RES IPSA LOQUITUR

 

               I’m not a lawyer, and I’ve never played one on TV, but along the way I’ve picked up some lawyer lingo, and one such phrase seems apt to describe a couple of current sports issues. It’s res ipsa loquitur, which is Latin for “the thing speaks for itself.”

               What that means is that, sometimes, the evidence supporting something is so obvious that no further proof of cause is necessary; for example, if an air-conditioner falls from a window and beans someone below, the fact itself proves negligence or bad intent on someone’s part. Ditto if a surgeon leaves a sponge in a patient.

The conclusion that’s obvious from any skim of the facts is that the National Football League has a dismal record when it comes to hiring black coaches. In a league in which about two thirds of the players are black, its 32 teams had exactly one black head coach—the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin-- in the weeks leading up to Sunday’s Super Bowl. A couple of recent hires—Lovie Smith by the Houston Texans and Michael McDaniel by the Miami Dolphins—increased that total to three (or to two and a half depending on how you’re counting, because McDaniel is biracial), but a deep deficit remains. That’s despite the pious rhetoric the league churns out over its minority-hiring policies.

 The issue was brought to the forefront by a lawsuit against the league and three of its teams by Brian Flores, a black man who was fired by the Dolphins at the end of last season despite having a respectable 24-25 won-lost record in his three years with the team, and 19-14 the last two. Flores further alleged that a couple of his interviews for a new job, with the New York Giants and Denver Broncos, were charades designed to put a good face on processes with foregone conclusions—the hiring of white head coaches.  

               The suit was especially notable because Flores filed it while still in the job market; not surprisingly, he remains unemployed. It stood out further for his assertion that during his first season with the Dolphins Stephen Ross, the team’s owner, offered him a $100,000 bonus for every game the team lost, with the aim of securing a better position in the NFL’s worst-is-first annual draft. That NFL (and other leagues’) teams sometimes “tank”—intentionally lose—is another res ipsa loquitur proposition, but the bribery angle was novel.

                 All of our Big Three major professional sports leagues give lip service to being color (and sex) blind in their hiring, but results vary widely. For example, the 30 teams of the National Basketball Association, about three-fourths of whose players are black, currently have 13 black head coaches, but number was in single digits a couple of years ago, while in Major League Baseball the current count is two (Dave Roberts and Dusty Baker), but it’s been higher.

 In none of those leagues, though, is the player-head coach ratio more out of whack than in the NFL. The league moved to remedy that in 2003 with the adoption of the so-called Rooney Rule, named for Steelers’ owner Dan Rooney, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for important posts, but by one published count only 15 of its 129 head-coaching vacancies since then have been filled by blacks. It’s probably also worth noting that the Texans’ recent promotion of the 63-year-old Smith is widely regarded as a stopgap until that woebegone organization can get the rest of its house in order.   

 Pro sports’ hiring practices are, no doubt, a complex matter, but one important part of it usually escapes notice despite lying on the surface: the dual nature of the leagues. They often are regarded as single entities, and they are for things like negotiating television and labor contracts, but in their day-to-day affairs they are many: 32 in the NFL. Further, each team save the community-owned Green Bay Packers is a fief run by a single person or family, a privately held corporation that doesn’t have to follow the disclosure and other rules publicly owned companies do.

             Owners typically are men who have made a lot of money elsewhere but yearn for the celebrity big-time sports ownership can bring. They’re in it for the money, of course, but they also treasure the locker room info and cred that comes with their unique positions. They may run their primary businesses like, uh, businesses, but for many their teams are personal playthings, to do with as they please. If their hires are based on man-to-man chemistry there’s no one, including NFL commish Roger Goodell, to say nay. As Carroll Rosenbloom, the former Los Angeles Rams’ owner once said, “I’ve given my children a great many things, but I kept the football team for myself.”  

                Flores’s charge of money for losses has been loudly denied by owner Ross, but the fact of tanking in sports is as beyond dispute as a surgeon’s misplaced sponge. It can be a tricky matter, because athletes are loath to take the field to lose, so teams get around that by stripping their rosters of saleable (i.e., competent) players and letting nature take its course. In baseball, the Washington Nationals’ management team of Stan Kasten and Mike Rizzo called that practice “The Plan” when they dumped the 2008, ’09 and ’10 seasons to man up for a later string of playoffs finishes and the 2019 World Series title. Theo Epstein repeated it in Chicago enroute to the Cubs’ drought-ending 2016 triumph. The Cincinnati Bengals dragged in at 2-14 in 2019, picked Joe Burrow No. 1 in the next draft, and wound up in the Super Bowl this season. 

                The race to the bottom became so obvious in the NBA that in 1985 the league introduced a draft-lottery system that makes it chancy for terrible teams to get plum draft choices; the latest of many versions makes the 14 teams that fail to make the playoffs eligible for one of the top-four picks. Establishing such a system in baseball is a topic in current labor-contract talks. In sports, the “what” often is nose-on-your-face apparent, but fixing it takes more doing than you might think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              

 

   

                 

              

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I turned 84 last week (Feb.2) but still have more questions than answers. Here are some of them.

--Is there a mattress store in America that isn’t having a sale?

--Don’t those ads for time-share freedom make you glad you never signed up for one?

--Is it possible to conclude a close college basketball game without the officials holding a five-minute huddle over the possession of a ball tipped out of bounds or whether a couple tenths of a second should be added to the clock?

               --Can anything enliven a sandwich more than giardiniera, a spicy-hot collection of diced, pickled vegetables packed in olive oil? Nothing goes better on Italian beef or a lunchmeat sandwich.

               --Why do some people use “anxious” as a synonym for “eager”? Anxiety implies a feeling of dread, eagerness doesn’t.

               --Did I ever say anything bad about Amazon customer service? If I did I take it back. Their phone service, at 1-888-280-4331, is excellent.

               --But why is it that when I call United Healthcare I have to answer five or six questions before they’ll let me ask one?

               --Don’t you think cell-phone makers intentionally make their products slippery so we’ll drop them and have to buy new ones?

               --Wouldn’t it be nice to get a Facebook “friend” request from someone you know?

               --Is there a less-edifying new baseball stat than “exit velocity”? Who cares how fast a ball was going when it left the park?

               --When did “length” replace “height” in describing athletes’ sizes?

               --Why do Trumpian election liars insist their man won by a “landslide”? Wouldn’t a narrow win have been enough to salve his wounded ego?

               --So you’re running around outside carrying a machine gun, and someone makes you “feel threatened,” so it’s okay to shoot him, right?

               --Why will baseball batsmen take a strike down the middle on a 3-0 count and then swing at a bad pitch at 3-1?

--Hasn’t the new-med-naming contest been settled by the entry of Imbruvica? What could top that?

--What does it say about the aging process when you come to regard throw rugs like poisonous snakes?

               --What are the most robo calls you’ve received before 8 a.m.? Our record is four.

--Why do the airlines make you print out five or six pages when all you want is your departure- and return-flight info?

--If it’s against the law in Arizona to alter auto license plates, how can so many people drive around with ones that are obviously doctored?

               --Is it possible to use one of those “super glues” without getting some on your hands?

               --Wasn’t not using email the smartest thing Trump ever did?

               --Doesn’t it look like NFL refs get paid by the flag?

               --Does anyone sitting on hold for 20 minutes believe that line about your call being “very important to us”?

               --Remember when VRBO really meant “Vacation Rentals By Owner”? Now it’s a big, bureaucratic corporation run by real estate agents with more rules than the SEC, and no owners in sight.

               --Why is a university’s chief sports officer almost always referred to as the “athletic director” when it should be “athletics,” plural? The position’s formal title is “director of athletics” and its occupant needn’t be jocklike.

               --Doesn’t it seem that everyone who goes unvaccinated will contract covid-19 sooner or later?

               --Is there such a thing as a good-news message from Microsoft?

               -- And relatedly, aren’t about half our waking hours spent trying to fix glitches in our electronic devices?         

               Just askin’.