomas interception, another touchdown. 27-21. 9 minutes left. Defensive 3-and-out, punt, defensive 4-and-out. Then with 31 seconds left, Marshawn Lynch ran it in to put the Seahawks up 28-27. It was a beautiful thing to behold, not just as a fan, but as a human, watching a team forge its own destiny.

A kickoff and two plays later, Atlanta had driven into field goal territory. Their 49-yard attempt cut effortlessly through the Georgia Dome air and split the uprights. Final score: Falcons 30, Seahawks 28.

From distress to ecstasy to shock. I suddenly felt in touch with the elemental side of life. This game carried significance beyond its temporal boundaries. It was the culmination of a breathtaking season by a young team of entertaining characters that formed a distinct collective personality in step with their improved performance, from a 4-4 start to an 11-5 finish. Slowly but surely, the 2012 Seahawks captured imaginations, gaining national recognition as they actualized their goals and blossomed into something pure. I now know what it feels like to be a parent.  After the loss to the Falcons, I was not mad, or even sad – only proud. The 4th quarter was so captivating that I could not process what was happening in real time. The game left me in disbelief, not that this team could stage such a dramatic comeback, but that this resilient, electrifying, swagged-out team was not of Boston or New York or Los Angeles, but of Seattle.

I read an article after the New York Giants won the Super Bowl in which Eli Manning was asked if he did it for the fans. No, he said, we do it for the guys in this locker room. It is not wishful thinking to believe that the players on the 2012 Seahawks do it not only for themselves, but also for the city and the name on the jersey. The 12th Man crowd, with the help of some well-designed stadium acoustics, is responsible for making Century Link Field the best home-field advantage in the NFL. In this age of Twitter, there is greater transparency between player and fan, and Seahawk players tweet thanks to the Seattle faithful on a regular basis. This should be taken with a grain of salt, but the time they take to express their gratitude is a nice gesture.

Seahawk fans were rooting for more than just laundry this season because we got to know the players both on and off the field. Starting in training camp, fullback Michael Robinson posted weekly 15-20 minute shows to his YouTube channel, The Real Rob Report. He films casual interviews and portrays the atmosphere inside the Seahawks practice facility locker room. Over the course of the season, Robinson introduced almost every player on the 53-man roster.

Football is a sport that dehumanizes the players. They are much more athletic than regular people, and they experience routine acts of violence that are far removed from everyday life. Helmets and masks obscure their faces. The drama is condensed to only 16 regular season games and a few playoff games. The game doesn’t have a consistent flow like basketball or soccer: the drama is then condensed even further into 4-7 second bursts. Offensive linemen are human shields and safeties are human projectiles. It’s almost impossible to relate to the players as they do battle. And that’s what makes The Real Rob Report so great. Robinson, a captain, welcomes you to meet the players with their helmets off. He has shown us how the Seahawks interact, what music they like, how they dance, and who they voted for in the election, or if they voted at all. He has shown us Red Bryant’s passion for cookies, and he has shown us Chris Maragos, the overconfident, white, backup safety, talk trash to Marshawn Lynch. Now, seeing Maragos standing on the sideline during a game brought me great pleasure.

Seattle has had a lackluster sports history, and the 2012 Seahawks have probably been the most exciting team the city has ever seen. More exciting than the GP/Kemp ’96 Sonics, more exciting than the 116-win ’01 Mariners, more exciting than the ’05 Seahawks who went 13-3 and played in the Super Bowl. That Seahawks team won methodically; The 2012 Seahawks won with style. With crazy comebacks. With dreadlocks flowing out the helmets of half of its star players, including cornerback Richard Sherman, indubitably the cockiest player in the league. With a potent read-option offensive attack. With a 5’10” quarterback named Russell Wilson who scrambles like a young McNabb and passes from the pocket like a young Brady. This season was a cultural movement the likes of which Seattle fandom has been waiting on forever.  This particular team’s identity cannot be separated from its symbiotic relationship between fans and players.

I must finish with Russell Wilson. He inspires me to become a better person. He inspires me to work hard and fulfill my potential. He won the starting job in training camp over big free agent signee Matt Flynn by waking up at 6:30 every day to watch film. He watched film the day after the Falcons loss. He visits sick kids in Seattle Children’s Hospital every week.  “I want to be great,” he said in December. “I want to be one of the people a 100 years from now, everyone talks about. That is the way I treat every single day.” He is the number one reason for the Seahawks improvement over the course of the season; he threw 10 TDs and 8 INTs Weeks 1-8, and 19 TDs and 3 INTs the rest of the way. He is the number one reason there has been a special relationship between players and fans this season. He is an underdog by virtue of his height, and we are all underdogs in one way or another. Russell Wilson transcends football. He is living proof that sports can be a valuable and even vital distillation of what we want to achieve and experience in life.

When the Seahawks plane landed in Boeing Field at dawn the morning after the Falcons game, Wilson tweeted, “Best feeling in the world seeing all the #12thman at the airport! Wow I love this team and this amazing city. #GoHawks.” The power of positive thinking in the face of defeat. The cult of Russell Wilson is growing fast, and there is little doubt that he will inevitably achieve his biggest goal.

Performance Enhanced, or Performance Achieved?

by

Carver Low

Season Categories Published
MP00 Sports

Dec 14, 2012


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A winning compound?

Ever since Seahawks cornerbacks Brandon Browner and Richard Sherman’s got suspended for violating the NFL’s substance abuse policy last weekend, something has been bothering me.  I think it’s the Adderall.  Yes, the drug that’s probably helping you write that last ten page essay or party your face off in celebration of finishing thesis.  That original suspension wasn’t the only of its kind.  More than a few other players have been suspended over the course of the current season and the NFL is dealing with a problem big enough for the media to write about. While most people have responded to this newest performance enhancing scandal with the usual outcries of “THIS IS AN EPIDEMIC, IT MUST BE STOPPED,” I’m only surprised this hasn’t become an issue sooner.  The problem hasn’t been confined to the NFL either.  Carlos Ruiz, starting catcher for the Phillies, has also been suspended for 25 games for Adderall use.  In the middle of the off-season.  Clearly both leagues agree that Adderall is a performance enhancing drug.  However, it doesn’t enhance performance in the traditional vein-popping, syringe-injecting, muscleman way. Adderall use is far more akin to a problem Major League Baseball had in the 70s and 80s than the one it dealt with in Barry Bonds and BALCO.

The year is 1970.  The Summer of Love has just passed and people everywhere are doing drugs.  Lots of drugs.  Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis throws a no-hitter while on LSD. The same year, Jim Bouton releases his book Ball Four.  It’s less of an expose and more of a retrospective, but a retrospective that nonetheless brought the abundant use of amphetamines in baseball to the attention of everyone.  Not that the use of various amphetamines in sports was a recent development.  Players had been using what were (and still are known) as ‘greenies’ during the baseball season since the 1920s.  Since then the chronicle of drug use in sports, particularly amphetamine use and baseball, has been well documented through suspensions, arrests, and even deaths.  Players from that era openly admit to the lack of stigma against cocaine and other amphetamines.  Players took them before, during, and after games.  Their perks sometimes turned out not to be, but the increased energy, confidence, and focus the drugs gave contributed to a general goodwill towards their use in sports.  They also got the players high, which helps.  There wasn’t a specific amphetamine prescribed for every ailment.   Players just generally did them.  Eventually the leagues began cracking down, and since then health studies, a slew of suspensions, and a general shift in the American cultural paradigm have rendered the exploitation of cocaine and illegal amphetamines non-existent in professional sports aside from the occasional anomaly.

Returning to the current era, it’s easy to see why a player would use Adderall.  It is, after all, an amphetamine in the same vein of the Greenies golden era baseball players used.  Adderall offers many of the benefits rudimentary amphetamines afforded players from the seventies, but without almost any of the detriments.  Increased focus.  Extended mental stamina.  Heightened energy. Lack of appetite.  The last one might not exactly be a benefit, but Adderall holds a trump card that even anabolic steroids never fully held – legality.

Still, the legality of Adderall hasn’t stopped the league from handing out suspensions.  Rookie New York Giants safety Will Hill, despite having a prescription for Adderall, was suspended for using the substance this October.  The Phillies’ Ruiz was caught and suspended, but in reality 1 in 10 MLB players uses Adderall legally with a medical exception.  While it’s true that NFL players can often get access to prescriptions and medications that wouldn’t be available to the average, non-multimillion dollar man, Hill’s case does illuminate the areas where the Adderall ban fails.

A pro football player’s job doesn’t stop when he leaves the football field after each game, or even each practice.  He watches film.  He studies his team’s plays. He studies the other team’s plays.  So when the league bans Adderall use, that can make each of those tasks challenging for a player who actually needs Adderall to focus.  Yes, Adderall probably helps players’ performance on the field, but it also probably helps players’ more off the field.  However, any push back along this line of argument may be a product of college life, where Adderall use without a prescription as common as walks of shame.  In that sense, the NFL’s ban on Adderall is actually more akin to its marijuana use policies than any PEDs, as it directs how a player may use his time outside of games rather than within them.

Herein lays the greatest difference between any other ‘performance enhancing drug’ and Adderall.  Other PEDs have acted as useful augmentations in specific scenarios like recovery or muscle-building, but Adderall is usually prescribed and generally understood as an everyday supplement.  Even though there are specific instances where Adderall is most effective (like studying film), the perception of Adderall is as a way to right an individual’s inefficiencies and shortcomings on a daily basis.  If steroids are a way to boost a body beyond its normal limitations, taking Adderall is a tool for to maximize everything a mind and body is already capable of.  It’s the difference between a black and white distinction of normal and abnormal growth and a question of potential.  Both heuristics have their limitations, but one is based in objective science while the other is based on the eternally-unpredictable future.

The NFL and MLB have opened a can of worms when it comes to restricting ADD and ADHD medication, and while it may take years for the results to manifest, we can learn a lot about Adderall’s place in society in the process.  When I was in elementary school, finding out someone was on ADD or ADHD medication was a reason for ridicule.  In college fifteen years later, that same kid would be the subject of more unwanted attention, although of a very different kind.  Adderall has become a ubiquitous leg-up on the competition in any facet of school, and in turn business.  NCAA restrictions on Adderall use are also far more lenient than those of the NFL, in large part because their players are (say it with me) “student-athletes.”  Everyone who plays in the NCAA doesn’t end up being a professional athlete, and neither does everyone who graduates from college end up being a CEO.  Colleges realize this.  However in life, just as in business, not everyone is on a level playing field.  Some “know the right people,” others have enough financial or cultural clout that everyone wants to know them, and the rest are left with their own ambition and talents.

It seems ironic that while professional sports work hard to remain a more level playing field than society (something sports have long been lauded for), Adderall is fast becoming the golden standard for excellence.  At least part of the reason professional sports are so against PEDs is because of the moral example it sets for kids (and parents).  So it’s really beside the point who gets suspended for Adderall, and for how long – these players aren’t all trading secrets on how best to beat the system and break the game they love.  They’re just using what they’ve learned (especially in college).  Because how long will it really be before fast tracked students are given Adderall from a young age, or drug companies begin developing designer versions of the drug a la Limitless?  These ideas may be ridiculous now, but so was the notion that a player could be suspended for Adderall as a performance enhancing drug.  Maybe the NFL, MLB, and the rest of professional sports aren’t the ones out of their depth.  Maybe it’s the rest of us.

The New Breed of Seahawk

by

Danny Schwartz

Season Categories Published
MP00 Sports

Oct 19, 2012


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This past Sunday, New England led the Seahawks 23-10 in the 4th quarter when Tom Brady locked eyes with dreadlocked Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman. “He looked at me like, ‘talk to me after the game,’” Sherman later said. “It’s just one of these things where I think Newton’s third law of motion applies. Every action has an equal or greater reaction.”

The Seahawks scored two late touchdowns to squeeze by the Patriots 24-23 for one of the most dramatic regular season victories in team history. Sherman took care not to do Isaac Newton right after the game.

“Me and Earl walked up to him and said, ‘We’re greater than you. We’re better than you. You’re just a man — we’re a team.’” An hour later, he tweeted the above picture, setting off an instant firestorm among the New England faithful. “Patriots fans mad lol…” said Sherman in his next tweet. “Talking bout Super Bowl rings…. What have u done lately? Oh ur 3-3 lol”

That is not a rational statement. One win does not outweigh 3 Super Bowl rings and 5 Super Bowl appearances in the Brady-Belichick era. Sherman doesn’t sound confident – he sounds arrogant.

And yet, I am delighted. Sherman has some attitude. It is significant here that he plays defense and not offense. Unlike on offense, everyone on defense plays with the singular goal of stopping the ball; to play defense, you need that strong carnal instinct. To me, this incident with Sherman shows that he possesses the type of competitive edge that’s essential to success on the defensive side of the football. If he is so happy with the Seahawks win that he talks trash to Brady after the game, then flaunts his trash-talking on Twitter, then backs up his flaunting – he is a real competitor.

Last year the Seahawks secondary anointed itself the Legion of Boom: Sherman, cornerback Brandon Browner, free safety Earl Thomas, and strong safety Kam Chancellor.  Sherman was the only member of the Legion of Boom not to receive an invitation to the 2012 Pro Bowl. Defensive backs are usually small and swift, like 5’11” Darrelle Revis. The Legion of Boom is huge. Chancellor is 6’3”/230, Sherman is 6’3”/200, and Browner is 6’4”/220. Sherman and Browner use their size best on bump-and-run and their length best to deflect balls. They aren’t the quickest, but they have a valuable counterweight in Earl Thomas, who at 5’10” uses his short legs to accelerate quickly from his position in center field; he has as much range as any safety in the league. So while these cornerbacks play an unorthodox style, their secondary is consonant as a whole.  Shit is working. Right now the Seahawks rank 5th in total defense and 3rds in scoring defense.

The Seahawks gave up 200 more yards to the Patriots than they had to any team all season. The Pats put together back to back 80-yard touchdown drives in the 1st half. But from then on, they scored only 9 points on 5 trips to the red zone. Sherman and Thomas each had a 2nd half interceptions, and the defense forced back-to-back punts with their offense down 13 points in the 4th quarter. They held Tom Brady to his lowest rating of the season.

Last night, the Seahawks lost 13-6 to the 49ers. They are 4-3. But still, this is the most exciting Seahawks season since they went 13-3 en route to the Super Bowl in 2005. Something feels different. New Nike uniforms help relieve the unsavory stank of the last 4 years (combined 23-41). The defense is young – rookie Bruce Irvin is on pace for double-digit sacks, rookie Bobby Wagner starts at middle linebacker. Starting OLB K.J. Wright is 23; Thomas is 23; Sherman is 24; Chancellor is 24; Browner is 28, but in only his second year in the league after a stint in the CFL. QB Russell Wilson is 23. Marshawn Lynch leads the league in yards after contact. It’s a youth movement…something great is in the works.

Shannon Sharpe once said,”Ray Lewis is the type of guy, if he were in a fight with a bear I wouldn’t help him, I’d pour honey on him because he likes to fight. That’s the type of guy Ray Lewis is.” Ray Lewis and Ed Reed applied the mischievous traditions they learned as Miami Hurricanes to the Baltimore Ravens, making it the most fearsome defense in the NFL for over a decade. They are animals, with no regard for human life. The Ravens D has been the Muhammad Ali of the league. But now Lewis is out for the year. The Seahawks D feels like the new Ravens. Fearless. Dickish. Brotherhood.

At the very least, they are giving the city of Seattle a sports team with a real edge, which was last seen in the Gary Payton/Shawn Kemp era in the mid-90s (Payton is still an active trash-talker on Twitter). The Mariners can’t score for shit, nor will they ever in the cavernous Safeco Field. The Sonics are gone. The Sounders are good, but the MLS is lame. It’s fun to rally around athletes who want nothing in life more than to win. If they talk excessive shit as a symptom, and if they can back up that sass, it’s even more fun. After the Tom Brady incident, Richard Sherman said, “People, they don’t look at the film. They don’t analyze anything. That’s why these analysts and commentators need to shut their mouth.”  Amazing. I’d like to thank Sherman, the Legion of Boom, and the 2012 Seattle Seahawks for restoring my faith in humanity.