Monday, December 29, 2008

The Demeanor Fallacy

Eric Mangini has had his ups and downs as head coach of the New York Jets.

His first season was all up. He took over a Jets team that was 4-12 the year before and coached them to a 10-6 record and a playoff berth. He became a New York folk hero, dubbed ManGenius by the tabloids. He even made a Sopranos cameo.

But season two was a downer as the Jets fell back to 4-12. And season three was a roller coaster ride. A shaky beginning, a terrific middle, and a horrible end.

And this morning the Jets took the New York Post’s advice (DUMP ‘EM) and fired their precocious head coach. The Times’ story on the firing echoed a theme I’ve heard a lot the past few weeks in the tabloids and on talk radio:



"Mangini has been criticized for a lack of emotion in his coaching style..Fullback Tony Richardson said he had never seen Mangini show frustration. He does not storm around the practice fields, spew invective or flip over water coolers."

In fact, this lack of emotion is the only criticism cited in the story, suggesting that if Mangini had expressed more emotion the Jets may have been more successful.

This is a logical fallacy. The syllogism goes something like this:

+ Coaches with placid sideline demeanors can’t win

+ Coach X has a placid sideline demeanor

+ Therefore, Coach X can’t win

But of course, the NFL is filled with stone-faced winners. Tom Landry had 20 straight winning seasons, five NFC titles, and two Super Bowl wins without ever changing expression. (His Hall of Fame bio’s first words are “noted for impassive sideline demeanor”.) Statuary is more expressive than Chuck Noll, who won four Super Bowls. And Bill Belichick, to quote Dorothy Parker’s quip about Katherine Hepburn, “runs the gamut of emotions from A to B”.

Meanwhile, the NFC’s version of the New York Jets – the Tampa Bay Buccaneers – featured a coach, Jon Gruden, who is so emphatic on the sidelines that his nickname is Chuckie, from the horror-movie doll. Gruden’s passion did not prevent the Bucs from collapsing in nearly identical fashion to the Jets.

The Torre Stare

We’ve been here before. Joe Torre took over as manager of the New York Yankees in 1996, and proceeded to go on the greatest run in recent baseball history. Four World Series championships, six AL crowns, and eleven straight playoff appearances. Except for walks to the mound, Torre spent the entire eleven years on the bench, arms crossed, staring out at the field. But in his final year – a year in which he once again made the playoffs, he was ripped in New York for not having enough fire.

Alas, having too much fire is also a crime. When Tom Coughlin was, experts all agreed, the worst coach in football, his biggest problem was sideline histrionics. When he won the Super Bowl those same experts agreed that he did so because he followed their advice, and got his demeanor to just the right temperature.

This doesn’t just apply to coaches. Eli Manning appears at all times to be in a medically-induced coma. In the early promising part of his career it was lauded as a plus. In the middle shaky part of his career it was derided as a minus. Now, with a Super Bowl ring and a #1 seed, it is once again a positive. Just wait, though – if the Giants lose to the Falcons in two weeks, the sports psychologists will change their minds again – stoicism will be renamed placidity, calmness will be reclassed as indifference. "Look how excited Matt Ryan is", they'll gush.

The Reason - and a Prediction

There is, I believe, a reason for this. Most football fans, myself included, don't know enough about the complex game of modern football to truly judge a coach on his merits. Very few fans are capable of dissecting the Jets' blitzing schemes or interior line play. I've never heard Pete from Passaic call the Fan to complain the Jets' don't disguise their run formations well enough, or suggest ways to exploit the weak-side linebacker in the Miami defense.

So in our ignorance we go overboard on the things we do understand. That is why clock management mistakes and 4th down decisions are overamplified by fans and media. Even the dumbest among us can form an opinion on these things.

And a coach's demeanor? In the absence of substantive criticism, which most of us are ill-equipped to make, it's an easy one to go after.

I try to stay away from predictions, but I’m going to sneak out on a limb here. Eric Mangini, who at age 40 has had winning seasons in two of his three seasons as head coach, will be hired somewhere else, maybe a struggling team that experienced failure under a fiery coach.

That team will be successful early in Mangini’s tenure. And fans will nod their head knowingly, saying, “It’s his sideline demeanor. He exudes calm, which is just what that team needed.”

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Men Without Hats

Foul ball!

On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the youngest elected President in United States history. As he went through the carefully orchestrated ceremony of the day, he did so hatless. Kennedy believed hats made him look old so he refused to be photographed in one. Considered the most glamorous and sophisticated man in the world, JFK’s bare head was a dagger to the hat industry, whose sales dropped precipitously and never recovered.

That’s how the story has always been told anyway. An entire book was even written about it (Hatless Jack: The Presidency, The Fedora, and the History of American Style). It turns out to be a myth, though, effectively skewered by Snopes.

Still, something happened. Men used to wear hats. Picture large crowds at, say, a baseball game from the first half of the 20th century and every guy’s got a fedora, a bowler, a derby – some kind of stylish headgear. The ubiquity of hats was perfectly captured in a scene from The Big Chill. William Hurt is watching an old black & white movie on TV when Jeff Goldblum asks what’s happening in the scene.

“I think the guy in the hat did something,” drawls a stoned Hurt.

Cut to the TV, showing dozens of 1930’s era guys wearing hats.

Then there was this exchange from Seinfeld*:

Elaine: You should have lived in the 20's and 30's. You know men wore hats all the time then.

George: What a bald paradise that must have been! Nobody knew!

* Seinfeld is to 21st century Americans what the Bible was to most of Western Civilization for thousands of years – the text that provides wise and relevant quotes on nearly every subject.

Government Bailout for Hat Industry?

I bring all this up because we’ve had some nasty weather in New York lately. Snow, sleet, howling wind, freezing rain. And as I walk the city streets I see men in suits coping with the weather in one of four ways:

- Baseball hat
- Wool cap
- Umbrella*
- Bare head

The first two look ridiculous with a suit. The third is overkill. And the fourth is too stupid to merit comment.

* There are, of course, two types of umbrellas. The tiny ones, which aren't much bigger than a hat. And the huge golf umbrellas. I have a message to those guys with the huge ones, the ones that are designed to cover Tiger Woods, his caddy, his golf bag, and the entire 14th green: Everybody hates you.

A handful of us, me included, were wearing wide-brimmed hats. Mine is a brown Indiana Jones-type thing. I get a lot of abuse for this hat, best summed up by my son as I returned from work one evening.

“You wear that in public?” he asked.

But it’s a wonderful thing. It keeps my head warm. The wide brim collects flakes and repels light rain. And in my opinion, it’s rather stylish. All I need now is for hats to come back in style so I can wear it with slightly less embarrassment than I do today.

And there is one man who has the power to bring it back. On January 20, 2009, the glamorous and sophisticated Barack Obama will take office. Will he go bareheaded, a la the mythical Jack Kennedy? Or will he don a snap-brim fedora, tilted at a rakish angle. If he does the latter, look for the comeback of the hat industry.

Now that’s change I can believe in.

Friday, December 12, 2008

No Glib Title Today


I haven’t written much about the economic crisis. As near as I can tell, the sharpest economic minds on earth have no earthly idea what is going on, how it happened, who gets the blame, what to do about it, or how it’s going to end. So what can an English major like me possibly add to the conversation?

Then again, the whole purpose of having a blog is to offer uninformed opinions nobody asked for.

Let’s go back for a moment to the Fall of 2001. The country was in a recession. The dot-com crash had started in March 2000, wiping out paper wealth in the trillions. Numerous corporate scandals, most notably Enron, had more Americans than usual thinking public companies were running elaborate shell games. And two planes flew into buildings in the financial center of planet Earth, killing thousands and paralyzing the global economy.

At the time I thought, we’re really in for it now.

But amazingly, we weren’t. The American economy shrugged off the triple body blows of Dot-Com, Enron, and 9/11 like they were love taps. By 2003, the recession had ended, and the American economy began adding jobs by hundreds of thousands per month and seeing its usual 2-3% growth rates. (The bad news for Bush is that nobody seemed to notice this astonishing success story because Iraq was in flames. Now, nobody is noticing the astonishing success story in Iraq because the economy is in flames.)

At the time I thought, wow, this economy can really take a punch. Or three.

So when this latest storm came along, I remained optimistic longer than most, because I had developed this profound belief in the resiliency of the U.S. economy. That’s not to say that I thought we were recession-proof. Only fools and madmen believe economies can completely insulate themselves from periods of recession. I just thought we’d have 2-3 quarters of negative growth and then whoever won the election in November would get credit for a recovery that was going to come anyway.

But now – who knows? The sharpest economic minds on earth still seem baffled, but there is general agreement that it’s going to get worse before it gets better – especially when the next two shoes drop (the credit card crisis and the effects of growing unemployment). I can only console myself that these guys have been so consistently wrong on just about everything else that they’ll be proven wrong again. And hope that, once again, the American economy will defy expectations and reveal its underlying strength.

To sum up, I’m just like the sharpest economic minds on earth. I have no earthly idea what is going on, how it happened, who gets the blame, what to do about it, or how it’s going to end

So for now, I'll console myself with this: the Mets just added two great arms to their bullpen. Bring on the Fightin' Phils!

Note: Instead of wasting your time here, you should read the work of someone who has a rare combination of deep knowledge, clarity of writing, and intellectual honesty. That guy would be Robert Samuelson at Newsweek. He’s my go-to guy on economic issues. Check out his archive here.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Couples in Canton

As I wrote recently…of the twelve NFL head coaches elected to the Hall of Fame during the Super Bowl era, ten coached a Hall of Fame quarterback and one coached a guy who should be in the Hall and may yet make it(Ken Stabler). Only Joe Gibbs went to Canton alone.

In yesterday’s Monday Morning Quarterback, Peter King identifies 7 head coaches who will be Hall candidates in the coming years. Five of them – you guessed it – coached present or future Hall of Famer quarterbacks:

Mike Shanahan (John Elway)
Bill Belichick (Tom Brady)
Dan Reeves (John Elway)
Mike Holmgren (Brett Favre)
Tony Dungy (Peyton Manning)

The sixth is Marty Schottenheimer. Schott doesn’t strike me as a Hall of Famer, but he is sixth all time in Wins (and may not be done). Still, it’s hard to imagine him making it without a Super Bowl appearance.

The seventh is Bill Parcells. Parcells coached a bunch of good quarterbacks – Simms*, Bledsoe, Testaverde – and of course, started the “legend” of Tony Romo. But none are in the Hall.

* Simms may have made the Hall if he didn’t get hurt in the 12th game of the 1990 season. Assuming the Giants still won the Super Bowl that year, Simms would have 2 Super Bowls and 200 TD passes (he finished with 199). That, and the fact that the media likes him personally may have been enough to push him in.

Parcells vs. Gibbs would make an interesting debate. If we assume the five guys above make the Hall and Schottenheimer doesn’t, Parcells and Gibbs would be the only two Super Bowl era coaches in the Hall – out of 17 – who didn’t have a HoF quarterback. In fact, the two coaches won 5 Super Bowls with 5 different quarterbacks – Theismann, Simms, Williams*, Hostetler, and Rypien.

* Both Simms and Williams had days that Hall of Famers can only dream about

But who is better? Gibbs has 3 Super Bowls to Parcells’ 2. But Parcells took four teams from the pits to the top (or neat-top), a remarkable record. And that’s not counting what’s going on in Miami right now.

I'm inclined to give the nod to Parcells, because I think there is no greater proof of coaching ability than turning losers into winners multiple times. But then, I'm a biased Giants fan.


P.S. I learned something fun doing this: Jimmy "How 'bout them Cowboys!" Johnson isn't in the Hall of Fame (but this Jimmy Johnson is). I'll have to do a reverse on this someday - see how many quarterbacks made it in without a Hall of Fame coach. But the overrated Troy Aikman is one of them.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Obama's Other Challenge

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece wondering why the McCain campaign never made a campaign issue out of the absence of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan has a piece called “At Least Bush Kept Us Safe”. (You may or not like Noonan’s world-view, but she is arguably the best writer in the punditocracy today. Its pure poetry compared to the snarling sledgehammer attacks of most columnists.)

It looks at the same issue, but more from a post-election standpoint – from the point of view of Bush’s Legacy, and the challenge laid at Obama’s feet.

And it made me think of the other dog that didn’t bark this election – the debate over civil liberties versus security. That debate, which was held in an extremely clumsy fashion in America during the middle Bush years, was almost completely off the table during the 2008 election.

More on this to come, but for now check out Noonan…