Isobel Cup, Overdog Leafs, what the CFL's future debate is really about, and a 'Pony Exce$$' retrospective
Formatting and presentation matters, so today will start with some quick hits before a long SportsLit Segue about a college football scandal that actually sold Young Neate on the sport.
The National Women’s Hockey League is holding its playoff this weekend, a brief riff on what we really talk about when we talk about the future of Canadian pro football and the voter suppression efforts in the United States probably have some ramifications for Canada and sports. All of that is setup for a really long and esoteric TL;RL essay about a fabled college football scandal.
But remember, it is Boston
It took the Toronto Maple Leafs about a century to realize that never beating Boston in the playoffs was a great bit. The Toronto Six are already at that stage in their first season! Or the Six and leading scorer Mikyla Grant-Mentis could beat the Boston Pride in the Isobel Cup semifinal on Friday (5:30 p.m. ET, Twitch in Canada).
Hey, memes and uncle jokes are one way of helping full-time salary-and-bennies women’s pro hockey get over, along with watching their big games. Toronto was on a four-win streak before the league’s Lake Placid bubble season was cancelled due to positive COVID19 tests. Boston already has two championship banners in its six-season history, and the final four is on their home ice, so yeah, there is part of a story line if you are dropping in a casual.
It is not for me to say how differences between the league and the Dream Gap Tour should play out. Here is to hoping it keeps moving toward the day when a couple of hundred hockeywomen are paid to play, coach and support other women. We all win when that happens.
And if I am wishcasting, the league will have a team in southeastern Ontario called the Kingston Kodiaks, who will occasionally bust out some Red Barons reverse retros.1
The Leafs make some NHL betting history
No team either trips on or just barely clears a low bar like the Leafs, eh. One of my writing gigs is in sports information, so I checked OddsShark to confirm that the Leafs had never been as heavily favoured in an away game as they were against the Ottawa Senators on Thursday.
Toronto was a -310 favorite by game time, which means one would have to risk $31 for a $10 profit. That is the deepest into ‘minus money’ that Toronto has gone in an away game for all the seasons OddsShark has kept records. So do not look so shocked that the Leafs, facing a last-place team that had played the night before and was using its fifth goalie of the season, only played with the lead for all of 2½ minutes and needed almost all of the three-on-three overtime to score the winning goal.
The old mark was -280 on Dec. 28, 2001 against the Atlanta Thrashers. Mats Sundin-era2 Toronto lost that one, but hey, it was the first game back after Christmas and Atlanta at least had Dany Heatley and Ilya Kovalchuk.
Being pro-Canadian football
A few years ago, Doug Saunders published Maximum Canada: Why 35 Million Canadians Are Not Enough. It argued that Canada will need a population of 100 million by 2100 to be competitive and the time is now to build the infrastructure to support that. The other framework Saunders offered is that there is Minimum Canada with an “inward-facing worldview,” and the Maximum Canada that is ambitious and wants to get ahead on merit.
The Canadian Football League, as you know, is debating its format and its future after opting out of playing in 2020. In the long view, the CFL was sort of conceived in a Minimum Canada framework, but it will need less of that and more Maximum Canada in order to be viable.
That is my macro hope. The micro one is to have more vertical integration from the grassroots up through to the pro league.
Another general observation is that CFL Twitter tends to get way too far into the mud about rules. Really, there are only a few sacred cows when it comes to the format.
Creating jobs and professional development for Canadian football players. The league’s ratio is part of the intent of the first part. The second part is where the league has historically had a gap. It is rare to see our guys in the GLOREE BOY roles of quarterback, featured running back, shutdown cornerback or edge rusher since there is a lack of interest by the league in early identification, even though the emergence of Canadians playing the ball-skill positions in the NFL, such as Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Chase Claypool, show it can be done.
In terms of game play, having three downs, unlimited motion by the offensive team and no fair catches on punts is non-negotiable.
Supporting female participation in football, whether tackle or flag.
Also, one minor rules thingy. Canada’s rule about a fumble out of bounds — possession to the last team to touch the ball, rather than having an extended replay review to see who was the last team to establish possession with two feet in bounds — is so much simpler.
Georgia on one’s mind
Every no-good, horrible, very bad policy idea that originates in the Incited States from one particular wing along the left-to-right political spectrum is imported to Canada eventually. Faced with an aging voting base, one party simply pushes to try to choose the electors. It is hella antidemocratic, and what happened in the state of Georgia on Wednesday has a ripple effect all the way up to here. A BIPOC female legislator, Rep. Park Cannon, was arrested for knocking on the door of the governor’s office. (The same thing happened with another legislator in 2018.)
That image of Cannon being arrested by police officers definitely conjures up images of Selma, Ala., circa 1965, and it can only be imagined that might how schoolchildren in 2075 will see it. Of course, some will not.
Subscribing to Greg Palast’s newsletter is one way to keep up with this. The disenfranchisement dirty deeds are also directed at Asian-American voters. The other thing is that Major League Baseball is supposed to have the all-star game in Atlanta in July. Via Cup of Coffee, there is a column from Bill Shaikin saying there is no way Major League Baseball can state support for civil rights and then stage a tentpole event in a state that engages in this foolishness.
If MLB does go ahead with this, it will be less progressive than the NFL … the NFL 30 years ago. The Super Bowl at the end of the 1992-93 season was pulled from Phoenix due to Arizona’s failure to recognize Martin Luther King Day as a holiday. The game was played in Pasadena, Calif., instead.
SportsLit Segue — 26 March
The infamous words in one of American college sports’ biggest corruption scandals — “you have a payroll to meet” — were spoken on this date in 1985.
The decision by powerful men connected with the Southern Methodist University Mustangs football team, including a two-time Texas governor named Bill Clements, to honour contracts to pay players under the table even while the National Collegiate Athletic Association was about to drop a big hammer of sanctions on SMU proved fateful. Twenty-three months later, SMU became the first and only major-college football team to receive the so-called death penalty.
Some 3½ decades later, the hell of it for SMU might be that choosing to pay out a few thousand dollars apiece to players after already being busted probably cost the school’s athletic program somewhere up in the hundreds of millions in revenue. The Mustangs, who have played in a skein of second-rank conferences since 1996, have recovered to the point of being a decent team that occasionally pops up in the AP Top 25 poll and plays in a cheap-content-for-ESPN bowl game at Christmastime. But a Dallas-based team with some proud history would have been an ideal member of the Big 12 conference. The Big 12’s current media rights deal with ESPN is worth US$200M per year.
Shorttermism is death, but death to shamateurism, too. It is 2021 and athletes in revenue sports still do not have professional contracts.
The SMU story was/is journalistic dynamite. It had/has everything in terms of Texas-sized egos and excess, and in raising uncomfortable questions about why college sports must be a billions-of-dollars business that “depends on very poor student-athletes,” as author David Whitford put it in the 30-for-30 doc Pony Exce$$. (Short answer: ’cause the cruelty is the point.) There is also the great American need to make someone or something the symbol of widespread corruption, typically right as the end of a decade looms. It beats tackling the widespread corruption. The Mustangs were guilty as hell, but in truth they were, to borrow a phrase Jared Yates Sexton has applied to the state of Texas’ junior United States senator, “an indictment of a system that has been corrupted and malfunctioning for way, way too long.”
College football was shady before it adopted the forward pass.
Whether it is Ben Johnson and steroids, Pete Rose and betting on baseball games, Barry Bonds and Slugging While Black in baseball’s steroid era, or Tiger Woods and infidelity, someone goes down. It creates a distraction from whatever greater deception is being carried out at the time. So it goes.
Filmmaker Thaddeus D. Matula’s Pony Exce$$ (ESPN, 2010) is probably the most accessible treatment of the Southern Methodist saga. It does what a 30-for-30 doc should — bring sports-minded seekers into someone else’s deeply personal story, which might have been big news at the time but has lost context over time. It was the highest-rated documentary in the history of ESPN and won a Peabody Award. You could tell how much it meant to Matula, whose father was a professor at SMU, to tell that story.
The timing of both the scandal and Matula’s film, made two decades later, has helped freeze it in time.
The you-had-to-be-there part with SMU is that college football in the 1980s was in the early days of an economic revolution that turned it from a regionalized obsession into today’s behemoth that needs to die.
In the summer of 1984, the big football schools won an antitrust case against the NCAA at the Supreme Court and wrested control of their media rights. One part of a basic twofold effect was that tradition and school spirit would never again count for as much as having a footprint in major media markets. That led to having Rutgers in the Big Ten, basically.
The other was the NCAA had to find other ways to affirm its relevance. It found that through control of March Madness and by beefing up rule enforcement in football. It is also not for nothing that this coincided with another current coursing through the sport that Jeff Pearlman pointed out in his book Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty (Harper, 2008): the Miami Hurricanes were exactly what cultural conservatives who ran college football had always sweated on sleepless nights.
As Pearlman put it, before Miami came along, Black football players had always been expected to conform to a white society, but ‘The U’ embraced a strong Black identity and expected a white society to adapt to them.
Miami and SMU (here one also thinks of Michael Weinreb’s book Season of Saturdays) were rogue elements that had to be controlled. The trouble was that there were also name-brand teams that were dirty at that time. The Kentucky Wildcats, college basketball’s Big Blue, ended up on probation. Football’s Oklahoma Sooners took a decade to recover from sanctions.
At the risk of telegraphing, white hats at that time included the likes of Penn State and various Big Ten institutions.
Personally, all that made at least one culturally-American Canadian Xennial in Kingston, a border town, more interested in college sports.
One would not presume to speak for the general interest level Canadian sports seekers have in college sports. Some of us really get into it, reflecting that whole culturally American deal, and some steer clear of the entire hornet’s nest.
Kingston is about a two-hour drive from Syracuse, N.Y., so there was a connection to Big East basketball at its apex in the 1980s. Both SportsLit hosts had a Big East team (Syracuse for Neate, Seton Hall for Neil Acharya).
Becoming a college football fan of it probably was so simple as the fact it was readily available on over-the-air stations pulled in from Watertown, N.Y., right while one was starting to understand they were better at watching sports and writing about them than playing them.
But the notion that this sport which seemed fun on the field also had this seamy underbelly was strangely compelling. If people cared so much about winning that they were willing to bend and break the rules, why not watch it?
On that same plane, college football and hoops and the NFL were also a conduit for understanding the cruelty is the point, rather than an unintended effect, of how the United States is set up. It was escapist fantasy where you could watch a SEC game from the South or a Big Ten game from the Upper Midwest and see the passion you saw little of in your own backyard, while being glad said backyard had more free healthcare and less jock culture.
Canada has its own cruelty to the point sports paradigm called major junior hockey, which really should be retermed age-group minor pro hockey. That the athlete pool is limited to “pretty good rich kids” just adds to the cruelty.
All of that was, hopefully, a lesson in empathizing and identifying with the performer who fights against those great odds. Seeing something of yourself in people who are not like you is how we get through this life. Of course, at the end of the day, if you watch you are part of the product, regardless of whether your empathy is with the 20-year-old who takes on all the risk or his millionaire coach.
Pony Exce$$, by being released in 2010, also got in under the wire before the truly massive scandals in ‘College Sports, Inc.’ blew sky-high. By no means should there be clemency for repeatedly breaking “clearly agreed upon rules.” But its effect would have been lessened if it had come out after 2011, when journalist Sara Ganim began breaking the news of Penn State, that self-professed paragon of padded-up piety, had covered up child rape by Jerry Sandusky.
More recently, in the pious Big Ten, Michigan State paid out a half-billion dollars in settlements to sexual violence survivors over failure to monitor a doctor who molested dozens of young female athletes, including prepubescent girls. Ohio State faces a reckoning over the decades-long abuse of male wrestlers. In 2020, Michigan paid out over $20 million to athletic alumni who were sexually abused by a sports doctor.
There is probably also an irony that Baylor University, a Dallas-adjacent school that was invited to join the Big 12 while SMU was wandering the desert, also demeaned itself with a woefully insufficient response to sexual violence against women.
That all goes right at the top of the hierarchy of moral rot in a sporting institution. Actually letting the labourers have some share of the economic rents, albeit under the table, goes somewhere far below.
(Short note on Sara Ganim, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her reportage the year she turned 25. She did not write a book about Penn State. There is something to be said for not writing a book about something that shows the depth of human misery.)
If you have hung in for this long, here are the reccos on the subject.
Matula’s doc drew upon David Whitford’s book A Payroll To Meet: A Story of Greed, Corruption and Football at SMU (MacMillan, 1989). In that same year, Sports Illustrated scribe Rick Telander, a former Big Ten cornerback at Northwestern, published The Hundred Yard Lie: The Corruption of College Football and What We Can Do to Stop It (University of Illinois Press, 1989), which included calls for a radical reform where universities would sponsor teams in “age group professional football.”
A valuable alternate SMU perspective comes from David Blewett, who was a defensive lineman for the Mustangs during their final three seasons before the death penalty. In The Pony Trap: Escaping the 1987 SMU Football Death Penalty (Adriel Publishing, 2012), Blewett offers an engrossing story about his quixotic fight, in his mid-40s, to get back in shape and prove a point by petitioning to have his final year of football playing eligibility restored.
Blewett also says SMU’s punishment seemed to have the burnt-orange fingerprints of the University of Texas all over it, since the main state school in Austin certainly had it out for the private school in Dallas. That does not absolve SMU, but it adds a little more conspiracy sauce.
— 30 —
My sister is an alumna of the Greater Kingston Girls Hockey Association, and in its early days the youth teams went by the moniker of Kingston Kodiaks. The local teams are now the Ice Wolves.
This game might have been Peak Mats Sundin — one goal, one assist, and +4 plus/minus in a 5-4 defeat. In other words, the Sundin-Mikael Renberg-Jonas Hoglund line won their mini-game 4-0, and the rest of the team lost 5-0.