Pater Familias

ARE TWINS BETTER IN SOME SPORTS THAN IN OTHERS? The NBA season is starting and the Lopez twins are joining the Collins twins, also identical twins, as NBA players. One of my correspondents suggested to me that twins seem to be more successful in professional basketball than in other sports. He pointed to the Van Arsdale twins in the seventies, the Grants in the nineties, and the Collins twins and Lopez twins today. I checked this wikipedia article and added the names of Heather and Heidi Burge and Coco and Kelly Miller in women’s professional basketball. With the article I came up with Tiki and Ronde Barber and Josh and Daniel Bullocks in professional football. In baseball, nine pairs of twins have played in the majors, even if you go back to 1910—with only five pairs of twins since 1950. So it looks like there is some evidence (although with small samples) that twins do better in basketball. Could one reason be that basketball is a sport that you can practice one on one?

HOW MY FATHER CAME TO SING IN A BOYS CHOIR. I can’t sing. My father couldn’t either. This is not just understatement. I have been repeatedly assured by people who should know that I can’t sing.. I posted yesterday about how Jim Crowley (of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame) was a classmate of my father’s. Naturally, his athletic talent made him a hero to his classmates. There came a time that the nuns came to each classroom for auditions for the boys choir. When it was Jim Crowley’s turn, he said, “I can’t sing, sister.” When it was my father’s turn, he said (truthfully) the same thing. When the twelve singers were announced, the nun read off nine names, and then said, “And Jim Crowley, Elmer Schaefer and Walter Schaefer because we know you can sing.” My father didn’t know how his brother Walter was chosen because his brother couldn’t sing. All went well because nine of the boys could really sing. Then one day, only my father and his brother showed up. The organist told them after a couple minutes the equivalent of “I can take it from here.”

MY FATHER AND CURLY LAMBEAU. The Green Bay Packers have had a wonderful year and are in the playoffs. Our family are Packer fans because my father grew up in Green Bay. My father’s high school football coach was Curly Lambeau, the founder of the Packers, and the namesake for Lambeau Field. When my father talked about his high school team, he talked about Jim Crowley, who played on the team and went on to be one of the all time great football players as one of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. My father always smiled happily when he told of how he played second string and Lambeau yelled at him every day in practice because he could often get his hands on Crowley, but he could never tackle him. It was a comfort when it became clear in time that a lot of players had trouble tackling Crowley.

REFEREEING IS PART OF THE NARRATIVE. In addition to accountability (and providing economists with data), there is another reason for making a league’s evaluations of refereeing public. Like many fans, I watch a game because of the story. I watched a couple football games this year where the announcers couldn’t explain an important call, even with the benefit of replay. I never found out what happened in the game. In a close game, the evaluation of the refereeing can be as helpful as a box score. If fans spend three or more hours watching a game, they should be able to know the story (the interest in what really happened is one reason the Sun Belt Conference released this report on the refereeing of the 2006 Alamo Bowl).

AN ECONOMIST CALLS FOR MAKING REFEREE EVALUATIONS PUBLIC. I posted here arguing that referee ratings should be made public. I linked to a report by the Sun Belt Conference on the the refereeing of the 2006 Alamo Bowl which I think should be a model for all leagues and conferences. Now I have received an abstract of a paper by Ian Ayres of Yale University which is entitled: “Give Freakonomics a Chance.” The full abstract is as follows: “An NBA referee has now pleaded guilty, and forensic economists have found signs of bias and cheating in the NBA, college basketball and sumo wresting. Ian Ayres argues that the NBA should release referee data to allow forensic economists to look for statistical evidence of malfeasance, before credibility in results is lost.” The link to the article is here. I have not read the article because although the Berkeley Electronic Press has a generous policy of permitting a free view if I can recommend the journal to my institution, I don’t have an institution.

FORMULA ONE SHENANIGANS AND NFL SHENANIGANS. The National Football League Commisioner is reported by ESPN to be considering penalties on the New England Patriots for using TV cameras to steal defensive signals of opponents. The Yahoo! Sports article says, “According to the [ESPN] report, Commissioner Roger Goodell is considering “severe” sanctions, which include the possibility of penalizing New England multiple draft picks because the team has been suspected of previous videotaping violations.” In the meantime, here is a report that McLaren have been fined one hundred million dollars and thrown out of the 2007 constructors’ championship for theft of Ferrari intellectual property. The NFL thinks of the loss of draft picks as “severe” sanctions. Formula One has a different perspective.

USING THE HELMET AS A WEAPON. With better football helmets, the use of the head to make a hit, a kind of spearing with the helmet, has increased. The top of the helmet gives better protection than the side, so a hit to the side of the head is rougher on the recipient. This article about Ted Johnson, retired middle linebacker for the New England Patriots, describes some of the damage that can come from this kind of hit and from cumulative effects. There has been some effort to penalize helmet to helmet hits in the NFL, but only on quarterbacks. Back in the day, a tackle was supposed to be made with the shoulder with the head on the side because it less dangerous and because it was easier to “wrap up” the ball carrier. Now, a good hit with the helmet is celebrated by the announcers (“Wow, he really put a hat on him!”) and shown on highlights. Meanwhile, I am flinching and muttering, “Kids, don’t try this at home.”

FOOTBALL AND PREJUDICE. A young African-American man told me fairly recently that he encountered racial prejudice almost every day. The Super Bowl will have a match up of two African-American coaches for the first time. Although a majority of the players in the National Football League are African-American and have been for a long time, there are only a handful of African-American head coaches. Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy had been very highly regarded assistant coaches in the National Football League for many years before getting their chance to be a head coach. That two of them are in the Super Bowl is evidence that they had to be better in order to get the job. The situation with college football coaching is even worse, with only a few African-American coaches out of hundreds of jobs.

CACTUS JACK CURTICE’S UTAH PASS PLAY. Back in the fifties and sixties I often read about Cactus Jack Curtice’s Utah Pass Play, which was described as a short pass followed by a lateral. I had never seen it. On New Year’s Eve I heard a shovel pass described as a Utah Pass Play, and I said something about what I understood to be the Utah Pass Play. And then last night I had the thrill of seeing a team from Idaho pull off the Utah Pass Play–a pass and then a lateral for a touchdown. (Boise State tied the score against Oklahoma with less than fifteen seconds left in regulation time.) However, nobody seems to call it the Utah Pass Play and Google doesn’t recognize the term. It was still a great thrill.