George Atallah is the assistant executive director of external affairs for the N.F.L. Players Association, which means that he and his boss, DeMaurice Smith, are the top representatives for perhaps the most prominent labor union in history: NFL players.
We ran a contest yesterday with a simple question: what do the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers have in common? There are many correct answers, but there was one in particular I was looking for. I was worried it might be hard, and I was ready to step in and give a clue. But I was wrong to be worried. The post went up at 10:30 a.m.; the first correct answer came in at 10:31 a.m., in the very first comment.
I mean beside the fact they’re both playing in the Super Bowl this Sunday, or that they’ve both won a bunch of NFL championships, or that they’ve both reached the Super Bowl in recent years as a No. 6 seed. There may be lots of other commonalities I’m not thinking of, but whoever is first to give the answer I am thinking of will get his/her choice of Freakonomics swag, which now includes the just-released Freakonomics movie DVD and a movie poster.
When my wife saw the cover of the new book Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, which was sitting on my bedside table, all she could do was shake her head.
Are NFL coaches starting to listen to economists?
My gut feeling is that the answer to that question is almost certainly a resounding “no.” There are at least three pieces of data that hint at the possibility that economists might be making some headway.
I bet you cannot — although if you happen to know my rooting tendencies, you might have a clue.
Not long ago, we made a Freakonomics Radio podcast asking whether the NFL might someday sell ad space on its jersey fronts, as soccer teams around the world already do. In European soccer in particular, the revenue can be substantial.
On the football field, as in nearly every arena in life, the punishment doesn’t always fit the crime.
James Harrison of the Pittsburgh Steelers has become the poster child for the NFL’s crackdown on dangerous tackling. And he has paid the price in fines. His teammate Troy Polamalu has defended him, but Harrison’s reputation as a dirty player is growing. (As a Steelers fan, I do not subscribe to this view.)
No, this trick won’t work in the NFL, but Driscoll Middle School in Corpus Christi, Tex., pulled it off brilliantly.
Kal Raustiala, a professor at UCLA Law School and the UCLA International Institute, and Chris Sprigman, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, are experts in counterfeiting and intellectual property. They have been guest-blogging for us about copyright issues. Today, they write about the roles of “tweakers” and “pioneers” in the innovation world.
The theory behind copyright is simple – if we allow anyone to copy a good new idea, then no one will come up with the next one. The theory makes perfect sense – in theory. In previous posts, however, we have described how fashion designers, chefs, comedians and pornographers all continue to create, even though others are free to copy their fashion designs, recipes, jokes, and . . . images. In this post, we’ll take a look at something different: football.
Correct me if I’m wrong — I couldn’t find mention of it anywhere — but as the NFL season opens, the Pittsburgh Steelers would seem to be the only team that’s ever had three black quarterbacks on its 53-man roster: Dennis Dixon, Byron Leftwich, and Charlie Batch.
We recently solicited your questions for Bill Barnwell, a Football Outsider and one of the many authors of the new Football Outsiders Almanac. Here are his replies, which cover everything from miracle turnarounds to the role of injuries to his own background.
Bill Barnwell of Football Outsiders is here to answer any football questions you might like to throw at him.
If college and professional football are the unique and entire domain of male athletes, such that former players are most likely the most knowledgeable as to the game’s nuances both on and off the field, why is it that, while all the off-field commentary is also male-dominated, all the on-field interviewing and commentary is done by females who never touched a football, let alone played a down?
Football great Emmitt Smith was just inducted into the Hall of Fame. I had the great pleasure of playing golf with Emmitt a few years back. It is a round I will never forget.
We blogged last fall about the Book of Odds, an interesting site that generates “odds statements” of all sorts. Now, David Gassko and Ian Stanczyk of the Book of Odds have written a guest post which answers just the kind of question we like to ask around here: What are the odds that a given cow will make it to the Super Bowl?
Quite a bit more than on Saturday, to be sure — which is when the Wall Street Journal published this article about the psychic value of the Vikings to its fans. The tally: $530.65 per year.
We recently solicited your questions for George Atallah, the assistant executive director of external affairs for the N.F.L. Players Association. Atallah responded in a fashion that I believe is unique among all previous participants in our reader-generated Q&A’s: he answered every question you asked. If thoroughness counts for anything – not to mention candor and the willingness to engage sticky subjects – then the players would seem to have strong advocates in Atallah and his boss DeMaurice Smith.
Bring your questions for George Atallah, and follow him on Twitter at @gatallah.
It’s well-established that domestic violence is bad for the children directly exposed to it (and possibly their classmates as well) but experts still debate the drivers of family violence. Economists have traditionally characterized violence as a signal to outside parties or as part of an incentive contract between family members.
I respect Bill Belichick more today than I ever have.
Last night he made a decision in the final minutes that led his team the New England Patriots to defeat. It will likely go down as one of the most criticized decisions any coach has ever made. With his team leading by six points and just over two minutes left in the game, he elected to go for it on fourth down on his own side of the field. His offense failed to get the first down, and the Indianapolis Colts promptly drove for a touchdown.
This season the University of Texas at Austin’s football team is scheduled or has already played against such athletic powerhouses as the University of Louisiana-Monroe (59-20), the University of Texas-El Paso (64-7), and the University of Central Florida (on November 7). Most other top-flight teams are also scheduled against Division I schools that they are likely to wallop. Why? Very simple–a team must win 6 games to qualify for a post-season game; and scheduling a few teams that are nearly certain to be beaten makes the post-season minimum requirement easily attainable.
In both sports, it’s expected that someone or something “almost always get[s] hurt,” writes Malcolm Gladwell in this New Yorker article, where he goes over the sports’ similarities — including the reason why, despite their brutality, both will likely stick around for a long time.
As bad as most prognosticators are about most things, football prognosticators are really bad. Go back and look at just about any group of experts’ predictions for the coming season and you’ll see that their success rate is lower than that of the average monkey with a dartboard.
I have been participating in a fantasy football league for the last few years with many former college econ majors as well as two econ Ph.D. students. We are all still very plugged in to economic policy debate too. Anyway, we all pride ourselves on having amusing or clever team names. This year, with the current economic crisis, I thought a team name related to economics (in the academic or popular sense) would be appropriate.
At least two factors are conspiring to turn a top N.F.L. draft pick into a liability rather than a prize. “A No. 1 N.F.L. draft pick may be one of the most overvalued assets in our society.” The first is the rotten economy, which means that a team with a top pick will be compelled to spend a huge chunk . . .
Matthew J. Darnell, writing on Yahoo!’s N.F.L. blog, talks about how Andre Smith, an Alabama offensive lineman slotted as a potential overall No. 1 draft pick, has destroyed his own value with a series of bad decisions and, most recently, a really bad workout in front of pro scouts: I can’t recall anyone’s draft stock falling quite like Andre Smith’s. . . .
How about a blogger stimulus? (Earlier) Being murdered by a pacemaker hacker is possible, but highly unlikely. (Earlier) The Brian Lehrer Show wants your “uncommon economic indicators.” The streets of Central America proclaim a different football champion than we do. Photo from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.