Time to outlaw the NFL?

I need to start this blog by saying that I grew up loving professional football, but in the last few years that I have begun to sour on the hypocrisy of college football and the brutality of the NFL, both of which receive a semi-free pass from a mostly compliant press corp.

The average NFL career lasts 3.5 years. Of the 100,000 high school kids who strap on pads every year, only 0.2 percent will have the pleasure of experiencing such a short career. These statistics are courtesy of the NFL Players Association. It’s hard to imagine another profession that so callously discards men after they have outlived their usefulness.

For the players, part of the allure is the money, the million dollar contracts. Only, most athletes struggle to hold onto those riches. A March 2009 Sports Illustrated article reported that:

- By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.

To do the math, the average player logs three and half year in the NFL and two years later, he’s a financial wreck. At least the guy has his college education, right? No, absolutely not.

The graduation rate for kids in big time football and hoops programs is lower than the national average, which tells you those boys are hitting something other than the books. Everyone in the system knows these kids don’t attend four year degree school with the notion of coming out of it holding onto a diploma. You only need to listen to one press conference to realize most of these kids would have trouble with English Lit 101. I could go on, but the Root’s Deron Snyder has a really good take on the hypocrisy behind pretending these young men are student athletes.

The NCAA would have you believe that graduation rates are going up. Instead of spouting these numbers as gospel, can we point out that the NCAA only looks at kids have scholarships for four years? If the coaches think a freshman will not be good enough to make the team in his sophomore year, he isn't offered a scholarship for the sophomore year. I think you have to count those numbers in the dropout rate. They don’t help.

Well, so we’ve seen that the NFL doesn’t prepare its players for life out of the game financially and the colleges don’t give them the educational background they need to survive without football. But that’s not the biggest crime.

Depending on position, the average NFL retiree has a life expectancy 20 years less than the average man in America. In case you missed it the first time, yes that number is 20 years less.

And the quality of life is dramatically less. Those who live long lives will face knee and hip replacement surgery, an inconvenient truth the media has ignored.

Then there are the concussions. In light of aggressive reporting by the New York Times, the league has acknowledged concussions leave lasting damage. You can file that under things that are obvious unless you are trying to ignore them, like snow is cold and rain is wet.

When we attend movies, another entertainment venue, we employ a trick called suspension of disbelief to help us imagine that a car chase could happen on Fifth Avenue during rush hour in New York City or that aliens would want to phone home. During one particularly bad Christian Slater movie, my father once remarked, “There isn’t that much disbelief in the world to accept this plot.”

I feel that way about the NFL. I can’t look at it without thinking we are willingly sacrificing young men’s lives for our entertainment, and not just the guys who are who make it to the big time, but also the guys who work hard but aren’t good enough to play in the league.

Here’s is what I wonder: a thousand years from now, will archeologists look at football the same way will look at Roman gladiators and be appalled by how we let this happen?

Golf tours look forward to next season

I wrote this a while back but never posted it because it was off topic. Given Tiger's recent off-course driving experiences, I think it's relevant as I'll explain in a later post.

Let me start from an odd place, the LPGA. Michelle Wie finally won. Grabbed by an on course reporter moments after she tapped in for victory, Wie proceed to give a rambling, incoherent interview about how grateful she was to breakthrough, but the content of conversation didn't matter. The star the LPGA had been waiting and praying for emerged from the darkness, leaving everyone associated with the business end of the tour hoping that she can kick it into super nova and rescue the brand the way her 30 yard bunk shot by the 18 green rolled into gimme range to seal the tournament. The women's tour needs a bonifide star, and it doesn't matter if she, like Wie, is yellow. They need a woman who can win, wear tight clothes and represent the game. The Koreans clearly don't think media accessibility is on the checklist of things required to play on the tour. They maybe right that being out front media wise will not bring them the endorsements Wie and the other American-born stars have snagged without reaching the winner's circle, but that short-sighted view doesn't take into account the tour's long-term health.

At this point, the Koreans look like visiting strip miners, here to plunder American gold without helping to refill the coffers. It should be noted that when Wie won, not a single Asian woman stepped out of the late afternoon shadows that blanketed the 18th green to congratulate the 20-year-old star. Americans Paula Crammer and Morgan Pressel stepped out to spritz her with soda pop, while the Asians stood aside. You wonder what were they thinking.

Tiger Woods's assent to the most liked face in golf proves the golf world is willing to move past the color barrier if the star is telegenic and charismatic. The American women, including the gay ones, have always understand that wearing short skirts and tight tops drives television ratings on the golf channel just like it does for prime time shows on the major networks. Heck, the women's tour employs a make-up consultant to prep the women before they head to the practice tee. The Koreans act as if these attempts to gussy up their image demeans the sports, an admittedly possibly true assertion. Then again, no one complained in the 80's when NBA players wore tight and short shorts, certainly not the women watching the sport.

Anyway, I have digressed about the fairer sex longer than I had meant to. On the men's side of the house, the last three tournament have ended in playoffs. Exciting television even if the names on the leaderboard can only be recognized by hardcore golf devotees. Across the globe, Phil proved that he is not only back but ready to challenge Tiger's dominance. Tiger broke through with his first win on the Australian continent, but all is not perfect in Tigerland. Phil presents a serious challenge to the boy who could not be stopped. Already the Tiger mystique of winning every major when he has held the 54-hole lead was shattered after some Brian May clone didn't back down at the PGA. Now everybody will think the Colossus of the fairways can be knocked aside, banished like an ancient relic. Or maybe just when you have grabbed a tamed tiger by the tail is when you should worry most.

The flexible English langauge

Going back to basics, I picked up Grammar for Dummies the other day. It's one of a bunch of books that I have on the subject, though I confess that in this I am an inexpert student, as my friends never tire of reminding me.

Not through my hand alone, American English is under attack because of the informality of the digital age. To the our grandparents tell it, the introduce of email and texting, have assaulted the language of Shakespeare and Chaucer. According to those traditionalists, we are fueling the flames of hell with style manuals of all kinds.

I am, however, a person who believes in the flexibility of grammar and words, which drives the strict grammarians batty. But when our forefathers and mothers reached these shores, the English they spoke and wrote combined with the native tongues of other settlers from other nations, resulting in the polyglot we have today.

As a country, Americans hold the belief that world history (and the English language) starts with their birth, and change should only occur on thier terms. Unfortunately, that believe smacks up against the other core American values of exploration and self-determination. The country was founded by a group of explorers who made up a new form of government and a Constitution flexible enough to be a living document 220 years later.

Is it any wonder that we also look at language as malleable, at least as it's interpreted within a given set of rules?

That said, have fun finding all the typos in this post.

Consolidation, bad customer service, disaster

As consolidation sweeps across an industry, customers suffer. Oligarchies stifle competition, setting prices and releasing products that meet their needs, not the consumers. For a classic example of this, see OPEC during the 1970's, Ma Bell before the 1980's break up, the music industry or, for a more recent example, the U.S. auto industry. The other lesson here is that oligarchies hurt themselves. The lack of competition leads to complacency, a failure to innovation and focus on the bottom line not the end user.

No where is this clearer than in the customer service department of large corporations. Every call to a customer service department starts with a machine and menu of options that generally starts off letting the customer know how to pay the bill. From the outset, the company sets the image that its chief role is to collect payments, not provide service.

Customer service departments in large corporations are similar to human resources. They work for the people providing the service, not the people receiving it. As a result, they stick to corporate policies rather than resolving customer issues.

A case in point: I recently cancelled my FiOS service with Verizon because I moved out of their coverage area. While I liked the FiOS service and the channels, especially now that I am living with a more limited and more expense lineup from Comcast because I am no longer in a competitive market, for the first six months of my relationship with Verizon, I was over billed. Problems that I thought were resolved, snuck back into subsequent bills.

Cable bills are paid in advance. That means, you pay for June service before you actually receive it. They also don't prorate your last bill, but ask you to send in the full amount and promise to send you a refund check 6-8 weeks later, if they remember. During all that time, they collect interest on your money. During a call to Verizon I point out that there was no need for me to pay the full amount of the June bill, they had cut off service and I returned the equipment so I could not siphon off services. Verizon said they hadn't determined the final bill. But why not, I asked I had been without service for a little over a week, why couldn't they simply prorate the bill on the spot? Because that's not the way it's done came the answer.

Verizon is by no means alone in this, when I switched over to ATT to buy the iPhone, each of my first four bills contained $40 of extra services that I never ordered. It took four separate 30 minute phone calls to finally resolve the problem.

I mention this not because I think everyone should check their bills carefully--you should--but these companies can get away with this lack of customer service and over billing for two reasons:

1) They think people will not notice that they are being over billed and they are right.

2) There is no penalty for over billing. In fact, because most of us sign one or two year contracts to get favorable rates, there is a penalty on us if we fight back by taking our business away.

Bad customer service is one symptom of a larger malaise, a lack of focus on the customer. This disregard for the end user is fine as long as the consumer cannot find other choices, but it kills the corporation when sea changes occur. Most often this sea change comes with a shift in technology, such as the oil crisis and the resulting demand for cars with better gas mileage or Napster and music industry reluctance to embrace the Internet.

In both cases, the reigning colossus lost because it tried to dictate end user behavior and failed as outside forces proved to be too strong. To be fair, both the auto and music industry had products that inspired loyalty, but as giants who focused on their bottom lines rather that what was good for the customer, they didn't innovate and are on life support.

Who is next?