You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will (5 page)

Here’s what I find in life: when you combine a feeling of invincibility with a large salary, you create apathy and a lack of humility. In the case of college basketball coaches, those factors are combined with an almost fawning media, driven by various networks, including ESPN, that supports the worst-behaved coaches unconditionally. Put it all together and you’ve got the ingredients to manufacture petty tyrants and people who believe they’re bigger than life.

Because if I’m Mr. Big-Time Basketball Coach, here’s what I’m
seeing: I’ve got the fawning media, I make my own schedule, I make the tournament, you pay me a fortune, and you can’t fire me. I’ve got only one question: Where’s my throne?

I don’t feel that in the NBA, the NHL, Major League Baseball, or major college football. Even a baseball team like the low-payroll A’s—take a look at them. Billy Beane treats baseball managers like yesterday’s trash. Joe Girardi has to win or he’s in danger of losing his job. Other than Buck Showalter, who is not on the hot seat? Bruce Bochy because he’s won two of the last three World Series? Maybe, but he better not have two bad years in a row. Baseball managers are perpetually on the verge of being fired.

College basketball coaches are the most difficult and the most brittle. They’re the most unwilling to compromise. They’re the most defensive and combative when called on their behavior. And why not? An entire industry has been built up around their ability to control the young, mostly African-American athletes they recruit. And it’s not just an industry—it’s an aura.
This guy’s a genius. That guy’s a genius
. They have all this power and very little accountability. It’s no wonder they start believing all the gushing praise that flows their way.

It’s part of the culture, and the culture creates the personality.

There’s a bit I have on my radio show where I give my listeners a simple piece of advice if they find themselves pondering the sanity of a particular idea.

Say it out loud
.

Get it out. Let it breathe. Judge its merits based on how it sounds when it hits the open air.

Certain concepts seem outrageous when exposed to the elements. Here’s one: up until 1998, airline passengers in the United States were allowed to smoke on certain airline flights. It took until 2000 for the federal government to pass a law banning smoking on all United States passenger planes, regardless of length or destination.

This seems incomprehensible. Until April of 1998, we put people in a pressurized tube with recycled air and let smokers light up whenever they wanted. And that—somehow—was OK.

An airplane is a bundle of vital electrical systems. There are newspapers lying all over the place and fabric upholstery on the seats. But up until ’98, you were allowed to hold a smoldering piece of carcinogenic
fire
between your fingers at 33,000 feet if the domestic flight was longer than six hours. All the FAA and TSA regulations we have to deal with now—you can’t even bring a bottle of water onto a plane, or a 3.5-ounce stick of gel deodorant—and fifteen years ago you could pull out a lighter in 26E and blow cigarette smoke in the faces of the people on either side of you.

Say it out loud, and it sounds insane. Today, the thought of someone smoking in a warehouse or an enormous big-box store is
unfathomable. The idea of smoking in an airplane? It’s the most absurd notion in the world.

But we don’t have to look very deeply into the sports world to find analogies. In this case, the ingredients are football, young men, and alcohol, and the mixture creates a concoction that is senseless, dangerous, and frightening.

Start with this: a growing number of universities are now selling alcohol in their on-campus football stadiums.

Say it out loud
.

We’re putting charged-up young males in supercharged environments and serving them alcohol. Of the 120 Division I football programs, 21 of them sell alcohol at their games, and 11 of those stadiums are on campus.

It doesn’t sound like much, but think about the ramifications. As we know, binge drinking is a huge concern on college campuses, and nearly a dozen of those campuses are plying their students—the ones of legal drinking age, we assume—with alcohol during games.

College students start drinking on Thursday night. Are you telling me they can’t take a three-and-a-half-hour hiatus on Saturday afternoon?

Say it out loud
.

West Virginia started selling beer in its stadium in 2011, and the Associated Press reported the athletic department raised $520,000 in beer money. Is it worth it? You’re willing to take on the insurance risk and potential public-relations hit for half a million dollars? Are you aware of how much money BCS schools are making off television revenue and bowl revenue? A half-million dollars is not do-or-die money for a BCS-level athletic program.

You have to ask yourself, what’s the purpose? Notre Dame doesn’t sell beer in the stands. Does that hurt the aura of Notre
Dame football? I’ve been to games across the country. I’ve been to Camp Randall at Wisconsin and the Horseshoe at Ohio State, two schools that play in a conference (the Big Ten) in which no schools, except Minnesota, sell alcohol in the regular seating areas. And you know what? Those places aren’t suffering from a lack of enthusiasm or raucous behavior due to their not selling beer in the stands. It’s still a party atmosphere, just as it is in every major college football stadium.

We’re going to look back at this someday and say, “Wow—we were
completely
idiotic.”

There’s also a contradiction at work: the NCAA has no rules prohibiting sales at regular season events, but it bans the sale of alcohol and alcohol-related advertising during its eighty-eight championships. Additionally, host sites must cover up alcohol advertising during events. What does that tell you? Clearly, there are apprehensions within the NCAA about the connection between alcohol and college sports. It is saying, “We’re uncomfortable about this at a high-profile event, but we can’t do a whole lot if you want to sell it on campus.”

We hear the same arguments every time the topic is raised. People are already drinking before and after games, so what’s the difference? The undercurrent to that argument is this: Why shouldn’t colleges reap some of the profits from what everyone knows is already happening?

A lot of people smoke in America, too. Does that mean we should encourage it, or not make an attempt to lessen it?

Another argument: college football and drinking have become synonymous, and it’s foolish to try to stop it.

Well, fast food and obesity have become synonymous, too. Should we stop trying to educate people on that linkage? Should we go completely libertarian?

We know from a study conducted by the Institute of Alcohol Studies that 25 percent of binge drinkers commit violent offenses. On a more colloquial level, we know that alcohol plus young men equals trouble. Football games attract young men. Football games attract young men who like to drink. And
college
football games attract young men who are away from home for the first time and maybe drinking for the first time and doing stupid things out of their parents’ line of sight for the first time. Geez, what could go wrong?

In the UK, they had a government-funded initiative to confiscate alcohol from kids 18 and under. The result? A 15 percent drop in crime. We all know the game here, and we all know the consequences. There’s a gigantic risk involved in getting young men drunk enough to be idiots. Take a minute to go to YouTube and see the violence that takes place at football games. It’s not pretty.

There’s no part of this that makes sense. Universities should not be in the business of helping young men get drunk enough to be idiots. It’s simply not worth the risk.

And I don’t want to hear someone say, “You can’t let a few people ruin it for everyone.” Really? Yes, you can. That’s the way laws work. We have laws throughout our country to restrict young men from doing something stupid. It’s a logical means of protecting society from young men and young men from themselves. Look at car insurance—far more expensive for young men. Look at car-rental rules—can’t rent a car until you’re 25. Laws and rules are by definition restrictive. You can’t be president till you’re 35. You can’t drive a car until you’re 16. We have a concern about young men in America; they’re the liability most insurance companies are concerned with. A nation of actuaries can’t be wrong, can it?

But let’s not limit this discussion to college football. The NFL has an alcohol problem, too, and its alcohol problem has the
potential to become an economic problem. Right now, the NFL doesn’t have too many money issues. In fact, it’s almost impossible to find some part of the NFL that isn’t increasing: television revenue, television ratings, endorsement deals, player salaries, trainingcamp crowds. And yet the one outlier is game attendance. Game attendance is declining. Blackouts are more common. The Raiders decided to tarp off the Mount Davis section of the Coliseum to reduce seating by 11,000 and make it easier to sell out.

Why? Why are more and more NFL fans staying home? You can run down the usual list of suspects: traffic hassles, ticket prices in a tough economy, high-definition television, the Red Zone channel.

But you have to leave room for one major reason: the behavior inside stadiums is appalling. From the language to the behavior to the sight of grown men peeing in bathroom sinks or garbage cans, NFL stadiums are quickly becoming places that are not in the least bit family-friendly.

Something has to be done about this. You go into an NFL stadium and the vulgarity is awful. A huge percentage of the crowd is hammered by the time it stumbles into the stadium, and now we’re letting these guys leave parking lots just
smoked
. It’s no surprise, though, because the NFL targets this crowd. And the NFL is making it worse by pushing more games late Sunday night, late Thursday night, the usual late Monday night. They’re packing seventy thousand smashed people into a stadium and then sending them out on the interstate.

Say it out loud
.

In many places, the macho, drunken, jersey-wearing fan feels he’s upholding some unwritten code of local fandom if he gets as drunk as possible and defends his team’s honor by getting into a fight. His language is vulgar, his mood is foul, and you better not
stare at him for a millisecond too long or else he’ll walk up on you and try to goad you into a fight.

This sounds horribly elitist—I admit it up front—but you can separate men into two categories: Job Guy or Career Guy. The NFL markets itself to blue-collar, working-class men. All the commercials—Budweiser, Ford trucks, Doritos. It’s a man’s world, and these men aren’t eating organic spinach and driving Priuses (Pri-i?).

Generally speaking, Career Guy is not going to go to a game on a Sunday afternoon and put his career in jeopardy by doing something idiotic. This is anecdotal, and based on my experience dealing with sponsors and salespeople, and other professionals, but Career Guy is far less likely to risk his professional well-being in favor of a dozen shots of cheap tequila and an upper-deck brawl with a guy wearing a different-colored jersey. He’s got clients, maybe, or an important meeting on Monday. It’s a much bigger deal for Career Guy to show up for work on Monday morning with a raging hangover and a black eye than it is for Job Guy. You’re generally not going to put your career in jeopardy by throwing a haymaker at a guy at a football game. It’s simply not worth it.

Sad to say, there’s not as much of a social stigma for Job Guy if he acts like a complete asshat in a public setting. If you’ve got a job at a warehouse and the guy behind you pops off, what do you give a shit? You’ve had nineteen jobs, and your honor or your team is more important than that job. Job Guy might throw the haymaker, consequences be damned.

Say it out loud
.

It’s reached the point where the behavior inside stadiums is so appalling I believe alcohol should be banned, with few exceptions. One exception I would make—and this is going to sound elitist one more time—is for suites. The suites are predominately
for advertisers, and many of the advertisers are alcohol companies. Obviously, the more they advertise, the more the franchise—and its fans—benefits. It’s a fine line; alcohol is big business in the NFL, but it’s also the biggest contributor to negative fan behavior. The stakes are high. The league—or individual teams—would not only have to take a stand, it would have to take a stand that would cost it some money.

But look at the big picture: this is the one league that has every major broadcast network under contract. This is the one league that is financially solvent, from top to bottom, inside and out. This isn’t the NBA, where a certain percentage of the teams lose money. This isn’t big-league baseball, where Tampa and Oakland just can’t draw. I wouldn’t fault the NHL if it said banning alcohol was a hit it couldn’t afford to take; $4 million for an owner in that league could mean the difference between red and black.

The NFL is in a category all its own. What are they making on beer sales? Seven million per team maybe? Hell, the Seahawks paid Matt Flynn $10 million to
not
play.