Are the media killing Tim Tebow’s career?

Nothing is seemingly ever simple in the pro football career of ESPN’s favorite boy, Tim Tebow.

After being released by the Jets a few weeks ago, Tebow still hasn’t found a new NFL home. For a guy with a 7-4 record and a playoff win (and as someone who has seen, in order, J.P. Losman, Trent Edwards and Ryan Fitzpatrick quarterback his favorite team, that record looks positively Unitas-ian), it is surprising that a team hasn’t at least taken a flyer on him as a back-up.

Of course, it’s Tim Tebow. Nothing’s simple with this guy. And Mike Silver at Yahoo! reports that team’s reluctance has as much to do with the Tim Tebow-ness of it all rather than just Tim Tebow himself:

As much as prospective employers are wary of Tebow’s flawed mechanics, much-maligned throwing motion or deficiencies when it comes to reading defenses, the incessant media and fan attention that accompanies his presence on the depth chart is an even bigger concern. “He seems like a great guy to have on a team, and I’d be tempted to bring him in as our backup,” one NFC head coach told me Wednesday. “But it’s just not worth dealing with all the stuff that comes with it.” … Or, in the words of one AFC head coach to whom I spoke recently: “You don’t want to put up with the circus.”

Let’s be clear about one thing – when people talk about the “media circus” around Tim Tebow, they mean ESPN. Period, point blank. ESPN is the network that took Tim Tebow coverage and made it TIM TEBOW coverage. They’re the ones that held a birthday party for him on the air. They’re the ones that had Tebow’s release as the lead story on the day the first gay male athlete came out. They are the circus.

But it strikes me as a little odd, and a little bit of an excuse, to blame the media for this. Certainly, a strong organization could handle this. An organization with an established identity, a strong structure, a definitive plan, could deal with a popular backup quarterback who had 3/4 of a successful season. The Jets were a disaster all around. They are not a strong organization, they had no plan whatsoever, and they are in the most oversaturated media market in the country, one that lies within commuiting distance of Barnum and Bailey’s headquarters in Bristol. But some organization would be strong enough, sure enough of itself, to provide Tebow a shot.

To blame the media, even if there’s some accuracy involved, seems like the ultimate cop-out. The blame Tebow’s fans is just insulting to people who spend their hard-earned dough supporting a league that is more interested in ignoring the physical costs of its product.

Chris Kluwe’s gay-marriage stance: Correlation or causation?

Correlation does not equal causation.

That’s one of the first lessons you learn in graduate school, or when you begin a research class. It means that just because things are statistically related or there’s a relationship between two variables, or events, or ideas, doesn’t automatically mean that one causes the other. This ignores time issues (for A to cause B, A has to come before B), or confounds or other factors (A is related to B, but the change is really due to C). It’s an understandable but bad mistake, one born of laziness, of having your mind made up before you sit down to do your work and run the data.

It’s a lesson journalists can always do well to remember. And it was on my mind last week, after Vikings’ punter Chris Kluwe was released. Les Carpenter at Yahoo!, among others, mused whether or not Kluwe was released because he is an outspoken advocate for gay marriage. Carpenter noted that Ravens’ linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo was also released after being outspoken in his defense of gay rights.

But because he is now the great threat to the social fabric of the NFL he was cut.

The issue was debated in more than a few places last week – it got a segment on PTI. But this line of argument seemed too neat, too clean, for my taste. Carpenter tries to argue that Kluwe is a solid punter, but by most stats he was near the bottom of the league. But the argument seemed predictable. And devoid of any evidence to the contrary, it seems too simplistic to say that Kluwe would still have a job if he weren’t a gay-marriage advocate.

And then Cyd Zeigler delivered this incredible blow to the argument on OutSports.com, who writes that stories like this actually do more to hurt the cause of gay athletes than help:

Members of the media have long been the biggest deterrent to gay athletes coming out. Attitudes in the NFL shifted years ago; And even where they haven’t, players will accept a productive gay teammate whether they realize it or not. Yet the mainstream media continues to pound the drum of NFL intolerance. A common theme I heard from “experts” in the last two weeks mentioned how Jason Collins’ coming out was lovely, but we all know how hard it REALLY will be for an out NFL player in the locker room. On this issue, the mainstream media has showed a dereliction of duty for a decade. This is simply the latest example … The storyline also hurts the LGBT sports movement. By putting a fictitious target on athletes who support gay rights, we make it harder to find athletes who will speak their mind on behalf of equality.

It’s such a great point. The writers of the “Kluwe was cut because he was an advocate” probably believe they are doing a good thing, pointing out what they think is a wrong in the name of tolerance, when in fact they are perpetuating an environment that works against tolerance.

And again, absent any direct evidence to the contrary, it’s a dangerous claim to make. And read the original stories from last week. There is no evidence to argue Kluwe was cut because he supports gay marriage. There are no quotes suggesting this, no on or off-the-record claims. It’s just speculation, based on a writer’s ideas. It’s lazy writing, born out of having their minds made up and a storyline already written before they even look at the data or do the work.

It’s arguing causation, when there’s just correlation.

And any grad student will tell you how wrong that is.

Derrick Rose should play hurt. Except that he shouldn’t.

If you’re a reader of this blog, you know I have a pretty endless fascination with The Sport Ethic. If you’re new, The Sport Ethic is a concept from sociologists Hughes and Coakley that examines some commonly held attitudes among elite athletes (and the subsequent consequences of those attitudes). One of the core attitudes of The Sport Ethic is playing through pain, playing while hurt, sacrificing your health for the team and for the game.

Which is why the Derrick Rose story fascinates me so much. Rose is coming off a torn-up knee, has been cleared to play by team doctors but still hasn’t played. Complicating the story is the fact that many of his Bulls teammates are playing through illnesses or injury, and that the Bulls are doing better than expected in the playoffs, having beaten the Heat in game one on Monday night. Rose has been getting killed in certain areas of the Chicago media for not playing.

This isn’t the first time this has popped up recently. The RGIII controversy in January was a textbook example of The Sport Ethic. A better comparison for the Rose story would be the Washington Nationals’ decision to shut down Steven Strasburg last year. But there was a key difference – last year, Strasburg wanted to keep pitching but the Senators made the decision to shut him down. They took the long-term view of what was best for their franchise – potentially sacrificing short-term success for long-term viability. That was the team making that decision.

This is a player doing it. This is a player putting his own health and his own future ahead of the short-term benefits of his team.

What’s surprising to me is how much support Rose is getting in some media circles. Mike Wilbon, a vocal Bulls fan, has been vocally in support of Rose’s decision. Tim McKeown is correct on ESPN: Rose can’t win no matter what he does.

The star player is supposed to return early from injury. He’s supposed to fight the doctors and his trainers and coaches to get out on the court or field to come to the aid of his teammates. He’s supposed to jog out onto the court to the thunderous ovation from appreciative fans who will forever be indebted to the man who played through the pain.

These columns, and others, are casting The Sport Ethic in a new light. It’s questioning the conventional wisdom of the locker room and of talk radio. It’s looking at things from the players’ point of view rather than swallowing the established storyline we all expect. It’s suggesting that maybe some norms valued by The Sport Ethic may be outdated, or wrong. Maybe playing when a player isn’t 100 percent isn’t always the best thing for the player and the team. Maybe we in the media and in the stands place too much faith in the myth of Willis Reed, of the flu game, of Jack Youngblood playing on a broken leg and forget the players who come back too early, too hobbled, too ineffective.

Maybe The Sport Ethic is starting to change, slowly and gradually.

Jason Collins and the media

I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.

And with that, Jason Collins provided us with the lede of the year, and one of the most significant sports stories of the year as well.

It’s been interesting to watch the media coverage of Collins’ coming out this week. The coverage seemed to hit all the right notes, and reaction to it has been, from what I can tell, very positive. It’s interesting to me how quickly this story has fallen off our radar – it went from the big story on Monday to almost no mention by Thursday. It’s odd, given how monumental it felt on Monday, that people aren’t really talking about it just a few days later. But maybe that’s the ultimate sign of progress.

The one problem with SI’s handling of the story is the headline: The Gay Athlete. Jason Collins isn’t the only gay athlete. He’s not even, to use the wonderfully tortured phrase of Monday, the only active gay athlete in the four major professional sports (aka only active male gay athlete). There are other gay athletes. There just are. Framing the story as “The Gay Athlete” makes Collins look like even more of an outlier.

But ESPN’s coverage … yeah, that’s been fun. First, it took them more than two hours to even acknowledge Collins’ announcement on Monday, and even after, it was the SECOND lead story on their ticker (behind, of course, Tim Tebow.) And later that day, on OTL, Chris Broussard launched into an anti-gay rant.*

(*-His line, “I don’t agree with homosexuality.” cracked me up. Like that matters?)

John Koblin on Deadspin did a masterful job breaking down Broussard’s comments and how ESPN’s asinine “Embrace Debate” mantra led to them. Seriously, read Koblin’s piece. It’s wonderful.

What’s so disappointing about the “Embrace Debate” mantra is that it leaves no room for subtlety. It leaves no room for conversations. Debate implies that an argument, a fight over who is right. A conversation is a discussion, an exchange of ideas.

A conversation is what’s in order on this story. And beyond the “is being gay OK?” nonsense, and even beyond the obvious questions of “how will this play in a locker room?”, there are ao many more interesting questions to discuss here:

• What is the role of gender in this story? The obvious mistake too many people made on Monday was saying Collins was “the first openly gay athlete.” Not even close. There are women who have coming out for literally 30+ years.Billie Jean King came out decades ago, as did Martina Navratilova. Britney Griner came out in April, and did so in such a nonchalant way that no one noticed. Is this disconnect due to the macho culture of men’s sports? Is that that many people (aka men) just assume that women athletes are all lesbians?
• This story is rightly a big deal. Collins should be applauded for coming out. It is a brave move. But looking big picture, how big a deal is it? Remember John Amaechi? Bet you, like friend of the blog Matt Zimmerman pointed out, had to google him. How much social impact will having a 34-year-old reserve player at the end of his career come out? Will the greater impact come when it’s a star, in his prime? Or even before his prime (in college)?
• What impact does the Jackie Robinson story have on our understanding and expectations of this story?

I’ve heard and read it said before that this story is looking for its Jackie Robinson, its player to break the barrier. I’ve thought that before myself. But I wonder if that mindset, if that story line, isn’t misplaced. For one thing, Robinson was a young player, at the start of what would be a hall-of-fame career. His crossing the color line in baseball was an incredibly important symbolic moment that addressed what remains our Original Sin.

But more importantly … Robinson’s debut came in 1947, when segregation was still legal. Not just practiced, not just endorsed. Legal. The supreme law of the land. He debuted seven years BEFORE Brown v. Board of Education. This is one of the cases when sports was ahead of society on the curve. But now, sports is behind the curve in terms of gay rights and acceptance of gays.

But also, waiting for Robinson – a legendary figure in every way – diminishes what Collins did. Charlie Pierce, of course, said it best: He’s not our symbol. He’s not a conduit for us to show how tolerant we are and how great sports is for being so tolerant. He’s a man, who should be able to live his life how he sees fit.

Which is the true victory of this week’s story.

Dick Joyce Sports Symposium 2013

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On deadline … but for how much longer?

A few weeks ago, the NCAA men’s basketball championship game was a sports writer’s nightmare.

It had nothing to do with the game between Michigan and Louisville, the result or anything like that. It was all in the timing. The game started at 9:27 p.m. on the East Coast. Which means for so many of the guys and gals on press row, it was a hellish deadline night.

This is not a new problem. Sporting events are starting later, to accommodate the national TV audience and its advertisers. This means a lot of times, writers are up against a hard deadline wall. It happened during Saturday night’s Final Four, too. The Syracuse-Michigan game tipped off at 9:21 p.m., and ended after 11:30 p.m. I talked to several reporters who covered the game, and they told me that their deadlines were between 11:45 p.m. and midnight.

Needless to say, there’s no chance to craft a well-rounded, analytical story. It’s hard to find a fresh angle, a unique take, a good perspective for your readers when you have to file a story that close to the end of the game.*

*(This was my only real problem with the Gregg Doyle-Jim Boeheim dustup in the press conference. There were writers in that room who needed to get quotes and get their stories filed, and Gregg picked that moment to get into a pissing match with Boeheim? That was crap.)

This is nothing new. Jim Kelley, the late Buffalo News NHL columnist, told the story of when he was covering Sabres games on the West Coast, he’d have to file his story AT the final horn. PR guys would be baffled. “You don’t understand the question – how long after the game do you file?” No! Kelley, would say. You don’t understand the answer! The second the horn sounded, he sent the story.

I had my share of tight deadlines. I wrote a 500 word story in nine minutes once. In the 2009 NCAA Tournament, the Binghamton-Duke first-round game I covered started a little after 10 p.m. My first-edition deadline was 12:30, final edition 1:30 a.m.

Journalists have a love-hate relationship with deadline – at least I did. Writing on a tight-deadline is what we do – especially in sports. I take great pride in my ability to write on deadline. But an early deadline means you don’t get a chance to develop any kind of interesting story. If your deadline is 20 minutes after the game is over, your story is not going to be a well-thought analysis of the game. It’s going to be a running game story, featuring play-by-play and a couple press-conference quotes. It’s probably going to rely on a pre-existing storyline, because you simply don’t have the time to come up with anything else.

But there’s a deeper question: How much longer is deadline going to be an issue?

Deadlines exist because of the print production cycle. This is not news. There comes a point each night where the presses have to start running, because tens or hundreds of thousands of papers need to be printed, bundled, put on a truck, delivered, etc.. Delaying the presses costs a newspaper money – there are overtime costs, delayed delivery, etc. Writing 40 years ago, Gaye Tuchman noted that the daily deadline is central to everything journalists do. In so many ways, that’s still true today. Writing on deadline is one of the defining traits of a journalist. It’s something we take pride in. It’s what we do.

But it’s increasingly becoming anachronistic.

There’s no need for a deadline structure online. There’s no need to file a story by midnight, if people won’t read it until the next morning. There’s no reason a column can’t be posted at 10 a.m., or 2:32 p.m., or at 6:17 p.m. Everyone always thinks the advantage of online news is its speed. But one of the advantages of online that no one talks about is its patience. There’s no need for a hard deadline. There’s no reason a writer can’t take her time to develop an analytical game story that goes beyond the play-by-play you probably already watched. There’s no reason a columnist can’t write something for the next morning, spinning the game forward rather than just looking back. As the journalism world continues to shift to digital, I think this will be one of the biggest changes to the way reporters do their jobs.

Our work is increasingly becoming consumed on screens, and yet we still write based on a production schedule created for paper.

The question is, how long will this be the case?

My award-winning sister

I wouldn’t be a sports reporter had it not been for my sister Amy.

A few years older than me, she dreamed of being a sports journalist as long as I can remember. She set the pace in our house, the example I followed growing up. I followed her to St. Bonaventure. I followed her to The Times Herald in Olean. I followed her to the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball beat (seriously. From 1997-2004, that beat was the Moritz family business).

But while I bailed on newspapers in 2009 for academia, she’s still living her dream every day at the Buffalo News, covering college sports and baseball. She’s one of the most compassionate writers you’ll ever read. But she’s more than that. She transformed herself into an iron-distance triathlete (by the time you read this, she’ll have run more today than you have all week). She’s an advocate for women’s sports and for an active lifestyle. She’s also, and this has been scientifically proven, the coolest aunt in the whole-wide world (P<.00).

Tonight, our alma mater honors her by giving her the John Domino Award, it’s highest honor it can give to a sports journalist. It’s a part of the school’s biennial Sports Symposium, which this year features Charles Pierce.

I’m honored to get the chance to watch her accept this award tonight.