As December begins, all four major professional sports angle for our attention. College football teams are wrapping up regular seasons, starting conference playoffs and securing bowl invitations. The NFL regular season is heading into its homestretch, and with five weeks to go, we’re starting to see potential playoff seedings for both the AFC and NFC. Now that America is in the season of shopping and giving, underachieving college and professional football teams are processing pink slips for coaches and dreaming towards better replacements and blue-chip draft picks for next season. The NBA lockout is presumably over, giving Americans one more thing to look forward to on December 25th. The NHL season is in full bloom, including a return to action by Sidney Crosby, healthy again for the Pittsburgh Penguins. Even Major League Baseball provides us reasons to look ahead to Spring Training, with a new labor deal extension, hot stove action, and the recent hiring of Bobby Valentine by the Boston Red Sox, bringing a new managerial energy.
I start today’s column on a rather odd note, and as the title of this column suggests, something seems amiss at ESPN. For those who don’t know, ESPN, the world’s largest sports cable network, is based in Bristol, Connecticut. However, if you watch enough of ESPN programming, you’d swear or at least wonder if ESPN’s thinking process is rooted south of the Mason-Dixon Line. No, I’m not talking about NASCAR and rednecks racing cars around tracks at breakneck speeds. I’m talking about ESPN employees openly pontificating from their Good Ol’ Dixie frame of reference. The ESPN employee? Skip Bayless, a former columnist with the Dallas Morning News, now a regular talking head panelist on ESPN’s First Take, seen Monday-Friday, 10:00am-12:00noon on ESPN2.
Bayless (AKA “The Bloviator” by fellow ESPN panelist Stephen A. Smith) has been a one-man pom-pom brigade for Denver Broncos “quarterback” Tim Tebow. I place the term “quarterback” in quotes because I frankly don’t believe Tebow has the physical build, upper-body mechanics, or the thinking intellect to be a starting quarterback running today’s sophisticated NFL offensive schemes. It’s a fairly simple assessment, one I’ve made in previous columns and still stand by: Tebow is too muscle-bound, too bulky and disproportioned in his muscle mass to throw a football with consistent effectiveness as a left-handed passer. It has nothing to do with passing from the pocket or on the run but has everything to do with how his arms and legs are coordinated in his passing motion. When your first mental instinct is to always tuck the ball under your arm and run like a halfback or fullback you will always look awkward trying to throw a football left-handed. This isn’t a debate about football philosophy; it’s a fact based on anatomy, physiology and physics.
If you don’t believe me, try imitating, physically or mentally, one of your favorite right-handed baseball pitchers, past or present, with really pronounced body mechanics and wind-up: Luis Tiant, Tom Seaver, Kent Tekulve, Nolan Ryan, Dwight Gooden, Bronson Arroyo, or perhaps Mariano Rivera. Got a physical or mental feel for how these guys pitched a baseball? Now try doing it LEFT-HANDED. Let me know how many times you fall down or spin yourself dizzy into the ground. Better yet, now let’s think of some lefties with pronounced mechanics: Tug McGraw? Fernando Valenzuela? Johan Santana? Ever really watch how David Wells pitched years ago? How about observing C.C. Sabathia? Any chance a right-hander could imitate those left-handed motions?
Pitching a baseball and passing a football both work on similar mechanical principles. As a consequence of those principles, a successful left-handed quarterback’s motion generally has to be pass-first in orientation, even if he’s rolling out after taking the snap from center. Right-handed quarterbacks don’t have this same issue to battle, which is why they can still pass effectively when rolling to their opposite side. No matter which direction a right-handed quarterback rolls, he can throw a legitimate NFL-quality pass downfield. If a left-handed quarterback rolls to his right, he’s at a greater disadvantage because he has to physically adjust his body position, and arm angle, in order to throw — in other words, lefties don’t throw on the run well rolling to their opposite side.
Am I the first person to point out these things regarding Tim Tebow’s physical limitations as an NFL quarterback? No, although I might be the first to present the argument by integrating football, baseball and science. Tim Tebow has several critics, and we all making similar arguments.
But Tebow doesn’t have a supporter quite like Skip Bayless. To put it bluntly, Bayless is unabashed, nonobjective, and biased in his public support. At first I wondered if his support was simply to be the lone contrarian among the naysayers. Bayless has stated several times that he doesn’t believe Tebow will ever win a passing title or earn a Pro Bowl spot, but he firmly believes Tebow will ultimately lead the Denver Broncos to the playoffs and possibly a Super Bowl title. In other words, Bayless believes Tebow’s a winner and the Broncos will be winners with him leading them into battle. At the moment it’s hard to argue against Bayless’ predictions. The Broncos are 5-1 this season with Tebow the starting quarterback, and 6-3 going back to last season. This looks a lot better than the 4-14 record Kyle Orton (now a Kansas City Chief) compiled the past two seasons. Although Tebow completes only 45.5% of his pass attempts, he has passed for 8 touchdowns against only one interception these past six weeks, and has rushed for 455 yards and 3 touchdowns to boot. The 6-5 Broncos are only one game behind the Oakland Raiders in the AFC Western division race, as well as one game behind the Cincinnati Bengals for the final AFC wild card spot, so anything’s possible.
But simply changing quarterbacks wasn’t good enough for Bayless. No, because Tebow cannot master today’s NFL offensive schemes, Bayless demanded that head coach John Fox and Executive Vice-President of Football Operations, John Elway, the Broncos’ former Hall-of-Fame quarterback (1983-1998), completely change their offensive scheme to tailor to Tebow’s strengths, which are primarily running the ball, playing out of a hurry-up shotgun formation, and throwing passes to receivers when defenses blow coverage assignments. Because winning is the name of the game, Fox and Elway switched to an option-based scheme (AKA “wishbone” or “veer” in college football). The results speak for themselves. The Broncos are 5-1 after a 1-4 start. They run the ball more than 65% of the time. They pass only when needed or if opportunity presents itself. Is it effective? Relative to the first month of the season, yes. Relative to competing against upper-echelon NFL offenses, the jury’s still out. The Broncos have benefited from playing slog-type games against opponents that struggled against a continuously improving defense. In four games, the Broncos were within a touchdown going into the fourth quarter. Opposing defenses eventually wore down trying to stop such a run-oriented offense, and the Broncos came back to win all five games in the fourth quarter or overtime.
Okay, so what’s the problem? NFL team switches quarterback, offensive scheme, and his biggest media supporter is enjoying the biggest and most-satisfying laugh right now. Well, with Tim Tebow, nothing is simply a matter of football, because he’s a Fundamental Christian and very public and vocal about it. Nothing can be discussed with this young man, a young man I knew absolutely nothing about, nor cared about, prior to 2007, when he won the Heisman Trophy at the University of Florida. Despite having lived and worked in Florida for ten years during the 1980s and 1990s, I have very little interest in Southeastern Conference sports, and the further I’m removed from my college football days (now 30 years and counting), the less interest I have in college football, the Heisman hype, as well as the BCS system. If I watched Tim Tebow play quarterback for U-of-F more than five times prior to the 2010 NFL draft, that was a lot. But I saw enough on television to recognize his flaws at the quarterback position and recommend he not be drafted as a quarterback, and certainly not in the first round, which the Broncos did on both counts.
Contrary to Bayless’ contention that we’re all “Tebow Haters” if we have and express doubts about Tebow’s ability to play quarterback in the NFL, or are rubbed wrong by this young man’s incessant in-your-face presentation about his religious faith, I’m personally rubbed wrong by the entire Tebow package: his ability to play quarterback, his continuous interjection of Right-wing Christianity, his arrogant demands before the 2010 NFL draft that teams only draft him as a quarterback, his public inability to consider the possibility that he might have to switch positions in order to play in the NFL, the marketing machine that advised him to produce an anti-abortion commercial with his mother to be televised during the 2010 Super Bowl (before he was even drafted), the public frenzy his fans and supporters like Bayless whipped themselves into, forcing the struggling Broncos, under a new head coach and front office, to dump Orton as their quarterback, bypass experienced backup Brady Quinn, and insert a bench-riding Tebow into the starting job, change the entire offensive scheme for him, and trading off or waiving an endless list of talented receivers who didn’t feel comfortable playing with Tebow as part of a gimmick, publicity stunt, and popularity contest among fans and supporters who look to this young man as the second coming, the wondrous sign of their “Rapture”, and the great shining hope of some Bible-Belt revival meeting.
Yes, the entire package offends me as a social liberal, former football player, mature, middle-aged and accomplished adult, and as a Jewish-American. While I’ve always advocated social awareness and a sense of conviction among our professional athletes, I also expect that if one is going to spout off in public, one should be able to discuss, or be respectful of, both sides of an issue. I don’t see that attribute with Tebow or his supporters. Like all fundamentalists, their view is all or nothing, and they preach it accordingly. I’ve also advocated that our professional athletes bring some humility to the public forum when they make the transition from collegiate sports. I also don’t see that with Tebow and his supporters who seem to think starting NFL quarterback is Tebow’s divine birthright, and anyone who dare suggest a different position (e.g., running back or tight end) commits biblical blasphemy. It takes more than a lot of chutzpah to demand what your job description should be before you’ve been fully evaluated, drafted and signed by an NFL team. The NFL didn’t and never owed anything to this young man and his supporters. Team Tebow knew well in advanced the questions being raised about his ability to play quarterback. Lord knows it wasn’t and will not be the first time NFL scouts and coaches had doubts about U-of-F or SEC quarterbacks, Heisman winners or not. But Team Tebow insisted starting NFL quarterback was the Lord’s mission.
Lastly, for those who admire Tebow’s commitment to faith (and that includes me, to a limited degree), what if the quarterback’s name was Chaim Lipschitz, a rebel kid from Crown Heights who dropped out of a Yeshiva to learn about and play football at a Big East program like Rutgers? What if Rutgers had to petition to the Big East and NCAA to ensure all their games were played on Thursdays? What if Mr. Lipschitz was a bearded version of Dan Marino inside the stadium and looked like he should be working in the Diamond District outside the stadium? What if ESPN interviewed him before the draft and he started quoting from the Talmud? What if the team drafting him found out he couldn’t play for an entire month of the regular season because games conflicted with Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot?
And this brings us to Mr. Skip Bayless, ESPN’s version of Anne Coulter. Here’s a man who’s so blindly supportive of Tim Tebow that he actually told Stephen A. Smith during a First Take debate that Tebow was being “discriminated” against for being a running quarterback, just like Michael Vick and Vince Young. I was just as incredulous as Smith was when Bayless offered this theory. Vick and Young are African-American quarterbacks, and that’s why they were discriminated against, just like Donovan McNabb, Warren Moon, and Doug Williams were. These men weren’t discriminated because of their ability or inability to run; they were discriminated on the basis of their race and presumed lack of intellect. Now, I will go on the record and say that neither Michael Vick nor Vince Young have the intellect to be successful NFL quarterbacks like many other quarterbacks are and have been, but I also have that same assessment for Tim Tebow. Vick, Young and Tebow can’t hold a candle to McNabb or Moon, not to mention Steve Young, Joe Montana, or John Elway when it comes to intellect about the game as well as the ability to run and pass. The ability to play NFL quarterback is a function of talent and smarts, not the color of one’s skin.
That a veteran sportswriter like Bayless would even utter the notion that Tebow is some kind of persecution victim not only shows a complete lack of understanding about what “discrimination” even means, but demonstrates why our continuously evolving and diversifying nation continues to polarize worse and worse. Does Tebow represent some kind of “getting back America” mentality that white, fundamental Christians have been yammering about since the 2008 presidential election? Yes, I think there’s some element to that, but one only need to listen to more of Bayless’ “bloviating” to see something more troubling and hypocritical.
Surprisingly, Bayless advocates for Michael Vick and Vince Young as running quarterbacks, so Bayless isn’t necessarily using race as his lens, even though he doesn’t completely understand how to use race in the first place. But Bayless is not necessarily an advocate of Donovan McNabb, an African-American (and a proud and dignified one) quarterback who used to be a good runner. After McNabb was granted his release by the Minnesota Vikings yesterday, Bayless commented that McNabb was “out of shape” towards the end of his tenure with the Philadelphia Eagles, when he reported to the Washington Redskins last year (after the Eagles traded him), and when he reported to the Vikings for training camp this year. Bayless questioned McNabb’s conditioning and commitment to playing football after a 12-year NFL career. While some folks might agree with Bayless’ view and see nothing more to it, I’m not among them.
It’s no secret that as this NFL season has progressed, Bayless has been extremely vocal in his distain for Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers. Despite last season’s Super Bowl championship and this season’s 11-0 start and Rodgers statistics (127.7 QB rating, 33 TDs, 4 INTs, almost 3500 yards passing), Bayless swears by New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady (105.5 QB rating, 28 TDs, 10 INTs, over 3600 yards passing) as the Most-Valuable Player. This is highly confusing but not impossible to decipher.
We need to begin with a basic question: what does Bayless have against Aaron Rodgers in Green Bay? Well, first we must appreciate that Rodgers’ younger brother, Jordan, plays quarterback for Vanderbilt University, which happens to be Bayless’ alma mater, located in Nashville, Tennessee. Bayless thinks the world of the younger Rodgers but routinely criticizes the elder one, who went to college at the University of California-Berkeley. Rodgers was a first-round draft pick of the Packers in 2005. He spent three seasons on the bench while the Packers were quarterbacked by Brett Favre. Remember him? One day in 2008, Ol’ Brett retired to his farm in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Rodgers inherited the quarterback job. Then Brett changed his mind and came out of retirement. Then the Packers traded Brett to the New York Jets, and... You know the rest of the story leading up to Brett’s most-recent retired status in 2011.
Brett Favre was one of Bayless’ favorites, a good ol’ boy from the heart of Dixie. Yeah, Brett drank, raised hell and played by the seat of his pants. And, boy, Ol’ Brett sure could run around and throw like the best of them, despite his lack of self-discipline. He was the 1990s version of Bobby Layne and Buddy Parker, two redneck quarterbacks who excited fans during the 1950s. If you watched Brett play the last three years of his career, he looked rather paunchy and unconditioned wearing a Jets uniform in 2008 and a Vikings uniform in 2009 and 2010, and it showed as each season moved along from September to December. He looked old. His behavior was erratic. He looked tired. He looked beaten up. He looked washed up. He played injured, costing his teams while he padded his Hall of Fame resume. More often than not, Brett Favre came out on the right end of the scoreboard, which is one of many reasons for his eventual enshrinement in Canton. But the Packers discarded this noble Prince of the South before Brett and his fans thought the time was right, making Aaron Rodgers an enemy of the Rebel Flag.
So now we can connect some dots: Skip Bayless gushes over Brett Favre, Michael Vick, Vince Young and Tim Tebow, and even Jordan Rodgers, but not Donovan McNabb (a Chicago native who played college football for Syracuse) or Aaron Rodgers. This may be but a limited sample of Skip Bayless, but might we be shocked to go through his publishing and social media archives and see mostly positive support for quarterbacks like Phillip Rivers, Jay Cutler, the Manning brothers, the late Steve McNair, Tony Romo and Drew Brees — quarterbacks who either grew up in the South, played college football in the South, or play for Southern-state NFL teams? Might we conversely notice mostly negative support towards quarterbacks like Steve Young (Connecticut native, graduate of BYU in Utah), Mark Sanchez (Southern California native, played at USC) or even Matt Hasselbach (Massachusetts native, graduate of Boston College)?
It’s just a thought, but perhaps Skip Bayless wears more than his support of Tim Tebow on his sleeve, and is incapable of socio-political neutrality. If Bayless was specifically an employee of some southern pep squad, perhaps his blatant bias would be both understandable and acceptable, but Bayless is a journalist, and paid to maintain the standards of neutrality for a cable network that does not act in any politically-driven capacity. If Bayless’ heart is that entrenched in the heart of Dixie, then perhaps ESPN should relocate him geographically to his own private studio where his loyalties and commitment to objectivity are. Again, ask yourself how Bayless would represent ESPN if the Denver Broncos quarterback’s name was Chaim Lipschitz.
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Philosophy of “Packer” Pedagogy:
Vince Lombardi, critical thinking and problem-based learning
Friday, December 2, 2011
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
No Longer Penn State Proud -- Doc’s Sports Thoughts for November 8, 2011
Most folks know my doctoral degree is from Penn State University. If you didn’t, now you do. I used to be very proud of that degree. I worked long and hard for it under challenging circumstances, and was extremely proud that my PhD came from a world-class university that everyone recognized. As of a few days ago I ceased being proud — not of the degree, but from where it was earned.
Many of us know the mind-boggling news out of Happy Valley, that a sexual abuse scandal has existed on Penn State’s campus, specifically within its lauded football program, for the better part of two decades. I’m too sickened by the details to write them in a column, so I’ll leave things at this: if the allegations (and we all need to keep in mind that these are still allegations, not convictions in a Court of Law) against former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky are true, the moral stench from the mountains of central Pennsylvania extends from more than Sandusky, athletic director Tim Curley, and another administrator, Gary Schultz. The stench comes from legendary head coach Joe Paterno, university president Graham Spanier, assistant coach Mike McQueary, and even a couple of janitors who saw evil but didn’t speak up about it after a 2000 incident.
Let’s start from the top: Graham Spanier sold his soul to the devil to return to Penn State and become its 16th president in 1995 after a previous tenure in Happy Valley between 1973 and 1982. He had a distinguished record. He was even the founding editor of the Journal of Family Issues, ironically. I was in the final leg of my PhD work when Spanier interviewed for his current job. It didn’t take many folks long to figure out he’d do anything to get the job. Now he’s sitting in his office trying to figure out how to hang onto his job. If — and that’s the key word for the moment, given where the legal process is -- Sandusky, Curley and Schultz are convicted or cop a plea in court, Spanier’s head needs to roll, because this all took place under his watch and the buck needs to stop at the president’s desk. Spanier is no longer a spring chicken; he’s in his mid-sixties, has been an educator for nearly forty years. He’s already at the summit of his career, comfortable and possibly governing on autopilot after all these years. If Spanier has been aware of Sandusky’s alleged antics since the beginning of his presidency, his office and position is now a lot less comfortable with nowhere to hide.
Everyone knows the stellar coaching career of Joe Paterno, an icon for 46 years who put Penn State on everyone’s map. Never mind the fact that Penn State has had its share of Nobel Prize winners among the faculty; Paterno’s football program brought big-time recognition to the American masses. Cries for his graceful retirement have existed for at least a dozen years, but at approximately 85 years old, Coach Paterno continues his winning tradition. Unfortunately, his record for a clean program is now irrevocably dirtied, not by players, booster money or agents, but by one of his former assistant coaches. No matter how the legal proceedings play out, Paterno is toast and this is really the final straw for those advocating his removal. At 85 years old, he’s been through enough and served the university enough, but in some ways he’s failed at serving his university and community on a much different level. Yes, football is “God” at major universities like Penn State. I understand and appreciate the mentality because I played college football too, but for a team Penn State routinely trounces on Saturdays.
I’ve met Paterno on a few occasions during my adult life, as both a player on an opposing college team thirty years ago and as a doctoral student teaching physics courses and tutoring for the athletic department nearly twenty years ago. Each encounter was positive; he always struck me as a nice man who cared about students and academics. But football and Paterno aren’t G-d, and Paterno needs to step down at the end of the season and allow a total housecleaning of the football program and athletic department.
What about McQueary? As a graduate student assistant, meaning he was already a college graduate and legal adult, he allegedly witnessed a 2002 shower rape by Sandusky, didn’t stop it, didn’t try to interfere with it, or protect the little boy being assaulted. But he ran home to his father and reported what he saw to him and Paterno. Paterno went to Curley. We all somewhat know the rest of the story from other newspaper articles or news stories written far better than my column.
What about the janitors who saw something in 2000? What about then-Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar, who never filed charges against Sandusky after a reported incident and investigation in 1998?
Right now no one’s talking on the record. Sandusky is under a gag order by his own attorneys. The typical Tuesday press conference Paterno has before football games was first scheduled for this afternoon but with limits as to the scope of questions and topics Paterno would address. Then the press conference is canceled without Paterno’s approval. Then reports come out that Paterno would step down immediately. Now we hear he’ll remain head coach for the foreseeable future. Given his age and the circumstances, it’s probably wise for Paterno not to meet with the press during a media feeding frenzy. But something really isn’t passing the “smell test” as everyone relevant to this story has clammed up on the Penn State campus. Even during the Watergate scandal, President Nixon’s administration issued daily public denials until the roof caved in from the mounting evidence. Paterno needs to make a public statement because this alleged abuse took place within his football kingdom. Spanier needs to make a public statement because this alleged abuse took place on his campus. Yes, the legal process may warrant a gag order among the Penn State higher-ups, but this isn’t just any scandal or criminal case. Paterno and Spanier need to come out of hiding and speak up. Neither man has the luxury of time to circle the wagons and get their stories straight. There are too many inflamed wounds across the nation and national sports scene to give Paterno and Spanier time to work with spin doctors, not after the allegations that they’ve had at least fifteen years to prepare for the court of public opinion. I want to hear what both of them have to say. I want to believe this story doesn’t stink all the way to the top of this university. I want to allow the legal process to play itself out to completion, but today I have a hard time believing anything coming out of this particular alma mater.
Aside from the sickening details of this story, what nauseates me most is how the child protection laws in Pennsylvania theoretically allow Paterno, Spanier, McQueary, Gricar, the unnamed janitors, and any other number of adults off the hook for Sandusky’s alleged criminal behavior. What did adults know and when did they know anything? Who did they report things to? Did they report things enough to as many state agencies or entities as possible? Right now we don’t know, but we do know this: according to Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly, Paterno and other adults are not necessarily people of interest or under investigation because they “met the minimal criteria” with respect to the law’s obligation for reporting child abuse. I repeat that again... met the minimal criteria.
I’m sorry, but I’ve never been a big fan of meeting minimal criteria, or being “sufficiently adequate” when it comes to anything beyond how I cook my own meals and clean my home (once you use a wheelchair and walker, some standards get a little lax). To me, this is the biggest crime of the entire criminal story. Why? Because if you can get by with meeting minimal criteria with respect to protection of children, what else can we get away with meeting minimal criteria for? Protection of the old, sick, disabled, racial or ethnic minorities, members of the GLBT community, the poor, not to mention anyone else vulnerable to the whims of our cold society?
For the time being, we all have to keep this scandal in perspective because a legal process needs to play out. However, we are working with the limited knowledge that McQueary and Paterno went through their “chain of command” and supposedly did their legal parts. Okay, maybe that’s the right way to do things at a large state university with incredible layers of bureaucracy and regulations to deal with, but we all feel in our bones that something doesn’t seem right. None of us is really in a position to be the moralist on protocol, least of all me, but one’s values need to be questioned when we hear “Met the minimal criteria... Said something to somebody... Did all I needed or could do.”
Did McQueary and Paterno do enough? Shouldn’t they have gone beyond the insulated walls of Penn State’s campus? Are they able to really live with their decisions to this very day? Can either or both of these men look straight in their mirrors and say “I did enough. I did my best. I couldn’t have done anything more”? I don’t know how either man can without blinking or turning away from the mirror, do you? In a sport where players are taught to play through the final whistle, you don’t tell anyone you met any minimal criteria or did all you needed or could do until everyone sees the final scoreboard. I’m left wondering if McQueary and Paterno walked off to the proverbial locker room long before halftime of this story.
Beyond the questions about McQueary’s and Paterno’s limited actions, we must ask why Sandusky retired at age 55 in 1999 when most Penn State football fans presumed he would be Paterno’s successor, why Sandusky was retired but still allowed to hold his Second-Mile camps on Penn State property, why Sandusky was allowed to be around young boys after being investigated for the first allegations of sexual misconduct, and why Sandusky wasn’t a pariah and unwelcomed at the campus after the 2002 incident McQueary and Paterno reported. Sandusky’s been under investigation in one form or another since 1998. Maybe Penn State wanted to wash its hands of Sandusky, but it didn’t really do a thorough job in retrospect, did it? Sandusky and his alleged problems never disappeared, leaving a lasting stain.
The more we read various news articles and the grand jury report available on the internet, the more we wonder if McQueary, Paterno, Curley, Schultz and Spanier, as well as Gricar and nameless janitors and other Penn State employees, were more worried about their own jobs and careers than these alleged abuse victims. Think about it... Just who the hell is Jerry Sandusky in the grand scheme of things? Yes, he was the man who guided Penn State’s defense to great achievement on the gridiron, but was he that powerful a person that all of the aforementioned people would fear him and his retribution if they went forward to local and state authorities? Sandusky’s an alleged, and now indicted, sexual predator, and all of these people enabled him, embraced him, protected him — Sandusky, not the kids whose lives are irrevocably damaged.
What gives? Sure, we know sexual pedophilia exists all over the world. This isn’t limited to State College or rural Pennsylvania. It goes on all over the United States, independent of geography, size of town or community, socio-economic status, race or ethnicity, or religion. The Catholic Church protected pedophile priests. Orthodox Jewish yeshivas protected pedophile rabbis. I’m sure it goes on with fundamental Christians, Muslims and Hindus too. The late tennis star and humanitarian Arthur Ashe once said “everyone needs someone to beat up on.” It shouldn’t be that way but people in power and the “haves” in our Orwellian world need powerless and “have-nots” in order to thrive. Without others to demoralize life isn’t worth living for some people, because there aren’t carcasses underneath to support their self-imposed pedestal. Pedophilia isn’t love, folks; it’s cruelty and a sick need to lord over others when nothing else justifies the pedophile’s status in his or her food chain.
It seems that McQueary, Paterno, Curley, Schultz, Spanier, Gricar and others all worried about their own bacon first, the mode of self-preservation. These allegedly abuse boys were collateral damage for the greater good of Penn State and Nittany Lion football. McQueary was just starting out his coaching career, so perhaps he didn’t want to do anything to kill his career before it ever got underway. How was he rewarded? He’s now a full-time, full-fledged and well-paid assistant coach for one of the nation’s biggest football programs. What happens if and when Penn State cleans house? How toxic will McQueary be on the job market in 2012? How many college football programs will honestly be willing to interview or hire him, much less any of Paterno’s long-time assistants? Could McQueary find employment in the NFL? I’d be reluctant to hire him, given how much outreach work the NFL does with schools and children across the United States. What about the Canadian League? Ha! Pedophiles are viewed even worse north of the border. Aside from the alleged victims, McQueary is the only named witness to these alleged acts. We could ask if McQueary had everything to gain by his limited actions and being stage one of a massive cover-up, or we could ask if McQueary had an axe to grind against Sandusky and made up the whole story. Could McQueary be part of an extensive scheme with a bunch of kids to ruin Sandusky? Why don’t we know the identities of the unnamed janitors, also alleged witnesses? Either way, McQueary seems to be someone who really wanted to have a coaching career at Penn State.
Paterno was well into his coaching legacy. Why risk it over a pedophile scandal? Spanier just took over the job of his lifetime in 1995. He sure as hell didn’t want to do anything to risk losing it. Gricar’s no longer a DA. Curley’s soon to be no longer an AD. Schultz and the rest of these folks will eventually become nameless details as time goes by. But just like Nixon’s gang at the end of Watergate, the Penn State royal circle will all eventually fall on the sword in one way or another.
But what doesn’t make sense is that no one made Sandusky simply disappear for good, leave State College, Centre County and possibly the state of Pennsylvania. He was allowed to remain. This makes no sense. As a former professor, I’ve seen university employees, especially faculty, chased from campuses for lesser reasons.
If the legal process plays out and we ultimately learn that Sandusky was completely innocent, that all these allegations were concocted as a means to push him off the coaching staff, then we have to give credit to all these people who stood by Sandusky and didn’t completely excommunicate him. But too many things would have to take place in order for such a scheme to work, and I shudder to think Mike McQueary was the mastermind behind a giant hoax for the sake of getting his own foot in the door of Paterno’s coaching staff.
If the legal process plays out and we ultimately learn that Sandusky was indeed guilty of everything, and all of these other Penn State employees coordinated a massive cover-up, not only should all heads roll and house be cleaned, we need to know exactly what Mike McQueary’s motivations were after witnessing the alleged events of 2002, why he, Paterno, Curley, Spanier and all these other adults did as little as they could to rectify the situation, and more importantly, what special hold did Jerry Sandusky have on everyone else that they allowed a pedophile to continue business as usual in their presence. Shame on them all.
Just like everyone, I’m guilty of an endless list of things I’m not proud of, perhaps even ashamed of. Today I have something else to be ashamed of, my association with Penn State.
Reminder — Don’t forget my new book is available (and on sale) in both paperback and eBook (PDF) format at Lulu.com.
Philosophy of “Packer” Pedagogy:
Vince Lombardi, critical thinking and problem-based learning
Many of us know the mind-boggling news out of Happy Valley, that a sexual abuse scandal has existed on Penn State’s campus, specifically within its lauded football program, for the better part of two decades. I’m too sickened by the details to write them in a column, so I’ll leave things at this: if the allegations (and we all need to keep in mind that these are still allegations, not convictions in a Court of Law) against former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky are true, the moral stench from the mountains of central Pennsylvania extends from more than Sandusky, athletic director Tim Curley, and another administrator, Gary Schultz. The stench comes from legendary head coach Joe Paterno, university president Graham Spanier, assistant coach Mike McQueary, and even a couple of janitors who saw evil but didn’t speak up about it after a 2000 incident.
Let’s start from the top: Graham Spanier sold his soul to the devil to return to Penn State and become its 16th president in 1995 after a previous tenure in Happy Valley between 1973 and 1982. He had a distinguished record. He was even the founding editor of the Journal of Family Issues, ironically. I was in the final leg of my PhD work when Spanier interviewed for his current job. It didn’t take many folks long to figure out he’d do anything to get the job. Now he’s sitting in his office trying to figure out how to hang onto his job. If — and that’s the key word for the moment, given where the legal process is -- Sandusky, Curley and Schultz are convicted or cop a plea in court, Spanier’s head needs to roll, because this all took place under his watch and the buck needs to stop at the president’s desk. Spanier is no longer a spring chicken; he’s in his mid-sixties, has been an educator for nearly forty years. He’s already at the summit of his career, comfortable and possibly governing on autopilot after all these years. If Spanier has been aware of Sandusky’s alleged antics since the beginning of his presidency, his office and position is now a lot less comfortable with nowhere to hide.
Everyone knows the stellar coaching career of Joe Paterno, an icon for 46 years who put Penn State on everyone’s map. Never mind the fact that Penn State has had its share of Nobel Prize winners among the faculty; Paterno’s football program brought big-time recognition to the American masses. Cries for his graceful retirement have existed for at least a dozen years, but at approximately 85 years old, Coach Paterno continues his winning tradition. Unfortunately, his record for a clean program is now irrevocably dirtied, not by players, booster money or agents, but by one of his former assistant coaches. No matter how the legal proceedings play out, Paterno is toast and this is really the final straw for those advocating his removal. At 85 years old, he’s been through enough and served the university enough, but in some ways he’s failed at serving his university and community on a much different level. Yes, football is “God” at major universities like Penn State. I understand and appreciate the mentality because I played college football too, but for a team Penn State routinely trounces on Saturdays.
I’ve met Paterno on a few occasions during my adult life, as both a player on an opposing college team thirty years ago and as a doctoral student teaching physics courses and tutoring for the athletic department nearly twenty years ago. Each encounter was positive; he always struck me as a nice man who cared about students and academics. But football and Paterno aren’t G-d, and Paterno needs to step down at the end of the season and allow a total housecleaning of the football program and athletic department.
What about McQueary? As a graduate student assistant, meaning he was already a college graduate and legal adult, he allegedly witnessed a 2002 shower rape by Sandusky, didn’t stop it, didn’t try to interfere with it, or protect the little boy being assaulted. But he ran home to his father and reported what he saw to him and Paterno. Paterno went to Curley. We all somewhat know the rest of the story from other newspaper articles or news stories written far better than my column.
What about the janitors who saw something in 2000? What about then-Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar, who never filed charges against Sandusky after a reported incident and investigation in 1998?
Right now no one’s talking on the record. Sandusky is under a gag order by his own attorneys. The typical Tuesday press conference Paterno has before football games was first scheduled for this afternoon but with limits as to the scope of questions and topics Paterno would address. Then the press conference is canceled without Paterno’s approval. Then reports come out that Paterno would step down immediately. Now we hear he’ll remain head coach for the foreseeable future. Given his age and the circumstances, it’s probably wise for Paterno not to meet with the press during a media feeding frenzy. But something really isn’t passing the “smell test” as everyone relevant to this story has clammed up on the Penn State campus. Even during the Watergate scandal, President Nixon’s administration issued daily public denials until the roof caved in from the mounting evidence. Paterno needs to make a public statement because this alleged abuse took place within his football kingdom. Spanier needs to make a public statement because this alleged abuse took place on his campus. Yes, the legal process may warrant a gag order among the Penn State higher-ups, but this isn’t just any scandal or criminal case. Paterno and Spanier need to come out of hiding and speak up. Neither man has the luxury of time to circle the wagons and get their stories straight. There are too many inflamed wounds across the nation and national sports scene to give Paterno and Spanier time to work with spin doctors, not after the allegations that they’ve had at least fifteen years to prepare for the court of public opinion. I want to hear what both of them have to say. I want to believe this story doesn’t stink all the way to the top of this university. I want to allow the legal process to play itself out to completion, but today I have a hard time believing anything coming out of this particular alma mater.
Aside from the sickening details of this story, what nauseates me most is how the child protection laws in Pennsylvania theoretically allow Paterno, Spanier, McQueary, Gricar, the unnamed janitors, and any other number of adults off the hook for Sandusky’s alleged criminal behavior. What did adults know and when did they know anything? Who did they report things to? Did they report things enough to as many state agencies or entities as possible? Right now we don’t know, but we do know this: according to Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly, Paterno and other adults are not necessarily people of interest or under investigation because they “met the minimal criteria” with respect to the law’s obligation for reporting child abuse. I repeat that again... met the minimal criteria.
I’m sorry, but I’ve never been a big fan of meeting minimal criteria, or being “sufficiently adequate” when it comes to anything beyond how I cook my own meals and clean my home (once you use a wheelchair and walker, some standards get a little lax). To me, this is the biggest crime of the entire criminal story. Why? Because if you can get by with meeting minimal criteria with respect to protection of children, what else can we get away with meeting minimal criteria for? Protection of the old, sick, disabled, racial or ethnic minorities, members of the GLBT community, the poor, not to mention anyone else vulnerable to the whims of our cold society?
For the time being, we all have to keep this scandal in perspective because a legal process needs to play out. However, we are working with the limited knowledge that McQueary and Paterno went through their “chain of command” and supposedly did their legal parts. Okay, maybe that’s the right way to do things at a large state university with incredible layers of bureaucracy and regulations to deal with, but we all feel in our bones that something doesn’t seem right. None of us is really in a position to be the moralist on protocol, least of all me, but one’s values need to be questioned when we hear “Met the minimal criteria... Said something to somebody... Did all I needed or could do.”
Did McQueary and Paterno do enough? Shouldn’t they have gone beyond the insulated walls of Penn State’s campus? Are they able to really live with their decisions to this very day? Can either or both of these men look straight in their mirrors and say “I did enough. I did my best. I couldn’t have done anything more”? I don’t know how either man can without blinking or turning away from the mirror, do you? In a sport where players are taught to play through the final whistle, you don’t tell anyone you met any minimal criteria or did all you needed or could do until everyone sees the final scoreboard. I’m left wondering if McQueary and Paterno walked off to the proverbial locker room long before halftime of this story.
Beyond the questions about McQueary’s and Paterno’s limited actions, we must ask why Sandusky retired at age 55 in 1999 when most Penn State football fans presumed he would be Paterno’s successor, why Sandusky was retired but still allowed to hold his Second-Mile camps on Penn State property, why Sandusky was allowed to be around young boys after being investigated for the first allegations of sexual misconduct, and why Sandusky wasn’t a pariah and unwelcomed at the campus after the 2002 incident McQueary and Paterno reported. Sandusky’s been under investigation in one form or another since 1998. Maybe Penn State wanted to wash its hands of Sandusky, but it didn’t really do a thorough job in retrospect, did it? Sandusky and his alleged problems never disappeared, leaving a lasting stain.
The more we read various news articles and the grand jury report available on the internet, the more we wonder if McQueary, Paterno, Curley, Schultz and Spanier, as well as Gricar and nameless janitors and other Penn State employees, were more worried about their own jobs and careers than these alleged abuse victims. Think about it... Just who the hell is Jerry Sandusky in the grand scheme of things? Yes, he was the man who guided Penn State’s defense to great achievement on the gridiron, but was he that powerful a person that all of the aforementioned people would fear him and his retribution if they went forward to local and state authorities? Sandusky’s an alleged, and now indicted, sexual predator, and all of these people enabled him, embraced him, protected him — Sandusky, not the kids whose lives are irrevocably damaged.
What gives? Sure, we know sexual pedophilia exists all over the world. This isn’t limited to State College or rural Pennsylvania. It goes on all over the United States, independent of geography, size of town or community, socio-economic status, race or ethnicity, or religion. The Catholic Church protected pedophile priests. Orthodox Jewish yeshivas protected pedophile rabbis. I’m sure it goes on with fundamental Christians, Muslims and Hindus too. The late tennis star and humanitarian Arthur Ashe once said “everyone needs someone to beat up on.” It shouldn’t be that way but people in power and the “haves” in our Orwellian world need powerless and “have-nots” in order to thrive. Without others to demoralize life isn’t worth living for some people, because there aren’t carcasses underneath to support their self-imposed pedestal. Pedophilia isn’t love, folks; it’s cruelty and a sick need to lord over others when nothing else justifies the pedophile’s status in his or her food chain.
It seems that McQueary, Paterno, Curley, Schultz, Spanier, Gricar and others all worried about their own bacon first, the mode of self-preservation. These allegedly abuse boys were collateral damage for the greater good of Penn State and Nittany Lion football. McQueary was just starting out his coaching career, so perhaps he didn’t want to do anything to kill his career before it ever got underway. How was he rewarded? He’s now a full-time, full-fledged and well-paid assistant coach for one of the nation’s biggest football programs. What happens if and when Penn State cleans house? How toxic will McQueary be on the job market in 2012? How many college football programs will honestly be willing to interview or hire him, much less any of Paterno’s long-time assistants? Could McQueary find employment in the NFL? I’d be reluctant to hire him, given how much outreach work the NFL does with schools and children across the United States. What about the Canadian League? Ha! Pedophiles are viewed even worse north of the border. Aside from the alleged victims, McQueary is the only named witness to these alleged acts. We could ask if McQueary had everything to gain by his limited actions and being stage one of a massive cover-up, or we could ask if McQueary had an axe to grind against Sandusky and made up the whole story. Could McQueary be part of an extensive scheme with a bunch of kids to ruin Sandusky? Why don’t we know the identities of the unnamed janitors, also alleged witnesses? Either way, McQueary seems to be someone who really wanted to have a coaching career at Penn State.
Paterno was well into his coaching legacy. Why risk it over a pedophile scandal? Spanier just took over the job of his lifetime in 1995. He sure as hell didn’t want to do anything to risk losing it. Gricar’s no longer a DA. Curley’s soon to be no longer an AD. Schultz and the rest of these folks will eventually become nameless details as time goes by. But just like Nixon’s gang at the end of Watergate, the Penn State royal circle will all eventually fall on the sword in one way or another.
But what doesn’t make sense is that no one made Sandusky simply disappear for good, leave State College, Centre County and possibly the state of Pennsylvania. He was allowed to remain. This makes no sense. As a former professor, I’ve seen university employees, especially faculty, chased from campuses for lesser reasons.
If the legal process plays out and we ultimately learn that Sandusky was completely innocent, that all these allegations were concocted as a means to push him off the coaching staff, then we have to give credit to all these people who stood by Sandusky and didn’t completely excommunicate him. But too many things would have to take place in order for such a scheme to work, and I shudder to think Mike McQueary was the mastermind behind a giant hoax for the sake of getting his own foot in the door of Paterno’s coaching staff.
If the legal process plays out and we ultimately learn that Sandusky was indeed guilty of everything, and all of these other Penn State employees coordinated a massive cover-up, not only should all heads roll and house be cleaned, we need to know exactly what Mike McQueary’s motivations were after witnessing the alleged events of 2002, why he, Paterno, Curley, Spanier and all these other adults did as little as they could to rectify the situation, and more importantly, what special hold did Jerry Sandusky have on everyone else that they allowed a pedophile to continue business as usual in their presence. Shame on them all.
Just like everyone, I’m guilty of an endless list of things I’m not proud of, perhaps even ashamed of. Today I have something else to be ashamed of, my association with Penn State.
Reminder — Don’t forget my new book is available (and on sale) in both paperback and eBook (PDF) format at Lulu.com.
Philosophy of “Packer” Pedagogy:
Vince Lombardi, critical thinking and problem-based learning
Saturday, October 15, 2011
It’s time for Jets to shut up and play football! -- Doc’s Sports Thoughts for October 16, 2011
Remember the good old days, April 2010, to be exact? The Jets had just pulled off a steal of a trade with the Pittsburgh Steelers for wide receiver Santonio Holmes, the MVP of Super Bowl XLIII, for a fifth-round draft choice. Despite Holmes’ off-field baggage, lots of Jets fans were excited at the prospect of quarterback Mark Sanchez having a game-breaker to throw passes to. Yes, Holmes was a great addition to the Jets passing attack. Yes, we’ll fondly recall his spectacular game-breaking and game-winning plays in 2010 against the Denver Broncos, Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, Houston Texans, and the New England Patriots, especially that touchdown catch in Foxborough during the Jets 28-21 AFC divisional playoff win. Yes, having Holmes back this year with a new five-year contract gave us all reason for hope of bigger and better things.
Well, so far this season, the only thing bigger seems to be Holmes’ mouth, quite possibly in direct proportion to his paycheck, and the only thing better seems to be that Jets fans will have Holmes for a full 16-game season, as opposed to 12 games last year (he was suspended for the first four games of 2010 for violating the NFL conduct policy).
Here we are, entering just the sixth game of the season, and Holmes has not once, but twice, shot off his big mouth to the press, complaining about how the Jets offense is not playing up to his standards as one of the team captains. More specifically, he has called out his quarterback and the offensive line as not doing their jobs well enough to give him the opportunities he apparently deserves in order to shine as a star and playmaker. In other words, if the line blocked better, Sanchez would be passing better, and Holmes would not only have better personal statistics but more highlight appearances on SportsCenter... Oh, and the Jets wouldn’t be a mediocre 2-3 going into Monday night’s home game against the 0-4 Miami Dolphins.
Twice, Holmes has been rebuked, first by the legendary Joe Namath, and now by Pro Bowl caliber right guard Brandon Moore. Namath called out Holmes for potentially creating a schism in the locker room. Moore made it unequivocally clear that Holmes is indeed creating division and dissention within the Jets locker room, and that’s not how a team captain is supposed to operate. Namath and Moore are absolutely right in scolding Holmes. Two of the many unwritten rules of professionalism in sports are: Dirty laundry stays inside the locker room, and Don’t throw teammates under the bus when the team is struggling. Holmes is definitely guilty of both and deserving of a court-marshal as one of the Jets team captains.
I’ve read as much as everyone else and listened to as much as everyone else on this nonsense, and don’t need any more newspapers, radio shows and television shows to tell me the Jets are in a funk, and nobody in Jets Nation needed Santonio Holmes’ yammering about it. In the grand scheme of things, perhaps Holmes’ yammering will end up being an insignificant blip of white noise, but at the present time, six weeks into a season already shaped by a lockout, truncated training camp and preseason, and salary-cap restrictions, Holmes’ big mouth has added to considerable stress and aggravation within the Jets locker room. To say Holmes’ comments to the media have been extremely unhelpful for the team is the season’s biggest understatement so far.
Yes, the Jets are 2-3. Yes, the Jets are riding a three-game losing streak, going 0-3 on a road trip through Oakland, Baltimore, and New England. Yes, the Jets are struggling on both offense and defense, giving up big plays, making too many mistakes, and committing too many penalties. Yes, the offense has yet to find its rushing attack, rushing-passing balance, and consistency with its passing game. Yes, the offensive line has been banged-up and isn’t blocking up to its usual level. Yes, Mark Sanchez has been very inconsistent connecting with his receivers. Yes, playmakers like Holmes have yet to put up big statistics so far.
But we’re only entering the sixth week of the season, the Raiders, Ravens and Patriots are hardly pushovers (the Ravens and Patriots are considered by many as preseason Super Bowl favorites), three-game losing streaks aren’t necessarily impossible to overcome, and there really isn’t any crime in losing on the road. If one objectively looked at the Jets regular season schedule once the lockout ended, one really shouldn’t be shocked the Jets are only 2-3. In fact, an objective Jets fan would’ve expected 3-2 to be a reasonably decent start, given their recent three-game road trip. More importantly, only the most cockeyed of Jets fans would’ve expected Gang Green to have a 2011 record of 13-3 or better. Most experts and realists figured the Jets to be 11-5 (same as last season) or possibly 12-4, so somewhere along the season we all expected the Jets to lose three games. Well, those three losses are now on the books. Perhaps it’s better those three losses come in September and October, rather than in November and December?
Should we completely disregard those three losses and not worry about what we saw over the past three weeks? No, of course not. The Jets lost three games against AFC opponents, three teams all potentially battling the Jets for playoff spots in December, when tiebreakers could be critical. The Jets looked flat and a step behind against the Raiders, reminding us that speed is important and the Jets don’t have as much speed on their roster as desired. The Jets offense looked entirely overmatched against the Ravens (then again, so did the Steelers in the season opener, and Pittsburgh played in last year’s Super Bowl), reminding us that a healthy offensive line is paramount when going against an aggressive defense. The Jets offense struggled on first and third downs against the Patriots suspect defense, reminding us that if you can’t keep Tom Brady off the field, eventually he and his offensive mates will wear down and kill any defense. There were lots of little things not to like about the Jets three-game losing streak and how it transpired. However, there were no major things taking place to hint at a team completely incapable of being in the hunt for a playoff spot and that elusive Super Bowl berth. There are things to fix, and fixed these things will eventually be, because head coach Rex Ryan, and his entire coaching staff, have found ways to fix things en route to the previous two AFC championship games and one step short of the Super Bowl.
And how “bad” is the offense doing — i.e., how much is Mark Sanchez holding back the offense with his regressive play? Let’s get something straight: Sanchez’s stats are not much different than many other AFC quarterbacks. Sanchez has completed 97 of 173 passes, a 56 percent completion percentage. Granted, this isn’t exactly the 68 percent by Tom Brady, but it’s better than the 49.3 percent by Baltimore’s Joe Flacco and not far behind the 59.8 percent by Houston’s Matt Schaub. By the way, the Ravens are 3-1 and the Texans are 3-2, the Texans play at Baltimore this afternoon, and neither team is running away from the AFC pack so far.
After five games, Sanchez has thrown 8 touchdowns and 5 interceptions. Only Brady, Schaub, the Buffalo Bills Ryan Fitzpatrick, and Matt Hasselbeck of the Tennessee Titans have passed for more TDs. The Patriots and Bills are both 4-1, and the Titans are 3-2. Let it also be stated that Brady has already thrown 6 picks after five games, Schaub has thrown 5, as has Matt Cassel of the Kansas City Chiefs. Supposed elite AFC quarterbacks Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers and Phillip Rivers of the San Diego Chargers have thrown seven and six interceptions, respectively, already. The Steelers are 3-2; the Chargers are 4-1. The bottom line is that Sanchez’s statistics aren’t glaringly different from many other AFC quarterbacks, quarterbacks held in higher regard and for teams considered more successful than the Jets so far. In fact, it looks like even the best of the best are having their off-moments, not too surprising for a season where everyone started out of synch after the lockout ended.
In fact, going into this weekend, 14 of 32 NFL teams are either 2-3, 2-2, or 3-2. In other words, almost half the league is within a game of .500 at the one-third mark of the season. This means at least half the league’s teams are still considered “in the hunt” for the playoffs with 10 or 11 games left to play. The Jets are among those “in the hunt” teams. However, given the annual hype since Rex Ryan became head coach, the Jets are expected to dominate, not simply be in the hunt. Well, if being in the hunt is below par, I can think of worse positions to be in after five weeks. Yes, the Jets could and perhaps should be playing better at this stage of the season, but they could be doing worse, and there are indeed a handful of teams who are playing considerably worse than the Jets. Maybe we should all count the Jets blessings instead of their omissions from the SportsCenter highlights list. It’s a shame Santonio Holmes can’t keep things in perspective, but then again, who knows how many times he has himself starting on his NFL fantasy team?
It’s bad enough inflated expectations have Jets fans flying off the handle and calling into radio stations as if the sky is falling during this recent losing streak, but to have players like Holmes sounding off rubs salt into everyone’s wounds. Holmes exacerbated a difficult situation and helps create more pressure than necessary when a bumbling team like the Dolphins come to town. The Dolphins are exactly what a struggling team needs to feel better and right the ship, but when fans and players are going off the wagon and losing perspective, the 0-4 team ends up having an artificial advantage because now the Jets run the risk of pressing harder to score 10-point touchdowns every time the offense takes the field. There’s no need to panic. Just work on correcting the mistakes, improving the physicality at the line of scrimmage, playing smarter and score your touchdowns seven points at a time. Consider yourselves lucky you get to fix what ails you against an 0-4 team rather than a 4-0 team. In other words, relax and play Jets football against a team that has no business challenging the Jets when playing to their potential.
Did Holmes say anything we don’t already know regarding what ails the Jets? No, but there was no value or benefit to him saying what he said, except to make himself absolvable of the team’s 2-3 start and struggles. Anyone who truly understands football and the team concept knows Holmes is full of baloney and chutzpah. If Holmes truly was worthy of being a team captain, if he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, he could have and should have said: “we’re all struggling on offense to play up to our potential. As a playmaker, I need to find ways to get open quicker for my quarterback to successfully pass the ball to me and place less stress on our offensive linemen.”
Holmes, a team captain and playmaker, should be talking about how he can help Sanchez, as well as the offensive line: Moore, Mangold, D’Brickashaw Ferguson, Matt Slausen and Wayne Hunter. But Holmes isn’t about helping his teammates as much as himself. After all, charity begins at home, and apparently yards-per-catch average, touchdowns, and SportsCenter highlight catches mean more to Holmes than fighting for the ball and the tough yards. Right now, no Jets receiver has the luxury of gliding downfield for four or five seconds to catch rainbow bombs from Sanchez, so everyone needs to buckle up their chin straps and dig underneath opposing coverages to find open spots where Sanchez can reach them for modest but positive gains. Homeruns will have to take a back seat to “small ball” as the offense grinds four or five yards at a time to covert series of first downs en route to the end zone. If this is what it takes this season, so be it. If it’s simply a matter of time before jabbing away leads to bigger plays, then Holmes needs to bite his tongue, as Moore advised, and be part of the jabbing attack until the offense finally breaks through.
I was among those fans a year ago who wondered if Holmes presence might blow up on Ryan and the Jets organization. Keep in mind, Holmes wore out his welcome so much in Pittsburgh that they gave him away for a fifth-round choice only two years after being a Super Bowl MVP. When times are tough and your head coach has either enough faith or naïveté to name you one of the team captains, perhaps you should have the wisdom and humility to support your teammates like someone who was traded for peanuts, not someone who won an MVP on the basis of a SportsCenter highlight catch. It’s time Holmes finally bought into the tune “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way...” instead of constantly humming Da-da-da! Da-da-da! to himself.
As I advised Jets fans during the past week via Twitter, it’s still a long season to go, anything can happen, so try to keep the pessimism balanced a little longer. Quit griping and start encouraging your team to straighten up and play real Jets football. As for the Jets, it’s time for everyone to stop popping off to the media and figure out how to play smarter. You may not have the talent, speed, power, strength, health or depth to dominate like you expected to, but championship-caliber teams find ways to overcome challenges and struggles by using their heads better than any opponent. As I wrote in Philosophy of “Packer” pedagogy, Vince Lombardi and his teams found ways to win games when opponents had the physical advantage. There’s no reason why Rex Ryan’s Jets can’t do the same. The time has come for Gang Green to show itself and everyone else that talking a good game is one thing, thinking a good game is another.
Reminder — Don’t forget my new Book! Available in both paperback and eBook (PDF) format.
Philosophy of “Packer” Pedagogy:
Vince Lombardi, critical thinking and problem-based learning
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/DavePushkin_PackerPedagogy
Well, so far this season, the only thing bigger seems to be Holmes’ mouth, quite possibly in direct proportion to his paycheck, and the only thing better seems to be that Jets fans will have Holmes for a full 16-game season, as opposed to 12 games last year (he was suspended for the first four games of 2010 for violating the NFL conduct policy).
Here we are, entering just the sixth game of the season, and Holmes has not once, but twice, shot off his big mouth to the press, complaining about how the Jets offense is not playing up to his standards as one of the team captains. More specifically, he has called out his quarterback and the offensive line as not doing their jobs well enough to give him the opportunities he apparently deserves in order to shine as a star and playmaker. In other words, if the line blocked better, Sanchez would be passing better, and Holmes would not only have better personal statistics but more highlight appearances on SportsCenter... Oh, and the Jets wouldn’t be a mediocre 2-3 going into Monday night’s home game against the 0-4 Miami Dolphins.
Twice, Holmes has been rebuked, first by the legendary Joe Namath, and now by Pro Bowl caliber right guard Brandon Moore. Namath called out Holmes for potentially creating a schism in the locker room. Moore made it unequivocally clear that Holmes is indeed creating division and dissention within the Jets locker room, and that’s not how a team captain is supposed to operate. Namath and Moore are absolutely right in scolding Holmes. Two of the many unwritten rules of professionalism in sports are: Dirty laundry stays inside the locker room, and Don’t throw teammates under the bus when the team is struggling. Holmes is definitely guilty of both and deserving of a court-marshal as one of the Jets team captains.
I’ve read as much as everyone else and listened to as much as everyone else on this nonsense, and don’t need any more newspapers, radio shows and television shows to tell me the Jets are in a funk, and nobody in Jets Nation needed Santonio Holmes’ yammering about it. In the grand scheme of things, perhaps Holmes’ yammering will end up being an insignificant blip of white noise, but at the present time, six weeks into a season already shaped by a lockout, truncated training camp and preseason, and salary-cap restrictions, Holmes’ big mouth has added to considerable stress and aggravation within the Jets locker room. To say Holmes’ comments to the media have been extremely unhelpful for the team is the season’s biggest understatement so far.
Yes, the Jets are 2-3. Yes, the Jets are riding a three-game losing streak, going 0-3 on a road trip through Oakland, Baltimore, and New England. Yes, the Jets are struggling on both offense and defense, giving up big plays, making too many mistakes, and committing too many penalties. Yes, the offense has yet to find its rushing attack, rushing-passing balance, and consistency with its passing game. Yes, the offensive line has been banged-up and isn’t blocking up to its usual level. Yes, Mark Sanchez has been very inconsistent connecting with his receivers. Yes, playmakers like Holmes have yet to put up big statistics so far.
But we’re only entering the sixth week of the season, the Raiders, Ravens and Patriots are hardly pushovers (the Ravens and Patriots are considered by many as preseason Super Bowl favorites), three-game losing streaks aren’t necessarily impossible to overcome, and there really isn’t any crime in losing on the road. If one objectively looked at the Jets regular season schedule once the lockout ended, one really shouldn’t be shocked the Jets are only 2-3. In fact, an objective Jets fan would’ve expected 3-2 to be a reasonably decent start, given their recent three-game road trip. More importantly, only the most cockeyed of Jets fans would’ve expected Gang Green to have a 2011 record of 13-3 or better. Most experts and realists figured the Jets to be 11-5 (same as last season) or possibly 12-4, so somewhere along the season we all expected the Jets to lose three games. Well, those three losses are now on the books. Perhaps it’s better those three losses come in September and October, rather than in November and December?
Should we completely disregard those three losses and not worry about what we saw over the past three weeks? No, of course not. The Jets lost three games against AFC opponents, three teams all potentially battling the Jets for playoff spots in December, when tiebreakers could be critical. The Jets looked flat and a step behind against the Raiders, reminding us that speed is important and the Jets don’t have as much speed on their roster as desired. The Jets offense looked entirely overmatched against the Ravens (then again, so did the Steelers in the season opener, and Pittsburgh played in last year’s Super Bowl), reminding us that a healthy offensive line is paramount when going against an aggressive defense. The Jets offense struggled on first and third downs against the Patriots suspect defense, reminding us that if you can’t keep Tom Brady off the field, eventually he and his offensive mates will wear down and kill any defense. There were lots of little things not to like about the Jets three-game losing streak and how it transpired. However, there were no major things taking place to hint at a team completely incapable of being in the hunt for a playoff spot and that elusive Super Bowl berth. There are things to fix, and fixed these things will eventually be, because head coach Rex Ryan, and his entire coaching staff, have found ways to fix things en route to the previous two AFC championship games and one step short of the Super Bowl.
And how “bad” is the offense doing — i.e., how much is Mark Sanchez holding back the offense with his regressive play? Let’s get something straight: Sanchez’s stats are not much different than many other AFC quarterbacks. Sanchez has completed 97 of 173 passes, a 56 percent completion percentage. Granted, this isn’t exactly the 68 percent by Tom Brady, but it’s better than the 49.3 percent by Baltimore’s Joe Flacco and not far behind the 59.8 percent by Houston’s Matt Schaub. By the way, the Ravens are 3-1 and the Texans are 3-2, the Texans play at Baltimore this afternoon, and neither team is running away from the AFC pack so far.
After five games, Sanchez has thrown 8 touchdowns and 5 interceptions. Only Brady, Schaub, the Buffalo Bills Ryan Fitzpatrick, and Matt Hasselbeck of the Tennessee Titans have passed for more TDs. The Patriots and Bills are both 4-1, and the Titans are 3-2. Let it also be stated that Brady has already thrown 6 picks after five games, Schaub has thrown 5, as has Matt Cassel of the Kansas City Chiefs. Supposed elite AFC quarterbacks Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers and Phillip Rivers of the San Diego Chargers have thrown seven and six interceptions, respectively, already. The Steelers are 3-2; the Chargers are 4-1. The bottom line is that Sanchez’s statistics aren’t glaringly different from many other AFC quarterbacks, quarterbacks held in higher regard and for teams considered more successful than the Jets so far. In fact, it looks like even the best of the best are having their off-moments, not too surprising for a season where everyone started out of synch after the lockout ended.
In fact, going into this weekend, 14 of 32 NFL teams are either 2-3, 2-2, or 3-2. In other words, almost half the league is within a game of .500 at the one-third mark of the season. This means at least half the league’s teams are still considered “in the hunt” for the playoffs with 10 or 11 games left to play. The Jets are among those “in the hunt” teams. However, given the annual hype since Rex Ryan became head coach, the Jets are expected to dominate, not simply be in the hunt. Well, if being in the hunt is below par, I can think of worse positions to be in after five weeks. Yes, the Jets could and perhaps should be playing better at this stage of the season, but they could be doing worse, and there are indeed a handful of teams who are playing considerably worse than the Jets. Maybe we should all count the Jets blessings instead of their omissions from the SportsCenter highlights list. It’s a shame Santonio Holmes can’t keep things in perspective, but then again, who knows how many times he has himself starting on his NFL fantasy team?
It’s bad enough inflated expectations have Jets fans flying off the handle and calling into radio stations as if the sky is falling during this recent losing streak, but to have players like Holmes sounding off rubs salt into everyone’s wounds. Holmes exacerbated a difficult situation and helps create more pressure than necessary when a bumbling team like the Dolphins come to town. The Dolphins are exactly what a struggling team needs to feel better and right the ship, but when fans and players are going off the wagon and losing perspective, the 0-4 team ends up having an artificial advantage because now the Jets run the risk of pressing harder to score 10-point touchdowns every time the offense takes the field. There’s no need to panic. Just work on correcting the mistakes, improving the physicality at the line of scrimmage, playing smarter and score your touchdowns seven points at a time. Consider yourselves lucky you get to fix what ails you against an 0-4 team rather than a 4-0 team. In other words, relax and play Jets football against a team that has no business challenging the Jets when playing to their potential.
Did Holmes say anything we don’t already know regarding what ails the Jets? No, but there was no value or benefit to him saying what he said, except to make himself absolvable of the team’s 2-3 start and struggles. Anyone who truly understands football and the team concept knows Holmes is full of baloney and chutzpah. If Holmes truly was worthy of being a team captain, if he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, he could have and should have said: “we’re all struggling on offense to play up to our potential. As a playmaker, I need to find ways to get open quicker for my quarterback to successfully pass the ball to me and place less stress on our offensive linemen.”
Holmes, a team captain and playmaker, should be talking about how he can help Sanchez, as well as the offensive line: Moore, Mangold, D’Brickashaw Ferguson, Matt Slausen and Wayne Hunter. But Holmes isn’t about helping his teammates as much as himself. After all, charity begins at home, and apparently yards-per-catch average, touchdowns, and SportsCenter highlight catches mean more to Holmes than fighting for the ball and the tough yards. Right now, no Jets receiver has the luxury of gliding downfield for four or five seconds to catch rainbow bombs from Sanchez, so everyone needs to buckle up their chin straps and dig underneath opposing coverages to find open spots where Sanchez can reach them for modest but positive gains. Homeruns will have to take a back seat to “small ball” as the offense grinds four or five yards at a time to covert series of first downs en route to the end zone. If this is what it takes this season, so be it. If it’s simply a matter of time before jabbing away leads to bigger plays, then Holmes needs to bite his tongue, as Moore advised, and be part of the jabbing attack until the offense finally breaks through.
I was among those fans a year ago who wondered if Holmes presence might blow up on Ryan and the Jets organization. Keep in mind, Holmes wore out his welcome so much in Pittsburgh that they gave him away for a fifth-round choice only two years after being a Super Bowl MVP. When times are tough and your head coach has either enough faith or naïveté to name you one of the team captains, perhaps you should have the wisdom and humility to support your teammates like someone who was traded for peanuts, not someone who won an MVP on the basis of a SportsCenter highlight catch. It’s time Holmes finally bought into the tune “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way...” instead of constantly humming Da-da-da! Da-da-da! to himself.
As I advised Jets fans during the past week via Twitter, it’s still a long season to go, anything can happen, so try to keep the pessimism balanced a little longer. Quit griping and start encouraging your team to straighten up and play real Jets football. As for the Jets, it’s time for everyone to stop popping off to the media and figure out how to play smarter. You may not have the talent, speed, power, strength, health or depth to dominate like you expected to, but championship-caliber teams find ways to overcome challenges and struggles by using their heads better than any opponent. As I wrote in Philosophy of “Packer” pedagogy, Vince Lombardi and his teams found ways to win games when opponents had the physical advantage. There’s no reason why Rex Ryan’s Jets can’t do the same. The time has come for Gang Green to show itself and everyone else that talking a good game is one thing, thinking a good game is another.
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Philosophy of “Packer” Pedagogy:
Vince Lombardi, critical thinking and problem-based learning
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/DavePushkin_PackerPedagogy
Friday, September 16, 2011
What’s wrong with American Education? Go visit a grocery store and see for yourself! -- Doc’s Thoughts for September 16, 2011
Author’s Note: This column was originally started on September 7 and completed today. I was in the hospital last week for surgery and simply didn’t have enough time or energy to complete the column as planned. Apologies aside, I hope you’ll enjoy it.
There I was, Labor Day... A day where I could sit back and write about any number of topics on baseball (hmmm... Already wrote a column last week on the pennant races) or football (hmmm... I can do that next week. There are a few topics I’m not mentally ready to write about, particularly yesterday’s passing of former Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive end, and teammate, Lee Roy Selmon). No... I have something more interesting and less emotionally draining to write about today... Today’s column will focus on stupidity.
(Assumed Editorial Feedback: Oh Dave, don’t you find a way to write about stupidity in almost every column?)
Well, maybe I do take advantage of opportunities and consistently try to teach one little lesson about the unwritten commandment Thou shalt not be a moron, but today is a special opportunity because it coincides with the start of a new academic year for our elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities, so, since it’s my column I’ll set the theme, and our theme for today is stupidity.
Well, maybe not stupidity as much as ignorance... Nope, stupidity is the appropriate theme, I’ve made up my mind, and as you read along, I’m sure you’ll appreciate how and why I came to the conclusion that stupidity is the right theme for this Labor Day column.
Before I dive into today’s story, I’d like to point out that I do take my columns seriously, even though I don’t earn any income writing them. As much as a blog column could be a vehicle for venting, I try to put as much substance as possible into my thoughts, because: (1) I’ll always be a teacher at my core, so I feel the need to teach something, or at least give readers something to think about in each column, (2) each column is potentially the core of a chapter for another book project, and (3) I don’t want to simply write a bunch of silly nonsense when my columns are distributed to approximately 5,000 people via email, Twitter, Linked-In and other social media modes. Besides, if I expect such a sizeable number of people to consistently and regularly read what I write, the least I can do is write like I’ve put significant thought behind my words.
So, here’s today’s story for our amusement and reflection...
Today I decided to take a drive to the grocery store in order to stock up on some basic food staples for the next week or two. I happen to be scheduled for a full day of medical tests on Thursday and outpatient surgery on Friday, and I know I won’t have the time or physical strength to run errands beforehand or afterwards, so today’s errand was a practical necessity, no different from how residents of the east coast recently prepared for Hurricane Irene, but with far less hysteria.
For those who know me well, I hate grocery shopping more than any domestic chore a human being must do, and this hatred for grocery shopping (make that all shopping) has continuously increased over the years since my spinal injury simply because it’s a lot of strain on my spine and legs. Even if I was a completely healthy person, I’d still consider grocery shopping tedious and far too time-consuming compared to the hours I could invest in other activities. In fact, there have been times when I’ve been completely traumatized by shopping, especially the day before a major holiday, religious or secular. Crowds are not my thing, especially crowds that grab around and over you, shoving anyone in sight all in the name of procuring that final jar of salsa during a 2-for-1 sale. In this era of coupons and manager specials, shopping is clearly a contact sport requiring helmets and other protective padding when large numbers of maniacs race up and down store isles with shopping carts and then behave similarly with their automobiles in the parking lot. Not a day goes by that I don’t pine for the days when I was young and healthy and could do my grocery shopping at 2:00am when 24-hour stores were nearly empty of people to interfere with me as I tackled this chore with quiet efficiency.
However, this column has little to do with the physical or even mental toll grocery shopping takes out of me, because those consequences will always be a part of my life no matter what day of the week, month or year I’m in a store. This column actually has to do with the aftermath of shopping.
What’s the aftermath, you ask? Ah... This takes place after you’ve completed filling your shopping cart, found a cashier lane moving at a “faster than molasses” pace, load your groceries onto the conveyer belt, hand over your frequent shopper savings card and coupons to the cashier, bag your own groceries (since another employee is rarely available for that duty and your cashier is really just the cashier, analogous to the “I don’t do windows” mentality), and pay your bill. The aftermath is when (or possibly if) you move aside with your shopping cart and inspect your receipt prior to leaving the store. I happen to be someone who scans over my receipt immediately after I leave the cashier lane, simply because I know errors happen. If I’m quick enough I can catch the error while the cashier is scanning the items and have the cashier back up and double-check a price, but today wasn’t such a day.
Anyway, while scanning today’s receipt I noticed an error at the very top; it was the only error. I needed bread (among a few other items on sale at this particular grocery store, Stop and Shop). Hey, sometimes toast or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is all I’m in the mood to eat, so why not be prepared in case that’s all I feel like eating after surgery? It just so happens that Arnold-brand breads were on sale -- buy one and get one free of equal or lesser value.
I happen to be a very picky person when it comes to bread. I like bread with oomph, bread with substance, fiber — give me a good chewy rye bread or something with whole wheat or multigrain. You’ll never satisfy me with plain ol’ white bread, and the same goes for rolls, pita breads or wraps. I love my carbohydrates as much as anyone else, but at least give me enjoyable healthy carbohydrates. Oh, and if the bread has seeds I’m in heaven, even if the seeds get stuck in my partials. Seeds simply reinforce the oomph in the bread’s taste.
I luckily found two different loaves of Arnold breads that met my criteria, so I bought one loaf called “healthy grain whole wheat” and one loaf of “whole wheat 12-grain”. Each loaf costs $4.49, so we’re not talking cheap bread here. For $4.49, I could drive over to Whole Foods and buy a loaf of bread to die for, but I’m neither the richest person on the planet nor was I up to driving an extra 20 minutes to Whole Foods, so two loaves of healthy Arnold bread at Stop and Shop for the same price would have to do, because you can’t just drive an extra 20 minutes to Whole Foods for one loaf of bread. Shopping at Whole Foods is like those Lays Potato Chips commercials, where you can’t stop at one. If I’m going to Whole Foods, I have a significant shopping list written down to buy a bunch of food I love to eat but wish I had the budget for.
So, there I was, in Stop and Shop, receipt in hand, noticing an error. For some reason, the cash register’s computer (You have to blame it on the computer, because cashiers are simply humans scanning items with barcodes for a computer to read and provide a corresponding price. Cashiers really don’t think about what they’re scanning.) charged me for two loaves; it didn’t give me one for free. Hey, these errors happen, probably more often than we think, so I wobbled over to customer service with my shopping cart (no, I don’t really walk with my cane anymore; I wobble), showed the young lady at the counter my receipt, the Stop and Shop circular with the advertised sale for Arnold-brand breads, and the two loaves of Arnold-brand bread I bought, and explained that I shouldn’t be charged for both loaves. When you’re a reasonably logical adult, you figure this is more than sufficient information to provide someone at the customer service counter.
The problem is that the person on the other side of the customer service counter may not be as logical as you or me, and the young lady (let’s call her “Juliette”) working the customer service counter at my local Stop and Shop clearly had some logical limitations. The first thing Juliette did was randomly flip through all the pages of the circular — the very circular I handed her with the Arnold-brand bread sale ad front and center — and say, “are we even having a bread sale? I don’t see anything here.” I had to instruct Juliette to fold up the circular exactly how it was handed to her. Finally Juliette saw the ad. Juliette then carefully stared at the ad, looked up at me, and said, “you bought the wrong bread. The ad is only for 24-ounce breads.”
I now share with you the size information on each package of bread: “1 LB, 8 oz (680 g).”
I told Juliette these were 24-ounce breads (please forgive my butchered grammar... I do mean “24-ounce packages of bread”), and this is when things went downhill for Juliette...
“No-uh, you bought 8-ounce breads. It says right there.”
The package says one-pound and 8 ounces. That’s 24 ounces.
“No-uh, 1 pound is 8 ounces.”
Did you just say 1 pound is 8 ounces? How many ounces are in one pound?
“Eight. The bread says so.”
There are 16 ounces in one pound. 16 plus 8 equals 24 ounces.
“I don’t need your math lesson and attitude to know I’m right. That’s a 1-pound bread that’s 8 ounces.”
As I was just about to ask to speak to the store manager Juliette inexplicably took the two packages of Arnold bread and scanned them into her register. Sure enough, both packages registered as “Arnold Bread 24oz, $4.49”, and just like that, she opened up her cash drawer and counted out the cash owed back to me... $4.44... Yes, $4.44... Four single-dollar bills, one quarter, one dime, one nickel, and four pennies. Apparently the combination of quarters, dimes and nickels was too much to process for Juliette. This required the manager’s attention, which is another story for another column if I dare revisiting the topic.
Some of you might be wondering, what’s the big deal? You eventually got your correct refund. Yes, perhaps I eventually did, but the educator in me found the whole experience quite disturbing. Here’s a young lady, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty years old. Perhaps she’s a recent high school graduate. Perhaps she’s a local college student. Perhaps she doesn’t attend school at all and is a full-time employee of Stop and Shop. But here’s a young adult who cannot figure out that “1 LB, 8 oz” is equivalent to 24 ounces, because she doesn’t know how to read a package of bread, because she doesn’t understand basic units of measurement we expect fifth graders to comprehend for the purpose of high-stakes standardized testing. I’m wiling to bet she still doesn’t believe “1 LB, 8 oz” is equivalent to 24 ounces, but she blindly trusts what the cash register tells her when she scans the package’s UPC bar code. I can only imagine how much longer I would’ve been standing at the customer service counter if her register didn’t identify the bread package weights. One would think that since each package cost $4.49 on my receipt and the circular ad explicitly stated that the price of one package without your shopping discount card was $4.49 this would be sufficient information for Juliette, but it wasn’t. Worst of all, Juliette “didn’t need math” to know she was right, even though she was indeed wrong.
This, to me, was scarier than Juliette’s ignorance of basic measurement units. As I’ve written for many years in academic journals and book chapters, adults generally have four amorphous stages of cognitive development, according to the research and theory of former Harvard psychologist William G. Perry: dualism, multiplicity, skepticism and relativism. As we encounter more experience in life, within and outside academic settings, we’re supposed to evolve towards more open-minded thinking. As researchers of the 1980s and 1990s have shown, the overwhelming majority of college graduates are essentially as narrow-minded and myopically-thinking as they were when first coming to college. What this means is that if you’re an ignorant, closed-minded blockhead at 17 or 18 years old, chances are you’re going to be the same intellectually-stunted person at 22 or 23 years old, if not older, no matter who you are, what you’ve earned a degree in, how many academic degrees you’ve earned, or where you’ve earned those degrees from. I interpret that to mean bigots and racists will likely remain bigots and racists because it takes a LOT of years to overcome your upbringing and foundation, and the same can be said for many of the negative attributes associated with a broad spectrum of American society: laziness, ignorance, functional stupidity, vanity, lack of empathy for your fellow person, etc. This is supposedly why we’re supposed to care so much about our educational system, so we can “slap to stupid” out of America’s youth before it becomes too entrenched, no matter who a child is or where that child lives. As we well see in adult society, American education hasn’t managed to land a finger, much less slap stupidity out of kids’ heads, for generations. All we need to do is open a newspaper or watch any number of television shows to see adult society has more than its share of stupidity.
Are we all capable of stupidity? Of COURSE we are! This includes you, me and everyone else who reads or doesn’t read my columns. We all do stupid (or “dumb” for those with a personal stigma about the word “stupid”) things from time to time, but we’re capable of recognizing our actions or words and rectifying the consequences as best as we can. Those stupid things we do are part of the learning experience, whether we’re organizing a monthly budget, cooking a particular meal for the first time, fixing a car, planning a party, performing a chemical experiment, solving a word problem, or quarterbacking a football game (see Dallas Cowboys and Tony Romo). The goal is to recognize, diagnose and correct our mistakes so we can avoid repeating them, or at least minimizing the times of repetition (see Dallas Cowboys and Tony Romo).
There are, however, people who don’t operate the same way we try to, because they simply can’t recognize the possibility of being fallible, and you don’t need to be in a position of power to belong in this category (see former President George W. Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney). Many years ago, 1998 to be exact, I started writing about a phenomenon I coined “cognitive capitulation.” For those new to this term, I viewed cognitive capitulators as Perry’s theory in reverse, where people could actually become more narrow-minded and less-capable of reasoning beyond one’s reference point. Back then I used to get regularly attacked by snarky graduate students who would say, “so, you want me to get outside my box and simply surrender to your way of thinking instead? I’ll show you, and remain at peace with a view I accept without outside challenge.” If you’ve read the entire homogenized quote you see how these graduate students validated my theory. I never asked anyone to “buy” what I’m selling (well, aside from the books I’ve written...); I ask people to be open-minded enough to listen to what I have to say, just like I’ve had to spend thirty years listening politely to what THEY have to say. Whether we agree with each other is irrelevant; the point is to be cognizant and respectful of our views. When we can’t do that, we become pawns of a mob mentality, defending a dominant paradigm to the proverbial death all in the name of preventing the other side from being heard.
If I told you the citizens of 1930s Germany and Italy were cognitive capitulators to Hitler and Mussolini, you’d likely see merit in that thought. If I told you members of today’s Tea Party are cognitive capitulators to people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, you might feel less comfortable with the thought but you might still give it a bit of merit. If I told you that educators of the past 30-40 years are cognitive capitulators to whatever is the new mode of political expedience by people who’ve never been in a classroom, your response might depend on how supportive you are of teacher unions, or your biases about schools and American society. If I told you that today’s chemistry professors are cognitive capitulators to yesterday’s chemistry professors, you might take great offense, because a chemistry professor is supposedly someone of high intellectual integrity and independence. Really? Ever heard of tenure committees?
So what’s your response if I tell you that Juliette’s a cognitive capitulator? Do you agree with me, possibly because a young lady who can’t decipher pounds and ounces was absolutely sure she was right, I was wrong, and math was irrelevant to the conflict resolution? Or, do you disagree with me, possibly because Juliette doesn’t possess enough knowledge to think in the first place?
Where do we draw the line at debating the place of thinking in society? Does thinking only apply to certain age levels and settings in society, or should thinking be a universal concern? Is insistence of “being right” or having “the right way” of doing things only relevant to mature adults and highly-educated members of society, or possessors of supreme power? I can go on and on with this debate, but the bottom line is when do individuals come to terms with the possibility they just might be wrong on something and it’s time to shut up and listen to someone perhaps more knowledgeable, regardless of age, academic credentials, race, ethnicity, gender, or power status in society? For more than thirty years I’ve routinely wondered when exactly my ideas have merit, or more precisely: when do I finally earn the respect of any human being for the simple courtesy of allowing me to calmly demonstrate that I know what the hell I’m talking about, be it about chemistry, physics, science education, football, or buying a lousy loaf of bread?
As embarrassed as I am to say it, I had a momentary urge to “slap the stupid” out of Juliette and tell her in front of anyone and everyone at Stop and Shop: You stupid kid! Is there any little warning light in your head telling you to shut up and listen to somebody more than twice your age, who actually grew up in an era BEFORE the metric system, much less computerized cash registers?! I don’t know about you, but I take great offense having to deal with people less knowledgeable than me who are UNWILLING to defer to my level of knowledge, and that’s pretty sad considering we’re talking about a trivial 24-ounce package of bread. This is hardly deciphering the New England Patriots no-huddle offense or quantum mechanics.
This is supposed to be America’s future, folks — the next generation of citizens for a rapidly changing information age, or what former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney calls a “Smart Phone Society.” If Juliette is an example of Romney’s “Smart Phone Society”, I hope Juliette’s smart phone can do the mother load of Juliette’s thinking, because I’m skeptical that she or many of her peers can think independently of automated machines. If you think I’m getting ahead of myself, keep in mind that young people like Juliette will be the continuous faces shown during the next fourteen months leading up to the 2012 presidential election as our economy remains mired in double-digit unemployment rates for most segments of America. Imagine the possible (I’m too cynical about our government and the US Congress to say words like “eventual”) passing of a Jobs Bill and employers pointing to people like Juliette as a primary reason why unemployment still cannot be reduced, claiming “you can’t hire dummies who can’t work with the most basic of knowledge.”
Now, people like Juliette are hardly unique. We’ve all encountered our share of cashiers and store clerks who can’t count change or perform the most basic of math operations without profound difficulty, and I probably wouldn’t even dwell on it so much if I hadn’t recently seen an HBO special showing “The best of ‘Hard Knocks’”, a compilation of ten years of candid camera moments from NFL training camps. If you haven’t seen this “Hard Knocks” retrospective, there’s one scene from the New York Jets training camp last summer where one assistant coach offers another a question (I’m paraphrasing it) from the Jeff Foxworthy show “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” -- [A child] is holding two yard sticks and a 12-inch ruler. How many feet does that equal?
Needless to say, the second Jets assistant coach could not correctly answer the question, that the child is holding seven feet of measuring sticks. Why? Because he neither understood how many feet were in a yard nor how many inches were in a foot, and football is supposedly a game of inches, feet and yards! This is considered entertainment by HBO. I consider it embarrassing that my favorite NFL team still employs an assistant coach who can’t do fifth grade math.
We can test children and young adults until the cows come home in our schools and colleges and the simple truth is that those tests will never tell us whether children or young adults genuinely learned anything or understand what educational administrators and political leaders expect these citizens to know. Chances are this Jets assistant coach scored sufficiently enough on standardized tests to get through our educational systems and find employment in the NFL. Chances are Juliette scored just as sufficiently on whatever tests she had to take during her formal education and now she works for a moderately large grocery chain like Stop and Shop. Yet neither comprehend fundamental math knowledge our nation arbitrarily considers a benchmark for being a literate citizen, and that’s rather disturbing.
So what’s the take-home lesson or punch-line to this story? In a nation still muddling through a major recession, price inflation, stagnant wages, and double-digit unemployment for people lacking at least a bachelors degree, we have politicians and political pundits all screaming about job creation, but where’s the guarantee that all these new jobs can be filled by knowledgeable and capable people? If a better-paying opportunity becomes available for people like Juliette, will they really be qualified for these opportunities? If the New York Jets suddenly fire this one assistant coach and he needs to find new employment outside of football, will there be enough jobs he’s qualified for, or will he be limited by his inability to comprehend elementary school-level math? Worse, how do we know that one day we won’t turn on the six-o’clock news one evening and hear that Juliette didn’t poison her child because she didn’t know how to properly measure the correct dosage of medicine prescribed by a pediatrician? Don’t call me an alarmist, because we’ve all heard of at least one story over the past decade or two where parents improperly administered medication to a child because they either couldn’t read the directions on the package or measure out the medicine.
Everyone makes mistakes, just as everyone is capable of having a brain freeze. Even I’ve made calculation mistakes over the years, and the mistakes have become more frequent as I’ve gotten older. But I take my mistakes to heart; I take my mistakes seriously. That’s because I take knowledge seriously. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many citizens of Governor Romney’s “Smart Phone Society.” How many times have we heard young people (or not so young people) say there’s no need to remember certain things, because they can look it up on a computer?
What if a computer’s unavailable, like many were during Hurricane Irene, because tens of thousands of citizens were without electricity? What do you do then? Stop taking or administering medication on account of darkness? Declare a moratorium on measuring? That may be acceptable when it comes to portion control of your favorite comfort food during a blackout, but not when it comes to medication or something of equal importance.
I know... It was just a loaf of bread, but the loaf of bread is merely an example of an underlying problem with our educational system, especially when our educational system keeps emphasizing literacy and standardized testing of the basics, including mathematics. The underlying problem, folks, is that our educational system continues to fail at inspiring educators, administrators and learners to give a damn about knowledge in general. If it ain’t on the state or national test, it don’t matter. I actually wrote about this academic philosophy expressed by a veteran high school social studies teacher of the New York City public school system in my 2001 book Teacher training: A reference handbook. If there’s not high-stakes test or grade attached to information it’s simply white noise, as disposable a commodity as the six-pack of paper towels we all likely have on our typical grocery shopping lists. We teach knowledge and we test knowledge, but we really don’t care much about knowledge, simply because we don’t fully understand what knowledge is in the first place.
In my new book, Philosophy of “Packer” pedagogy I present a vision of what a critically-thinking and problem-solving literate society can be in terms of Vince Lombardi’s four core principals of teaching and learning. Lombardi’s fourth principal was “winning isn’t a sometimes thing, it’s an all the time thing.” I upgraded principal this to state: thinking and the effort to learn is (sic: are) not a sometimes thing, it’s an all the time thing. In other words, using your brain shouldn’t be an occasional luxury; it should be a daily endeavor. But we don’t have a dominant culture or society that advocates this principal beyond artificial academic assessment? How many times have we heard parents encourage or demand their children to “get good grades” as the daily objective of school. Just once, couldn’t parents encourage or demand their children demonstrate evidence of thinking, or even offer the advice don’t do anything stupid today?
As a parting thought, many of us have heard the saying “don’t argue with an idiot; no one will recognize the difference.” There’s considerable merit to that saying. Unfortunately, as you and I go through our daily lives, the sad truth is that the idiots in society tend to own the megaphones and airwaves, and we’re inundated with their oppressive droning. Ask yourself when’s the last time you were able to listen to a calm voice of reason that didn’t exist solely inside your head? Maybe it’s time we all got a little pissed off, mouthed off and slapped the stupid out of some folks. Who knows? We’ve may stun these nitwits into the silence we crave.
Reminder — Don’t forget my new Book! Don’t buy it because I’m “right” -- Buy it because I have something worthwhile to say and think about.
Philosophy of “Packer” Pedagogy:
Vince Lombardi, critical thinking and problem-based learning
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/DavePushkin_PackerPedagogy
There I was, Labor Day... A day where I could sit back and write about any number of topics on baseball (hmmm... Already wrote a column last week on the pennant races) or football (hmmm... I can do that next week. There are a few topics I’m not mentally ready to write about, particularly yesterday’s passing of former Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive end, and teammate, Lee Roy Selmon). No... I have something more interesting and less emotionally draining to write about today... Today’s column will focus on stupidity.
(Assumed Editorial Feedback: Oh Dave, don’t you find a way to write about stupidity in almost every column?)
Well, maybe I do take advantage of opportunities and consistently try to teach one little lesson about the unwritten commandment Thou shalt not be a moron, but today is a special opportunity because it coincides with the start of a new academic year for our elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities, so, since it’s my column I’ll set the theme, and our theme for today is stupidity.
Well, maybe not stupidity as much as ignorance... Nope, stupidity is the appropriate theme, I’ve made up my mind, and as you read along, I’m sure you’ll appreciate how and why I came to the conclusion that stupidity is the right theme for this Labor Day column.
Before I dive into today’s story, I’d like to point out that I do take my columns seriously, even though I don’t earn any income writing them. As much as a blog column could be a vehicle for venting, I try to put as much substance as possible into my thoughts, because: (1) I’ll always be a teacher at my core, so I feel the need to teach something, or at least give readers something to think about in each column, (2) each column is potentially the core of a chapter for another book project, and (3) I don’t want to simply write a bunch of silly nonsense when my columns are distributed to approximately 5,000 people via email, Twitter, Linked-In and other social media modes. Besides, if I expect such a sizeable number of people to consistently and regularly read what I write, the least I can do is write like I’ve put significant thought behind my words.
So, here’s today’s story for our amusement and reflection...
Today I decided to take a drive to the grocery store in order to stock up on some basic food staples for the next week or two. I happen to be scheduled for a full day of medical tests on Thursday and outpatient surgery on Friday, and I know I won’t have the time or physical strength to run errands beforehand or afterwards, so today’s errand was a practical necessity, no different from how residents of the east coast recently prepared for Hurricane Irene, but with far less hysteria.
For those who know me well, I hate grocery shopping more than any domestic chore a human being must do, and this hatred for grocery shopping (make that all shopping) has continuously increased over the years since my spinal injury simply because it’s a lot of strain on my spine and legs. Even if I was a completely healthy person, I’d still consider grocery shopping tedious and far too time-consuming compared to the hours I could invest in other activities. In fact, there have been times when I’ve been completely traumatized by shopping, especially the day before a major holiday, religious or secular. Crowds are not my thing, especially crowds that grab around and over you, shoving anyone in sight all in the name of procuring that final jar of salsa during a 2-for-1 sale. In this era of coupons and manager specials, shopping is clearly a contact sport requiring helmets and other protective padding when large numbers of maniacs race up and down store isles with shopping carts and then behave similarly with their automobiles in the parking lot. Not a day goes by that I don’t pine for the days when I was young and healthy and could do my grocery shopping at 2:00am when 24-hour stores were nearly empty of people to interfere with me as I tackled this chore with quiet efficiency.
However, this column has little to do with the physical or even mental toll grocery shopping takes out of me, because those consequences will always be a part of my life no matter what day of the week, month or year I’m in a store. This column actually has to do with the aftermath of shopping.
What’s the aftermath, you ask? Ah... This takes place after you’ve completed filling your shopping cart, found a cashier lane moving at a “faster than molasses” pace, load your groceries onto the conveyer belt, hand over your frequent shopper savings card and coupons to the cashier, bag your own groceries (since another employee is rarely available for that duty and your cashier is really just the cashier, analogous to the “I don’t do windows” mentality), and pay your bill. The aftermath is when (or possibly if) you move aside with your shopping cart and inspect your receipt prior to leaving the store. I happen to be someone who scans over my receipt immediately after I leave the cashier lane, simply because I know errors happen. If I’m quick enough I can catch the error while the cashier is scanning the items and have the cashier back up and double-check a price, but today wasn’t such a day.
Anyway, while scanning today’s receipt I noticed an error at the very top; it was the only error. I needed bread (among a few other items on sale at this particular grocery store, Stop and Shop). Hey, sometimes toast or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is all I’m in the mood to eat, so why not be prepared in case that’s all I feel like eating after surgery? It just so happens that Arnold-brand breads were on sale -- buy one and get one free of equal or lesser value.
I happen to be a very picky person when it comes to bread. I like bread with oomph, bread with substance, fiber — give me a good chewy rye bread or something with whole wheat or multigrain. You’ll never satisfy me with plain ol’ white bread, and the same goes for rolls, pita breads or wraps. I love my carbohydrates as much as anyone else, but at least give me enjoyable healthy carbohydrates. Oh, and if the bread has seeds I’m in heaven, even if the seeds get stuck in my partials. Seeds simply reinforce the oomph in the bread’s taste.
I luckily found two different loaves of Arnold breads that met my criteria, so I bought one loaf called “healthy grain whole wheat” and one loaf of “whole wheat 12-grain”. Each loaf costs $4.49, so we’re not talking cheap bread here. For $4.49, I could drive over to Whole Foods and buy a loaf of bread to die for, but I’m neither the richest person on the planet nor was I up to driving an extra 20 minutes to Whole Foods, so two loaves of healthy Arnold bread at Stop and Shop for the same price would have to do, because you can’t just drive an extra 20 minutes to Whole Foods for one loaf of bread. Shopping at Whole Foods is like those Lays Potato Chips commercials, where you can’t stop at one. If I’m going to Whole Foods, I have a significant shopping list written down to buy a bunch of food I love to eat but wish I had the budget for.
So, there I was, in Stop and Shop, receipt in hand, noticing an error. For some reason, the cash register’s computer (You have to blame it on the computer, because cashiers are simply humans scanning items with barcodes for a computer to read and provide a corresponding price. Cashiers really don’t think about what they’re scanning.) charged me for two loaves; it didn’t give me one for free. Hey, these errors happen, probably more often than we think, so I wobbled over to customer service with my shopping cart (no, I don’t really walk with my cane anymore; I wobble), showed the young lady at the counter my receipt, the Stop and Shop circular with the advertised sale for Arnold-brand breads, and the two loaves of Arnold-brand bread I bought, and explained that I shouldn’t be charged for both loaves. When you’re a reasonably logical adult, you figure this is more than sufficient information to provide someone at the customer service counter.
The problem is that the person on the other side of the customer service counter may not be as logical as you or me, and the young lady (let’s call her “Juliette”) working the customer service counter at my local Stop and Shop clearly had some logical limitations. The first thing Juliette did was randomly flip through all the pages of the circular — the very circular I handed her with the Arnold-brand bread sale ad front and center — and say, “are we even having a bread sale? I don’t see anything here.” I had to instruct Juliette to fold up the circular exactly how it was handed to her. Finally Juliette saw the ad. Juliette then carefully stared at the ad, looked up at me, and said, “you bought the wrong bread. The ad is only for 24-ounce breads.”
I now share with you the size information on each package of bread: “1 LB, 8 oz (680 g).”
I told Juliette these were 24-ounce breads (please forgive my butchered grammar... I do mean “24-ounce packages of bread”), and this is when things went downhill for Juliette...
“No-uh, you bought 8-ounce breads. It says right there.”
The package says one-pound and 8 ounces. That’s 24 ounces.
“No-uh, 1 pound is 8 ounces.”
Did you just say 1 pound is 8 ounces? How many ounces are in one pound?
“Eight. The bread says so.”
There are 16 ounces in one pound. 16 plus 8 equals 24 ounces.
“I don’t need your math lesson and attitude to know I’m right. That’s a 1-pound bread that’s 8 ounces.”
As I was just about to ask to speak to the store manager Juliette inexplicably took the two packages of Arnold bread and scanned them into her register. Sure enough, both packages registered as “Arnold Bread 24oz, $4.49”, and just like that, she opened up her cash drawer and counted out the cash owed back to me... $4.44... Yes, $4.44... Four single-dollar bills, one quarter, one dime, one nickel, and four pennies. Apparently the combination of quarters, dimes and nickels was too much to process for Juliette. This required the manager’s attention, which is another story for another column if I dare revisiting the topic.
Some of you might be wondering, what’s the big deal? You eventually got your correct refund. Yes, perhaps I eventually did, but the educator in me found the whole experience quite disturbing. Here’s a young lady, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty years old. Perhaps she’s a recent high school graduate. Perhaps she’s a local college student. Perhaps she doesn’t attend school at all and is a full-time employee of Stop and Shop. But here’s a young adult who cannot figure out that “1 LB, 8 oz” is equivalent to 24 ounces, because she doesn’t know how to read a package of bread, because she doesn’t understand basic units of measurement we expect fifth graders to comprehend for the purpose of high-stakes standardized testing. I’m wiling to bet she still doesn’t believe “1 LB, 8 oz” is equivalent to 24 ounces, but she blindly trusts what the cash register tells her when she scans the package’s UPC bar code. I can only imagine how much longer I would’ve been standing at the customer service counter if her register didn’t identify the bread package weights. One would think that since each package cost $4.49 on my receipt and the circular ad explicitly stated that the price of one package without your shopping discount card was $4.49 this would be sufficient information for Juliette, but it wasn’t. Worst of all, Juliette “didn’t need math” to know she was right, even though she was indeed wrong.
This, to me, was scarier than Juliette’s ignorance of basic measurement units. As I’ve written for many years in academic journals and book chapters, adults generally have four amorphous stages of cognitive development, according to the research and theory of former Harvard psychologist William G. Perry: dualism, multiplicity, skepticism and relativism. As we encounter more experience in life, within and outside academic settings, we’re supposed to evolve towards more open-minded thinking. As researchers of the 1980s and 1990s have shown, the overwhelming majority of college graduates are essentially as narrow-minded and myopically-thinking as they were when first coming to college. What this means is that if you’re an ignorant, closed-minded blockhead at 17 or 18 years old, chances are you’re going to be the same intellectually-stunted person at 22 or 23 years old, if not older, no matter who you are, what you’ve earned a degree in, how many academic degrees you’ve earned, or where you’ve earned those degrees from. I interpret that to mean bigots and racists will likely remain bigots and racists because it takes a LOT of years to overcome your upbringing and foundation, and the same can be said for many of the negative attributes associated with a broad spectrum of American society: laziness, ignorance, functional stupidity, vanity, lack of empathy for your fellow person, etc. This is supposedly why we’re supposed to care so much about our educational system, so we can “slap to stupid” out of America’s youth before it becomes too entrenched, no matter who a child is or where that child lives. As we well see in adult society, American education hasn’t managed to land a finger, much less slap stupidity out of kids’ heads, for generations. All we need to do is open a newspaper or watch any number of television shows to see adult society has more than its share of stupidity.
Are we all capable of stupidity? Of COURSE we are! This includes you, me and everyone else who reads or doesn’t read my columns. We all do stupid (or “dumb” for those with a personal stigma about the word “stupid”) things from time to time, but we’re capable of recognizing our actions or words and rectifying the consequences as best as we can. Those stupid things we do are part of the learning experience, whether we’re organizing a monthly budget, cooking a particular meal for the first time, fixing a car, planning a party, performing a chemical experiment, solving a word problem, or quarterbacking a football game (see Dallas Cowboys and Tony Romo). The goal is to recognize, diagnose and correct our mistakes so we can avoid repeating them, or at least minimizing the times of repetition (see Dallas Cowboys and Tony Romo).
There are, however, people who don’t operate the same way we try to, because they simply can’t recognize the possibility of being fallible, and you don’t need to be in a position of power to belong in this category (see former President George W. Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney). Many years ago, 1998 to be exact, I started writing about a phenomenon I coined “cognitive capitulation.” For those new to this term, I viewed cognitive capitulators as Perry’s theory in reverse, where people could actually become more narrow-minded and less-capable of reasoning beyond one’s reference point. Back then I used to get regularly attacked by snarky graduate students who would say, “so, you want me to get outside my box and simply surrender to your way of thinking instead? I’ll show you, and remain at peace with a view I accept without outside challenge.” If you’ve read the entire homogenized quote you see how these graduate students validated my theory. I never asked anyone to “buy” what I’m selling (well, aside from the books I’ve written...); I ask people to be open-minded enough to listen to what I have to say, just like I’ve had to spend thirty years listening politely to what THEY have to say. Whether we agree with each other is irrelevant; the point is to be cognizant and respectful of our views. When we can’t do that, we become pawns of a mob mentality, defending a dominant paradigm to the proverbial death all in the name of preventing the other side from being heard.
If I told you the citizens of 1930s Germany and Italy were cognitive capitulators to Hitler and Mussolini, you’d likely see merit in that thought. If I told you members of today’s Tea Party are cognitive capitulators to people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, you might feel less comfortable with the thought but you might still give it a bit of merit. If I told you that educators of the past 30-40 years are cognitive capitulators to whatever is the new mode of political expedience by people who’ve never been in a classroom, your response might depend on how supportive you are of teacher unions, or your biases about schools and American society. If I told you that today’s chemistry professors are cognitive capitulators to yesterday’s chemistry professors, you might take great offense, because a chemistry professor is supposedly someone of high intellectual integrity and independence. Really? Ever heard of tenure committees?
So what’s your response if I tell you that Juliette’s a cognitive capitulator? Do you agree with me, possibly because a young lady who can’t decipher pounds and ounces was absolutely sure she was right, I was wrong, and math was irrelevant to the conflict resolution? Or, do you disagree with me, possibly because Juliette doesn’t possess enough knowledge to think in the first place?
Where do we draw the line at debating the place of thinking in society? Does thinking only apply to certain age levels and settings in society, or should thinking be a universal concern? Is insistence of “being right” or having “the right way” of doing things only relevant to mature adults and highly-educated members of society, or possessors of supreme power? I can go on and on with this debate, but the bottom line is when do individuals come to terms with the possibility they just might be wrong on something and it’s time to shut up and listen to someone perhaps more knowledgeable, regardless of age, academic credentials, race, ethnicity, gender, or power status in society? For more than thirty years I’ve routinely wondered when exactly my ideas have merit, or more precisely: when do I finally earn the respect of any human being for the simple courtesy of allowing me to calmly demonstrate that I know what the hell I’m talking about, be it about chemistry, physics, science education, football, or buying a lousy loaf of bread?
As embarrassed as I am to say it, I had a momentary urge to “slap the stupid” out of Juliette and tell her in front of anyone and everyone at Stop and Shop: You stupid kid! Is there any little warning light in your head telling you to shut up and listen to somebody more than twice your age, who actually grew up in an era BEFORE the metric system, much less computerized cash registers?! I don’t know about you, but I take great offense having to deal with people less knowledgeable than me who are UNWILLING to defer to my level of knowledge, and that’s pretty sad considering we’re talking about a trivial 24-ounce package of bread. This is hardly deciphering the New England Patriots no-huddle offense or quantum mechanics.
This is supposed to be America’s future, folks — the next generation of citizens for a rapidly changing information age, or what former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney calls a “Smart Phone Society.” If Juliette is an example of Romney’s “Smart Phone Society”, I hope Juliette’s smart phone can do the mother load of Juliette’s thinking, because I’m skeptical that she or many of her peers can think independently of automated machines. If you think I’m getting ahead of myself, keep in mind that young people like Juliette will be the continuous faces shown during the next fourteen months leading up to the 2012 presidential election as our economy remains mired in double-digit unemployment rates for most segments of America. Imagine the possible (I’m too cynical about our government and the US Congress to say words like “eventual”) passing of a Jobs Bill and employers pointing to people like Juliette as a primary reason why unemployment still cannot be reduced, claiming “you can’t hire dummies who can’t work with the most basic of knowledge.”
Now, people like Juliette are hardly unique. We’ve all encountered our share of cashiers and store clerks who can’t count change or perform the most basic of math operations without profound difficulty, and I probably wouldn’t even dwell on it so much if I hadn’t recently seen an HBO special showing “The best of ‘Hard Knocks’”, a compilation of ten years of candid camera moments from NFL training camps. If you haven’t seen this “Hard Knocks” retrospective, there’s one scene from the New York Jets training camp last summer where one assistant coach offers another a question (I’m paraphrasing it) from the Jeff Foxworthy show “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” -- [A child] is holding two yard sticks and a 12-inch ruler. How many feet does that equal?
Needless to say, the second Jets assistant coach could not correctly answer the question, that the child is holding seven feet of measuring sticks. Why? Because he neither understood how many feet were in a yard nor how many inches were in a foot, and football is supposedly a game of inches, feet and yards! This is considered entertainment by HBO. I consider it embarrassing that my favorite NFL team still employs an assistant coach who can’t do fifth grade math.
We can test children and young adults until the cows come home in our schools and colleges and the simple truth is that those tests will never tell us whether children or young adults genuinely learned anything or understand what educational administrators and political leaders expect these citizens to know. Chances are this Jets assistant coach scored sufficiently enough on standardized tests to get through our educational systems and find employment in the NFL. Chances are Juliette scored just as sufficiently on whatever tests she had to take during her formal education and now she works for a moderately large grocery chain like Stop and Shop. Yet neither comprehend fundamental math knowledge our nation arbitrarily considers a benchmark for being a literate citizen, and that’s rather disturbing.
So what’s the take-home lesson or punch-line to this story? In a nation still muddling through a major recession, price inflation, stagnant wages, and double-digit unemployment for people lacking at least a bachelors degree, we have politicians and political pundits all screaming about job creation, but where’s the guarantee that all these new jobs can be filled by knowledgeable and capable people? If a better-paying opportunity becomes available for people like Juliette, will they really be qualified for these opportunities? If the New York Jets suddenly fire this one assistant coach and he needs to find new employment outside of football, will there be enough jobs he’s qualified for, or will he be limited by his inability to comprehend elementary school-level math? Worse, how do we know that one day we won’t turn on the six-o’clock news one evening and hear that Juliette didn’t poison her child because she didn’t know how to properly measure the correct dosage of medicine prescribed by a pediatrician? Don’t call me an alarmist, because we’ve all heard of at least one story over the past decade or two where parents improperly administered medication to a child because they either couldn’t read the directions on the package or measure out the medicine.
Everyone makes mistakes, just as everyone is capable of having a brain freeze. Even I’ve made calculation mistakes over the years, and the mistakes have become more frequent as I’ve gotten older. But I take my mistakes to heart; I take my mistakes seriously. That’s because I take knowledge seriously. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many citizens of Governor Romney’s “Smart Phone Society.” How many times have we heard young people (or not so young people) say there’s no need to remember certain things, because they can look it up on a computer?
What if a computer’s unavailable, like many were during Hurricane Irene, because tens of thousands of citizens were without electricity? What do you do then? Stop taking or administering medication on account of darkness? Declare a moratorium on measuring? That may be acceptable when it comes to portion control of your favorite comfort food during a blackout, but not when it comes to medication or something of equal importance.
I know... It was just a loaf of bread, but the loaf of bread is merely an example of an underlying problem with our educational system, especially when our educational system keeps emphasizing literacy and standardized testing of the basics, including mathematics. The underlying problem, folks, is that our educational system continues to fail at inspiring educators, administrators and learners to give a damn about knowledge in general. If it ain’t on the state or national test, it don’t matter. I actually wrote about this academic philosophy expressed by a veteran high school social studies teacher of the New York City public school system in my 2001 book Teacher training: A reference handbook. If there’s not high-stakes test or grade attached to information it’s simply white noise, as disposable a commodity as the six-pack of paper towels we all likely have on our typical grocery shopping lists. We teach knowledge and we test knowledge, but we really don’t care much about knowledge, simply because we don’t fully understand what knowledge is in the first place.
In my new book, Philosophy of “Packer” pedagogy I present a vision of what a critically-thinking and problem-solving literate society can be in terms of Vince Lombardi’s four core principals of teaching and learning. Lombardi’s fourth principal was “winning isn’t a sometimes thing, it’s an all the time thing.” I upgraded principal this to state: thinking and the effort to learn is (sic: are) not a sometimes thing, it’s an all the time thing. In other words, using your brain shouldn’t be an occasional luxury; it should be a daily endeavor. But we don’t have a dominant culture or society that advocates this principal beyond artificial academic assessment? How many times have we heard parents encourage or demand their children to “get good grades” as the daily objective of school. Just once, couldn’t parents encourage or demand their children demonstrate evidence of thinking, or even offer the advice don’t do anything stupid today?
As a parting thought, many of us have heard the saying “don’t argue with an idiot; no one will recognize the difference.” There’s considerable merit to that saying. Unfortunately, as you and I go through our daily lives, the sad truth is that the idiots in society tend to own the megaphones and airwaves, and we’re inundated with their oppressive droning. Ask yourself when’s the last time you were able to listen to a calm voice of reason that didn’t exist solely inside your head? Maybe it’s time we all got a little pissed off, mouthed off and slapped the stupid out of some folks. Who knows? We’ve may stun these nitwits into the silence we crave.
Reminder — Don’t forget my new Book! Don’t buy it because I’m “right” -- Buy it because I have something worthwhile to say and think about.
Philosophy of “Packer” Pedagogy:
Vince Lombardi, critical thinking and problem-based learning
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/DavePushkin_PackerPedagogy
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Has this baseball season really surprised you too much? - Sports Thoughts for August 30, 2011
I know it's been a while since my last column, so after all the recent excitement of an earthquake and hurricane Irene, I've suddenly found myself a spare moment or two to comment about this year's baseball season. Have you enjoyed it as much as I have, despite my being a loyal Mets fan (hey, I figured a .500 season was good enough for all the Wilpons and their feisty troops have endured since spring training)? More importantly, has anything really surprised you for the better or worse? Well, in some ways this season has been both full of pleasant surprises and drags, but overall, any baseball season is better than none at all in this era of labor strife.
First off, let me tell you that I'm not overly shocked at how these pennant (oops, I'm so arcane... I meant DIVISIONAL) races have gone so far. Last summer, when I was more actively writing columns, I said the key to winning your division was simply based on three factors: beating up on your divisional opponents, having a solid winning percentage at home, and having a decent (i.e., .500) winning percentage on the road.
So... look how 2011 is really not much different than 2010. As we approach Labor Day weekend, the final checkpoint of the season heading into the homestretch and the final 30-35 games, let's see how each divisional race is going:
NL East:
Unless we see a total collapse (i.e., vintage Mets of 2007 or 2008), it looks like the Philadelphia Phillies will outlast the Atlanta Braves and likely own the national league's best record. Going into this waterlogged weekend on the east coast, the Phillies were up by 6 games, the exact number of additional wins within the division compared to the Braves. The Phillies were not only a healthy 46-21 at home, but a league-best 37-24 on the road. While the Braves have had a wonderful season so far, playing nearly .600 baseball, the difference seems to be they simply haven't won enough games within the division to stay closer to the Phillies.
NL Central:
It's funny how slow starts mean so little anymore. If you remember back in early April, the Milwaukee Brewers were stumbling out of the gate and giving up a lot of runs in Cincinnati during a opening week. Well, here we are going into September, and after a season that's seen the Reds, St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates (yes, THOSE Pittsburgh Pirates) all hold first place at different points of the spring and summer, we see the Brewers running away like a freight train, leading the division by 10.5 games over the Cardinals. How have they done it? Hitting, hitting and more hitting... and some good pitching too. After sweeping their weekend series with the Cubs, the Brewers are a league-best 41-21 within the division and a majors-best 50-16 at home, enough to compensate for a 31-38 road record.
NL West:
Really the only division up for grabs in the national league, the Arizona Diamondbacks lead the defending World Series champ San Francisco Giants by 4 games. The Giants have a slightly better record within the division, but the Diamondbacks play better than .500 on the road, so there's really not much difference between how either team has played to this point. These two teams still have 6 games left against each other (3 in San Francisco Labor Day weekend, 3 in Phoenix September 23-25). It may simply boil down to which team is healthier and playing better.
AL East:
Yankees-Red Sox. Red-Sox-Yankees. Like any of us should care or have sympathy for whichever team fails to win the division? All summer long it's been a foregone conclusion that these teams would have the top record and wild card spot, and going into September we see nothing's changed. It's amazing how the horrid April start of 0-6 and 2-10 have faded away for the Red Sox, owners of the league's best record, albeit by 1.5 games over the Yankees. The only significant difference between both teams so far is that Boston's 31-15 within the division while the Yankees are 25-23, and even with that much difference against The Rays, Jays and Orioles, this divisional margin is the major's smallest.
AL Central:
Was it only springtime when the Cleveland Indians were playing .650 baseball and sitting on top of the division by almost a double-digit lead? The summer heat and reality caught up to the Indians, who are now battling to stay at or above .500 while they and the Chicago White Sox fight to stay within 5 games of the Detroit Tigers. The Tigers have clearly overtaken this division and shown they are the best team. They're the only team playing above .500 within the division (32-20), and they're the only team to be above .500 at home and on the road. The one doubt folks may have about the Tigers is that while Cy Young frontrunner Justin Verlander is 20-5, the rest of the Tigers pitching staff is below .500. Can the starting rotation offer enough beyond Verlander to help wrap up the division and get the Tigers deep into the October post-season? Time will tell.
AL West:
At one point it looked like the defending AL champ Texas Rangers were going to run away with the division, but now the Los Angeles Angels have gotten to within 3 games even with their starting rotation taxed during an oppressively hot weekend in Arlington last week. The key difference between these teams seems to be Texas' 27-14 record within the division, while the Angels struggle to stay better than .500 against the Rangers, Oakland A's and Seattle Mariners. In years past, the Rangers used to run out of gas while their pitchers melted during the brutally hot Texas summer. Now it appears to be the Angels who struggle to maintain stamina for the stretch run, resorting to Pedialyte instead of Gatorade during this past weekend series in Arlington.
Other observations of the season:
Have we seen a few no-hitters? Sure have, and we may very well see one or more before September is done. Just like last year, we've seen no-hitters, near no-nos, and plenty of complete-game shutouts. For the second year in a row, it looks like pitchers can hold their own against hitters.
Have we seen our share of explosive offense? Sure, just look at the Yankees hitting three grand slams last week in a 22-9 win over the A's. Toronto's Juan Bautista has shown that last year wasn't a fluke for home run production. Batting averages may be a bit down compared to years past. Jose Reyes has spent two stints on the 15-day Disabled List for the Mets and STILL leads the NL with a .336 batting average.
Have we seen a few quirky things? Sure, look to Atlanta second baseman Dan Uggla, he of a recent 30-game hitting streak that raised his batting average from .173 to .230.
Have we seen milestones? How about Mets reliever Jason Isringhauser reaching 300 career saves? How about Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter reaching 3,000 career hits and improving his average from below .260 to above .290 AFTER getting hit number 3,000 out of the way? How about Twins designated hitter Jim Thome (now recently traded to the Indians) reaching 600 career homers, only the seventh person to do so during the past 100 years?
Have we seen passings and losses to bring sadness to the game? MLB mourns the deaths of former greats like Harmon Killebrew and the recent death of one baseball's nice guys, former Orioles pitcher and general manager Mike Flannigan. Brian Stowe still fights for his life in a San Francisco hospital after being beaten into a coma on opening day at Dodger Stadium, and the Texas Rangers organization is still dealing with the tragic accidental death of a local firefighter, Shannon Stone, who fell over a railing, 20 feet to his death, while trying to catch a wayward baseball for his six-year-old son.
But like every season, baseball also gives us a sense of renewal and hope. For the first time since 1992, the Pirates may actually end up with a .500 or better season, giving fans in the Steel City a reason to return to PNC Ballpark all summer long. All summer long, fans in rust belt cities like Detroit and Cleveland have good reason to come to their ballparks and cheer on their teams. Even in places like Minneapolis, where the Twins are suffering through a disappointing and injury-riddled season, fans routinely come to Target Field to watch a team stuck around 20 games under .500. This past weekend, the Twins hosted the Tigers, trailing Detroit by 17 games. Average attendance for each game? 39,5000 fans. Even in a down year, fans still come to watch their team. For the first time in many years, baseball fans in the mid-west and smaller-market cities feel encouraged to come watch their teams in person, no matter where these teams are in the August standings.
Who knows how the rest of this season will play out, and who will ultimately meet up for the Fall Classic, but if September and October live up to the various thrills and surprises we've seen between April and August, it looks like real baseball fans might go into the long cold winter with a big enough smile to sustain until spring training.
First off, let me tell you that I'm not overly shocked at how these pennant (oops, I'm so arcane... I meant DIVISIONAL) races have gone so far. Last summer, when I was more actively writing columns, I said the key to winning your division was simply based on three factors: beating up on your divisional opponents, having a solid winning percentage at home, and having a decent (i.e., .500) winning percentage on the road.
So... look how 2011 is really not much different than 2010. As we approach Labor Day weekend, the final checkpoint of the season heading into the homestretch and the final 30-35 games, let's see how each divisional race is going:
NL East:
Unless we see a total collapse (i.e., vintage Mets of 2007 or 2008), it looks like the Philadelphia Phillies will outlast the Atlanta Braves and likely own the national league's best record. Going into this waterlogged weekend on the east coast, the Phillies were up by 6 games, the exact number of additional wins within the division compared to the Braves. The Phillies were not only a healthy 46-21 at home, but a league-best 37-24 on the road. While the Braves have had a wonderful season so far, playing nearly .600 baseball, the difference seems to be they simply haven't won enough games within the division to stay closer to the Phillies.
NL Central:
It's funny how slow starts mean so little anymore. If you remember back in early April, the Milwaukee Brewers were stumbling out of the gate and giving up a lot of runs in Cincinnati during a opening week. Well, here we are going into September, and after a season that's seen the Reds, St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates (yes, THOSE Pittsburgh Pirates) all hold first place at different points of the spring and summer, we see the Brewers running away like a freight train, leading the division by 10.5 games over the Cardinals. How have they done it? Hitting, hitting and more hitting... and some good pitching too. After sweeping their weekend series with the Cubs, the Brewers are a league-best 41-21 within the division and a majors-best 50-16 at home, enough to compensate for a 31-38 road record.
NL West:
Really the only division up for grabs in the national league, the Arizona Diamondbacks lead the defending World Series champ San Francisco Giants by 4 games. The Giants have a slightly better record within the division, but the Diamondbacks play better than .500 on the road, so there's really not much difference between how either team has played to this point. These two teams still have 6 games left against each other (3 in San Francisco Labor Day weekend, 3 in Phoenix September 23-25). It may simply boil down to which team is healthier and playing better.
AL East:
Yankees-Red Sox. Red-Sox-Yankees. Like any of us should care or have sympathy for whichever team fails to win the division? All summer long it's been a foregone conclusion that these teams would have the top record and wild card spot, and going into September we see nothing's changed. It's amazing how the horrid April start of 0-6 and 2-10 have faded away for the Red Sox, owners of the league's best record, albeit by 1.5 games over the Yankees. The only significant difference between both teams so far is that Boston's 31-15 within the division while the Yankees are 25-23, and even with that much difference against The Rays, Jays and Orioles, this divisional margin is the major's smallest.
AL Central:
Was it only springtime when the Cleveland Indians were playing .650 baseball and sitting on top of the division by almost a double-digit lead? The summer heat and reality caught up to the Indians, who are now battling to stay at or above .500 while they and the Chicago White Sox fight to stay within 5 games of the Detroit Tigers. The Tigers have clearly overtaken this division and shown they are the best team. They're the only team playing above .500 within the division (32-20), and they're the only team to be above .500 at home and on the road. The one doubt folks may have about the Tigers is that while Cy Young frontrunner Justin Verlander is 20-5, the rest of the Tigers pitching staff is below .500. Can the starting rotation offer enough beyond Verlander to help wrap up the division and get the Tigers deep into the October post-season? Time will tell.
AL West:
At one point it looked like the defending AL champ Texas Rangers were going to run away with the division, but now the Los Angeles Angels have gotten to within 3 games even with their starting rotation taxed during an oppressively hot weekend in Arlington last week. The key difference between these teams seems to be Texas' 27-14 record within the division, while the Angels struggle to stay better than .500 against the Rangers, Oakland A's and Seattle Mariners. In years past, the Rangers used to run out of gas while their pitchers melted during the brutally hot Texas summer. Now it appears to be the Angels who struggle to maintain stamina for the stretch run, resorting to Pedialyte instead of Gatorade during this past weekend series in Arlington.
Other observations of the season:
Have we seen a few no-hitters? Sure have, and we may very well see one or more before September is done. Just like last year, we've seen no-hitters, near no-nos, and plenty of complete-game shutouts. For the second year in a row, it looks like pitchers can hold their own against hitters.
Have we seen our share of explosive offense? Sure, just look at the Yankees hitting three grand slams last week in a 22-9 win over the A's. Toronto's Juan Bautista has shown that last year wasn't a fluke for home run production. Batting averages may be a bit down compared to years past. Jose Reyes has spent two stints on the 15-day Disabled List for the Mets and STILL leads the NL with a .336 batting average.
Have we seen a few quirky things? Sure, look to Atlanta second baseman Dan Uggla, he of a recent 30-game hitting streak that raised his batting average from .173 to .230.
Have we seen milestones? How about Mets reliever Jason Isringhauser reaching 300 career saves? How about Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter reaching 3,000 career hits and improving his average from below .260 to above .290 AFTER getting hit number 3,000 out of the way? How about Twins designated hitter Jim Thome (now recently traded to the Indians) reaching 600 career homers, only the seventh person to do so during the past 100 years?
Have we seen passings and losses to bring sadness to the game? MLB mourns the deaths of former greats like Harmon Killebrew and the recent death of one baseball's nice guys, former Orioles pitcher and general manager Mike Flannigan. Brian Stowe still fights for his life in a San Francisco hospital after being beaten into a coma on opening day at Dodger Stadium, and the Texas Rangers organization is still dealing with the tragic accidental death of a local firefighter, Shannon Stone, who fell over a railing, 20 feet to his death, while trying to catch a wayward baseball for his six-year-old son.
But like every season, baseball also gives us a sense of renewal and hope. For the first time since 1992, the Pirates may actually end up with a .500 or better season, giving fans in the Steel City a reason to return to PNC Ballpark all summer long. All summer long, fans in rust belt cities like Detroit and Cleveland have good reason to come to their ballparks and cheer on their teams. Even in places like Minneapolis, where the Twins are suffering through a disappointing and injury-riddled season, fans routinely come to Target Field to watch a team stuck around 20 games under .500. This past weekend, the Twins hosted the Tigers, trailing Detroit by 17 games. Average attendance for each game? 39,5000 fans. Even in a down year, fans still come to watch their team. For the first time in many years, baseball fans in the mid-west and smaller-market cities feel encouraged to come watch their teams in person, no matter where these teams are in the August standings.
Who knows how the rest of this season will play out, and who will ultimately meet up for the Fall Classic, but if September and October live up to the various thrills and surprises we've seen between April and August, it looks like real baseball fans might go into the long cold winter with a big enough smile to sustain until spring training.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
How much are your favorite NFL players worth to you? -- Sports Thoughts for August 1, 2011
Well, well, well... Here we are, the start of August, the long-awaited start to NFL training camps in preparation to the new season. After nearly five months, the decertification and recertification of the NFL Players Association, multiple lawsuits in federal court, false hopes and bitter war or words through the media, we can all cheer a new collective bargaining agreement, a 10-year CBA with no opt-out clause for either side, and presumed labor peace throughout all the land for 32 teams, 32 team owners, approximately 1,700 players filling up 53-man active roster spots, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and NFLPA Executive Director DeMaurice Smith.
Okay, perhaps this year’s league-wide Secret Santa roll call may have more than a bit of awkwardness, especially for guys like Steelers linebacker James “Don’t Rely on my Bladder in case of fire” Harrison. However, today’s column is not about the nasty rhetoric between players and the owners, or players and the league, or players and other players (geez, there sure are lots of nasty players in the NFL, aren’t there?). Today’s column is about harmony, especially fiscal harmony.
Did I say “fiscal harmony”? Yes, I did, and boy do I regret using such terminology! Let’s face it, if there’s fiscal harmony between players as this wild and wooly edition of free agency takes place, then everyone’s singing “Kumbaya” on Capitol Hill in Washington while debating what to really do about our nation’s debt ceiling.
What has me so grouchy and cynical? Hmmm... Perhaps I can boil it down to one position on the football field, defensive cornerback, and two cornerbacks immediately come to mind and put a major burr in my saddle (I’m in New Jersey, so perhaps it’s aggravating my hemorrhoids): Former Oakland Raiders cornerback (now a Philadelphia Eagle) Nnamdi Asomugha, and perhaps former New York Jets cornerback (destination still unknown) Antonio Cromartie. What has me all grumped up? Their free agent salary demands for 2011 and how those demands compare to the paycheck Darrelle Revis collects playing cornerback for the New York Jets. In case you didn’t know, there ain’t much free about free agents.
Let’s go back to last summer and Revis’ holdout, seeking a new and improved contract from the Jets. Oh, we all remember those fun days of summer 2010? Revis, who unquestionably outperformed his rookie contract, wanted more money, for many reasons, and rightfully so. However, one reason ultimately stuck out more than any other, to be the highest-paid cornerback in the game. While that seems a reasonable demand for arguably the best cornerback in the game, Revis took on the ridiculous stance that he wanted to be paid one more dollar than the current highest-paid cornerback in the league, Nnamdi Asomugha. For those who can’t remember, Asomugha was signed to a 3-year contract that paid him $15.1M per season. Naturally, Revis wanted more and felt he deserved more because he was the better cornerback. While that seemed a fair self-assessment (with lots of help from his agents and his uncle, former Washington Redskin and Carolina Panther defensive lineman Sean Gilbert), the fiscal reality was that the Jets were not going to pay Revis $15.1M plus an extra dollar. After Revis’ holdout and lots of haggling, Revis agreed to a new contract that would pay him $11.5M this season.
And what became of Asomugha? Raiders owner Al Davis released him at the end of the 2010 season as part of a fiscal purge with a lockout approaching, and the $15.1M man became a man without a team.
Fast forward to a few days ago. Asomugha the free agent was interested in joining the Jets, the Dallas Cowboys, the Houston Texans, and one team in the shadows, which turned out to be the Eagles. Anyway, at some point of this past week, Jets general manager Mike Tannenbaum backed out of negotiations and decided Asomugha’s price tag was simply too rich for the Jets and their overall roster needs and fiscal constraints. Asomugha signed a 5-year contract with the Eagles that would pay him an average salary of $12M — not Al Davis-type money, but certainly a higher paycheck than Revis earns.
How does Cromartie fit into this story? The Jets obtained Cromartie in the final year of his previous contract in a trade with the San Diego Chargers. Cromartie was supposed to be the counterpart to Revis in a Batman-Robin cornerback tandem the NFL had not seen since the early 1980s when Mike Haynes and Lester Hayes tormented opposing receivers while manning the corners of the Raiders defensive backfield. When the Jets set their sights on Asomugha, Cromartie was left in the wings to wait or explore his options. After all, Asomugha is considered by many NFL pundits to be a far superior cornerback to Cromartie, and it seemed just about everyone drooled at the prospect of a Revis-Asomugha tandem, making the Jets virtually impossible to pass on in 2011.
Now that things didn’t work out with Asomugha, Cromartie is back on the Jets radar. However, Cromartie, who strongly desires to play for a team with legitimate Super Bowl aspirations (as did Asomugha), now wants the Jets to pay out in excess of $10M per season, because the father of seven children to six different women in five different states (I hope I have these details all correct) doesn’t give “hometown discounts” to his most-recent employer, the team willing to take a cornerback with financial and legal problems, not to mention a damaged reputation for “playing soft” and “locker room bitching” when with the San Diego Chargers, the team that came within one game of an AFC championship title for the second straight year. In addition to the Jets, Cromartie reportedly has interest from the San Francisco 49ers (6-10 in 2010) and the Raiders (8-8 in 2010, and starting 2011 with a new head coach, new defensive coordinator, and new defensive scheme to learn).
Let me go on the record — and you can check my entire archive of columns as well as all Twitter postings since the NFL lockout started — I had no opinion about the Jets signing Asomugha prior to or during this free agency period. Would I love to see a Revis-Asomugha pairing? Sure, who wouldn’t? It could be intriguing. It could be exciting. But I would’ve been equally happy if the Jets simply re-signed Cromartie and he and Revis had a full training camp and season to work together as Batman and Robin. In other words, I didn’t and still don’t see Asomugha as the be-all and end-all of the Jets defensive success. In fact, when someone asked me last week on Twitter if I thought the Jets could sign Asomugha in addition to other free agents like Santonio Holmes, I responded: It depends on available salary space and how greedy [these players] want to be.
And that’s what this free agency period has boiled down to, available salary cap space, player greed, and the ensuing fiscal insanity, as opposed to harmony. Have these players learned ANYTHING from this 136-day (give or take a day) lockout? Have these players understood ANYTHING about the establishment of a cash-only $120M payroll (let’s round off to the nearest million) to pay the collective salaries of 53 men on each team’s 2011 active roster?
Consider some basic statistics I looked up about the 2010 New York Jets from espn.com. In 2010, the Jets offense, defense and special teams units were on the field for a total of 2,439 plays (including all punting, kickoff, and field goal/extra-point plays). The offense was on the field for 1,067 plays (approximately 44%), the defense was on the field for 979 plays (40%) and the special teams unit was on the field for 393 plays (16%). If you look up the 49-man active team roster for game days, offensive players account for 22 roster slots (approximately 45%), defensive players account for 26 (53%) and the specialists (kicker, punter, long-snapper) account for three slots (6%). So for all intents and purposes, let’s assume an estimated 40-40-20% split between offense, defense and special teams.
Now let’s translate this to a rounded-off $120M payroll for 53 players, 49 who will likely be in uniform on game days. Since the offense and defense each account for 40 percent of the team plays, that means each unit has a theoretical payroll of $48M; the special teams unit has a payroll of $24M. Perhaps there could be some shifting of payroll funds between units depending on needs (no to mention the fact the Jets aren’t spending $24M on a kicker, punter and long-snapper), but for argument’s sake, let’s work with these numbers.
Since cornerbacks seem to be making big fiscal news of late, let’s focus on a hypothetical Jets defensive roster of 25 players — 5 defensive linemen, 9 linebackers, 7 cornerbacks, and 4 safeties. That means GM Mike Tannenbaum needs to build the best, most-dominant defensive unit he can on $48M, a unit that can play up to the standard head coach Rex Ryan sets and a unit with quality players and sufficient depth in case of injuries or situational substitutions.
Right off the top we have Darrelle Revis commanding $11.5M. Now you have $36.5M to take care of 24 other players. Along comes Asomugha and his desire for $12M, which the Eagles were happy to pay. Now you have two players accounting for $23.5M, leaving Tannenbaum $24.5M to pay the other 23 defensive players. You prefer a better bargain? Let’s have Cromartie and his $10M demand instead. Now you’ve left Tannenbaum $26.5M to pay the other 24 guys.
No problem, you say? Each player gets slightly more than $1M? Fine, now try explaining this to linebacker David Harris who’s patiently waited for his long-term contract. Take care of Harris and all is happy, you say? Fine, now what about important veterans like linebackers Bart Scott and Calvin Pace, defensive end Shaun Ellis, safety Jim Leonard, and the list goes on and on? If you keep taking care of all the top players you won’t have anything left but crumbs for half the defensive roster. No problem, you say? The league’s minimum salary is around $400,000? Fine, and how many high-talent players do you think you can get to play for that salary? Suppose you are lucky enough to find 15 guys to fill out the defensive payroll earning the league minimum, how dominant do you think your defense is going to be? There’s a good reason why so many NFL players earn the league minimum: they aren’t as talented as the superstars they back up on a team’s roster. Yes, these players are indeed far more talented than the roster you see for any college football program, but guys making around $400,000 aren’t on the same level as Revis, Harris, Pace, Scott and many other Pro Bowl caliber stars.
And guess what happens when your team puts a K-Mart roster on the field when the regular season opens the weekend of September 11th? Your team won’t play like world beaters and you’ll be the first one to whine to your local sports radio station how your teams stinks and everyone should be cut and the head coach should be fired and the general manager is an idiot. And this is exactly why New York Daily News columnist Bob Raissman refers to such fans as the “Valley of the Stupid.”
If you go back and read my columns during the 2010 summer you’ll see that I was already scolding Darrelle Revis over his contract demands as early as June 15, then really took him to task August 15, when I wrote the following:
Memo to Darrelle Revis: Let me get this straight... No matter what the Jets offer you, you won’t settle for anything less than $16-million per season. Fine... And when next year and the year after come, and other defensive players exceed your salary, are you going to hold out again and hold your team hostage? Just a thought…
If Revis EVER holds out again as a New York Jet, demanding to be paid at least one dollar more than Nnamdi Asomugha, don’t say I didn’t forewarn you long beforehand.
This is what this Revis-Asomugha-Cromartie dynamic boils down to, greed — pure, unadulterated, uncompromised, unmitigated greed. Chutzpah to the max. A maddening narcissism focused on getting mine now while the getting’s good and damn the rest of the team. Yeah sure, these guys all want a Super Bowl ring, but not if it takes one extra nickel out of their piggy banks. Look at the list of players willing to renegotiate their contracts in order to help their teams fit the best players possible under the $120M salary cap... Well, aside from Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, we don’t see too many players coming forward with such generosity. Look to Seattle and now ex-Seahawks linebacker Lofa Tatupu. When he balked at restructuring his contract, Seattle cut him, hence the cold reality in today’s NFL and a hard salary cap. Where’s the leadership? Where’s the commitment to win? Hell, where’s proof these players have taken some math and basic economics courses while in college?!
Again, I don’t begrudge these guys from earning as much as they can while they have an NFL career. However, when players all ratify a new CBA that calls for a $120M salary cap, that should tip players off to know that revenue sharing isn’t merely something between owners. Players also need to know how to share the wealth in order to make sure everyone is well-rewarded on the best team possible in terms of talent. If that sounds like socialism to you, as I’ve said time and time again over the years, color me Karl Marx, Harpo, Groucho, Chico, Gummo and Zeppo too. If you want to put together the best team possible, all teammates need to be willing to work together within the system, be it schematic or financial. If you truly are committed to being a champion, you need to put your money where your mouth is and put team over yourself, your personal agenda for wealth over the collective goal of 53 men playing for a common goal while everyone makes a fair salary. Would it be nice if NFL teams had salary caps of $150M or $200M? Sure, but that’s not the negotiated salary cap and players need to make more realistic demands.
Are the 1,700 players on NFL rosters the best athletes in their sport? Yes, they certainly are. However, both they and we need to appreciate that there's a broad spectrum of talent among these 1,700 players and only a select few are truly superstars worthy of top-5 salaries at their positions. As talented as these players are, there are simply too many, even at the top level of the player pool, who have slightly warped and over-inflated opinions of themselves. These players, and their agents, have overvalued themselves, much like the housing market before the bubble burst in 2008. Not everyone can be best or one of the top 5 at their position. Not everyone can be paid accordingly. In some ways, this need to be the highest-paid or top-5 level paid gets as silly as grade inflation in our nation’s educational system. In a nation as intellectually mediocre as ours, how is it that more than 60 percent of all high school and college students boast an overall grade-point average of at least a B? If the average student in our nation is graded as either good or excellent, shouldn’t we expect to see better production and achievement? Imagine what we might expect of every NFL player demanding at least a top-5 level salary — perhaps an annual performance worthy of Canton enshrinement?
Somewhere among the NFL’s 1,700 players there needs to be the acceptance that you’re among the top 32 people in the entire country who play a given position for an NFL team. Somewhere along the lines there needs to be acceptance that even among the top 32 people in the country to play your position, you’re still paid quite well compared to the majority of your fans — fans who are schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, manual laborers, office workers, waiters, waitresses, busboys and restaurant cooks, just to name a few occupations. Somewhere along the line there needs to be acceptance that NFL players, even at the lowest levels, earn a decent wage. One need to be piggish about salary demands in a country where so many football fans are struggling just to make ends meet. I don’t just say this stuff off the top of my head. I know of what I talk about. Prior to my academic career I was one of those young men aspiring for an NFL roster spot, when there were only 28 teams, fewer roster spots on each team, and the minimum salary was a lot less than $400,000. Contracts were no more guaranteed then than now. Greed existed back then too, before salary caps and free agency rules were put into place, but the perspective and lifestyles were somewhat different.
When players like Nnamdi Asomugha and Antonio Cromartie start demanding salaries that show they understand the concept of a team salary cap and salary structure, then I’ll believe these guys truly want to be champions. As for football fans who demand their teams sign this player and that player, then agonize over how their teams fail to sign top-level players for top dollar, perhaps it’s time to take a step back from playing fantasy football and realize that NFL general managers are not playing with Monopoly money and there are limits to building the best 53-man roster. Although it’s relatively modest compared to today’s top-level salaries, consider that winning the Super Bowl gets you a big shiny ring and a bonus check in excess of $80,000. If you’re really interested in winning a Super Bowl, perhaps a willingness to sacrifice a little on your salary demands will pay off six months later with the ring and check that goes with being a champion, and being a champion beats being super-rich any day in my book.
Reminder — Don’t forget my new eBook!
Philosophy of “Packer” Pedagogy:
Vince Lombardi, critical thinking and problem-based learning
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/DavePushkin_PackerPedagogy
Okay, perhaps this year’s league-wide Secret Santa roll call may have more than a bit of awkwardness, especially for guys like Steelers linebacker James “Don’t Rely on my Bladder in case of fire” Harrison. However, today’s column is not about the nasty rhetoric between players and the owners, or players and the league, or players and other players (geez, there sure are lots of nasty players in the NFL, aren’t there?). Today’s column is about harmony, especially fiscal harmony.
Did I say “fiscal harmony”? Yes, I did, and boy do I regret using such terminology! Let’s face it, if there’s fiscal harmony between players as this wild and wooly edition of free agency takes place, then everyone’s singing “Kumbaya” on Capitol Hill in Washington while debating what to really do about our nation’s debt ceiling.
What has me so grouchy and cynical? Hmmm... Perhaps I can boil it down to one position on the football field, defensive cornerback, and two cornerbacks immediately come to mind and put a major burr in my saddle (I’m in New Jersey, so perhaps it’s aggravating my hemorrhoids): Former Oakland Raiders cornerback (now a Philadelphia Eagle) Nnamdi Asomugha, and perhaps former New York Jets cornerback (destination still unknown) Antonio Cromartie. What has me all grumped up? Their free agent salary demands for 2011 and how those demands compare to the paycheck Darrelle Revis collects playing cornerback for the New York Jets. In case you didn’t know, there ain’t much free about free agents.
Let’s go back to last summer and Revis’ holdout, seeking a new and improved contract from the Jets. Oh, we all remember those fun days of summer 2010? Revis, who unquestionably outperformed his rookie contract, wanted more money, for many reasons, and rightfully so. However, one reason ultimately stuck out more than any other, to be the highest-paid cornerback in the game. While that seems a reasonable demand for arguably the best cornerback in the game, Revis took on the ridiculous stance that he wanted to be paid one more dollar than the current highest-paid cornerback in the league, Nnamdi Asomugha. For those who can’t remember, Asomugha was signed to a 3-year contract that paid him $15.1M per season. Naturally, Revis wanted more and felt he deserved more because he was the better cornerback. While that seemed a fair self-assessment (with lots of help from his agents and his uncle, former Washington Redskin and Carolina Panther defensive lineman Sean Gilbert), the fiscal reality was that the Jets were not going to pay Revis $15.1M plus an extra dollar. After Revis’ holdout and lots of haggling, Revis agreed to a new contract that would pay him $11.5M this season.
And what became of Asomugha? Raiders owner Al Davis released him at the end of the 2010 season as part of a fiscal purge with a lockout approaching, and the $15.1M man became a man without a team.
Fast forward to a few days ago. Asomugha the free agent was interested in joining the Jets, the Dallas Cowboys, the Houston Texans, and one team in the shadows, which turned out to be the Eagles. Anyway, at some point of this past week, Jets general manager Mike Tannenbaum backed out of negotiations and decided Asomugha’s price tag was simply too rich for the Jets and their overall roster needs and fiscal constraints. Asomugha signed a 5-year contract with the Eagles that would pay him an average salary of $12M — not Al Davis-type money, but certainly a higher paycheck than Revis earns.
How does Cromartie fit into this story? The Jets obtained Cromartie in the final year of his previous contract in a trade with the San Diego Chargers. Cromartie was supposed to be the counterpart to Revis in a Batman-Robin cornerback tandem the NFL had not seen since the early 1980s when Mike Haynes and Lester Hayes tormented opposing receivers while manning the corners of the Raiders defensive backfield. When the Jets set their sights on Asomugha, Cromartie was left in the wings to wait or explore his options. After all, Asomugha is considered by many NFL pundits to be a far superior cornerback to Cromartie, and it seemed just about everyone drooled at the prospect of a Revis-Asomugha tandem, making the Jets virtually impossible to pass on in 2011.
Now that things didn’t work out with Asomugha, Cromartie is back on the Jets radar. However, Cromartie, who strongly desires to play for a team with legitimate Super Bowl aspirations (as did Asomugha), now wants the Jets to pay out in excess of $10M per season, because the father of seven children to six different women in five different states (I hope I have these details all correct) doesn’t give “hometown discounts” to his most-recent employer, the team willing to take a cornerback with financial and legal problems, not to mention a damaged reputation for “playing soft” and “locker room bitching” when with the San Diego Chargers, the team that came within one game of an AFC championship title for the second straight year. In addition to the Jets, Cromartie reportedly has interest from the San Francisco 49ers (6-10 in 2010) and the Raiders (8-8 in 2010, and starting 2011 with a new head coach, new defensive coordinator, and new defensive scheme to learn).
Let me go on the record — and you can check my entire archive of columns as well as all Twitter postings since the NFL lockout started — I had no opinion about the Jets signing Asomugha prior to or during this free agency period. Would I love to see a Revis-Asomugha pairing? Sure, who wouldn’t? It could be intriguing. It could be exciting. But I would’ve been equally happy if the Jets simply re-signed Cromartie and he and Revis had a full training camp and season to work together as Batman and Robin. In other words, I didn’t and still don’t see Asomugha as the be-all and end-all of the Jets defensive success. In fact, when someone asked me last week on Twitter if I thought the Jets could sign Asomugha in addition to other free agents like Santonio Holmes, I responded: It depends on available salary space and how greedy [these players] want to be.
And that’s what this free agency period has boiled down to, available salary cap space, player greed, and the ensuing fiscal insanity, as opposed to harmony. Have these players learned ANYTHING from this 136-day (give or take a day) lockout? Have these players understood ANYTHING about the establishment of a cash-only $120M payroll (let’s round off to the nearest million) to pay the collective salaries of 53 men on each team’s 2011 active roster?
Consider some basic statistics I looked up about the 2010 New York Jets from espn.com. In 2010, the Jets offense, defense and special teams units were on the field for a total of 2,439 plays (including all punting, kickoff, and field goal/extra-point plays). The offense was on the field for 1,067 plays (approximately 44%), the defense was on the field for 979 plays (40%) and the special teams unit was on the field for 393 plays (16%). If you look up the 49-man active team roster for game days, offensive players account for 22 roster slots (approximately 45%), defensive players account for 26 (53%) and the specialists (kicker, punter, long-snapper) account for three slots (6%). So for all intents and purposes, let’s assume an estimated 40-40-20% split between offense, defense and special teams.
Now let’s translate this to a rounded-off $120M payroll for 53 players, 49 who will likely be in uniform on game days. Since the offense and defense each account for 40 percent of the team plays, that means each unit has a theoretical payroll of $48M; the special teams unit has a payroll of $24M. Perhaps there could be some shifting of payroll funds between units depending on needs (no to mention the fact the Jets aren’t spending $24M on a kicker, punter and long-snapper), but for argument’s sake, let’s work with these numbers.
Since cornerbacks seem to be making big fiscal news of late, let’s focus on a hypothetical Jets defensive roster of 25 players — 5 defensive linemen, 9 linebackers, 7 cornerbacks, and 4 safeties. That means GM Mike Tannenbaum needs to build the best, most-dominant defensive unit he can on $48M, a unit that can play up to the standard head coach Rex Ryan sets and a unit with quality players and sufficient depth in case of injuries or situational substitutions.
Right off the top we have Darrelle Revis commanding $11.5M. Now you have $36.5M to take care of 24 other players. Along comes Asomugha and his desire for $12M, which the Eagles were happy to pay. Now you have two players accounting for $23.5M, leaving Tannenbaum $24.5M to pay the other 23 defensive players. You prefer a better bargain? Let’s have Cromartie and his $10M demand instead. Now you’ve left Tannenbaum $26.5M to pay the other 24 guys.
No problem, you say? Each player gets slightly more than $1M? Fine, now try explaining this to linebacker David Harris who’s patiently waited for his long-term contract. Take care of Harris and all is happy, you say? Fine, now what about important veterans like linebackers Bart Scott and Calvin Pace, defensive end Shaun Ellis, safety Jim Leonard, and the list goes on and on? If you keep taking care of all the top players you won’t have anything left but crumbs for half the defensive roster. No problem, you say? The league’s minimum salary is around $400,000? Fine, and how many high-talent players do you think you can get to play for that salary? Suppose you are lucky enough to find 15 guys to fill out the defensive payroll earning the league minimum, how dominant do you think your defense is going to be? There’s a good reason why so many NFL players earn the league minimum: they aren’t as talented as the superstars they back up on a team’s roster. Yes, these players are indeed far more talented than the roster you see for any college football program, but guys making around $400,000 aren’t on the same level as Revis, Harris, Pace, Scott and many other Pro Bowl caliber stars.
And guess what happens when your team puts a K-Mart roster on the field when the regular season opens the weekend of September 11th? Your team won’t play like world beaters and you’ll be the first one to whine to your local sports radio station how your teams stinks and everyone should be cut and the head coach should be fired and the general manager is an idiot. And this is exactly why New York Daily News columnist Bob Raissman refers to such fans as the “Valley of the Stupid.”
If you go back and read my columns during the 2010 summer you’ll see that I was already scolding Darrelle Revis over his contract demands as early as June 15, then really took him to task August 15, when I wrote the following:
Memo to Darrelle Revis: Let me get this straight... No matter what the Jets offer you, you won’t settle for anything less than $16-million per season. Fine... And when next year and the year after come, and other defensive players exceed your salary, are you going to hold out again and hold your team hostage? Just a thought…
If Revis EVER holds out again as a New York Jet, demanding to be paid at least one dollar more than Nnamdi Asomugha, don’t say I didn’t forewarn you long beforehand.
This is what this Revis-Asomugha-Cromartie dynamic boils down to, greed — pure, unadulterated, uncompromised, unmitigated greed. Chutzpah to the max. A maddening narcissism focused on getting mine now while the getting’s good and damn the rest of the team. Yeah sure, these guys all want a Super Bowl ring, but not if it takes one extra nickel out of their piggy banks. Look at the list of players willing to renegotiate their contracts in order to help their teams fit the best players possible under the $120M salary cap... Well, aside from Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, we don’t see too many players coming forward with such generosity. Look to Seattle and now ex-Seahawks linebacker Lofa Tatupu. When he balked at restructuring his contract, Seattle cut him, hence the cold reality in today’s NFL and a hard salary cap. Where’s the leadership? Where’s the commitment to win? Hell, where’s proof these players have taken some math and basic economics courses while in college?!
Again, I don’t begrudge these guys from earning as much as they can while they have an NFL career. However, when players all ratify a new CBA that calls for a $120M salary cap, that should tip players off to know that revenue sharing isn’t merely something between owners. Players also need to know how to share the wealth in order to make sure everyone is well-rewarded on the best team possible in terms of talent. If that sounds like socialism to you, as I’ve said time and time again over the years, color me Karl Marx, Harpo, Groucho, Chico, Gummo and Zeppo too. If you want to put together the best team possible, all teammates need to be willing to work together within the system, be it schematic or financial. If you truly are committed to being a champion, you need to put your money where your mouth is and put team over yourself, your personal agenda for wealth over the collective goal of 53 men playing for a common goal while everyone makes a fair salary. Would it be nice if NFL teams had salary caps of $150M or $200M? Sure, but that’s not the negotiated salary cap and players need to make more realistic demands.
Are the 1,700 players on NFL rosters the best athletes in their sport? Yes, they certainly are. However, both they and we need to appreciate that there's a broad spectrum of talent among these 1,700 players and only a select few are truly superstars worthy of top-5 salaries at their positions. As talented as these players are, there are simply too many, even at the top level of the player pool, who have slightly warped and over-inflated opinions of themselves. These players, and their agents, have overvalued themselves, much like the housing market before the bubble burst in 2008. Not everyone can be best or one of the top 5 at their position. Not everyone can be paid accordingly. In some ways, this need to be the highest-paid or top-5 level paid gets as silly as grade inflation in our nation’s educational system. In a nation as intellectually mediocre as ours, how is it that more than 60 percent of all high school and college students boast an overall grade-point average of at least a B? If the average student in our nation is graded as either good or excellent, shouldn’t we expect to see better production and achievement? Imagine what we might expect of every NFL player demanding at least a top-5 level salary — perhaps an annual performance worthy of Canton enshrinement?
Somewhere among the NFL’s 1,700 players there needs to be the acceptance that you’re among the top 32 people in the entire country who play a given position for an NFL team. Somewhere along the lines there needs to be acceptance that even among the top 32 people in the country to play your position, you’re still paid quite well compared to the majority of your fans — fans who are schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, manual laborers, office workers, waiters, waitresses, busboys and restaurant cooks, just to name a few occupations. Somewhere along the line there needs to be acceptance that NFL players, even at the lowest levels, earn a decent wage. One need to be piggish about salary demands in a country where so many football fans are struggling just to make ends meet. I don’t just say this stuff off the top of my head. I know of what I talk about. Prior to my academic career I was one of those young men aspiring for an NFL roster spot, when there were only 28 teams, fewer roster spots on each team, and the minimum salary was a lot less than $400,000. Contracts were no more guaranteed then than now. Greed existed back then too, before salary caps and free agency rules were put into place, but the perspective and lifestyles were somewhat different.
When players like Nnamdi Asomugha and Antonio Cromartie start demanding salaries that show they understand the concept of a team salary cap and salary structure, then I’ll believe these guys truly want to be champions. As for football fans who demand their teams sign this player and that player, then agonize over how their teams fail to sign top-level players for top dollar, perhaps it’s time to take a step back from playing fantasy football and realize that NFL general managers are not playing with Monopoly money and there are limits to building the best 53-man roster. Although it’s relatively modest compared to today’s top-level salaries, consider that winning the Super Bowl gets you a big shiny ring and a bonus check in excess of $80,000. If you’re really interested in winning a Super Bowl, perhaps a willingness to sacrifice a little on your salary demands will pay off six months later with the ring and check that goes with being a champion, and being a champion beats being super-rich any day in my book.
Reminder — Don’t forget my new eBook!
Philosophy of “Packer” Pedagogy:
Vince Lombardi, critical thinking and problem-based learning
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/DavePushkin_PackerPedagogy
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