Idiots Write About Sports

Read this piece (bugmenot) this morning and elevated my blood pressure.

I flipped. Like a cheese omelet.

Or maybe more like a mob informant. That’s how stressful it seemed knowing that my Associated Press Top 25 vote could determine whether Texas or California plays in the Rose Bowl.

I moved Texas ahead of Cal in my final regular-season AP vote. Not because of the many e-mails and voicemails I received, mostly from Longhorns fans either begging or blistering me for my vote.

In the end, I had to stick to my main reason for keeping Texas below Cal: style points.

So now I’m a crank e-mail writer:

To: kwhitmire@dallasnews.com

Your “explanation column” is a disgrace. And it displays:

1. Why the mainstream sports media has no clue

2. Why it’s unethical for sports journalists to vote in polls of any kind that actually affect the outcome of the college football season.

Style points? Cal took its longest trip of the year to face a bowl-bound team that was at one point ranked in the top 20, and — depleted of most of its wide receivers — dominated the yardage and won by 10.

Would it have mattered if that bad clipping call had not taken away a touchdown? Or if Tedford had decided to pull a Bob Stoops and take some more shots rather than running down the clock at the end? Or if the game had taken place on Sept. 16 instead of Dec. 4?

Perhaps your vote might not have flipped if you were in a state other than Texas. Just a thought.

In any event, there’s no harm in me disagreeing with you. People disagree.

The harm is in the fact that your vote makes you a part of a story you should have no part in; you have _made_ the story rather than reported on it. Any reasonable news organization would realize that the current reliance on the votes of writers to decide the outcome of the college football season has created a remarkable ethical lapse.

That you seem to be proud about your illogical, unethical decision is all the more sickening.

-jason

UPDATE: Keith wrote me back, which was awful nice of him:

Cal was a 24-point favorite and won by 10. We’re talking about switching the 5-6 spots here for two teams that failed to win their conference. Cal had a chance to prove it was the No. 5 team in the country and didn’t.

Uh… so wait a second. It’s not Keith’s fault, but the fault of Las Vegas oddsmakers and sports bettors? Okay… And to Keith’s other point, um, what was Texas favored by over Kansas? Oh, that’s right. 22. And it won by 4 after trailing by 10 with less than 5 minutes to go.

But, hey, at least Keith Whitmire has standards. Double standards.

"Cal was a 24-point favorite and won by 10."

Keith knows that point spreads are set by handicappers for the purpose of ensuring that an equal amount of money is bet on both the favorite and the underdog, thus ensuring that the house can turn a profit on the vig, right? And that point spreads should, therefore, not really be used as a predictive tool?

Oh wait -- of course Keith doesn't know that. He writes about sports for a living. Why the hell should sportswriters know what the hell they're talking about?

Exactly correct, with one slight qualification. I suspect that most sports writers take their odds infomation from the initial lines set by LVSC (unless they're polling a bunch of casinos to determine where betting closed, which seems unlikely.) If that's the case, then the line Keith quotes is only a best attempt at maintaining a balance between both sides of a wager, and not the adjusted line that reflects how people actually bet. It's still not a particularly useful predictive tool, but it's better than one that has seen the influence of bettors.

Another fun fact: Most Vegas sports books rarely, if ever, turn a profit because they don't take a vig. They book is only there to pull people into the casino so that sports bettors -- or the hapless spouses they dragged there with them -- will drop money into the shiny slot machines nearby. Which is an implicit vig, I suppose. Anyway, the house is usually ecstatic if they just manage to break even.

These are quibbles, I realize, and they in no way dilute your original points. I'm just desperate to get something out of the couple of months I spent working at a book, besides permanent liver damage from spending every night playing quarter craps and drinking free Michelob.

I'm going to say you're wrong, Steve, because you've worked at a sports book and I haven't (which, oddly enough, adds immeasurably to my respect for you). But I've got here a betting slip from the Mirage in which I've bet $10 on the A's to win the 2004 World Series at 12-to-1 odds, and the ticket says that it'll pay $130, but that I'll win $120. That sort of sounds like a vig to me, but maybe they're just thoughtfully deducting the $10 I laid down from my supposed profit. I dunno.

Speaking of which, I guess I can safely discard that betting stub now, huh?

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