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Interesting way to run an international sports association. ESPN is reporting that the head of FIFA (the international governing body for what we in the US call “soccer”), Sepp Blatter, won’t travel to the US because he is fearful of the consequences of an FBI investigation into bribery accusations surrounding the way FIFA has awarded the World Cup to Russia and Qatar. (via Report: Sepp Blatter Too Afraid Of The FBI To Enter The United States)

(via Chris Rock’s Take on Blacks in Baseball: Real Sports (HBO) - YouTube) What does it mean for the future of Baseball in the US, when the sport loses its African American audience and participants?

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that the public entity that controls the Rams’ current home, the Edward Jones Dome, has sued the city of St. Louis to prevent a public vote on whether taxpayer money should be used to pay for a new Rams stadium.

Report: St. Louis Stadium Authority Sues To Dodge Public Vote

The NFL wants these photos not because it cares about getting Hardy’s punishment right, but because it wants to get the optics of the punishment right. The question the NFL is trying to answer isn’t “Did Greg Hardy beat his ex-girlfriend?” but rather “How bad will we look if these pictures become public without us seeing them, and our punishment is deemed to have been too light?”

Why Does The NFL Need To See Photo Evidence Of Greg Hardy's Abuse?

Thinking about sports and disabilities, and all that sports participation can mean socially and psychologically for teens, what do you think about disabled or special needs kids being recognized with varsity letters or jackets?

Should a female athlete with a naturally high level of testosterone be required to medically repress it in order to compete internationally as a woman? What about other natural biological advantages that other athletes might have? How much of this depends on restrictive notions of gender and what is normative?

John Oliver explores the moral complexity that is March Madness with unparalleled wit.

Just let the students concentrate on the sports, and let the support staff take care of the school work? "According to the report, athletics staffers were actively posing as basketball players, logging into their university accounts, and reading and sending emails to professors as if they were the players."..."As you might expect, many of the course assignments that the support staff emailed to players' professors had not been written by those athletes. The report cites an internal investigation that checked the metadata of the documents handed in, and found that "the 'Author' and 'Last edited by author' field was attributed to someone other than the student-athlete."

Headbands might help some surface injuries, but can they really help reduce the incidence of concussions in women's soccer?

Debra Pyka: I never had any idea that football had anything to do with it until after he died. I remember listening to the news, and hearing about professional athletes dying from suicide, but I didn’t make the connection. After he died, his brother Tyler told me that I needed to send his brain in, to get tested. And then when I read about the symptoms of CTE, I saw that he had every single one of them — the anger, the depression. I just had a feeling that the test would come back positive. Otherwise, it made no sense: he had been a happy kid, with a lot of friends. How else could this happen? Jeffrey Chernach: Right up to the point of his diagnosis, a year after his death, I didn’t suspect it at all. When it came to football, I just wasn’t aware of the potential for long-term brain problems. When I heard the diagnosis, I don’t want to say it was a relief, but…it was an explanation. It finally made some sense.

We lost our son to football and brain disease. This is our story. - Vox

Ramogi Huma of the College Athletes Players Association spells out the reasons for collective bargaining for college athletes.

For women, what connections might there be between participation in competitive sports and participation in political life? For young women, could sports provide a more likely path to politics than participation in student government or other political clubs? How might policies, like Title IX, that aim at providing equal opportunities for female students to participate sports impact the political world of our future?

Labor Board: College Football Players are Employees

In what looks like a game-changing decision for college athletics, the National Labor Relation Board ruled that Northwestern University football players are employees of the school--and are entitled to unionize.

The efforts of CAPA, or College Athletes Players Association, were supported financially by the United Steelworkers. More from ESPN:

CAPA attorneys argued that college football is, for all practical purposes, a commercial enterprise that relies on players' labor to generate billions of dollars in profits. That, they contend, makes the relationship of schools to players one of employers to employees.

In its endeavor to have college football players be recognized as essential workers, CAPA likened scholarships to employment pay -- too little pay from its point of view. Northwestern balked at that claim, describing scholarship as grants.

Now the school will appeal this regional NLRB decision to the national level.

Does the future of sports include video-gaming?

Chung-Ang University in South Korea now considers competitive gamers the same as traditional athletes. And it’s a top 10 (South Korean) school!

The university will begin accepting eSports applicants starting next year, with students matriculating into the school’s Department of Sport Science—previously home to the ball sports you’d generally associate with college athletes.

Instead of seeking compensation, the suit would simply ask the court to rule that the NCAA's caps on student-athlete compensation violate anti-trust laws. It would ask the court to call NCAA "amateurism" by its proper name: price-fixing.

This Is How You Kill The NCAA

Transparency and Fair Play in Track and Field?

Sarah Barker has a nice article up on Deadspin about the impact of Nike's money on the judging of US Track and Field: "When A Famed Nike Coach Tried to Steal a Race, A Track Protest Was Born". It tells the story of Gabe Grunewald's exciting 3,000 meter indoor win at the US Indoor National Championships--and her subsequent disqualification under highly dubious circumstances.

"There are two main reasons this incident became such a big deal," Grunewald's agent, Paul Doyle, told me. "The first is, the supposed violation was very obviously not a violation. It's absurd to think Gabe could have been DQ'd for such a minor interference. Contact between athletes happens hundreds of times, particularly in indoor track. Athletes, fans and coaches saw what happened or didn't happen. The second reason is the unorthodox procedure. Three times, Gabe was cleared, and 30 minutes later, after 'enhanced video evidence,' which no one has seen, she was DQ'd. I can't remember, in my 15 years in professional sports, that this has ever happened."

Fortunately for Grunewald her win was reinstated. And fortunately for the sport--and the runners--there may just be a new bit of transparency in the sport:

On Monday, USATF will meet with the TFAA to "discuss the procedure for protests and appeals of results" at championship track meets. The Albuquerque Spring has succeeded in getting the athletes a seat at the table. Now comes the hard work of getting USATF to more clearly define its rules and ensure everyone is playing by the same ones.

Olympic Figure Skating and Fair Play

The Olympic’s women’s figure skating competition raised a lot of questions about the subjectivity of the voting—and the national biases of the judges. The Wire has a comprehensive breakdown of why the judging seemed, well, “off.” All of which leads to questions about fair play and what sports even mean in the absence of fair play:

The unavoidable question then becomes: why watch skating at all if there’s all this corruption and alleged manipulation? What is this sport worth if the stakes and standards seem to shift with each competition?

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