The Rise of Okiefascism
David Boren, former U.S. senator and current president of the University of Oklahoma, has given voice to the latest oddball trend in American political culture—calling for the selective denial of the results of sporting events. While certainly not on par with “Islamofacism� or even neo-conservatism, what I’ll dub “Okiefascism� in honor of Boren and his angry student body nevertheless represents the latest annoyance to modern civilization.
The problem started this past Saturday, when OU’s celebrated football team played the University of Oregon on the road. Under the contract governing the teams’ match, officials from Oregon’s Pac-10 Conference ran the show. In the game’s final two minutes, the game officials made two calls that went against OU. Because instant replay was adopted for college football this year, the calls were reviewed but ultimately affirmed by separate replay officials. Oklahoma lost the game by one point.
In the days since the game, OU’s reaction “has transitioned from righteous indignation to outright insanity,� in the words of ESPN columnist Pat Forde. Coaches complain about poor officiating every day. It’s unusual, however, for the university president to get involved. David Boren didn’t just complain—he sent a letter to his own Big 12 Conference demanding “that the game should not go into the record books as a win or a loss by either team in light of the level of officiating mistakes.�
Aside from Boren’s letter writing, some OU fans have taken to making death threats against the Pac-10 officials responsible for their crimes against "Sooner Nation". (The officials were suspended today for one game by the Pac-10.) The replay official old the Associated Press that his wife and kids have been threatened, and that his own health has been compromised.
Boren’s demand to erase the game from the record books—as if there’s a single canonical book—would be laughable if it wasn’t part of a pattern of such cries from politicians and the media to do so in other sports. There’s been mounting calls to remove or “asterisk� the home run records of Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire, because of alleged (yet unproven) steroid use. Sen. Jim Bunning, a Hall of Fame baseball player himself, has mounted a crusade to restore Roger Maris’s “clean� home run record from 1962. (It’s degenerated to the point where reporters have preemptively “asterisked� Ryan Howard, a Phillies player who is approaching Maris’s hallowed record of 61 home runs.)
Another recent story involves football player Reggie Bush, now of the New Orleans Saints and formerly of the University of Southern California. During his Heisman Trophy-winning season at USC last year, it’s been alleged that Bush and his family accepted $100,000 in payments from two marketing agents. The NCAA—which forbids players and their families from making any money without its consent—is investigating the accusations. In theory, the NCAA could “vacate� every USC game that Bush played in, which would also strip the school of its two national championships. Bush could also lose his Heisman trophy.
If you peruse the NCAA’s “official� record books, you will see numerous asterisks listing records that were later “vacated� because of rules infractions discovered after-the-fact. Indeed, the NCAA men’s basketball championship games in 1971 and 1980 never “officially� happened because the losing teams were retroactively disqualified. Interestingly, the records of the winning teams in those games remain un-asterisked. How can one team’s records exist when the other team never participated? Since the NCAA didn’t physically erase the memories of everyone who witnesses those “vacated� games or otherwise destroy the visual evidence,
Similarly, even if you vacate the result of the Oklahoma-Oregon game, and even if you declare all statistics from that game void, everyone saw what happened. The people who vote in football pools and for individual awards are unlikely to simply ignore what happened. Officiating mistakes, no matter how egregious, don’t negate reality.
Sporting events aren’t scientific experiments. You don’t throw out the “bad data� because the laboratory conditions weren’t ideal. You can correct mistakes during a game—that’s why there are officials—but not after the fact. The very reason sports are considered legitimate is because, unlike politics, facts aren’t arbitrarily re-written to accommodate the person who complains the loudest.
It’s also important to separate the records themselves—the data—from the subjective values that individuals hold. Many who argue against baseball’s home records, for instance, are less concerned about steroids than they are preserving their own nostalgia for Roger Maris and Hank Aaron. Indeed, when those men were breaking Babe Ruth’s records, many argued that it was a travesty that “less distinguished� players should displace baseball’s greatest player. Along those lines, even if you vacate USC’s season or Bush’s Heisman, the fans of those teams will still remember and value the experience of watching those games. More people ultimately watch and enjoy sporting events than read and obsess over record books.
And then there’s the David Borens and Jim Bunnings of the world who seek the mythical “perfect� records that are untainted by the passage of time or the errors of normal human action. For these men, sports is another theater of human activity in need of suffocating regulation and strict legality. They are the reason that things like “instant replay� even exist. As with the state’s parade of market interventions, the Okiefascists insist upon more and more rules to deal with every perceived injustice. NFL referees are forced to explain decisions to a degree that would make the Supreme Court gag. Routine fumbles are scrutinized with greater intensity than the Zapruder film. And now, the president of a flagship state university—a supposed bastion of academia—has said that it is an “understatement� to call two bad calls in a football game an “outrageous injustice.�
Okiefascism, if left unopposed, may eventually destroy major sports in America. There’s only so many new regulations and public condemnations that the system can tolerate before people throw up their hands in disgust and find a less authoritarian form of entertainment.
Comments (8)
As an Okie and a huge Sooner fan, I think the writer misunderstands the situation. Million of dollars are involved. The BSC has a complex math model for determining rank, the results of which determines who goes to bowl games. Playing in bowl games mean millions of dollars of income for the universities involved. While the AP writers may discount the game, the BSC models can't. The loss to Oregon could cost OU a bowl game slot and millions of dollars. In addition, participation in a bowl game makes recruiting top players much easier, which in turn helps win games the next year. Winning teams get more TV time which brings in even more millions of dollars.
As a fan, I feel like OU should have been able to prevent Oregon from scoring after the on-side kick. But as an alumni, I can see where the dishonesty on the part of the refs, even after a review of the video, can cost the University of Oklahoma much needed income.
Published: September 20, 2006 8:52 AM
Roger M, I think the writer is dead on. OU fans had no trouble with the bureaucracy and "fairness" of the BSC and its "complex math model for determining rank" when the model lofted them into the BCS championship game versus LSU in 2003 (despite a loss in their own conference championship game). Nor did OU fans and administrators disparage the system when the BCS lofted them into the 2005 BCS championship game against SC, despite the fact that Auburn (#3 in the BCS) had beaten more top-ten teams than SC and OU combined. Over the years, OU has benefited from bad referees and blown calls, just like everyone else. Live by the BSC; die by the BCS. But don't cry "foul" only when the politicized system works against OU. Decry the politicized system altogether.
Published: September 20, 2006 9:28 AM
Anonymous, I'm not saying that OU hasn't been hypocritical in the past, but that's not the current problem. They're not attacking the BSC system, just the one ruling. Everyone attacks the BSC model, but I happen to think it's about as fair as humans can make the system. I was just defending Boren's response, which seems exaggerated until you consider the amount of money involved. Keep in mind that the millions in income from bowl games and TV pay for every other sport on campus except basketball, as well as scholarships and infrastructure.
Published: September 20, 2006 10:00 AM
I think the only way to solve the problem is to hold Congressional hearings on the matter.
Published: September 20, 2006 10:07 AM
Oklahoma is willing to go to the UN!
Published: September 20, 2006 11:28 AM
You hit a nerve for me -- I have written several times about emergent order and top-down vs. bottom-up systems as it relates to sports records. Please pardon the wandering digression:
Today I was listening to sports-talk radio for a while, and the topic of conversation was "Should major league baseball nullify (or asterisk) Barry Bond's home run records because he is strongly suspected to have taken steroids." Now personally, I don't believe anyone has broken Roger Marris's single season home run record who was not taking steroids. How much that bothers me depends on what day of the week you ask me, but my answer to the record book question never varies: no, the MLB doesn't have to do a thing. Here's why, though get ready for a digression.
Perhaps the toughest libertarian-capitalist concept for most people to grasp, even tougher than the idea that wealth is not zero-sum, is that of emergent or bottom-up order. Capitalism is all about order emerging bottom-up: Market prices emerge without any one person setting them from above; supply matches demand without any central body coordinating production. For many people, this process is some sort of black magic not to be trusted -- just observe Congress and their silly proposals on gasoline prices, reminding us of savages who don't understand how nature works performing elaborate rituals to make the crops grow.
In fact, this whole issue of emergent order vs. grand design is actually a point of incredible inconsistency in American politics. Observe certain liberals, strong secularists who reject the concepts of God and intelligent design in favor of evolution and bottom-up emergent order in the natural world, but then in turn reject emergent order in human relations and economics in favor of top-down not-so-intelligent design as run by the federal government. You have only to remember back to Katrina to see the public demand for, followed by the spectacular failure of, top down relief approaches.
The other day I had an argument with a friend about one of those commercial star registries -- you have probably heard the commercial-- pay $X and have a star named after someone you love. My friend was appalled. He said - "do you know that they have no authority to name those stars. Don't people know its not official. They just put your name in a book somewhere - but its not the official book in Switzerland (or wherever the hell he said it was)." My reaction was -- so what? Who had the right to call the other one "official"? The standard star naming by scientists is accepted because it is useful. But that doesn't mean I can't come up with my own naming system. Let's see, I think I am going to rename the Orion constellation as "Warren". Yes that's much better. Now, its unlikely anyone else will find a useful reason to adopt this same convention.... The fact is that the star names we use represent a consensus that has emerged over time. In many cases, constellations and stars had competing names (e.g. Big Bear vs. Big Dipper) that still have not been fully reconciled.
Or here is an example that might work better for modern Internet users. The Internet does have an official central body that sets addressing conventions. They set up the rules by which I can lease the rights to www.coyoteblog.com and the 12-digit IP address that is attached to it. This is the "official" way to address the web.
But early on, as web sites proliferated, entrepreneurs attempted to impose their own order on the Internet, sort-of the equivalent of suggesting an entirely new set of names for stars. Yahoo and AOL both developed huge hierarchical directories, effectively imposing a nested-tree addressing system over the Internet's flat addresses. And for a while, these approaches prospered, as users found these to be a more useful way to organize the Internet. Then, along came search engines, like Altavista and then Google, and yet a new organizational paradigm was proposed, in effect a third different set of names for the Internet constellations. Again, users found this keyword and link-popularity approach superior to hierarchical trees, and search engines have prospered while the old directories have languished.
The point is, no one gave Google a license or top-down authority to reorganize the Internet. They just did it, like thousands of others tried at the time. Of these thousands of different approaches, no single smart man picked Google as the approach that everyone should use. Rather, individuals tried all these different approaches, and over time a consensus emerged that Google was the most useful.
Which -- and I know you thought I forgot -- brings us back to Barry Bond's records. Individual baseball records don't actually have any meaning to the game of baseball itself -- baseball is played for team wins and losses and ultimately for team championships. So while individual hits and home runs may have mattered in getting to a champion, the fact that Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in a year has no real meaning within the context of declaring a team as champion. It has meaning only in the way that fans react to it.
One proof of this is the fact that people focus so much on the single-season home run record. Is this record more inherently valuable than say, the single season triple record? Triples are actually harder to hit, so you might argue that the triple record is more interesting. No one from official MLB offices ever declared the single season home run record to be among the most important. But over time, a fan consensus has emerged that people are far more intrigued by the home run record, so most everyone can name Barry Bonds at 73 home runs but only a geek would know Chief Wilson at 36 triples.
I contend that Barry Bond's 73 home run record (and his lifetime home run record, if he ever gets that) will take care of themselves without any action from the league office. Over time, fans will decide for themselves if Bond's 73 is better than Marris's 61. Today, for example, most discussion of pitching records excludes the period before 1915 or so, which people refer to as the "dead ball" era. Someday, fan consensus will emerge that they are OK with steroid-driven records (as they have become comfortable with Gaylord Perry's records despite his use of the illegal spitball) or else they are not OK and batting stats from the past decade will be excluded as the "juiced player era".
Published: September 20, 2006 11:43 AM
College football is an interesting animal. On one hand, I think everyone can agree that the wrong call was blatantly made, then upheld, TWICE, at critical times in the game. On the other --and this is why college football is so interesting-- even a single loss can damage an entire season's worth of victories in terms of chance to go to the BCS championship. In no other sport I can think of can a loss be so detrimental. David Borens may have gone overboard by writing a strongly worded letter to conference officials, but I think he should be commended for taking a stance on an issue that has so engrossed his student body. His institution is making national headlines, and he's defending it vigorously. There's nothing wrong with that.
It is my personal opinion that the Ducks stole that victory last Saturday as a direct result of admittedly incorrect calls made by the officials. While I agree that demanding the results be struck from the record book is a bit extreme, I am surprised to see that voters in the AP polls dropped the Sooners two spots to 17, while raising the Ducks to 13. I think a much more reasonable approach to the situation would have been for Borens to implore the voters to at least acknowledge that in some part, (to what extent might vary from person to person) Saturday's victory by Oregon was determined not by playing better football than Oklahoma, but rather by egregious human errors even the conference publicly admits to. Fine. Keep the loss on the record. Let the Sooners take the field this weekend as a 2-1 squad. But pull them up to 13 in the polls --or at the very least-- let them stand pat at 15.
Given the events of this past Saturday, and how they unfolded, its ludicrous to me to rank Oregon over Oklahoma in the week four AP top 25 polls.
Published: September 21, 2006 10:00 PM
Coyote: excellent analysis and summation. Any relation to Wiley (I always thought he got a raw deal)?
Published: September 22, 2006 6:53 AM