Motivated Thinking with Bad Intent: Politics and Football
One way to know who among us can wield power is to pay attention to who makes the worst arguments. No, it is not that good arguments allow people to gain power. That would make sense. The perverse reality is that making obviously -- even painfully -- bad arguments is almost invariably a sign of laziness, and that laziness in turn derives from the fact that people with power (and their allies) know that they truly have no reason to bother coming up with honest and compelling arguments.
If that does not count as a paradox, it is at least a surprisingly backward state of affairs. Because I have always been an argument-oriented person, I become especially exercised when I see people make jaw-droppingly bad arguments without conscience or consequence. Reacting to truly bad arguments is probably the most consistent theme running through my writing here on Dorf on Law, on Verdict, and very much in my academic writing as well ("No, budget deficits do not automatically make future generations poorer," "No, economic efficiency is not a neutral concept").
And this alertness to nonsense often finds me looking not only at politics, economics, law, and public policy but also at professional and college sports. As I have noted in prior columns, the screaming-at-your-opponent model of logic-free commentary is the same in both politics and sports. Indeed, the current iteration of "The Daily Show" (which would have been better if Jon Stewart had not come out of retirement, but I digress) has a regular parody segment called "Sports War," in which the two shouting commentators "are legally not allowed to agree with each other" (example here). The vibe of the old "McLaughlin Group" lives on.
Over the years, I have occasionally pointed to the bad arguments that we often see in sports commentary. There, however, it is often not necessarily bad intent and the arrogance of power that is at play but simply low stakes and not very bright commenters. To be clear, there are plenty of people who are stellar counter-examples of the "dumb jock" meme, but there are at least as many (even among those who are given TV jobs after their careers end) who are apparently simply incapable of complicated thought.
Why do the bad arguments mostly remain unchallenged in sports punditry? Again, often the stakes are low. The familiar "record-setting season statistics" trope is the one that has annoyed me the most over the years, with one of this year's best examples coming from the NFL. Eagles running back Saquon Barkley had a total of 2005 rushing yards for the season, which was exactly one hundred yards less than Eric Dickerson's all-time record from 1984. One note: the regular season had 16 games in 1984, but it has 17 now.
When Barkley agreed not to play the final (meaningless) regular season game, a bunch of people freaked out about "missing a chance at history" or something. Barkley's explanation was sensible: Why risk injury before a playoff run? But he could also have said: "You know what? I played 16 games, and Dickerson played 16. He had more yards, and the fact that seasons are now an extra game should have put an asterisk on my 'record,' if I had played and gotten more than a hundred extra yards." Of course, Dickerson's record is itself not meaningful, because his per-game average was lower than O.J. Simpson's in a 14-game season, which was in turn lower than Jim Brown's in a 12-game season. It is not even close.
This is mostly a matter of meaningless hype (again, low stakes). As another example, in this year's college football season, the big innovation was the expanded playoff system. There, instead of the 4-team playoff that had been used over the last ten years (preceded by a decade or so of a single-game championship), twelve teams made the playoff. Given the seeding system in use (four byes in the first round, then four quarterfinal games), that meant that between four and eight teams could have at least one "playoff win" in the first two rounds.
And sure enough, talking heads were all excited about how various teams had "won playoff games for the first time." The problem is that every team that won a first-round or quarterfinal game would be doing so for the first time, not only the teams that had never won semis or finals before. When Penn State, for example, was given a ridiculously favorable draw and won two games against clearly lesser teams, people were saying that this was somehow validation of that team. Penn State then played a real team and lost a close game, which they do against all real teams. But hey, they won playoff games!
That is an even more ridiculous version of the games-in-a-season logic error, which has been especially prevalent as the college game has added more and more games to the schedule. We hear about some team having "a string of x 10-win seasons for the first time since the 1970's," ignoring the inconvenient fact that teams can now play as many as 17 games in a season (13 guaranteed, including a bowl for every 6-win team) whereas 12 was the maximum fifty years ago. That is no small difference.
All of which brings me to the situations with higher stakes. More games means more injuries. No question about it. And some of those injuries will be career-ending. The NFL players' union fights fiercely against adding games to the schedule for that very reason. They have been able to get the owners to reduce the number of preseason games in exchange for longer regular seasons, which is an imperfect balance, but at least it is something. Every play of every game is a potential tragedy.
How bad is the injury problem? One day during the 2024 regular season (October 29, with a full month left in the regular season), I logged onto ESPN's "news" link for college football. The top five headlines were all about injuries. The top story: "U-M QB Tuttle retires: Need to prioritize health." The next story: "Injured Iowa QB McNamara not on depth chart." These are guys in their early twenties, and one had to retire or face permanent disability. The latter, so far as I know, is going to try again, even though he has essentially no chance at a pro career and is now at greater risk of permanent injury.
How do my comments above apply here? The commentary about this year's first 12-team playoff included a fairly large number of not-stupid people observing that all four teams that had byes in the first round had lost their quarterfinal games. There was a simple reason for that, however, which is that the system was set up to try to make conference championship games (another one of those extra games that once did not exist) continue to be meaningful, which meant that two lower-ranked conference champions were given byes. In addition, the second-seeded team had lost its starting quarterback to (no surprise, sadly) a season-ending injury. Only Ohio State's win over Oregon even counted as a surprise, but even there, the Buckeyes had gotten the championship-game week off by having blown a game as a 21-point-favorite over Michigan (and there was much rejoicing), which means that OSU had gotten some extra rest before the playoffs.
But sure enough, the new theory was that somehow "rest is bad," because all of the teams with byes had lost! Cue the armchair theorizing, discussions about "rust," and all the rest.
And what is the solution? This is where the stakes change. Whereas it ultimately makes no difference whether we say that Coach X has "a playoff win" or "the school's first-ever 12-win season," the conclusion among those who noticed that the bye teams had lost mattered: Expand the playoffs! Now, all the talk is about 16-teams, and some are floating 32- or even 64-team tournaments in the not-too-distant future.
As I noted above, the surest sign of arrogance is when someone confidently utters absolute nonsense. The fact is that more playoffs mean more money and more opportunities for ESPN to hype games, so there is precious little resistance to any argument that supports the further physical punishment of players.
Moreover, the commentators are fully aware of the injuries. Although they have learned to sound solemn when talking about any particular injury, the "it's all part of the game" mantra is everywhere. In the championship game last week, the commentary was all about how many injuries Notre Dame had suffered during the year, but the response was to laud the team for its "next man up" mindset. In other words, that elite program had stocked up enough cannon fodder to get to the championship game, where they lost to a team that had had fewer key players injured.
Meanwhile in politics, Republicans repeatedly make utterly stupid comments about trickle-down economics,"job-killing tax increases" (which is a talking point in Canada as well as the US), and Donald Trump says that birthright citizenship is bad because: "If somebody sets just a foot -- one foot, you don't need two -- on our land, 'Congratulations, you are now a citizen of the United States of America!'" And those are only two of dozens of examples. Republicans say these things because they know that they will not be called out by cowed reporters or even most Democrats, not because those arguments are even minimally defensible.
When people want something to happen and have the power to make it so, they know at least subconsciously that they merely have to say words. Republicans last week brushed off Trump's pardons of violent felons by saying that "we have to look forward," even as they approved a House committee specifically to look backward at what those felons did on January 6, 2021. Why say embarrassing things? Because they can. Why say that undocumented immigrants are causing a crime wave, even though crime is down and such immigrants commit many fewer crimes than US citizens do? Because they can.
More to the point, these lies and logical blunders are in service of hurting people about whom no one bothers to care, harm that is inflicted by people who know that they will get away with it so long as they show no shame. They know what outcome they want to achieve, and they know that they will be able to strong-arm it through in any case. Why bother making sense?