Football is the king of sports

They say that it is dangerous to discuss politics or religion because people tend to be opinionated and inflexible on those subjects.  My experience, however, is not consistent with that belief.  I have found that when you approach the subject thoughtfully and stay calm, other people usually reciprocate. 

In addition to politics and religion, another subject that can turn into a powder keg is sports.  In fact, many people are more opinionated and inflexible about sports than politics and religion combined.    

Yesterday in my apartment pool, I got into a wide-ranging conversation with some guys who obviously were left-of-center.  First, they expressed their love of hockey by opining that NHL hockey players deserve million-dollar salaries more than any other professional athletes.  I deftly defused their argument by pointing out that salaries for professional athletes in various sports have nothing to do with how tough the job is, but rather depends almost exclusively on how much money the sport is able to generate.  And everyone knows that the NFL is the king of money.

Unwilling to genuflect before the NFL, these left-of-center guys cleverly agreed that football is the king of money, but football of the soccer variety.  When I expressed my ignorance of how much money soccer generates or pays its players, they assured me that soccer generates more money and pays higher salaries.  Despite their assurances, I expressed my doubt based on America’s wealth and its love of sports.  In my mind, that is why America has to pay a king’s ransom to televise the Olympics while other countries pay a relative pittance. 

Eventually, my new friends and I agreed to disagree, but when I got home, I decided to confirm my suspicions by determining which professional teams were the most valuable and which athletes were paid the most.  The first item was easy to find.  Less than a year ago, Forbes magazine compiled a list of the 50 most valuable sports teams.  Although soccer team Manchester United heads the list at $1.86 billion, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys are #2 at $1.81 billion, the NFL has 14 of the top 20, and all 32 NFL teams are in the top 50.  Soccer has eight teams in the top 50, while baseball has six.  Clearly, the NFL is the king.  

Forbes magazine also answered the question about which athletes are the highest paid.  According to Forbes, the highest paid athlete from May 2011 to May 2012 was boxer Manny Pacquaio at $67 million.  The top soccer guy was David Beckham, #7 at $46 million, while the top football guy was Peyton Manning, #8 at $42 million.  The top 17 was a motley assortment of five tennis players, three soccer guys, two NFLers, two boxers, two golfers, two basketballers, and one baseball player.  I think this information does not accurately reflect the dominance of the NFL because its compensation is spread over so many players on an NFL team.  An NFL roster consists of 53 players, while a major-league baseball team has 25, a soccer roster is about 20, and an NBA team has 12. 

Oh yeah, an NHL team has a roster of 22.  I almost forgot that this conversation started with my new friends’ love of hockey.  Unfortunately, hockey does not appear to generate much money, so the hard-working guys on skates don’t get on any high-dollar lists.  It just ain’t fair, but no one said that life is fair.

Should parents allow their sons to play tackle football?

A fascinating article is USA Today addressed whether parents should allow or encourage their sons to play football.  The article is fascinating because it contrasted the opinions of a famous football player, Tom Brady, and his opinionated dad, Tom Brady, Sr. 

Not surprisingly, the article is headlined with an attention-grabbing quote from the attention-seeking dad – who says that playing football is like playing Russian roulette – instead of from his football-playing son, who actually has some skin in the game.  I think it is significant that an intelligent, multi-talented 35-year-old adult who “has it all,” including the prospects of a fabulous post-NFL life, thinks the risks associated with playing NFL football are acceptable. 

One might argue that parents might be more conservative in the risks that they are willing to accept on behalf of their sons, but even in that case it seems that Brady, Sr. has forfeited his right to be so opinionated by already reaping the fame and fortune that have come his way from football.  Instead, he has the chutzpah to criticize other parents of football players – “Apparently, they don’t take their own parenting responsibility very seriously, or they don’t value their children’s health as much as they should.”

Personally, all of my four sons played tackle football, but only my youngest, Jimmy, played enough to be potentially at risk.  Jimmy was good enough to start on Clark’s defensive line for two years and was involved in a lot of collisions.  In fact, he had planned on playing football in college, but that hasn’t worked out yet. 

Jimmy’s mom was always worried about the collision component of football, but that didn’t start to concern me until his senior year.  Because of that late-arriving concern, however, I will not be terribly disappointed if Jimmy never suits up in college.

There appear to be two fundamental issues:

1. What are the costs and benefits of playing contact football?
2. Who decides?

The benefits of playing football are legendary.  Although I never played (my high school had only 49 kids), I have heard from countless players how much they learned from the game.  And I did play high-school basketball, so I concur in affirming the lasting, significant benefits derived from team sports.  The costs associated with playing football are less certain, almost like global warming.  Furthermore, the most problematic costs appear associated with high-level competition, such as the NFL or maybe college-level.

Regarding who decides whether to play football, that obviously varies from family to family.  If the parents are strong-minded on this subject, they can prevent their sons from playing in either middle school or high school.  Most parents, however, are amenable to persuasion by their sons, so much depends on how badly the sons want to play.  And then when the sons get to the point where physical damage is a greater risk (college and the pros), the sons will make their own decisions, as Tom Brady has done.  Of course, by then, the chances of a young man turning down football are almost non-existent.  If Tom Brady, with the world as his oyster, continues to play, virtually everyone else will, too.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with parents who oppose their sons playing tackle football, and they should take as strong a position as they want.  But I don’t think Brady Sr. should be impugning the parenting of those who do what he did – let ‘em play.

Dealing with celebrities

America has become obsessed with celebrity, and this obsession has resulted in a media that focuses more on hounding celebrities than on developing thoughtful communication. 

Ordinary people who try to avoid this culture of celebrity sometimes are placed in an awkward position when they encounter a celebrity.  The awkwardness comes from not wanting to be too hot or too cold.  Celebrities are entitled to their privacy, but their privacy does not take priority over the rest of us doing our thing.  For example:

• Give them their privacy.  I often see NBA All-Star Michael Finley at Lifetime Fitness, and he is apparently keeping his game sharp in the event an NBA team needs him.  If you look at my Facebook page, you will see that I have a photo album of my “glory days – high school basketball.”  Because I played in the relative obscurity of North Dakota, you might think that I would want to challenge Finley to a game of one-on-one, and you would be right.  But that would not be the right thing to do.  Even if I beat him, what would that prove?  And it wouldn’t be fair to Finley to spend his time letting every Tom, Dick, and Harry compare their games to his.
• Celebrities need to get in line with the rest of us.  Today at Lifetime Fitness I was doing some work on one of their four flat bench presses, starting at 135 lbs.  (That’s also the weight I finish at.)  After doing one set, I moved away for a few minutes to do some bicep curls.  While I was gone, NBA David Robinson and another guy (looked like a player, too) started using my bench and my weights (135 lbs.)  I gave them a few minutes, but when they started on their second set, I decided to move in.  David may be the Admiral, but that was my bench.  I walked right up to David and said I was using that bench, and furthermore I thought that 135 lbs. was a little too light for them.  He said he was sorry (everyone knows David is one of the nicest guys in the world), and I said don’t worry about it because I will use one of the other benches.

        It’s all about balance and perspective.

Joe Paterno finally speaks

In an article in today’s Washington Post, based on two interviews with Sally Jenkins, Joe Paterno finally speaks.

Jenkins reports that Paterno has been slowed by radiation and chemotherapy (“a wig replaced his once-fine head of black hair”), but he was anxious to defend his record.  The reference to 85-year-old Joe’s black hair reminds me of Ronald Reagan, who was always accused of dyeing his.  But I am also reminded of the Reagan comparison for another reason – how much or how little he micromanaged his empire.  Many of Reagan’s opponents thought he was a dunce who wasn’t aware of what was going on around him; that he was a mere figurehead.  Then Saturday Night Live did a hilarious skit suggesting that Reagan was actually just acting dumb so his opponents would underestimate him. 

Before the Sandusky incident, I often heard the same about Joe Paterno – i.e., he was no longer the vigorous person that he once was and that the football program was on cruise control, being run by his assistants.  But once the Sandusky affair occurred, that talk disappeared.  Instead there seemed to be unanimity amongst the media that Joe was a God-like person who presided over all things related to Penn State. 

The article and Joe addressed this issue head-on:

• Yet it came with the realization that as the face of the university, people assign him greater responsibility than other officials.  “Whether it’s fair I don’t know, but they do it,” he said. “You would think I ran the show here.”

In fact, Joe didn’t feel like he was an omniscient God:

• [McQueary] was very upset and I said why, and he was very reluctant to get into it,” Paterno said. “He told me what he saw, and I said, what? He said it, well, looked like inappropriate, or fondling, I’m not quite sure exactly how he put it. I said you did what you had to do. It’s my job now to figure out what we want to do. So I sat around. It was a Saturday. Waited till Sunday because I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. And then I called my superiors and I said: ‘Hey, we got a problem, I think. Would you guys look into it?’ Cause I didn’t know, you know. We never had, until that point, 58 years I think, I had never had to deal with something like that. And I didn’t feel adequate.”

The article also directly addressed why Joe didn’t do more than forward the report of the sex-abuse incident:

• “Almost as difficult for Paterno to answer is the question of why, after receiving a report in 2002 that Sandusky had abused a boy in the shower of Penn State’s Lasch Football Building, and forwarding it to his superiors, he didn’t follow up more aggressively.  ‘I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was,’ he said. “So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”….  Paterno’s portrait of himself is of an old-world man profoundly confused by what McQueary told him, and who was hesitant to make follow-up calls because he did not want to be seen as trying to exert any influence for or against Sandusky. “I didn’t know which way to go,” he said. “And rather than get in there and make a mistake . . .” 

The Washington Post article gave me another déjà vu moment when it described Paterno’s dismissal.  I still remember Dallas Cowboys football coach Tom Landry complaining about the way he was summarily dismissed by new Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.  Although I didn’t think Landry’s dismissal was handled so badly, Paterno has a much better argument:

• Paterno is accused of no wrongdoing, and in fact authorities have said he fulfilled his legal obligations by reporting to his superiors. Nevertheless, the university Board of Trustees summarily dismissed him with a late-night phone call four days after Sandusky’s arrest. At about 10 p.m., Paterno and Sue were getting ready for bed when the doorbell rang. An assistant athletic director was at the door, and wordlessly handed Sue a slip of paper. There was nothing on it but the name of the vice chairman of trustees, John Surma, with a phone number. They stood frozen by the bedside in their nightclothes, Sue in a robe and Paterno in pajamas and a Penn State sweatshirt. Paterno dialed the number.  Surma told Paterno, “In the best interests of the university, you are terminated.” Paterno hung up and repeated the words to his wife. She grabbed the phone and redialed.  “After 61 years he deserved better,” she snapped. “He deserved better.”

Regarding Paterno’s relationship with Sandusky:

• On a Saturday morning in 2002, an upset young assistant coach named Mike McQueary knocked on Paterno’s door to tell him he had witnessed a shocking scene in the Penn State football building showers. Until that moment, Paterno said, he had “no inkling” that Sandusky might be a sexual deviant. By then Sandusky was a former employee, with whom Paterno had little to do. Although Sandusky had been his close coaching associate and helped fashion Penn State defenses for three decades, their relationship was “professional, not social,” as Paterno described it. “He was a lot younger than me.” Sandusky had been out of the program for three years, and in fact, Paterno said he cannot recall the last time he had seen or spoken to Sandusky. “I can’t,” he said.

About Sandusky’s surprise retirement:

• Sandusky retired in 1999, shortly after Penn State made the Alamo Bowl. The timing was curious. Paterno’s understanding was that Sandusky took early retirement on his recommendation after Paterno told him frankly that he would not become his successor. The state was offering 30-year employees a handsome buyout, and Paterno believed Sandusky should take it. Paterno was frustrated that Sandusky spent so much time working on his youth foundation, The Second Mile, that he was not available to help in recruiting and other coaching duties. Authorities now say Sandusky used Second Mile to meet and groom his alleged victims.  “He came to see me and we talked a little about his career,” Paterno said. “I said, you know, Jerry, you want to be head coach, you can’t do as much as you’re doing with the other operation. I said this job takes so much detail, and for you to think you can go off and get involved in fundraising and a lot of things like that. . . . I said you can’t do both, that’s basically what I told him.”

Jenkins’ article gives Joe Paterno the opportunity to speak, something he was denied by the Penn State Board of Trustees, an entity he supposedly controlled.  I believe Joe’s statements are credible and adequate to defend his conduct in this entire affair.  In the end, people will remember Joe’s accomplishments, and he will be seen as a victim, not an accomplice in the Sandusky affair.

Nocera weighs in against the NCAA

Joe Nocera is an op-ed columnist for the NT Times who specializes in business issues.  In 2010, he co-authored one of the most widely-read books on the 2008 Wall Street financial meltdown – titled “All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.”  This past weekend, Nocera produced a NY Times column and a lengthy NY Times Magazine article attacking the NCAA’s exploitation of its college athletes.   

The column calls the NCAA a cartel and compares it to OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries).  Because the essence of a cartel is collusion and price-fixing, they are illegal in America, and Nocera wants to know why the NCAA is allowed to operate as it does.  Unfortunately, his column provides little in the way of legal information.  Instead of citing a lawyer, Nocera quotes an economist and litigation consultant (Andy Schwarz):

• “If steel companies got together to decide when and where to produce steel, that would violate the antitrust laws. But if sports teams in a league get together to decide when and where to play games, that’s generally allowed.” Major League Baseball has long had an antitrust exemption; other professional leagues have salary caps, which are legal because they have been agreed to by the players.  The N.C.A.A. has neither an antitrust exemption nor a player’s union to negotiate with.

Nocera implies that, because college athletes aren’t organized, the NCAA is an illegal cartel that violates America’s anti-trust law, and then he concludes his column with the meek suggestion:

• The N.C.A.A. claims it has the legal right to do all the above and more. And maybe it does. But it certainly would be worthwhile to see someone challenge its cartel behavior in court. The inevitable rollback of the $2,000 stipend and the four-year scholarship would be an awfully good place to start.

The reference to a $2,000 stipend and four-year guaranteed scholarship (instead of a one-year renewable scholarship) is based on a proposal by the president of the NCAA, Mark Emmert, but the proposal has been put on hold because a large number of universities objected.  According to Nocera:

• “At the N.C.A.A. convention in mid-January, both of these rules will be reviewed. In all likelihood, the N.C.A.A. will roll them back. However benignly it characterizes this action, it will be as clear-cut an example of collusion as anything that goes on at an OPEC meeting.”

Nocera’s article in The New York Times Magazine is titled, “Let’s Start Paying College Athletes.”  In the article, Nocera goes much further than proposing modest stipends and four-year, guaranteed scholarships.  Instead, he essentially recommends the professionalization of the two major revenue-producing college sports – football and men’s basketball.  Among his suggestions:

• Each team would have a salary cap (perhaps $3 million for 60 players on a football team and $650k for 13 players on a basketball team).
• A minimum annual salary of $25,000 per athlete, but the best athletes could be paid as much as a team’s salary cap would allow.  After paying the minimum salary to its 60 players, a football team would still have $1.5 million to be divvied up to its key performers.
• Six-year scholarships, with the final two to be used to get a degree (or an advanced degree) after exhausting your four years of playing eligibility.
• Lifetime health insurance.
• An organization would be created to represent the athletes.

Obviously, this is an extreme proposal.  My friend Kevin Brown, who thinks college athletes are already too pampered, prefers the opposite extreme. He would prefer seeing athletes treated the same as other students, which is essentially what they do in Division III football.

Nocera’s response to Kevin would be that anything short of professionalization would be blatant exploitation and hypocrisy, with everyone getting rich except the kids.  Nocera points out that the head football coach at the University of Texas already gets paid twice as much as the cost of Nocera’s plan to professionalize all 60 football players.  An article in Atlantic aptly described the current system as a plantation.

The NCAA, of course, disagrees.  According to its president Emmert, the concept of amateurism is essential and the $2,000 stipend does not compromise that concept.  He posits that, on average, athletic scholarships fail to cover $3,500 in college costs, so the $2,000 stipend would not be pay-for-play, but rather a partial reimbursement of uncovered educational costs.

Although I think Nocera’s plan is just and reasonable, it is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse.  The slave-owners are not going to give up their slaves unless forced to, and nothing in the column or article addresses the prospects of a legal challenge to the current system.

Hot yoga (Bikram) in the news

I’ve been practicing yoga regularly for more than three years.  To persuade my friends to give it a try, I tell them it is not highly aerobic and it is certainly not mystical/meditative, at least not the classes that I attend.  Rather, it is about stretching, balance, and strength, which makes it a perfect complement to an exercise regimen that is typically dominated by aerobic calorie-burning.

My favorite yoga class is called Hot Yoga, which is loosely based on a famous yoga class called Bikram.  Bikram consists of 26 poses and two breathing exercises performed in a room heated to 105 degrees.  I love this type of practice because it focuses more on stretching and balance and less on strength than other practices.  I get enough strength training by lifting weights.

I describe Hot Yoga as “loosely based” on Bikram because in 2003 Bikram was able to copyright its sequence of poses and breathing exercises, plus the heating, and it aggressively litigates against copycats.  To avoid copyright violations, copycats modify the class by adding or deleting some poses or rearranging them. 

Well, thanks to rethinking by the U.S. Copyright Office, the copycats have been set free.  Earlier this week, the Copyright Office reversed its position and told Bikram that yoga poses and the sequence of moves are “exercises” rather than “choreography” and can’t be copyrighted.

According to an article in Bloomberg, “The office reviewed the legislative history of the copyright law and decided exercises, including yoga, ‘do not constitute the subject matter that Congress intended to protect as choreography.  We will not register such exercises (including yoga movements), whether described as exercises or as selection and ordering of movements.’”

Great news for the free market.

Tim Tebow – love him or hate him?

My son Tommy sent me an article from the Grantland website discussing why people hate Tim Tebow.  For the uninitiated, Tebow is the quarterback for the Denver Broncos who has led the team to six wins in seven games since becoming the starting quarterback earlier this year.  Tebow has become controversial as a quarterback because he has a horribly unorthodox throwing style, yet has always managed to win games, whether in high school, college, and the pros.  But an unorthodox throwing style does not cause one to hate Tebow; people hate Tim Tebow because he is always thanking God for the good things in his life.      

When Tommy sent me the Grantland article, he highlighted the following paragraph:

• Tebow is a faithful person. He’s full of faith — filled to the top and oozing over the side. It’s central to every part of him. When someone suggested that he mentions God too frequently (and that this repetition is what annoys his critics), Tebow said, “If you’re married, and you have a wife, and you really love your wife, is it good enough to only tell your wife that you love her on the day you get married? Or should you tell her every single day when you wake up and have the opportunity? That’s how I feel about my relationship with Jesus Christ.” This is probably the smartest retort I’ve ever heard an athlete give to a theological question. What possible follow-up could the reporter have asked that would not have seemed anti-wife?

I responded to Tommy that there is a major difference between telling your wife repeatedly that you love her and repetitively saying that during every post-game interview.  I also directed Tommy to another paragraph in the article:

• I doubt many Christians believe that God is unfairly helping Tebow win games in the AFC West. I’m sure a few hardcores might, but not many. However, I get the impression that especially antagonistic secularists assume this assumption infiltrates every aspect of Tebow’s celebrity, and that explains why he’s so beloved by strangers they cannot relate to. Their negative belief is that penitent, conservative Americans look at Tebow and see a man being “rewarded” for his faith, which validates the idea that believing in something abstract is more important than understanding something real. And this makes them worried about the future, because they see that thinking everywhere. It seems like the thinking that ran this country into the ground.

The Grantland article went on to describe other ways that Tebow divides football fans based on their religiosity.  Because I don’t believe that God intervenes in world affairs, I find myself in that camp of people who dismiss athletes who suggest that God wanted their team to win.  But I recognize that athletes are entitled to believe that God is helping them to win and certainly that God gifted them with talent and motivation that results in winning.

In my opinion, there is a time and place for giving thanks – e.g., at awards shows or in your private life or during an interview that focuses broadly on an athlete’s life.  Even though 78.4% of Americans self-identify as Christian,  I don’t think most football fans want to have religion mentioned during football interviews.  And I think Tim Tebow would be better off if he respected that.

Sports and politics

As I prepare to spend a large portion of Thanksgiving at my son’s home watching professional and college football, including the Thanksgiving Classic between Texas and A&M, I noticed an article in the Texas Tribune reporting that a state legislator from San Antonio (A&M alum Lyle Larson) is lobbying to ensure that this century-old traditional game doesn’t end.  You see, A&M is moving to another conference next year, and Texas has decided against including A&M on its non-conference schedule.

Unfortunately, politics and sports usually don’t mix.  We had that experience a few months ago in North Dakota.  The heavy-handed, politically-correct NCAA insisted that my alma mater, the University of North Dakota (UND), drop the Fighting Sioux as our mascot, and the University administration caved; but not so, our politicians.  The North Dakota legislature passed a law that required UND to keep its mascot, but even the legislature had to recently capitulate when they learned the effect of NCAA-imposed sanctions.

I also remember more than three years ago when a refreshing, energetic, sports-minded presidential candidate, Barack Obama, told us that he would use his presidential power to solve the single greatest, intractable sports problem in America – i.e., the Bowl Championship Series (BCS).  Virtually all American college football fans want a playoff instead of the single-game BCS, but the Establishment (college presidents) isn’t listening.  As with many of candidate Obama’s promises, it met with reality and things haven’t changed that much from the Bush-43 administration.

As a Texas fan, I would vote to see the Texas/A&M tradition continue.  Furthermore, this sports vs. politics dispute is exceptional because we are dealing with two state schools.  Therefore, I think the state legislature has the right to intervene and do what’s right for Texas voters.

Go Lyle Larson, and hopefully we will see you next Thanksgiving, too.

The Bystander Effect

Last Sunday, I listened to NY Times columnist David Brooks engage in a Face the Nation panel discussion of the Penn State scandal.  Unlike the confidence emanating from virtually every other panelist on every other talk show regarding what they would have done if they had been grad assistant McQueary (their reaction ranged from physically rescuing the kid to physically assaulting Sandusky), Brooks warned that he wasn’t so confident.  According to Brooks, there was a broadly-accepted behavioral concept called the bystander effect that often prevented moral, decent individuals from intervening in troubling situations, especially when there was no generally-accepted script for how to react in that situation.  Brooks suggested that, based on this behavioral science, we should not be so quick to judge grad assistant McQueary, who stumbled across something beyond his imagination involving a person (Sandusky) who was an icon in his life.

As is often the case, insightful comments from Sunday panelists are often fleshed out in subsequent columns, and Brooks’ insights were fleshed out in his NY Times column today, aptly titled, “Let’s all feel superior.”  In his column, Brooks elaborates on the bystander effect and talks about Normalcy Bias and Motivated Blindness, but his essential point is that humans have a weakness for not acting and that we should recognize that weakness instead of looking for some anomaly, like the football culture, to blame.  He closed his powerful column as follows:

• “In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness.  These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.”
• “But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.”
• “Commentators ruthlessly vilify all involved from the island of their own innocence. Everyone gets to proudly ask: ‘How could they have let this happen?’  The proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it’s a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.”

After hearing Brooks’ comments on Sunday, I did some research on the internet to learn some more about the Bystander Effect and the salutary effects of scripts.  Although there are reams of information on the Bystander Effect, a/k/a Genovese Syndrome, there is virtually nothing about the role of scripts to ameliorate the effect.  Ironically, the only discussion of a script came
from a cognitive scientist (applied psychologist) from Penn State, Edward G. Glantz.  Shortly after the Sandusky case was reported, this scientist blogged about it in the context of the Bystander Effect.

• “Ethical problems are certainly not easy.  To improve response, it behooves the decision maker to work from a specific ‘perspective.’  Thus, reflecting on ethical problems in advance may provide a framework for more appropriate decisions.”
• “Similarly, ‘Naturalistic Decision Making’ (NDM) is the cognitive study of people making complex decisions in situations typically marked by high stakes (e.g., death) and time constraints.”
• “What if you witness a victim-would you get involved?  In 2011, bystanders lifted a burning car to rescue an injured motorcyclist.  I would like to think all of us would put ourselves in harm’s way to do the same, but I am not so sure.  For example, at least twelve people observed the1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, yet did nothing.  Here I would like to think all of us would react differently, but again, I am not sure.”
• Lack of witness action is called the ‘Bystander Effect,’ or ‘Genovese Syndrome.’  Unfortunately, there is no shortage of examples including, for example, claims that a graduate assistant witnessed the rape of a child and then took no immediate action, nor notified authorities.  I would hope that others in a similar situation would intervene, as they
  have claimed, but again am not so sure.  The encountered scene was indeed horrific and most likely absent a scripted response.”

The Penn State scientist suggested two steps that should be scripted:

1. Take a Stand.  A child cannot consent to a sexual act.  Thus, any sexual act involving a youth has to be considered an assault.  Problematic here, perhaps, was alleged eye contact between victim and witness.  Plain and simple, assume action is required – do not expect or require a plea.  [The Penn State grand jury report does not address this issue, and I look forward to learning more details regarding how Sandusky and the 10-year-old child reacted after seeing McQueary.]
2. Anticipate Your Action.  Plan ahead so your action is quick and without anguish.  In any case that may involve a victim, set as a minimum the anonymous 911 call.

This two-part script is a good starting point.  Although Brooks mentioned scripting during the Sunday talk show, I think he shortchanged the subject in his column, so I am going to suggest to him that, because he loves the topic of behavioral science, he should do some more research on the type of scripting that would help us deal quickly and effectively with the Sanduskys of the world.

America’s love affair with the media – not

When the Penn State child-abuse scandal broke last week, I was surprised how quickly and how monolithically the media turned on Joe Paterno.  As I noted in my blog on November 8, the first Paterno critic I heard was Don Imus, but Imus has a reputation for being an irreverent iconoclast, and I assumed the more traditional pundits would be more circumspect and respectful to the legendary coach.   As I listened later in the day to other pundits, they all in essence agreed with Imus.  They were outraged that Paterno had allowed his “superiors” to cover-up the crime.  (I used quotations around superiors, because the pundits often noted that Joe had no true superiors at Penn State.  He was like an all-powerful God on campus.)

Outrage was appropriate, of course, when you read the publically-available grand jury report that graphically describes the sexual abuse of eight young boys (around ages 10-12) by a retired defensive coordinator from Penn State and the apparent cover-up of that crime by two senior administrators at Penn State.  All three men were charged by the grand jury with multiple crimes.

In addition to the three charged men, the grand jury mentioned three other Penn State employees who had some involvement in the matter – (1) a graduate assistant witnessed an incident of sexual abuse and he reported the incident to Joe Paterno, the head football coach, (2) Joe Paterno relayed the grad assistant’s report to the two senior administrators who were charged by the grand jury with cover-up crimes, and (3) the president of Penn State, who was briefed on the matter by the senior administrators and concurred in their recommended handling of it as a minor matter.

Inexplicably, most of the media attention was directed toward the three uncharged individuals instead of the three charged individuals.  Presumably, the charged individuals would have their days in court, but the media wanted to know what was going to happen to Coach Paterno, President Spanier, and former grad assistant McQueary?

Actually, the media wasn’t interested in asking Penn State anything because it saw its role as much greater than an inquisitor.  The media saw itself as a moral arbiter whose
role was to tell Penn State what needed to be done.  The media took it upon itself to insist that Paterno, Spanier, and McGuery be punished for their outrageous conduct.

All of this raises the question – since when does the media think it has the duty to decide instead of to report?

Of all the pundits that I heard pontificate on this matter, only one declined to enter judgment on whether Paterno should be allowed to coach.  I don’t remember who this pundit was, but his response was so unusual that I did not initially grasp its significance.  He said that the decision regarding Paterno coaching the Penn State team was a decision that the Penn State family needed to make, and since this guy had never played for Penn State, he didn’t feel it would be appropriate for him to interject an
opinion.  Let them decide, he said.

The more I thought about this pundit’s comment, the more it struck me as reasonable.  Of course, the media would still have a role to play by presenting different opinions and questioning those who gave their opinion.

In the Paterno incident, I don’t recall anyone in the Penn State family pushing for a rush to judgment.  And I’m not talking about the Penn State family in a narrow sense of the term.  I’m talking about players, students, administrators, or even Pennsylvania politicians or citizens.  But those aren’t the people who were pushing for Paterno’s firing.  The “Fire Paterno” movement consisted almost entirely of media outsiders.

So do outsiders and the media have a responsibility for battling what they conclude to be injustices?  There are obvious precedents for this.  With Civil Rights in the 60s, lots of Yankees went south to provide support to Civil Rights advocates down there.  Similarly, for many years the media and outsiders battled the Augusta Country Club for its refusal to accept women, Jews, and blacks as members.  I don’t know whether the Penn State matter is analogous to those Civil Rights fights.

The Penn State matter has shown that there is great danger to the media when it volunteers for such battles.  It wasn’t coincidence that, during the riot following Paterno’s firing, a media van was turned onto its side – the rioters accurately held the media responsible for the firing.  Does anyone doubt that Paterno would still be coaching at Penn State if the media had not monolithically demanded that he be fired?

I think it is interesting that since Paterno and McQueary got fired, the media shifted to the factual issues of what McQueary told Paterno and what Paterno told the Penn State administrators.  Last night, I heard Anderson Cooper and others use the old Watergate phrasing in saying that we still needed to know what Joe knew and when he knew it.

That, in my opinion, is the ultimate outrage.  First the media acted as judge and jury to have Paterno, McQueary, and Spanier fired.  Then they decide that all of the key questions about these three unindicted co-conspirators (more Watergate lingo) are unresolved and need further investigation.

I think they’ve got things bassackwards.