The great PED purge is also having an effect on the most tangible manifestation of the morals of people in baseball – the Hall of Fame ballots. So far, no ex-player whose name has been tainted by allegations of steroid or HGH use has ever been voted into the Hall. This is awkward, because almost all of the superstars now eligible for entrance into the Hall have used PEDs at some point. Thus far, this has resulted in one year in which no players were elected, and others in which only second-tier players were elected, leaving big names like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens conspicuously mouldering on the ballot.

This is a problem first and foremost because, by keeping recent superstars out of the Hall of Fame, the Baseball Writers’ Association is holding them to a higher standard of ‘cleanliness’ than it did their predecesessors. While steroid and HGH use is a comparatively recent development in baseball’s history, the use of other performance enhancers has been widespread for almost the entire history of the sport. Amphetamines were the most prominent pre-steroid era PED, and they seem to have been common almost to the point of ubiquity for a time. They were only banned by Major League baseball (MLB) in 2006, after players had been using them for decades. By denying steroid-era players the honour of being in the Hall of Fame, the Writers’ Association is implying that those players violated the code of a game that is supposed to be played ‘clean.’ The Hall of Fame voters are trying to clean up the history, a sport that has always been played by cheaters and drug abusers, and played gloriously.

Many of the greatest baseball players of all time were famous for cheating. Ty Cobb, a player from the 1930s widely considered to be one of the greatest pure hitters in baseball’s history, infamously sharpened his metal cleats so that people would be afraid to tag him as he slid into bases. Another Hall of Famer, Gaylord Perry, wrote a whole book about his success with an illegal pitch called the spitball. Substance use has also been a constant part of the grand tradition. Babe Ruth was infamous for drinking too much, and he’s in the Hall, alongside countless players from the amphetamine era. Dock Ellis infamously pitched a no-hitter while tripping on acid. The idea that steroid users somehow ‘tainted’ a prevlously pure game with their substance abuse is absurd.

Another problem with MLB’s anti-PED crusade is that drug use has had no negative effect on the game from an entertainment standpoint. In fact, the steroid era was perhaps the most exciting time in MLB history. The steroid era saw the single-season home run record broken twice in less than a decade, and saw Hank Aaron’s record for career home runs shattered. Since baseball’s PED crusade started, both total home runs and total scoring have declined. Anyone even remotely interested in baseball knows that it is a sport that involves long periods of waiting between exciting moments, and the decline in offence caused by the end of the steroid era is doing nothing for the sport’s popularity or viability.

I’m not necessarily advocating for the reinstatement of drug-fuelled baseball, but I will say that MLB’s moral panic over PEDs is ridiculous, and is ultimately harmful to the legacy of the sport. The steroid-era stars deserve to be in the Hall of Fame because they succeeded in an era where steroids were as ubiquitous as amphetamines used to be. Drugs only provide a little assistance. Players like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were clearly the greatest of their eras, and arguably some of the greatest players of all time. I have little sympathy for arguments that drugs ‘cheapen’ the game in some way. Baseball has always been played on drugs, and the steroid era was exhilarating to watch from a fan’s perspective. Baseball needs to come to terms with its coloulful history and realize that it has never been a bastion of moral righteousness. It’s a hell of a lot more fun that way.

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In any case, for many former NHL players, these measures are too little, too late. Over 200 retired players have now signed onto a class-action lawsuit that accuses the league of willfully withholding information about the long-term health effects of repeated head trauma and encouraging dangerous behaviour. This lawsuit is very much in the vein of the successful suit brought against the National Football League (NFL) in 2013 by several thousand former players that resulted in the league paying out a $765 million settlement to the plaintiffs. The NHL has responded to the players’ claims by stating that players should have learned about the long-term effects of concussions from publicly available sources and “put two and two together” about the dangers of the sport they played in.

Whether or not the NHL players’ suit will succeed like that of the NFL players is up in the air. There may be issues with the statute of limitations, since most of the players involved have long been retired. Additionally, the players will have to prove that the long-term health issues that require treatment they are hoping the league will pay for were caused by their time in the NHL rather than from injuries sustained in other causes. This will be difficult to do, as Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the long term illness caused by concussions, happens because of the cumulative effects of repeated trauma, and most NHL players have been getting hit in the head since their youth hockey days. While the players may be able to prove that they are suffering from depression, forgetfulness, and other symptoms of CTE, it will be very hard for them to prove that the NHL alone is responsible.

This raises the most troubling aspect of the brain injury issue in hockey: no matter how well the NHL deals with concussion issues in the future, youth hockey players are still beating the crap out of each other, perhaps even more than the professionals do. According to hockeyfights.com, in the 1,230 games of this NHL season, there have been 421 fights. In the Canadian Hockey League, a junior league with teen (16-20) players, there have been 1,449 fights in 1,928 games. While it is important to note that fighting doesn’t cause all the injuries that lead to CTE, the fact that youth hockey is so much worse than the NHL in this measure of violence is worrying. Furthermore, three recent studies focusing on college hockey players suggests that for young adults, even one concussion can have measurable long-term effects on the brain.

These studies, published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, indicate that the brains of college players who were concussed during the season exhibited damage that persisted at least until the end of the season. Specifically, the players’ white matter was shown to have sustained damage. White matter is important to brain functioning because it is the medium through which different parts of the brain communicate with each other. While there is not yet enough research to know whether the damage caused by one concussion is permanent, the evidence that multiple concussions cause irreversible damage is indisputable. Paul Echlin, an Ontario sports medicine physician, said to the CBC patients suffering from the effects of head trauma: “it affects their school, their occupation, their forward progress in society. It will lessen their ability to achieve the things they want academically or work-wise and often relationship-wise.” Of the 45 student athletes who participated in the white matter studies, 11 were diagnosed with concussions over the course of one season. If that rate of concussions is anywhere close to representative, then it is very likely that many young hockey players have had grave and permanent harm done to their brains even before graduating from university.
While the concussion issue is often presented as a problem with professional sports, it actually affects players on all levels of play. To prevent young hockey players from doing irreversible harm to their brains, swift action must be taken to regulate and prevent fighting and dangerous hits in youth hockey. While the game of hockey itself may have to be changed a great deal, we are at the point where we must choose between preserving the game of hockey we know and preserving the minds of young Canadians. Only the foolish would think the former more important.

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On February 3, Kane showed up to a Jets team meeting in a tracksuit, in violation of the team’s dress code for such occasions. Allegedly to “send a message,” Kane’s teammates threw his clothes in the shower. Later, an hour before puck drop, Kane told team officials that he would not play in the scheduled game in his hometown of Vancouver. Then, on February 11, Kane was traded to the Sabres. Last, but certainly not least, Kane is a black man who plays hockey.

Is that last point salient to the events in question? Nobody who remains on the Jets seems to think so. When asked to comment on the tracksuit incident, Kane’s then-teammate Blake Wheeler said, “We’re professionals, we make a lot of money. And we’re expected to uphold a certain standard. That’s the code we live by. That’s just the way it is.” That may be how Kane’s teammates view things, but there are deeper issues at play here than mere professionalism. Kane has long been known for being ‘controversial,’ and the criticisms that have previously been leveled at Kane that made him a ‘controversial’ player have been uncomfortably tinged with racial assumptions. This reputation almost undoubtedly contributed to Winnipeg’s decision to ship him off after this recent incident.

Kane’s first brush with media infamy came in 2012 when he posted a photo of himself holding stacks of cash to Twitter. It set off a media firestorm of sorts, with some accusing him of being disrespectful to NHL fans and employees by posting a record of his wealth during the lockout. Kane has stated that he thinks that much of the criticism he received for that picture happened because he was black. Not everyone agrees. Commenting on Kane’s claims, Don Cherry, everyone’s favourite hockey bloviator and unreconstructed old-school Canadian, said, “When he says stuff like that, it gets the crowd against him […] to say it’s racial is ridiculous.” Of Kane’s character, Cherry said, “He’s gotta straighten out a little. You can’t be a loose cannon in hockey. You can in football and you can in basketball, but not in hockey.”

That kind of line illustrates the type of racially-motivated criticisms that black players receive in hockey and in other sports. First, Cherry identifies Kane’s posting of the picture as a problematic behavior that needs tamping down, and then says that that sort of behavior is acceptable in sports that are considered to be blacker than hockey. Cherry probably doesn’t even think of his criticisms in racial terms, but he is hostile to the entrance of an element of stereotypically black culture into his white world of hockey.

Cherry’s bias against blackness can be seen again in a YouTube clip entitled “Is Don Cherry Racist?” The clip compares Cherry’s analyses of the play of two rookies. First, we see Cherry – infamous for encouraging goonery in hockey – uncharacteristically criticize then-rookie P.K. Subban’s play for being violent and disrespectful, even ominously implying that somebody will hurt Subban if he doesn’t moderate his style of play. Next, we see Cherry enthusiastically cheer on the violent playing of Brad Marchand. The only obvious difference between the two players that could account for Cherry’s varrying reactions is race. Subban is black and Marchand is white. This analysis is uncomfortably reminiscent of the racist trope of the ‘uppity black man’ who needs to be put in place by white authority.

This subtle kind of prejudice, which quite often goes unnoticed by the person uttering prejudiced words, is an insidious and pervasive force in modern sports commentary. It can make sports feel unwelcoming to minority groups who wish to participate, and it will be hard to eradicate. Admittedly, hockey has its share of overt racism in addition to the more covert forms too: from P.K. Subban being the target of thousands of racist tweets from Bruins fans, to Wayne Simmonds of the Flyers getting a banana thrown at him. These acts of overt racism combine with the more frequent airings of dog-whistle prejudice to create a potentially hostile environment for non-white players. Troublingly, since the members of media who criticize black players in subtly racist ways do not think of themselves as racist, it will be very hard to convince them that they need to change their tune.

The question of race is not as hotly debated in the NHL as it is in leagues like the NBA and the NFL. This is, perhaps, because there are simply not as many visible minority players in the NHL, as there are in the other leagues, to bring this issue to the up. In recent years, players in the NFL like Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks have called out the media for using words like thug to refer to black players whose attitudes are perceived as being threatening to the status quo. The NHL needs more players like Kane and Simmonds to speak up about how fans and the media treat them to help hockey break out of its comfortably tolerant self-image.

So did Evander Kane get shipped out of Winnipeg because he was black? It’s complicated. I would not say that Kane’s blackness was the only reason, or even the most important reason, for his trade to the Sabres. Clearly, there was a toxicity in the Jets locker room that went beyond questions of race. However, I think it is clear that Kane’s race was a factor that distanced him from the fans in Winnipeg, contributed to his reputation as a ‘controversial’ player, and thus nudged the Jets in the direction of letting him go. Unlike Cherry, I say that race is of course a factor in hockey, just as it is a factor in every other facet of life in Canada and the U.S. To say otherwise is naive and ultimately damaging.

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These are vexing questions. Sports can be seen (and are seen by quite a few people) as an egregious waste of time and resources, of no benefit to anyone apart from Budweiser and the kleptocrats who own teams. They feature, on a grand scale, people performing feats of extreme difficulty for no reason other than to demonstrate physical prowess and to entertain. They seem like a colossal waste of everyone’s time.

While I am in some ways sympathetic to this view of sports, I believe it to be an oversimplification. A life without entertainment is a quite dull one and, to my mind, not one worth living. Athletics, at least as practiced by those in its upper echelons, is an activity glorious to behold, a demonstration of skill and grace as beautiful and mesmerizing as the best art. The viewer gets to share in the glories and disappointments of their uniformed champions, to feel the joys of victory and the sorrows of bitter defeat. Sports, at least in some way, combine the visual splendour of fine art with the heightened drama of fictional narratives. They thrill and chill and divert us from the often humdrum experiences of our day to day lives.

At least, this is what professional sports do when they are working as they should. When they feature players working at the top of their game, trying their hardest to win the match, to top the standings, to make the playoffs, to win the championship. in other words, when they are true competitions. However, in certain professional sports, this is not always the case. There are times when baseball, basketball, and hockey, in a very real way, fail to be sports. They fail to accomplish the basic premise of sports: that two opposing sides attempt to achieve victory over each other. Now teams are losing on purpose in order to secure a better draft pick; this phenomenon is called tanking. The National Basketball Association (NBA), National Hockey League (NHL), and Major League Baseball (MLB) all, in one way or another, incentivize tanking, and they are murdering the very concept of sports right before our eyes.

I have skin in this game right now because my home basketball team, the Philadelphia 76ers (the Sixers to any local) are in the midst of making a mockery of basketball in a historic way. In basketball, there is a lottery system to determine which teams get the top picks in the draft, and the worst teams from the previous year have a higher chance of receiving better draft spots, giving them a better chance of signing the premium talent entering the league from college. The NBA has been a home to tanking teams since time immemorial, but until recently there has always seemed to be an unspoken agreement that teams shouldn’t be too flagrantly obvious about it. The Sixers decided to flout this precedent last year by ditching almost anyone on their team with talent halfway through the season and embarking on a historic 26-game losing streak. This year, they dismantled themselves further, employing an entire roster of no-name non-talent, losing the first 17 games of the season (which almost broke the record for worst start ever). There was talk that they would break the record for worst NBA season ever, a record which coincidentally belongs to a previous Sixers team. ‘Disappointingly,’ they now have won 11 games, and are no longer in the running for that record (at least they could have been the best at something!).

The 2014-15 Sixers feel like a piece of anti-basketball performance art designed to highlight the hypocrisies of the NBA. There’s something surreal about watching professional basketball players try their hardest to win games and just be completely incapable of doing so because they are all so bad. Deadspin has pointed out that this year’s Sixers are so bad that their opponents get to use Sixers games as an opportunity to let their star players rest; on average, the three best players on teams that played the Sixers played two minutes less against the Sixers than against other opponents. And they don’t even have the worst record in their division; that crown goes to the New York Knicks, who have just recently gotten into double-digits in the win column. Tanking has become so widespread in basketball that the team doing it the most shamelessly isn’t even the best at it this year. This does not bode well for the future of the sport, and one fears that if the Sixers’ gamble pays off, NHL owners will take note, as the leauge has a similar draft System that gives the teams with the worst records the greatest chance of a high draft pick. It can even be argued that certain NHL teams are already tanking in order to have a chance at drafting one of two generational players, Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel.

Sports are supposed to provide entertainment. The Sixers are putatively an entertainment organization. They are manifestly failing to fulfill their purpose for existing. Defenders of the tanking strategy say that tanking is just a necessary step in the process of building up a championship team. I say: I don’t care! Firstly, there is no guarantee that a terrible team’s high place in the draft will get them a franchise player who will lift them from their terribleness. Take the Edmonton Oilers, for example, who have had three first overall picks in four years and are still god-awful. Second, I would much rather watch a mediocre but competitive team fight it out every night over a manifestation of long-term business planning lose by design. That’s really what’s at stake here. This year’s Sixers, and all teams that intentionally tank, aren’t sports teams so much as regrettable side effects of a long-term investment scheme. And nobody wants to watch that on TV.

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First of all, a little background for those of you not from the land of good-ol-boys and ‘freedom.’ In the U.S., college athletics is a seriously big business. It is governed by the National College Athletics Association (NCAA), which in 2013 raked in $912.8 million in revenue, most of which comes from television deals and other media and marketing sources, like lending its name to sports video games. The schools with top-level sports teams, like University of Texas, can earn over $100 million per year in revenue from their sports teams. Top football and basketball coaches earn millions of dollars per year. Yet, despite all this money, the NCAA prohibits players from being paid for their work in any form except receiving scholarships, and, more bizarrely, prevents them from earning money through any means related to their athletic performance, including selling their autographs or endorsing products. The NCAA even regulates how athletes may make money in their pre-college careers, making star high school athletes who accept endorsement deals ineligible for playing college sports.

The NCAA justifies making tons of money off of its players without compensating them by appealing to the hallowed amateurism that it argues has been the defining characteristic of college sports. The president of the NCAA, Mark Emmert, has argued that allowing players to endorse products and accept other corporate deals would leave them vulnerable to exploitation by big business. Harris Pastides, the president of the University of South Carolina, recently stated that a core part of the college sports experience was that the athletes were “not yet corrupted by money and other financial influences.” Another popular defence of the NCAA’s employment practices, taken here from an NCAA legal brief, is that by not paying student athletes, the organization is letting them do “what students do rather than trying to make as much money as possible, which is what professionals do”– in other words, making them focus on their education rather than on money.

Is amateurism really as important to the soul of college sports as the NCAA argues? Probably not. With regards to the ‘make them focus on their education’ defence, no one makes similar arguments about other on-campus jobs like working in the dining hall or at the bookstore.

Many college students successfully manage to learn and make money simultaneously. Similarly, who would say that somebody who worked at the campus bookstore was ‘corrupted’ by their paycheck? Is everyone who receives money for the provision of goods or services ‘impure’ in some way? Why should college athletes be held to a different standard than the rest of society?

Getting back to the first defence, that college athletes would be exploited by corporate interests if allowed to capitalize on their fame financially, one is tempted to say that this is already happening, except the exploiter is the NCAA itself, and its partners such as ESPN and game manufacturer Electronic Arts (EA). Emmert mounted the exploitation defense in a court case that pitted the NCAA against Ed O’Bannon, a former U.S. college basketball star. O’Bannon argued that the NCAA was making money off of the likenesses of players used in the popular licensed NCAA video games published by EA. The NCAA had tried to avoid this kind of lawsuit by making the players in the games nameless and creating intentionally inaccurate player models for them, but their jersey numbers and gameplay attributes made it obvious that the virtual players were meant to represent real players on real college teams. This was not the first time the NCAA has been caught exploiting the fame of specific players for financial gain; in 2013, ESPN college basketball commentator Jay Bilas found that when he searched for star players’ names in the NCAA online store he was taken to links to buy the jerseys worn by those players, despite the NCAA’s insistence that it does not make profit from individual players’ names or reputations. This revelation came during a time when then-college star quarterback Johnny Manziel was under fire for selling his own autograph for profit. The NCAA’s anti-exploitation argument seems more like an ‘only we are allowed to exploit the players!’ argument.

Lest you think I protest too much in support of a student body population that is already coddled and showered with perks, consider this: yes, many of the players at top tier sports schools get full scholarships, but these do not cover the full cost of going to school. According to a recent study by the National College Players Association and Drexel University, the average university athlete with a full scholarship still had to cover $3,222 in expenses per year, and if they had no other source of income than their scholarship living stipend, 85 per cent of full scholarship players would live below the U.S. federal poverty line. Keeping in mind that not all college athletes come from a privileged background and that being a top-level college athlete is a full-time job, it is easy to see how it would be hard for even students with scholarships to make financial ends meet.

Change, however, might be on the horizon. That court case I mentioned earlier, NCAA v. O’Bannon, was decided in O’Bannon’s favor. The judge’s injunction was relatively tame, stipulating that the NCAA could not prevent schools from paying players up to the full cost of attending school, in addition to a $5,000 per year trust from a share of the media money to be received on graduation. Accepting endorsement deals and selling memorabilia is still forbidden for players. Nevertheless, this decision could be the beginning of a huge change in how the NCAA does business, depending on how other pending lawsuits are decided. Perhaps players will finally be able to earn pay for their work and for their image, like everyone else in the America theoretically has the right to do.

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This talk was hosted by the Desautels Sports Management Club, a student group in McGill’s Faculty of Managment as a chance for aspiring scouts, agents, GMs, and Sabermetricians to get a little wisdom straight from a guru instead of digging through dry papers or arcane blog posts to learn the craft. The event held at the Bronfman Building, was well-attended, with almost every seat in the small conference room taken. As Schuckers began speaking, his affable tone soothed my apprehension, and promised to deliver facts with a little side of entertainment. Then I registered the significance of his words and they chilled me to the marrow: this talk wasn’t just about sports statistical analysis, it was exclusively about hockey! And everyone else in this room knew a hell lot more about that than I do! And we were about to run a mock draft!

I guess I knew that as a sportswriter in Canada, my general indifference toward hockey would be punished someday, but I didn’t think I would be thrust into the deep end quite so quickly. Fortunately, the audience was split into teams of three to choose players, and I was gifted with knowledgeable and understanding partners who made all the choices and delegated me to writing them down in my journalist’s notebook. The purpose of the draft was to try to pick the five most effective players possible, and our choices were rated based on Schuckers’ own analytical statistic, the Total Hockey Rating (THoR). THoR is, at least to the uninitiated eye, an incredibly complicated metric, which, in Schucker’s words, measures “every event recorded by the NHL, [then] assigns value to those events based on the probability that they will lead to a goal.” The number then takes into accountsuch factors as the home-rink effect, power plays, and the statistical reporting eccentricities at each stadium, to come up with a number that represents wins above replacement (WAR) for every player in the NHL. (Fun fact: blocked shots in New Jersey are underreported by 27 per cent compared to the league average!) WAR is a unit of measurement borrowed from Sabermetrics that is used to measure a player’s contribution to their team. I was surprised to discover that Sidney Crosby, the only current hockey player I’ve ever heard of, did not even lead his team in WAR, suggesting that he is not the most vital player on the Pittsburgh Penguins (although he does place toward the top of the league). Instead, according to Schuckers’ analysis, the most useful forward on the Penguins is Tyler Kennedy. Judging by the gasps of my fellow audience members, other players’ THoR ratings were surprising as well.

My drafting team did not win. In fact, we only picked a single player in the top tier of THoR ratings, with our lineup including Jason Williams, Zach Parise, Jake Muzzin, Jimmy Howard, and our one star, Patrice Bergeron. The top non-goalie players according to THoR (apparently, statistical analysis suggests that goalies are the most replaceable players on any team) are: defencemen Kimmo Timonen, and Drew Doughty; left wingers Ray Whitney and Alexander Steen, and right winger Patric Hornqvist.

Next we talked about the future applications of statistical analysis like this for hockey strategy. Right now, Schuckers is most comfortable using his numbers for player evaluation and personnel decisions, as the data does not yet exist for sophisticated gameplay analysis. He was clearly excited, however, at the prospect of the NHL adopting technology similar to what already exists in the NBA, where the positioning of the ball and of every player on the court is recorded 25 times per second. This unprecedented level of data has already led to changes in the way NBA basketball is played, most dramatically in shot selection, with teams focusing on either getting to the rim or hoisting threes and leaving the poor two-point jump shot behind. The stats seem to show that mid-range jumpers just do not have the same expected gain as long-balls or layups in most situations. The same data can influence the NHL: for example, the Los Angeles Kings (arguably the most dominant playoff team in the NHL) base their game around puck possession. This decision it’s influenced by the rise of the Corsi Number, another complex form of statistical analysis used in the NHL.

Schuckers used his ThoR data to say that : when NHL teams are losing toward the end of games, they should pull their goalies to start a six-on-five attack much earlier than they currently do. As Shuckers said, “Losing by four is the same as losing by two. The risk of getting scored on is outweighed by the advantage of having an extra man on offence.”

This talk of changing hockey strategy made me think about how the rise of statistical analysis has altered the way other sports I love more dearly have been played in my lifetime. As one audience member pointed out, baseball, as a reasonably static, one-on-one sport, which was the first to be affected by the statistical craze has gone through stages where previous pronouncements by statisticians have been proven wrong by the arrival of more data. Most prominent among these was the Sabermetricians’ mantra that ‘defence doesn’t matter,’ which probably lengthened the careers of power-hitters like Adam Dunn at the expense of more balanced players. Now that it is easier to measure defensive performance, suddenly defence matters again in baseball! Statisticians and the coaches and GMs who listen to them need to remember to not get too confident about their numbers, especially in the early stages.

I also worry that the increasingly stats-driven approach to strategy will result in a dull sameness between all the teams in a given league, reducing the lovely idiosyncrasies that made your team yours. It’s exciting to watch NBA players chuck threes all the time, but I also get a little nostalgic for the 76ers of my Philly youth, coached by the fundamentalist zealot Larry Brown. If you shot a three on that team, you had better have been either Allen Iverson, the untouchable superstar, or completely open with a teammate under the basket to rebound. Otherwise you got the death glare.

But I’m not a cranky traditionalist. Sometimes conventional wisdom is even more soul-crushing than math. I look forward to the magical day when American football teams start listening to the stats nerds and start going for it on fourth and short regularly, and I love that the Sabermetricians admire underhanded baseball pitchers, dismissed by the old guard as mere novelties. In any case, it is useless to argue with the takeover of statistics in sports. It is the way of the future, whether I like it or not. And judging by the mesmerised attention paid to Schuckers at this event, the Desautels Sports Management Club may produce some hockey statisticians not too long from now.

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While some may argue that these very high salaries are commensurate with the amount of money college sports bring in, data from ESPN reveals that even at schools like Texas and Alabama,  which generate millions of dollars of revenue, most, if not all of the money generated, ends up being cycled back into the football program, giving the universities themselves little to no financial benefit. In fact, especially when one accounts for the student fees and university subsidies paid to the teams at many schools, even high-revenue teams end up losing money for their universities. For example, the second-highest-earning athletics department, Wisconsin, would have operated at a loss of well over $1 million dollars had the school not given them a subsidy of approximately $7 million, despite earning close to $150 million in revenue. Wisconsin pays its coaching staff over $15 million.

With the amount of cash that big American athletics programs bring in from media deals, ticket sales, and merchandising, it is inexcusable for any of them to rely on funds from universities to break even. Given that states all across America are cutting funding to public education, leading to tuition increases and budget cuts at state universities, the big-name athletics departments should start sharing their wealth with the schools they represent. One easy way for them to generate a surplus to give back to their universities would be to cut coaches’ pay to be more proportional with that of other public sector workers. Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, earns an annual salary of $133,000, which is less than 5 per cent of the University of Texas football coach’s earnings, Alabama’s governor has pledged to not take a salary until his state’s unemployment rate goes down to 5.2 per cent.

Some might argue that the fierce competition to bring in the best coaching talent necessitates the high salaries, but that argument doesn’t really hold water upon closer examination. After all, many talented people wish to be governors of states, despite the relatively low compensation, because of the power and prestige of the office. If university athletics departments agreed on a salary cap for coaches, they would not suddenly have a hard time finding high-quality applicants. Division 1 football and basketball coaches are some of the most revered and powerful figures in sports, and droves of people would be happy to do the job for free. After looking at  the listings of public employee salaries in Ontario and British Columbia, the football coaches at Canadian universities with big athletics programs are paid in the $100,000 to $200,000 range, and Canadian universities seem to have no trouble filling their coaching positions with high quality talent. Does $5 million get you 25 times the coach that $200,000 does?

Much like hosting an Olympics or a World Cup, having a nationally-ranked athletics department seems to provide little benefit other than prestige and publicity. Ultimately, the amount of money paid to coaches, and the amount in American college sports in general, is troubling because it seems to go against the purpose of universities. Universities are supposed to be “institutes of higher learning,” and the focus in many big public universities on athletics over academics robs students of a higher quality education. While being a football bowl contender or a basketball powerhouse may be exciting in the moment, one wonders if the students of big sports universities will look back at their time in school and wish they had a cheaper, better education instead of a trophy sitting in some case.

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Looking at the slate of massive, global sporting events happening in the next ten years, one notices an alarming amount of “unfree” or authoritarian host states. Russia, hot on the heels of its troubled 2014 Winter Olympics, will host the World Cup in 2018. After that, the next host will be Qatar. The Olympics will take a post-Sochi break from being hosted by despots, landing in Rio, Brazil in 2016, Pyeongchang, South Korea in 2018, and Tokyo, Japan in 2020. However unless things change dramatically, The Olympics will once again run into the open arms of a repressive government in 2022. Even when large sporting events are held in nominal democracies, the mere presence of such spectacles seems to turn the host countries despotic. The widespread protests in Brazil last year in the run-up to the World Cup were met by government crackdowns, and Britain used the 2012 Olympics as an excuse to increase its surveillance state and to push residents out of poor nieghbourhoods to make room for the event.

Why do big sporting events tend either to occur in authoritarian states or inspire authoritarian actions from governments who claim to be representative democracies? There is something about these events that is inherently hostile to democracy. For one, the governing bodies of both international soccer and the Olympics demand the right to change the laws of host countries by authoritarian decree. FIFA forced the Brazilian government to re-legalize alcohol sales in stadiums after they had been banned for ten years, causing a return of the dangerous levels of drunkenness that prompted the ban in the first place. When Norway rejected the 2022 Winter Olympics, one of its cited reasons for doing so was the ridiculous list of required accommodations for IOC members, which included a request for an extra lane on all streets used for Olympic business and reserved exclusively for the travel of IOC members. If these are the sorts of conditions expected by the IOC and FIFA, it is not surprising that they have an easier time finding authoritarian hosts. It is generally riskier for democratically elected officials to change laws on a whim than it is for dictators, although the recent experiences of Brazil and London show that the mere presence of democratic elements does not necessarily protect it from these kinds of injustices if its leaders are in the pockets of big sporting organizations.

Furthermore, hosting the World Cup or the Olympics has little actual value to a country other than perhaps conferring on it a certain level of prestige. Economically, being a host can be disastrous. Montreal finally paid off the last of its debt from the 1976 Olympics in 2006, and the Olympic Stadium sits basically unused except for tours. The bill for the 2004 Olympics was one of the stressors that led to Greece’s later economic crash. Russia spent $51 billion in Sochi for facilities that are already decaying from disuse. Perhaps Norway’s rejection of the 2022 Olympics is a sign that democratic citizens can no longer be duped by their leaders into believing that hosting giant sporting events confer an economic benefit that trickles down to them. Brazil’s World Cup protests definitely showed that the citizens of Brazil were aware of the economic injustice of spending billions on stadiums that would be used one time in a nation where millions live in favelas. The economic benefits of the Olympics and the World Cup are overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of the IOC, FIFA, and sponsors like Coca-Cola.

While world leaders may still crave the prestige that holding a world-class sporting event confers, it is becoming harder and harder for them to justify to their citizenry that holding these events benefits anyone but large corporations and other elites. Unfortunately, as shown in Brazil, citizen awareness does not always save them, as purported democracies still use tools of oppression to help the IOC and FIFA keep the money flowing, and keep events running smoothly. However, the backlash to the most recent World Cup and Olympics seems to be giving all but the most repressive states second thoughts about the practicality and utility of hosting these big-tentpole spectacles. Hopefully, the bidding wars for the next few global sporting events will be as dismal and uninspiring as the one for the 2022 Olympics. Perhaps that will make the governing bodies of world sports realize they need to restructure the way they run these events, and find some way of actually benefitting their host nations instead of stealing money and freedom from their citizenry.

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However, on the other hand, the statement that Guimont-Mota should never have been admitted to the university because of a previous assault conviction is deeply troubling. Clint Uttley found it troubling too, and listed it as one of the main reasons he tendered his resignation. Of course, this might not be the whole story. Uttley was the one who originally recruited Guimont-Mota, and as such there is a good chance that he resigned as a face-saving measure and would have been pushed out regardless. Nevertheless, he brings up a very good point in his resignation statement: that people who have been convicted of crimes deserve a second chance. Uttley says that is why he recruited Guimont-Mota, and if so, he had a noble intent. The fact that in this case it did not work out does not change the worth of the endeavor.

There is a persistent myth in our society that crimes are committed by a special breed of people called criminals, who are separated from us normal, law-abiding citizens by a vast and impenetrable gulf. This myth has led us to create a society in which it is very difficult for those who have committed crimes to participate fully, even after they have completed their sentences, often causing them to commit more crimes. By denying those convicted of crimes the opportunity to study at a place like McGill, one deprives them of the tools they need to stay out of prison. Of course, sometimes even when given opportunities for rehabilitation, people continue to commit crimes, but people who have never been convicted also commit crimes.

McGill, by trying to say that it made a mistake by letting a bad person on the football team, is trying to obscure the real problem: that there seems to be an institutionalized issue with violence in the Redmen environment, and in football as a by Redmen players in the last ten years, the previous two being the aforementioned rape case and the hazing scandal that shut down the program’s 2005 season. In America, the NFL is currently plagued with one instance of off-the-field violence after another. We need to ask ourselves, as students and sports fans, if an institution that surrounds itself with violence deserves our support.

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Sports media has been taken over again by another American football scandal: the appearance of a video of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice assaulting his then-fiancée, now-wife Janay Rice in the elevator of a casino. This incident, and the National Football League’s (NFL) reaction to it, has highlighted a problem with domestic abuse that has existed in the league for some time. However, it does more than just illuminate the NFL’s problems; the Rice case throws into glaring light the way in which institutions of power consistently fail to punish domestic abusers, and by their indifference enable more abuse.

The fact that Ray Rice assaulted Janay Rice has been known about for a while; previously, however, the only available video was of the immediate aftermath, in which Rice drags the unconscious Janay out of the elevator and dumps her on the floor of the lobby. With this evidence in hand, the NFL suspended Rice for two games, even though he had confessed to knocking Janay out. When this lenient punishment provoked criticism, the NFL alluded to the existence of the elevator tape, and said that it contained evidence which made Rice’s violence more understandable. Now that the tape has come out, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell insists that no one in the organization ever saw the tape, and Rice has been cut from the Ravens and suspended indefinitely from the NFL on the basis of this ‘new’ evidence.

While it is still unclear exactly who knew what and when, an Associated Press report refutes the NFL’s claims that it never had access to the elevator tape. In any case, it is certain that Goodell knew that Rice had assaulted Janay Rice when he doled out a tiny two-game suspension, half the length of those given to players for smoking marijuana or using performance-enhancing drugs. The appearance of the video, and the NFL’s response to it, has drawn outrage from a wide variety of sources, with some, such as the National Organization of Women, calling for Goodell’s resignation.

If, as it seems, the NFL trivializes domestic abuse and cares more about maintaining a drug-free league, this attitude is borne out in its players’ behavior. The lack of firm punishments are a tacit approval of abuse, may be responsible for it occurring more frequently than it would otherwise. Domestic violence makes up a disproportionate amount of the crimes for which NFL players are arrested. For example, domestic violence arrests occur in the NFL at 55 per cent more of the rate they do in the general population, whereas drug arrests occur at only 11 per cent more of the general rate. The only other crime that occurs in the NFL at such an unexpectedly high rate is murder.

These statistics raise troubling questions about whether a permissive culture surrounds domestic violence in the NFL. After Rice was suspended for two games, Baltimore coach John Harbaugh said, “I stand behind Ray. He’s a heck of a guy. He’s done everything right since.” Goodell also praised Rice, saying, “I was also very impressed with Ray in the sense that Ray is not only accepting this issue but he’s saying, ‘I was wrong.’ […] I want to see people, when they make a mistake, I want to see them take responsibility and be accountable for it.” The league’s handling of its most recent high-profile abuse scandal makes one wonder if it has the will or inclination to do anything about its domestic violence problem. If the league’s standard for holding domestic abusers accountable is a two-game suspension, it is doubtful that the situation will improve anytime soon.

Of course, domestic abuse is a crime, so while the NFL is justly criticized for trivializing abuse, the police and the judicial system are the institutions upon which the responsibility to punish and prevent ultimately rests. The police, upon viewing all the security footage, decided to charge both members of the couple with assault. While the footage does show that Janay rushed angrily towards Rice in the elevator, to call her actions commensurate with his is laughable. In response to her advance, Rice – who, of course, as an NFL running back, has a formidable physique, and is used to having people running at him – decides to strike his fiancée in the jaw. The blow lifts Janay’s feet from the ground; she is almost parallel to the floor of the elevator when her head smacks into the side rail.

After the police’s initial assessment, a grand jury decided that Janay’s charge should be dropped, and indict Ray Rice for third-degree aggravated assault, a more serious charge that carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail. However, instead of taking the case to trial, the police chose to place Rice into a diversionary program, a kind of probation arrangement in which he is obligated to take anger management classes. He also had to pay a $125 fine. If Rice follows the guidelines of his program, the charges will be dropped and he will be left with no criminal record. This kind of punishment is rare in cases of domestic abuse. Sandy Clark of the New Jersey Coalition for Battered Women has expressed dismay at the legal outcome of the case, saying, “With third-degree aggravated assault, I would like to think those [charges] do not wind up being dismissed.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a U.S. public health institute, approximately one in four women in the U.S. experience domestic violence in their lifetime. While rates of reported domestic violence have been going down in the past twenty years, it is one of the most under-reported crimes, with an reporting rate of approximately 25 per cent.

Why is this rampant crime so radically underreported? As the Rice case has shown, powerful institutions in our culture still tend to minimize the seriousness of domestic violence, find ways to defend its perpetrators, and victimize its survivors. This not only causes authority figures to punish domestic abuse inappropriately, but can pressure survivors to claim responsibility for their own abuse. After Ray Rice was suspended initially, he and Janay held a press conference together. Janay said she “deeply regrets the role she played the night of the incident.” The Ravens put that quote in an official tweet, as if to say, ‘See, it was her fault! She even said so!’ Until the NFL, the police, and other powerful institutions stop being so eager to find excuses for domestic violence, it will continue to be an underreported, hidden crime, whose survivors’ cries are not listened too.

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Amidst all of these scandals, there has also been an ongoing discussion and debate in the last year or so on the name of the team from Washington, D.C.. The Redskins have been battling ever-mounting pressure to change their name from groups such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and the Oneida Indian Nation, both of whom released commercials during the last football season protesting the name. A representative from the NCAI stated last year, “Cheering for a football team should never include the casual use of a racial slur. It is important for all teams and all of their fans that the name of the D.C. team is changed.”

Recently, several prominent news organizations like ESPN and the Washington Post have decided not to refer to the team as the Redskins anymore in their reporting. While this may reduce the use of the slur, it does not solve the root of the problem. From fans dressing up in redface to the giant headdress-wearing Redskins logo on the field, the offensive name is inescapable. This season, Washington fans will have to ask themselves if they are comfortable supporting a team called the Redskins knowing that organizations representing Indigenous communities across the U.S have denounced the name. And here in Montreal with McGill’s football season underway, perhaps we should be asking ourselves similar questions about the Redmen, a name that all varsity male sports at McGill use.

The parallels between the two cases are numerous. For example, both organizations argue that their team name has benign origins. McGill states that the term “Redmen” does not refer to Indigenous people at all, but instead to the colour of the jerseys worn by the players and/or to the school’s Scottish heritage. However, Redmen has been used as a slur against Indigenous people in the past.

Similarly, Dan Snyder, the owner of the Redskins, stated that his team’s name “is a symbol of everything we stand for: strength, courage, pride, and respect — the same values we know guide Native Americans and which are embedded throughout their rich history as the original Americans.” That may be what Dan Snyder, a rich white man, thinks the team’s name and logo stands for, but he does not have the authority to speak on this issue or decide how to honour Indigenous peoples. Deejay NDN of A Tribe Called Red, an all-Indigenous musical group, has lampooned this tendency for offensively named sports teams to defend themselves by saying they ‘honour’ Indigenous peoples. NDN flips the script, sporting a “Caucasians” shirt clearly modelled on the insignia of the Cleveland Indians baseball team. After being told the shirt was offensive, he took to Instagram and, in words intentionally echoing owners like Dan Snyder, said, “I’m truly sorry if I offended anyone while wearing my ‘Caucasians’ shirt. I thought I was honouring you.”

Despite all of this criticism, Washington clings to their official story about the origins of its name – that it honours an early coach, William “Lone Star” Dietz, who claimed to be of Oglala Lakota heritage. However, there is a large amount of evidence suggesting Dietz was actually born to German parents, and was investigated by the FBI for dodging the draft by pretending to be an Indigenous person. Although this is still a controversial issue, if the evidence about Dietz is true then team name honours a white man who traded on the image of Indigenous peoples for personal profit.

McGill also argues that the name Redmen is harmless, though it uses a different explanation than Washington, calling on the university’s Scottish heritage. This may be partially true, but regardless of the true origin of the name, there is no doubt that McGill’s varsity teams have associated themselves with Indigenous symbolism in the past. Before the junior varsity and intermediate teams were cut because of funding problems in the 1970s, they were known as the McGill Indians, with only the varsity teams being known as the Redmen. Furthermore, from 1982 to 1992, McGill’s football and hockey teams used an image of an Indigenous person in a headdress as the insignia on their helmets and uniforms, just like the Washington Redskins do currently. Despite McGill’s claims to the contrary, the Redmen name clearly referred to Indigenous people, and was associated with an offensive logo. No one going to a McGill football game in the 1980s would think that the name Redmen referred to something other than the person depicted on the team’s helmet.

Yet despite mounting pressure, Washington refuses to even entertain the idea of a name change. In a press conference in May 2013, Dan Snyder stated, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.” Snyder’s flippant, disrespectful language at that press event focused even more attention on his team’s name than there had been before. The negative reaction to Snyder’s public statements has shown that this kind of disregard for the basic rights of Indigenous people no longer has any place in the world of sports. The only acceptable outcome of this controversy is a name change.

McGill, like Snyder and his organization, has been stubborn when confronted about the name of its men’s teams. When, reacting to pressure from student groups, the Athletics Board decided to remove the Indigenous insignia from team garb in 1992, Richard Pound, chairman of the Athletics Board, stated that the name Redmen would be preserved because they “believe the Redmen name and logo are quite separate issues.” That is spurious reasoning. Getting rid of the logo does not change the fact that the Redmen name has been associated with images of Indigenous people. McGill lost an opportunity to completely break away from its culturally appropriative team name in 1992. It should take the current outrage about the Redskins as a hint that these kinds of names are not acceptable anymore.

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