With Or Without U

My alma mater Waterloo has generally not had a great football team. They had a golden era of sorts in the 90’s, when they were a perennial contender. I could point out that their good era coincided with my time at the school, but I don’t think that’s fooling anyone.

Unfortunately, it went downhill after I left. The lowlight was a one-year suspension following a steroid scandal, followed by a brutal six-year run with a combined record of 4-44. But now it appears that the team is much improved. So when I remembered that they had a big test against Western yesterday, I was curious how it went.

So here is the record of my quest to find the score of yesterday’s Western-Waterloo game on the Internet. This shouldn’t be asking too much; this is the Information Age, and I just want a tiny piece of information. But as I’ve mentioned in the past, it’s amazing how often we can’t seem to convey information. And it all gets worse when you combine it with the giant national shrug that is Canadian university athletics (or U Sports, as it is now officially branded.)

Remember, this isn’t some obscure event, it’s a football game played approximately 24 hours earlier, featuring one of the most storied sports programs in the country:

SportsNet.ca:

• Choose “More/U SPORTS” off of the top menu. I’m greeted by a month-old story about Duke’s Canadian tour
• I choose “Men’s Football” off the U SPORTS sub-menu.
• I’m given a list of the weekend’s games, which immediately refreshes to show a list of next-weekend’s games. I can’t seem to find a button to go back a week. There’s a “Previous month” link at the bottom, but it doesn’t work.

TSN.ca:

• I choose “Sports” from the top menu, which drops down a list of sports and leagues. NCAA is on it, but U Sports isn’t.
• I choose “More Sports” at the bottom of the list. It pops-up a second list of choices, including U Sports, though it’s below “Jay and Dan”
• I’m greeted by a list of stories, the newest of which is more than two months old. The fifth-most recent story is about Western winning the Vanier Cup last year.
• I can’t find any link for scores: the U Sports sub-menu just has an entry for “News,” which is the page I’m at. The score ticker at the top of the page only has CFL/NFL/MLB/NHL/MLS

CBC.ca:

• Hit “Menu” link
• Choose “Sports” from “quick links” list
• Try “scores” heading, but it only has NHL/MLB/CFL/NFL/MLS
• Try “More/All Sports” this sends me to a list of sports that includes entries for the Commonwealth games, Red Bull Crashed Ice, and Spruce Meadows equestrian, but no University sports

GlobeAndMail.com

• Choose “Sports” from top menu
• Choose “Football” from Sports menu
• There are several stories listed, I click one labeled as “U Sports roundup”
• A pop-up tells me that this content is only available to subscribers

TheStar.com

• Choose “Sports” from menu
• There are articles arranged into several categories depending on what team, sport, or city they are about, and which columnist wrote them. There’s nothing on University sports, and only three articles in the “Football” section, all on the NFL.

NaitonalPost.com

• Choose “Sports” from main menu, and “Football” from sub-menu. The sub-sub-menu only has CFL and NFL options
• Try “All Sports” item instead. That page has many sports articles, but I couldn’t find any on Canadian University sports. There’s a “Scoreboard” box, but it only has NHL/NBA/MLB/NFL/CFL

I then gave up on national sports outlets, and when to the Waterloo Region Record, site, where I quickly found a recap of the game. Unfortunately, Waterloo was about as successful as I was looking for info on the game, in which Western won easily, 67-7.

I Am Jack's Disappointment With Social Media

Watching the Playstation Fiesta Bowl, Ohio State got off to a slow start when their kicker missed his first two field goal attempts. That's not a big deal, unless you're a fan of The Ohio State University, which I'm not. But during the awkward let's-show-close-ups-of-the-guy-who-screwed-up shots, they mentioned that the kicker's name is Tyler Durbin. Of course, that's quite similar to Tyler Durden, the character from Fight Club played in the movie by Brad Pitt. So when I saw that "Tyler Durbin" was trending on Twitter, I had to check it out, assuming I'd see creative humour based on the movie.

But I was disappointed. All I saw was angry, mindless condemnation of Durbin. In a few cases, it even escalated to idle threats against him, should he ever return to campus. Okay, there were a very few that made Fight Club-related jokes of the form, "The first rule of Missed Field Goal Club is..." But mainly, I was just overwhelmed with the unrepentant anger expressed. Certainly, I've been frustrated when a team does poorly in the big game, but I've never felt that much anger at a single player. Oh, and by the way guys, if your team's first-half offense consists entirely of two missed 40+ yard field goals, then the kicker is not the main problem.

This brings to mind a complaint I have about how people portray Twitter. I've heard voices in the media describe Twitter as dominated by celebrities. That's always news to me, as I find that it's dominated by writers, comedians, scientists and activists. But that's because Twitter (and the Internet in general) is what you make it.

What's depressing is that this isn't a new point. Back in the nineties when it was first going mainstream, we reached a point where most people had heard of the Internet, but only a few had any significant experience with it. So you'd sometimes see reports in the media (the old media, I mean) where they'd get people's impression of their first experiences with the new medium. And their thoughts usually included, wow, there sure is a lot of porn out there.

That angle was great for the media to demonize the Net as a chaotic underworld. But it also betrayed something about the people being interviewed. Then, as now, porn rarely just appeared on your computer for no reason. If you found pornography on the Internet, it was probably because you were looking for it. So although most people seeing these stories didn't realize it, the interviewees were essentiallly admitting that they had been given a chance to use this amazing new communications technology, and used it to look for porn.

Really, nothing has changed. The Internet is still what you make of it. If anything, it has become more personalized; with social media, you can surround yourself with people of whatever type you want. While that often means that you insulate yourself from the realities of the world, it also means that you can ignore hateful sportsfans with limited movie experience. Just remember that even if you're ignoring them, they're still out there, only a hashtag away.

Five-Pin Bowling

This year, for the first time, the champion of American college football will be decided by a tournament. Okay, it's only three games between the top four out of over 100 teams. But compared to the old Rube Goldberg scheme of polls and formulas, it's a big change. Of course, in Canada, we've had a straightforward tournament deciding our university football champion for years.

That's meant that we've generally had an undisputed winner, but the anachronistic system down south has some advantages. One is what we've seen played out in front of us over the last few weeks: the bowls. A lot of people hate the bowls, or at least, hate the huge number of bowls that mean even mediocre teams get to play in the limelight. But I actually like that. One thing I've complained about in sports is when there's a hegemony of teams that are constantly at the top. I've advocated for changes to level the playing field, but I guess another possibility is to throw a bone to the lesser teams that have at least played the best with the hand they were dealt.

Why not have bowls in Canada? True, we already have much greater parity in Canadian university football, and you occasionally see a Windsor or Waterloo rise from a joke to a contender. But for much of the time, Laval and Western games are as predictable as Alabama or Oregon facing a lesser team. So if, say, York overachieves and has a winning season, why not let them end their season with a moment in the sun by beating Guelph in the Petro Canada Poutine Bowl?

Okay, there is the problem that "bowl" games are named after the Rose Bowl, which is named for the shape of the stadium. But Canadian football stadiums favour seats on the sides, with open ends. So we'll need a new word. Instead of the Maple Syrup Bowl, it'll have to be the Maple Syrup Half-Pipe.

While we're at it, let's also adopt the conference concept. American college teams organize themselves into conferences based on location or ability. There are good and bad aspects to it, but a good thing is that big, athletically-successful schools can compete amongst themselves in the Big 10 or SEC, while lesser schools can compete in Mountain West, or Mid-America Conference.

So let's have the top teams beat up each other in the Big Prairie or East 10 conferences, and give the lesser teams their own space. Maybe some more schools would participate in football if they knew there wasn't a requirement of a yearly execution against Western. Put Waterloo in the Great Lakes East conference with Brock and Trent, and maybe we'd have a chance.

My Wife Could Blog Better Than This

No, I haven't gotten married suddenly. Rather, that title is a reference a recent post-game speech by a college basketball coach, in which he said his wife could shoot better than his team, among other insults.  His rant has gone viral. At least, I assume it has "gone viral" in the sense that people are watching it online. I do know that it spread across television quickly. I don't think that's considered "going viral." Maybe we should call that "going bacterial" or something.

It was a weird experience seeing it repeated on sports news shows and updates. I believe it was the first time I've ever seen the progression of Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame in real time. At least, fifteen minutes was the amount of time it took me to get sick of seeing it. Ol' Andy didn't anticipate that fame would greatly outlive our interest. The coach's rant will live on in talk shows and recaps forever.

That got me thinking: There are some famous college basketball coaches, but generally they don't get a lot of mainstream renown. For instance, I'm something of a sports fan, yet I only recently realized that Mike Krzyzewski, Mike Shuh-shev-skee, and "Coach K" are all the same person. I've also heard of John Wooden and Rick Pitino. Beyond that, I can only think of Bobby Knight, and he's mostly famous for his tantrums too.

But this coach has just vaulted to the top of the list. There are surely other coaches that have accomplished great things on and off the court, but they remain anonymous, while some jerk with no sense of restraint (or coaching skills, it would seem) has become a celebrity.

My point is that it's unfortunate that fame so often comes from poor behaviour. Usually sports is - for better or worse - a meritocracy. But even there you can see The Ford Effect, where the biggest rewards are not for success but for being ridiculous.

Say It Ain't So, Te'o

I was going to go through a big explanation of my thoughts on controversial college football player Manti Te'o, but a flowchart is worth a thousand words:

...and that's the trouble: we have no way of knowing what to feel about Manti Te'o, at least just yet.  But worse, whatever we feel, it's something that we will feel very strongly.  This kid mislead us and tugged at our heartstrings, or this innocent kid was mislead by so-called friends.  We'll probably find out in the next few days.  But until then, he's a pop-cultural Schrodinger's Cat, simultaneously villain and victim.

For me, if a person is in that situation, I'm going to tread lightly.  Whatever pleasure I might get from ridiculing the perpetrator of a national hoax, it's not worth the guilt I would feel if it turned out I had made fun of someone who's already gone through a lot of pain for another's humour.  But most people seem to be taking a different approach, seeing him as at least half-guilty, and thus as viable a pop-cultural target as anyone.  It's not like there are no other targets right now in the area of heart-warming stories involving sports and cancer that turned out to be deception.

Bowled Over

The American college football National Championship was decided this week, and all anyone can talk about is the quarterback's girlfriend.  If you didn't see the game - or wisely bailed out early on the one-sided contest - there was a moment when the cameras showed Katherine Webb, girlfriend of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron.  At that point, the eyes of veteran announcer Brent Musburger sprang out of his head towards Ms. Webb, his heart shooting out of his chest with every beat.  Okay, obviously I don't know that's what happened; as a commentator, the cameras weren't showing him.  But based on the profound effect her beauty had on him I can only assume he was reacting as a cartoon character.

A lot of people found it offensive, or just awkward.  I'd go with the latter: My policy has always been that there's nothing wrong with acknowledging a person's beauty, or even mentioning a personal attraction.  So I see nothing wrong with mentioning that the quarterback's girlfriend is beautiful - though it is about as surprising as mentioning that the quarterback has a strong arm.  You'd think that a guy who's covered college football for twenty years would have noticed the trend in hotness of quarterbacks' significant others.  And that brings me to why it was awkward.  Not that Musburger attested to her attractiveness, but that he was so moved by her beauty that he seemed to lose his composure, as though he had never seen such a woman before - also odd for a guy who's spent most of the last twenty years on college campuses.  Whether you're approaching this issue from a perspective of feminism or chivalry, you'll agree that a man should have some control over his hormones.

This brings up something I've never understood about men.  I mean other men.  And that is their over-the-top reaction to certain women.  Okay, you're a heterosexual man, you're attracted to women.  Some women more than others.  Logically there has to be a "most attractive" woman in the world for you.  But in my experience that woman is maybe 0.01% hotter than the second most beautiful woman.  It seems odd to pick out one exceptional unattainable woman and claim that she is head and shoulders above all other exceptional unattainable women.  Most human traits are like that: there's usually little to separate the top people in any one quality.  If, for instance, you put the top two football teams on the same field, you'd expect them to be so closely matched that there's no way one would crush the other by 28 points.  Okay, bad example.

Really, I think this phenomenon of men claiming one woman as the far-and-away most attractive is something that helps them in relationships.  By maintaining the idea that one woman can be that superlative, they can plausibly maintain the claim that the woman they're with is the best in the world.  If any man were to admit that many women are attractive to him, it would deprive him of any success with women.  Crap.

March is Mostly Over and I'm Still Not Mad

Somehow the NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament never seems to capture my attention.  I've never followed American college sports.  But still, somehow I manage to care about football's bowl season.  That's strange: arguably the teams in the lesser bowls are more pathetic than the worst basketball seeds.  But for some reason I can bring myself to care about Wheatman State University and their 6 and 6 record for three hours, and to actually feel like it matters whether or not they win the Speed Stick Canola Bowl.  And yet, I can't summon any enthusiasm for Soapstone College for two hours while they try to win the Midwestern 5 vs. 12 game.

In the past week, I have made an effort to watch some of the wall-to-wall basketball coverage.  Some upsets and close games made for entertaining viewing, but I still don't feel like putting in the effort to keep up with it.  This year, I couldn't even be bothered to look up Gonzaga on Wikipedia to remind myself where it is.

I guess one reason is the play-down, knock-out, everyone-loses-but-the-champs format.  Wheatman State may only have clinched a winning record, and the adulation of a half-full stadium of fans, but their reward is to feel like champs for a night.  Even if it was for beating-up on a mediocre team that merely had one more weakness than them.  But in the early March Madness rounds, teams are just playing for the honour of going one more round before being pummeled by a top seed, and their only reward is polite applause from fans who are only there because they couldn't get tickets for the Duke game tomorrow.

It doesn't help that the TV coverage bounces from one game to another every few minutes.  You start a relationship with a couple of teams, find a flimsy reason to favour one over the other, and then you're whisked off to another game.  But if these game fragments are going to dominate sports programming for the rest of the month, then maybe I'll make another effort to... Oooh, Women's curling!