Too many Easter baskets

By church’s end, each of my children had received three baskets. Here I’ve arrayed some of our Jesuses and sheep:

We have to keep Abel from swallowing these toys. He also steals his brothers’ chocolates and dissolves them in his mouth – still wrapped.

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Will Michigan win the championship? As I type, the Wolverines lead UConn by nine points. The Big Ten has gone uncrowned for roughly a quarter-century. Michigan State won in 2000; Maryland, not yet a conference member, won in 2002. Each one of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, MSU, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Purdue – every turn-of-the-century conference member, that is, except Iowa, Minnesota, Northwestern, and Penn State – has lost in the championship game at least once since MSU’s victory.

UConn first won in 1999 and went on to claim five more titles.

There are eighteen Big Ten members now. Loyal to the region, I penciled in Nebraska and Purdue as finalists. It was a bold but not outrageous prediction. Purdue unsurprisingly reached the Elite Eight; Nebraska advanced to the Sweet Sixteen having never previously won a tournament game. Had the Huskers gone far enough, I surely would have claimed Yahoo!’s $25,000 prize. (But it was the Huskies who reached the final.)

(A couple of years ago, I picked Creighton to reach the Final Four. I figure, the state is due.)

I did predict that Michigan would reach the semifinal. I achieved 60th-percentile staus this year, which is much better than usual. Yahoo! graded my bracket as “fine.”

Royals

What with news of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, it’s useful to have an updated Royal Family tree with birth years, titles, and succession indicators:

• article behind paywall (BBC)
• same article – gratis (Yahoo!)

For some readers this will be old hat. Not for me, alas. I’ve seen just one episode of The Crown.

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Current reading (books):

• W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (for the group)
• Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun
• Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott), Absent in the Spring
• E. W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman
• C. S. Lewis, Perelandra
• François Mauriac, The Holy Terror (a mini-book – for making up lost ground)
• John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (ditto)
• Aristotle, Poetics (ditto)
• John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (ditto)
• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (ditto; a re-read)
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

I was going to say it’s pretty cupcake, but surveying the list, I see the authors include two Nobel winners (Mauriac and Steinbeck), two Great Books of the Western World contributors (Aristotle and Machiavelli), and two theological giants (Christie and Lewis). So, not too shabby after all. Mr. Quiring would approve. Maybe not of Christie. I shake my head whenever well-read people don’t bother with Christie, especially if they do read Chesterton and Sayers. (See the latter’s gem “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” which I found in Anthony Kenny’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Poetics.)

Nick Saban

Heavy snow, frigid temperatures this three-day weekend. Church was canceled. We stayed indoors and watched crime shows, animal rescue shows, soccer, and the NFL playoffs. We finished the absorbing serial killer tale Dahaad which we’d been viewing since November (we’re always nibbling on a half-dozen shows at once). Episodes would begin with a written disclaimer in Hindi which Samuel would cheekily “read” aloud – rattling off gibberish, of course. I have no idea what prompted our four-year-old to engage in such culturally insensitive tomfoolery; maybe the impulse is innate.

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Bill Belichick, Pete Carroll, and Nick Saban all ended long coaching tenures within a day of each other. Belichick and the Patriots “parted ways.” Carroll was demoted by the Seahawks. Saban retired from Alabama.

I attend less and less to football. I’ve long loathed the collegiate variety. But Saban is worth a moment’s reflection.

This tweet has been making the rounds.

Since Nick Saban arrived in 2007, Alabama’s enrollment has increased from 25,000 students to 40,000 students.

That’s a 60% jump compared to a 10% national average.

But the *type* of student matters much more.

Alabama went from the majority of its student body consisting of in-state students to the majority now being from out-of-state.

This is important because those students pay 3x more in annual tuition – $32,000 vs. $11,000 – and it means Alabama increased its annual revenue by hundreds of millions under Nick Saban.

Alabama paid him $130 million over 16 seasons, but you could argue he was worth more than $1 billion.

“Nick Saban is the best investment this university has ever made,” said Alabama Chancellor Robert Witt.

Amazing.

But even if it’s to be admired – or envied – it’s not to be celebrated. Bama has become the megachurch that doesn’t bring in the unchurched so much as steal sheep. The really perverse thing is that this is what every name-brand collegiate sports program tries to do.

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“Every player who signed with the Tide and played four years under Saban won a national championship.”

I guess every four-year Bama student got to see the Tide win a championship, too.

Amazing.

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Saban cared about more than winning. This also has been making the rounds:

It was overtime of the 2017–18 national title game. Alabama trailed Georgia by three. That’s when Tua Tagovailoa, the true freshman thrown into the game to save the day, was sacked on first down for a 16-yard loss, only to then whip a perfect, 41-yard touchdown to win it all.

Amid the celebration, Tagovailoa ran into his coach, the forever-demanding Nick Saban, expecting, well, some kind of reaction other than what he got. After all, this was one of the most legendary passes in Alabama history. Maybe a hug and a “Great play, Tua.”

“He pulled me to the side [and said], ‘What were you thinking taking a sack?’”

That’s perfectionism, you might say, and whether this way of coaching is good or bad depends on whether perfectionism is good or bad.

You’d be wrong. I saw that game. Of course the guy should have been scolded for taking that sack. Of course Denzel Washington should have been scolded, or worse, for flying an airplane drunk, even if he managed to land the plane and save the passengers. That’s not perfectionism; it’s basic education.

Some coaches are just middle managers. Others are educators. Saban appears to have been the latter. So maybe he did belong in a school, after all.

What kind of school? College? High school? An independent hothouse for the football-gifted? That’s a question for another time.

Acknowledgment:

I’ve linked to quotes from a variety of sources, but I didn’t gather them myself; they were compiled by Kendall Baker, in a Yahoo! digital “newsletter.” Thank you, sir.

See also:

“Bill Belichick Finally Succumbed to the NFL’s Mean – and Defying It So Long Is What Made Him a Legend.”

“No Country for Old Coaches.”

Meanwhile, a slightly younger coach is still in the NFL freezing his mustache off.

Pre-tourney gripes

As if we needed more scandal, the rumor spread on Twitter that supporters of Qatar bribed several Ecuadorian players to lose the opening match. The rumorer, a British-based Bahraini journalist, has been identified and discredited.

Still, it irks.

Meanwhile, The Guardian takes pot shots, as it has been doing since Russia and Qatar rather than England and Australia were awarded the hosting rights for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments. The paper now claims that this World Cup is a ruse for the host nation to be glorified through the Argentinian, Brazilian, and French players employed and rested by Paris Saint-Germain. (The club is owned by Qatari investors.) True or not, the criticism is silly. Is it really unfair that PSG should give Messi some days off before the tournament, when other clubs – and entire leagues – could protect their stars if they so chose?

Other criticisms of the host country, and of the social and political evils of global soccer, are more serious. Of these, some are better supported than others. The Guardian’s tally of deaths of foreign workers is especially contentious, yet it is cited without qualification by other mainstream publications, such as The Atlantic.

There is a lot of noise.

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I listened to an analysis by the Anglo-centric YouTube channel Tifo Football that got Ecuador’s tactics and personnel pretty wrong. I’m not saying we’re world-beaters or that we play the prettiest soccer, or even that we’re better than Qatar or Senegal or the Netherlands. But it’d be nice not to be slandered. When we lose possession, we don’t immediately stack our players behind the ball; on the contrary, we fight to quickly regain possession high up the field. And it’s Moisés Caicedo who attacks and Carlos Gruezo who drops back, not vice versa. Anyone who watches knows this. (This mistake would be less irritating if the analyst hadn’t just name-dropped Caicedo – a Premier Leaguer – as if he knew whom he was talking about.)

As regular readers know, this is the time when my thoughts and blogging are pretty well filled up by the World Cup.

The World Serious

This blog entry’s title is due to Ring Lardner, who, in my estimation, is the all-time greatest Son of Michiana (he was born in Niles and began his reporting career in South Bend). So much lore surrounds baseball, I wish I liked the sport. I try to watch some of the Serious each year, if only to root against the Yankees (or, lately, the Astros); often, I end up rooting against almost everyone in the stadium, but I do cheer for this or that player. A pitcher in his late, late thirties, usually. One who glares like Clint Eastwood.

This year, the Astros and the Phillies have split the first two games. It’s been exciting. (But then, watching homemade YouTube videos of marbles racing each other down the gutter can be exciting.) For reasons of moral decency, I want the Phillies to win, even though that Bryce Harper fellow carries himself obnoxiously and, let’s face it, the city’s reputation isn’t good. But perhaps virtue is irrelevant in the World Serious. The sport is hardly without blemish.

“How did MLB get to [the] point where no African American players on a World Series roster isn’t a surprise to many?” asks a Yahoo! columnist, inelegantly.

The answer: economics. “Baseball is a white, suburban game reinforced by foreign labor.” Clubs can pay to develop players, or the players can pay to be developed (I mean, their parents can pay). And so the players come from two sources: academies in countries like the Dominican Republic, where it is cheap for the clubs to operate; and domestic pay-to-play leagues, which are even cheaper, because the clubs don’t pay. Pay-to-play. What an idea. Not only is it exclusionary, it’s, like, one step removed from giving your money to a casino. There’s a lot of that around South Bend, and not just in baseball.

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South Bend novelist makes it big

Here’s a pretty typical “rags to riches” story for this part of the country. One parent works for a Catholic high school; the other works for Notre Dame. Kid gets free tuition. Skips town as soon as possible. Moves to New York, then Los Angeles. Writes debut novel about how challenging it is in the Rust Belt. Becomes establishment darling.

Back in South Bend, the dozen-plus copies in the library system are all in use. People here love to root, root, root for the home team.

Newpaper profile 1 (The Guardian).

Newspaper profile 2 (Los Angeles Times).

Library event.

The sullied and the pure

A good article by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! :

“NCAA in a Nutshell: Bill Self, Kansas Win National Title with Infractions Case Still Pending.”

Good game, too. The 16-point comeback was breathtaking.

I’ve always liked the Jayhawks. They’re probably my favorite cheaters.

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Now, a dose of anti-cynicism. These videos are by the hero who unclogs drains.

In this episode, he travels north through New Hampshire, unblocking culverts as the snow melts.

And in this 44-minute video, he climbs into a culvert to clear away a beaver dam.

He is an amazing narrator. His sentences are punchy and staccato. He says his consonants crisply. He wastes no words.

In the first video, he peers out over campers on a frozen lake and describes the peril of driving on it as the weather warms. You can feel the ice melt beneath you.

In the second video, he is silent for long stretches while he clears out debris. The rhythm is lovely. It’s more like Terrence Malick than like Stanley Kubrick.

He concludes the video with scenes of bear tracks and chipmunks.

Same old, same old

I don’t care about college basketball anymore, but I do still enjoy the collision of mascots, cultures, and uniform colors in the NCAA Tournament. And so I liked this Yahoo! article from March 22:

“The 16 Most Interesting Potential Final Four Combinations.”

Ah, yes, I thought, reading through the list.

The “brainiac” Final Four.

The “party school” Final Four.

The “all-Catholic” Final Four.

The “‘when’s spring football practice?’” Final Four.

Any of the sixteen combinations would have been good, except the “blue blood” Final Four (Duke, North Carolina, Villanova, Kansas).

Guess which Final Four we’re getting.

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My two cents on the SCOTUS confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Senators Blackburn, Cruz, and Graham were in fine form – by which I mean, despicable form.

My right-leaning Facebook friends loved it, though.

Whine, whine, whine.

One wonders: if they don’t want a judge whose position is, Womanhood, as understood in the law, is not something for judges to define outside of the specific context of a court case informed by expert testimony of biologists – which is the long way of saying what I take Jackson’s quick and concise response to mean – what sort of judge could they want? Don’t they realize that Jackson’s response is friendly to conservative views of womanhood, and of the judiciary? Are they too busy scoffing to notice this – or to care?

(Notice, Jackson’s crucial qualifier, in this context, is omitted above.)

I am reading Proverbs, which says harsh things about scoffers and how to talk (or not talk) to them. And on Sunday, I heard a sermon about Luke 20:

One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and telling the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came with the elders and said to him, “Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority?” He answered them, “I will also ask you a question, and you tell me: Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” They discussed it with one another, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ all the people will stone us; for they are convinced that John was a prophet.” So they answered that they did not know where it came from. Then Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”
[NRSV]

A few points (not exactly the ones from the sermon, but not too different, either):

Jesus tells good news. Still, the religious leaders are determined to challenge him.

When they discuss how to answer Jesus’s question, they don’t consider which answer is true. Instead, they worry about saving face.

So, they don’t really care about finding out the truth.

So, Jesus doesn’t owe them an answer.

Even so, in the following verses, Jesus gives an answer (though he addresses it to the people). He tells the parable of the wicked tenants. This parable implies that his authority is from his Father (God); and that the leaders have no regard for this authority, though they’ve just made a show of asking about it.

Yahoo! trolls the world

There’s a tradition in U.S. soccer journalism of importing awful British pundits. Several of these donkeys have worked for Yahoo! Sports.

When I first moved to this country, I was delighted with Yahoo! for re-publishing other news agencies’ reports from all over the world. Every day, I’d read of the domestic leagues in Botswana or Thailand or wherever. Coverage of South America was especially good.

All of that fine reporting is long gone. Now, Yahoo!’s content is much narrower in scope, and the site employs its own journalists. These pundits have tended to sing the praises of (a) the English Premier League, (b) the U.S. men’s team, (c) the English men’s team, (d) Cristiano Ronaldo, (e) the other powerful European leagues and teams (France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s, and Spain’s), and (f) U.S. Major League Soccer – more or less in that order. Presumably, these are the topics that U.S. readers care about.

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For years, the especial jackass at Yahoo! was one Martin Rogers, who’s moved on to USA Today. How I loathed that “bloke.” … But now, I wonder if Ryan Bailey, the “wanker” du jour, is even worse.

First, Bailey doesn’t write. He makes videos. (Rogers would at least write his columns.)

Second, the videos are obnoxious, due to Bailey’s relentless cheerfulness.

Third, Bailey doesn’t just wish to preserve the status quo; he favors giving dramatically more power to the most mercenary entities.

See, for example, his recent video, “Making the Case to Scrap International Soccer.”

This is his case:

(1) International soccer sometimes conflicts with the Premier League.

(2) And the Premier League is obviously what everyone wants to view.

(3) Besides, we don’t have to scrap international soccer completely. If we were to keep soccer as an Olympic event, that would be good enough.

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This cannot be a serious argument. No one who isn’t already on Bailey’s side would be convinced. Bailey must be trolling.

But if Bailey is serious, he obviously hasn’t watched the South American World Cup qualifiers. If his idea of a good game is Brighton vs. Newcastle or Arsenal vs. Chelsea, he should try watching Uruguay vs. Chile, or Chile vs. Paraguay, or, least glamorous of all, Paraguay vs. Venezuela. (In the 2018 World Cup cycle, each of those South American fixtures turned out to be a matter of life and death.)

As for moving soccer’s main event to the Olympics: either the Olympics would have to be greatly expanded to accommodate a soccer tourney with the magnitude of the World Cup, or else the world’s main soccer tourney would have to be shrunk. The first option would leave in place all of what Bailey dislikes about the current system (including, I presume, the massive qualification phase). And the second option would fail to placate those who like having a big tourney and its attendant qualification games.

One suspects that the real motive for incorporating the world’s main soccer tourney into the Olympics would be to allow U.S. fans to feel better about themselves, since their country would likely excel in many other events. (“We didn’t reach the podium in soccer? Well, at least we earned the gold in beach volleyball.”)

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Bailey also states that players prefer to focus on their clubs and not their national teams.

To which every South American replies: You must be from England.

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Even so, I probably am more disillusioned with international soccer than I ever have been. This latest World Cup left me especially discouraged. I worry that international soccer will always be unjust – and not only contingently so; I worry that people’s valuation of it is conceptually confused.

I may discuss these issues further during the next several months.