Nation Obsessed

If the Cubs are the nation’s “lovable losers”, than the Cleveland Browns are the polar opposite. For a franchise whose history rivals any in professional football, the modern incarnation hasn’t even lived up to its late 20^th Century tradition of collapsing on the brink of achieving. In fact, the new Browns haven’t even had the opportunity to throw away a conference or Super Bowl championship, having only reached the playoffs on one occasion in the 15 seasons since returning from their post-Modell exile.

Yet for some reason it is Cleveland’s other franchise, the MLB’s Indians, who are saddled with the bane of the city’s frustrations, being labeled “underachievers” with an ownership group unwilling to make the investments necessary to compete for a World Series title.

I hate to say this makes Cleveland deserving of its trials and tribulations in the world of professional sports, but it sure does make it hard to defend my fellow fans.

Quick comparison:

Both teams had coaching vacancies this past offseason. The Indians went out and hired Terry Francona, a two-time World Series champion manager. The Browns? Rob Chudzinski, a first-time head coach who just five years earlier had been fired by those same Browns from his position as offensive coordinator.

Which of those franchises made the “commitment to winning” more clearly in their hire?

As I mentioned earlier, the Browns have had just a single playoff appearance in 15 seasons since returning to the NFL in 1999. They have had just two winning seasons and have not had a single postseason victory.

Even when you exclude the period of success had by the Indians in the 90’s under owner Richard Jacobs, the Indians have during that same period reached the playoffs twice under the ownership of the Dolans family, finishing .500 or better three times. In fact, the Indians have been in contention (including 2013) in the 2^nd half a full 8 times since the return of the Browns to Cleveland. Their neighbors on the gridiron, meanwhile, have been out of the playoff race by November in all but three seasons since their resurrection.

There is no doubting that baseball in Cleveland is a frustrating fan experience. The annual rite of seeing former stars lead other teams to division and league pennants is something unique to Northeast Ohio and obviously painful for the ardent fan to endure. But at the same time, the Indians do seem to produce those stars on a fairly regular basis, a claim the Browns could never make with a straight face. So why trust the Browns front office (no track record) and not an Indians staff that has done quite a bit despite far more limited resources (hey, even the Jimenez trade might work out)?

Still, I hesitate to say that this illogical clinging to Cleveland’s football team at the expense of its baseball franchise is peculiar to the city on the lake. In fact, I think Cleveland is no different in this respect from any other city in our increasingly football-crazed city.

Cleveland’s obsession with the Browns is a symptom of the nation’s obsession with football. High school football, college football, NFL football, even Arena league and Canadian football: if it involves goalposts, helmets, shoulder pads, and severe concussions then we are willing to put everything aside to watch it each and every chance we get.

Today the Indians blew a golden opportunity to potentially pull into a tie for the final AL Wild Card spot with just three weeks left in the season. It was a beautiful and sunny Sunday afternoon in Cleveland with an exciting young pitcher taking the mound for what could be his final start of the year. What did the Indians draw? 13,317

At the same time, on the other side of town, 71,513 fans watched the Browns play one of the most ugly games of football games possible in an opening week loss to the Dolphins.

Obviously its football and opening week so you would expect the Browns to draw a sellout, as do the Indians on their opening day each spring. But consider this: the Browns drew nearly 25,000 last month to a PRACTICE.

To quote Allen Iverson: “I mean listen, we're sitting here talking about practice, not a game, not a game, not a game, but we're talking about practice.”

Not even a preseason game, this was a practice. And it wasn’t just in Cleveland: the Chicago Bears drew nearly 30,000 to Soldier Field and the Packers drew a whopping 63,000 to Lambeau Field. Keep in mind, Green Bay is home to just 104,000 people. While I know there are many from outside the city who come to events such as the open practice (forgetting for a moment that traveling an hour-plus to watch a practice only furthers my point), that means that 63% of the city’s population came to watch a team run through drills.

Baseball is our national pastime and while I don’t want to sound like a traditionalist and go into a treatise on how we’ve lost our way in that respect, football is a demon that is taking our great country down a dangerous road.

The obsession with football is symptomatic of a general disregard in this country for human health and safety.

From our inability to realize the dangers of gun proliferation to our obsession with foreign wars, we seem to have lost that amongst our founding fathers’ belief in the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, it was life that they deliberately chose to be the leadoff hitter.

Late last month the NFL reached a tentative $765 million settlement with a group of 18,000 former players to compensate them for long-term injuries and wrongful deaths that have been shown to be the result of playing football for a living.

$765 million. Let that settle in.

While the settlement did not require the NFL to admit that it had been negligent or had committed any wrongdoing, it did show that the league recognizes the existential danger head injuries poses to the game of football and subsequently, to the billions of dollars the game has been able to generate.

But while the settlement essentially demonstrates that football is unreasonably dangerous by its very nature, we as a nation did not care one bit when the games returned a few days later.

After all, fans of football rarely have to deal with the adverse effects of the game themselves, so why should they care that the game is leaving its stars resigned to a life of chronic pain, severe depression, and a general inability to live normally?

We need to take a step back collectively and reassess how greatly we as a society value human life. Forget the “right to life” movement, a movement which inexplicably places more value on protecting the rights of unborn humans than the rights of those of us already here, we need a “right to live a normal life” movement.

Soldiers have a right to be able to get the care they need when they return from the wars we put them in. That shouldn’t be a debate.

All of us have the right to live free from fear of being shot up at the mall, the movie theater, at school, or at work. Again, that shouldn’t be a debate and if the solution means a few more hassles for hunters then so be it.

And while all of us have the right to enjoy the entertainment professional sports can provide, we need to recognize the competing right that professional athletes have to do their job without being subject to potential life-long injuries.

Respect for life isn’t manifested when we “ooh” and “aah” over a big hit or clap when an injured player is being carried off the field. Rather, respect for life manifests itself in those of us who recognize that danger and keep our children from getting started in a game that is increasingly being shown to be a ruthless and unreasonably dangerous endeavor.

Over time, I do believe that we will begin to rectify our obsession with football. Parents will begin to push their children away from the game and over time the NFL will become less and less enticing from a fan’s perspective.

But what I hope is that it doesn’t take that. Instead, I would hope we recognize that this very process of “making the game safer” and the boisterous objections many fans have made to it, prove the very existence of an obsession with violence and a general disregard for individual safety of which the nation’s love of football is but a mere symptom.

Once we do come to respect life and realize the dangers of football, the good news is that we have something to fall back on. After all, baseball is still our national pastime and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Delany Leading Big Ten Down Wrong Road and Its Time For A Change

As he nears his 25^th year as commissioner of the Big Ten Conference, Jim Delany has put himself in a position of immense power in the world of intercollegiate athletics. But while Delany is responsible for bringing millions of dollars to the Big Ten member institutions through innovations such as the Bowl Championship Series, the Big Ten Network, and NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament coverage, he is becoming more and more a threat to the very organization whose interests he is charged with representing on the national stage.

Since Delay became Big Ten commissioner in 1989, he has presided over the addition of Penn State University (1990), the University of Nebraska (2011), and now the University of Maryland and Rutgers University, both scheduled to join the conference for the 2014-2015 academic year. More recently, Delany has presided over the addition of Johns Hopkins University as an affiliate member for men’s lacrosse, bringing the Jays’ storied program into the fold as the Big Ten begins sponsoring competition in lacrosse starting in 2015.

But while all of this expansion has brought a treasure chest of fortune to the member institutions, it has done so while threatening the very brand upon which so much of the Big Ten’s value is built.

The conference’s own webpage describes how “even in its infancy, the conference established itself as the preeminent collection of institutions in the nation, where the pursuit of academic excellence prevailed as the definitive goal of all Big Ten universities.”

In short, for all the athletic prowess of Big Ten institutions, academics supposedly remain at the center of the conference’s mission.

Supposedly.

I say that because with the addition of Nebraska to bring the membership up to 12 in order to allow for a conference championship game in football, Delany signaled once and for all that the “pursuit of academic excellence” would no longer take precedence over the simultaneous pursuit of television contracts and football fortunes. Money talks and despite what Delany and company may say, everything else walks.

Clearly the Big Ten has decided that money is more important than reputation but even with that conceded, one has to wonder whether the conference can even compete in the football arms race it has decided to fight against the vaunted SEC.

Sure the SEC has inflicted some serious wounds on the Big Ten powers-that-be in its decade of drubbing on the gridiron, but they might in fact inflict the most damage as those powers continue to erode the prestige of the Big Ten conference in a futile response to try and compete for the title of nation’s best college football conference.

While the numbers actually point toward the Big 12 as the best football conference in the nation, it is considered fact at this point that the SEC holds the crown. Now winners of the last 7 BCS title games (carefully worded), the Southeastern Conference has a local talent pool, fan support, and popular reputation that would make it difficult for any conference of any size to effectively challenge its reign on the gridiron.

Yet that is exactly what Delany is attempting to do. Forgetting the basic mission of the Big Ten and the attributes that make the conference great (and different from the SEC), Delany has sought out any and all major football programs to join what has started to become a mass of teams and schools that leave much to be desired both on and off the playing field.

First there is Nebraska. While certainly a fine Midwestern institution and a flagship for the State of Nebraska, UN-L is not on the same level academically as the traditional Big Ten institution. Even the most ardent supporter of Nebraska would have to concede that the university is not on par with the likes of Michigan and Northwestern, traditional Big Ten institutions that hold permanent spots amongst the world’s leading research universities.

While Nebraska was a member of the AAU (American Association of Universities- a group of leading US and Canadian research institutions) at the time of the announcement they were moving into the Big Ten, the university was stripped of its AAU membership months prior to the official move. To think that Big Ten officials were unaware of this upcoming decision by the association is the epitome of naivety. They knew and they simply didn't care. Again, money talks.

Then there is the Penn State situation. Whether or not PSU was a good addition to the Big Ten seemed to have been settled as the university crossed the 20-year mark inside the conference. Until reality finality came to the surface. Not only does the Jerry Sandusky situation stain the reputation of Penn State, it stains the reputation of the Big Ten conference and every single one of its member institutions. While it has been reported that the conference considered expelling PSU for its actions (remember, football IS the reason Penn State was added in the first place), Delany and other conference leaders again chose to keep the money rather than taking a stand in support of the Big Ten’s reputation. Without Penn State, the conference would be down to 11 members and no longer eligible for a conference title game in football. No title game means no television deal and that was simply too high a price in Delany’s eyes.

Rutgers has brought forth another test of Delany’s devotion to reputation and as of yet, he has done nothing but fail. Continuing his obsession with bringing the conference to the New York City media market (ignoring the fact that several Big Ten schools have over 10,000 alumni in the market), Delany has tied the Big Ten in knots by sticking with a school whose athletic department has become the laughingstock of collegiate athletics in the wake of a scandal involving an abusive basketball coach and an incompetent search committee who eventually hired as the new athletic director a women facing allegations of abuse at not one but two different schools where she was previously employed.

But besides the scandals, Delany is betting the future of the conference on his belief that adding Rutgers will make New York City crazy for Big Ten football. As an alum myself, that is a bet I do not want the conference to take.

Although the additions of Rutgers and Nebraska were ill-conceived and the scandals facing Penn State should have resulted in the school’s expulsion from the conference, there is a way for the Big Ten to not only survive, but thrive as college athletics continues to undergo a major transformation headlined by conference expansion from coast to coast.

The solution comes from asking the simple question: What does the Big Ten do best?

Off the field, the answer is simple. No other major athletic conference boasts a collection of premier academic institutions even in the ballpark of the Big Ten. From a perennial top-15 school in Northwestern to “public ivys” Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, the Big Ten outpaces the other “BCS” conferences in the classroom without dispute.

Each and every “traditional” Big Ten school has a world-renowned academic program they can call their own:

·      Indiana’s Kelley School of Business ranks 11^th among undergraduate business programs according to US News and World Report

·      Iowa ranks 2^nd in Audiology and 1^st in Speech-Language Pathology programs while boasting a top-30 law school

·      Ohio State has the 5^th ranked Veterinary Medicine program and top-5 programs in Supply Chain Management, Vocational/Technical Education, and Interior Design

·      Michigan State has the top-ranked undergraduate program in Supply Chain/Logistics, a top-15 education program and a top-10 program in Veterinary Medicine

·      Minnesota is home to a top-20 law school and the 3^rd ranked Pharmacy school nationwide

·      Purdue boasts a top-10 engineering school and a top-20 program in computer science

Nebraska lacks a major program ranked inside the top 50 and Rutgers’ lone program inside the top 15 is in Library and Information Studies, not exactly the most robust and viable academic department as technology continues to progress.

The Big Ten has and should continue to excel in the classroom and thus academics need to be involved in the conference’s plans for the future.

Something else the conference does “better than most”, to steal a phrase from Gary Koch, is men’s basketball. Just as the SEC has dominated college football, the Big Ten dominates on the hardwood. While the nature of the game and of its postseason competition has left the conference without the national titles won by the SEC football powers (assuming you consider a BCS title to be a legitimate national championship), the numbers fail to lie when it comes to establishing the supremacy of Big Ten hoops.

Name another conference that relegated a team ranked in the top-10 nationally to the play in game at the start of conference tournament play. You cant.

The Big Ten may have lost its grip on football but there is no doubt the conference has the potential to solidify itself as the dominant power in men’s basketball.

This is where expansion should be focused. Rather than trying to win an unwinnable arms race for football supremacy against the SEC, the Big Ten should re-focus its energy on building its brand around domination on the hardwood. In addition to being a more realistic and equally as lucrative objective, basketball dominance would do more to attract the attention of New York media than any accomplishments on the gridiron. New York is not a college sports town and never will be. They do, however, have a soft spot for college basketball and if Delany wants to reign in the NYC media market for Big Ten exploitation, it will be on the hardwood where that battle is won.

As an added bonus, basketball prowess can be achieved without sacrificing in the classroom. While an expansion that is football-minded will inevitably and has already soiled the academic reputation of the Big Ten, the conference can expand for basketball while boosting that reputation to even greater heights.

So what exactly am I proposing Jim Delany do after all this rambling?

Simple, forget Rutgers and ditch Nebraska. Do that and then take a page out of the Johns Hopkins book by grabbing Georgetown and snatching Cornell. Sound crazy? Maybe, but at least hear me out.

A Big Ten Conference composed of Minnesota, Iowa, Northwestern, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Purdue, Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, Maryland, Cornell, Georgetown, and Penn State[1]would have the potential to send between 8 and 12 teams (out of 14!) to the NCAA Tournament on an annual basis while reaching a level of academic supremacy unparalleled among division 1 conferences.

As for football, the conference would still have perennial title contenders in Michigan and Ohio State while also boasting common top-25 teams from Wisconsin, Northwestern, Michigan State, Iowa, and (post-sanctions) Penn State. Even in such a setup, the Big Ten would arguably have as many teams truly capable of running the table as does the vaunted SEC. But that's another discussion.

Reinforcing the academic reputation of the conference by adding Cornell and Georgetown (while re-classifying University of Chicago to the same “affiliate member” status as Johns Hopkins) would not only add value to the Big Ten brand but more importantly would boost the inherent worth of a Big Ten degree.

Think about it this way: Brown is a member of the Ivy League. Brown is also ranked just 15^th among national universities and boasts exactly zero graduate programs placed inside the top-10 according to US News/World Report. Yet because of Brown’s membership in the Ivy League a degree from the school automatically has attached a level of worth that surpasses the quality that is actually present in the classroom. Membership in the worldwide fraternity that is the Ivy League has its perks and it is the perfect time for the Big Ten to start its own.

Why would Georgetown and Cornell join the Big Ten?

For Georgetown, the answer is fairly simple. With the end of the Big East, the school is in a state of flux when it comes to athletics, gambling on the success of the new “Catholic 7”/Big East both in men’s basketball and in so-called “non-revenue” sports. But the new conference lacks the meat of the former Big East and its potential to generate competition and revenue simply does not match that of the Big Ten and its television network. Additionally, Georgetown would benefit from having a natural geographic rival in Maryland and a potential rival in fellow private school Northwestern to replace lost conference foes Pittsburgh and Syracuse.

Adding Georgetown would further cement the conference’s presence in the Washington market while sealing its fate as the preeminent power in college basketball.

Cornell is probably the most outlandish of my proposed additions to the Big Ten. After all, the Big Red compete in the sacred Ivy League and are currently subject to the conferences’ infamous ban on athletic scholarships. But while Cornell is among the premier academic institutions in the world, it is far from a typical Ivy League school.

While the other seven Ivy League schools average just 6,518 in undergraduate enrollment, Cornell enrolls 13,931 undergraduates in Ithaca. Cornell is also the lone Ivy League school founded after the American Revolution (1865- in line with most Big Ten institutions) and is the only Ivy school that began as a land-grant institution, a history Cornell would share with many of its Big Ten brethren. Joining the Big Ten would allow Cornell to upgrade its athletic and academic facilities while expanding the geographic reach of the school in a way that isn’t currently possible as the “little brother” of the Ivy League.

From the conference’s standpoint, the addition is a no-brainer. The Big Red are a national power in wresting as well as in hockey and lacrosse, helping to provide tremendous value to the conference’s two newest competitive offerings. More importantly, Cornell is the real link to New York City that the conference should be pursuing. In addition to having a graduate campus along with many other academic and research facilities in the city, Cornell has nearly 75,000 living graduates living in New York state, with over 50,000 of them residing in the City itself. New York City has two major college connections: Syracuse and Cornell. Adding Rutgers is not going to get New Yorkers interested in the least.

With Syracuse leaving the Big East for the ACC, the door is open to anyone who wants to be “New York’s college team”. Cornell is best positioned to be that successor, having already established both a well-developed alumni base and an actual campus footprint in the city. With the injection of Big Ten television revenue and other financial support into Big Red athletics, there is no reason Cornell cannot compete on a high-major level in men’s basketball. After all, the Big Red are just three years removed from a Sweet 16 run that was made at the expense of none other than Wisconsin, one of the conference’s most consistent men’s basketball powers in the past decade.

Adding Georgetown and Cornell to the Big Ten at the expense of Nebraska and Rutgers would bring the conference its much-desired entre to the eastern seaboard in a manner that does not put in jeopardy the reputation built by the conference over its hundred-plus years in existence. Adding these two institutions (along with Johns Hopkins) would give the conference not just a couple isolated outposts out east but a true base of operations, with Cornell, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Maryland, and Penn State comprising a true eastern consortium within the Big Ten.

The way Jim Delany and the Big Ten are currently embarking on expansion is detrimental to all who are connected to the conference and its institutions. The addition of relatively mediocre institutions devalues the degrees of student athletes, regular students, and Big Ten alumni alike, while the over-reaching geographic expansion forces student-athletes out of the classroom and into the airport unnecessarily. Adding Maryland and Rutgers will only add marginal interest in both DC and New York while boosting the Maryland addition with Georgetown and Cornell would represent a notable splash into both media markets. Finally, Georgetown and Cornell bring to the Big Ten the one thing it has over other major conferences: academic prowess. The futile search for a way to compete with the SEC on the football field has placed that very important feature of the conference in danger and its time we reign these efforts in and re-direct them toward additions that could provide even more opportunity for financial growth and media exposure even if that growth is achieved outside the realm of college football.

Expansion can be a good thing but the way Delany and other conference commissioners have gone about implementing it has thus far been detrimental to the long-term viability of major collegiate athletics. By focusing on shared interests rather than shared profits, commissioners such as Delany can begin to truly represent the interests of their constituents.

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[1] Sadly I believe we are stuck with PSU. However, I would ideally like to see Penn State expelled and replaced by Vanderbilt

Indiana Ceremony Provides Fodder for Big Ten Foes

Just when it looked like the Big Ten men’s basketball title race was settling into finality, another Tuesday night surprise rocked the boat as Indiana fell at home on Senior night to a suddenly surging Ohio State. Instead of locking up an out-right claim to the Big Ten title, the Hoosiers now must win in Ann Arbor Sunday afternoon to avoid settling into what could very well be a four-way tie atop the final standings.

But while the news of the night undoubtedly will the game itself, the postgame festivities in Indiana’s Assembly Hall also managed to make the headlines. In addition to the customary senior video and speeches, the Hoosiers went a step further: they cut down the nets.

Before you even ask the question, yes, Indiana did clinch at least a share of the title so they will be considered “Big Ten Champions” regardless of the outcome in Ann Arbor. That certainly entitles them to the trophy, the hats, and a celebration.

Tuesday night, however, was not the night.

I realized that 99% of Indiana’s residents and fans nationwide were convinced Senior night would be nothing more than a coronation of the new champs and a celebration of IU’s first out-right title since 1993. Unfortunately for Hoosier nation, the Buckeyes had other plans, completely out-toughing the nation’s 2^nd ranked team en route to a 67-58 victory.

In other words, Tuesday was not a good night for Hoosier basketball.

While that shouldn’t take away from the accomplishment of winning a conference title, it did necessitate that the champagne (metaphoric of course) be put on ice for the time being. As much as they wanted to be able to celebrate in their last opportunity in front of a full house at Assembly Hall, losing should have put an end to those hopes. You just don’t cut down nets after a losing effort.

Except, apparently, if you are in Tom Crean’s program. The same program that gave out “Sweet 16” rings after last season’s two-game run in the NCAA Tournament further cemented its image as being the Big Ten basketball equivalent of a modern little league baseball team (“You get a trophy and you get a trophy, even you, you too get a trophy!”).

More importantly for Indiana, the celebration provided a nice ounce of motivation for the four teams now back in the Big Ten title picture heading into the last few days of the regular season. Given just about the best locker room material they could possibly be provided with, Michigan State, Ohio State, Michigan, and yes, even Wisconsin now head into their final games smelling the blood of a rival who seems already content with its accomplishment. You think Michigan doesn’t want to cut down the nets in front of this same Indiana team now?

The video of the Hoosiers taking pictures in their Big Ten Championship hats with the trophy and of cutting down the nets in front of a fairly empty Assembly Hall will no doubt find a place in locker rooms from Madison to Columbus, from East Lansing to Ann Arbor.

Indiana has clinched just one thing: a first-round bye in next week’s Big Ten Tournament. They will at least share the regular season title, but could end up with as low as a three seed in the tournament and after losing in Bloomington, a loss Sunday in Ann Arbor might cost the Hoosiers a chance to play in Indianapolis during the regional rounds of the NCAA Tournament.

Again, not much to celebrate.

This is why Tom Crean and the Hoosiers are the program everyone in the Big Ten loves to hate. Are they fun to watch at their best? Sure. But when they fall short and still celebrate the accomplishments of yesteryear as if the game never happened, the ire of the Big Ten falls squarely on the IU program.

Fixing Our Nation

Everyone talks about how to fix our country. Some focus on social issues, others on gun control, and still more on the economy and its struggle to transition into the postmodern era. But very few, save for a two week period early last month, talk about the impact that Congressional rules are having on the way our government functions. The reality is that these rules, designed not for the betterment of the country but solely for the convenience of the legislator, are wreaking havoc on the progress of the United States. Until we fix these rules, making them align with the interests of the nation, we will continue to walk hopelessly into the future as a broken society with a disfunctional government.

First and foremost, the filibuster is useless and in need of elimination. While further procedural restraints also come into play, it is the filibuster that has made it easy for Congressmen and Senators to avoid taking unfavorable votes and to put politics ahead of progress. The result is that votes in both houses of Congress are largely pre-determined, with the filibuster and other means acting to prevent politicians from having to generate a record of policy stances that would either back or dispute their campaign platforms.

It is so easy to fix this. The Democratic party, often the victim of such obstructionist tactics from a minority GOP, has had two opportunities in the last four years to repeal the very rules obstructing the agendas both of their own party and of the nation as a whole. Giving them a pass for 2009 (there was genuine optimism that the GOP would be a cooperative minority), Democratic Senate majorities in 2011 and 2013 each failed to take a stance against the filibuster and other tactics that have over time made their way into the legislative rules at the request of cowardly politicians on both sides of the aisle. In failing to take such a stance, despite threats to take it, the Democrats are perhaps even more responsible for the lackluster progress of Congress in recent years and for the growing inability of government to work as it should. Sure, the GOP has collectively acted like a group of pre-schoolers opposing the imposition of nap time, but it is the Democrats under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who have shunned use of the metaphoric pacifier very much available for use.

President Obama finally began to peel away the charade in his State of the Union speech last night. Calling for Senators and Congressmen to at least take the step of entering a vote on gun control legislation, the President exposed the impact procedural changes have had on the business of our national legislature. In effect, the ability to prevent even a vote has given politicians a relatively easy way to duck controversy and to play both sides of the coin. As a result, we not only have a Congress unable to do anything productive, but also deal with elections that regularly devolve into a war of words without any objective means of evaluation.

Whether you lie to the right or to the left of the elusive center, I think we can all agree that the filibuster is a tool for cowards. It allows those such as Paul Ryan to pass crazy legislation such as the "No Taxpayer Funding For Abortion Act", playing to right-wing constituencies, without forcing Senators on BOTH sides of the aisle to record a stance either for or against this controversial legislation. Congressional votes are the greatest "Fact Checker" we have at our disposal. This is how the "founding fathers" imagined the system of checks and balances to play out, never envisioning that we would be forced to deduce the truth through the filter of a CNN or Fox News-employed "fact checker".

I have no problem with politicians taking a stance that I disagree with. In fact, I think disagreement is the essence of American democracy. But taking a stance requires not simply making outlandish statements on cable news. It requires an actual vote. Right now, those stances are being avoided across the political spectrum.

If we remove the tools available to enable such cowardly governance, I truly believe that we would find solutions to our rapidly growing social and economic issues. We would find that when you remove rhetoric, the level agreement between those on opposite sides of the aisle is actually pretty substantial. When you no longer allow politicians to take extreme positions without a concrete vote backing them, you will quickly find that both extremes are far more moderate than they would like us to believe. Sure there are crazy folks out in government, but once they are subjected to the ultimate test of a vote, we will start to see them gradually fade away from prominence if only as a means of political survival.

From gun control to tax cuts and from military spending to emergency funding, all we can ask for from our leaders is that they take a stand and a vote to back it up. If that vote ultimately represents our views, we can vote for their re-election. If it doesnt, we can take our vote elsewhere. But democracy doesnt work without the taking of votes, without the willingness on the part of representatives to show their constituents how they are going to actually govern. If we want solutions, the first thing we need to solve is the system of legislative rules we have in place that enables cowardice to produce Congressional deadlock. Once we collectively take the cover off and expose the views of these political cowards, we will be well on our way to "fixing the nation".

Badgers Have It Right

I don’t think I am alone in being both stunned and outraged by the news that the girlfriend of Manti Te’o, who supposedly died of leukemia hours after Te’o’s grandmother and days before a key matchup with Michigan State, never existed. Thanks to a story from Deadspin published Tuesday, the once-clean image of the Notre Dame Linebacker has been sent on a free fall.

But while I certainly have my beliefs about what actually happened and the potential motives behind it, I will save that speculation for more polished writers. Having said that, there is one thing I can say with certainty in the wake of this bombshell: the influence of college athletics is too big for its own good.

It is one thing to have college programs cheat the rules of the NCAA. At its worst, rules violations such as those that occurred at Ohio State and Miami prevent the maintenance of a level playing field. But with the last two bombshell stories in college football, the result is the degradation of human decency, a consequence that just isn’t worth the potential reward.

Now before I digress into another rant on how college sports have been perverted into an outlet for ego and revenue, I have to turn the attention back to the relationship stories like Penn State and now Te’o have to athletics here at Wisconsin.

I cannot claim to know everything that goes on inside the athletic department at UW. I am certain that my squeaky clean mental image of the program doesn’t exactly match reality, in fact I don’t think there is any major college program out there that hasn’t at least walked a thin line in recent years.

What I can appreciate, especially after witnessing the events last night in Bloomington, is that Wisconsin is about team and not ego. Save Barry Alvarez and his often-inflated legend, the recent successes by Wisconsin football and basketball have come without the benefit of nationally-recognized figures like Te’o and Paterno.

Last night put that philosophy on display for the college basketball nation to see. Despite Indiana sophomore Cody Zeller dominating the box score and the ESPN highlight reel, the team effort of a UW team given absolutely no chance to win ultimately allowed the impossible to become a reality.

These team efforts are what college sports SHOULD be about. Too often of late the promise of awards and money have led players, coaches, administrators, and yes, media types to trump the individual over the team. The stories of Te’o, of Saban, of Calipari, and of the Tebow/Meyer duo trump any story on success certain teams have been able to have on the field despite a lack of individual “stars”.

Wisconsin basketball is one of those teams. Though the lack of a star player or egotisical (relatively) head coach make the Badgers a disappointing lead for ESPN and others, they are more indicative of what college athletics should be all about than perhaps any other team in the country. Coaches like to talk about “next man up” but the Badgers truly embrace that philosophy, continuing to be a factor in the Big Ten conference regardless of roster composition.

Its time we start getting back to the team and start moving away from the individual. The more we try to put individual coaches and players on a pedestal in stories that “transcend sports”, the more we set ourselves up for ultimate disappointment. Sports are what they are and that is why it is so refreshing to watch Wisconsin focus on simply putting up more points than the other team when the clock strikes zero.