Common Sense Sports

Conventional wisdom and herd mentality are anchors wrapped around any possibility of original thought in the realm of sports writing. Once a story is broken and columnists take to keyboards it seems as though all that’s left is variations on a theme, projections based on “just because” and something that is “always true”.

Andrew Luck is making a mistake by staying in college instead of entering the NFL draft where he is expected to be the first player chosen, guaranteeing millions of dollars more than later picks. Former USC quarterback Matt Leinart and current Washington quarterback Jake Locker are always trotted out as cautionary tales. Both were projected first overall picks as juniors and decided to stay and in their cases had their draft stock drop as a result. Leinart has not had a good NFL career anyway and Locker has yet to prove himself one way or another and while his draft stock has dropped he may still prove to be an excellent player. Regardless they prove nothing for the future of Luck. If Luck is as good as projected he will be as good next year. And even if his draft position is hurt, if he works as an NFL player he will eventually be paid accordingly.

Jim Harbaugh will not be a good NFL coach because he is a good college coach. Again in this familiar storyline, cautionary tales such as Nick Saban or Steve Spurrier are mentioned. This line is very similar to the previous example in that before a coach who may or may not take a job somewhere else is deemed to fail before even taking the chance. If they are successful mass amnesia follows and the sports writing community always was in support of the coach and if they are not successful they will point back in time as predicting failure.

John Elway will be unsuccessful as an NFL GM because he was a former player. Another well trotted line is that high profile former players cannot successfully run a professional franchise with the most famous examples, almost always Isaiah Thomas, mentioned as evidence. Elway may be different. As a successful businessman using a finance degree earned while he was at Stanford, he built an auto dealer empire and then won an Arena Football League championship as an owner and manager of a team in Denver.

The mess that is the baseball hall of fame is impossible to dissect. Chaos seems to be compulsory in the way that the selectors, who happen to be sports writers, behave where there are no written rules to point to the way that players are selected. It is a strange and completely unclear process flush with biases and assumptions.

In the three specific examples above the conventional wisdom may very well materialize. The benefit of being a sports opinion writer is that there are many conventions that lead to easy copy and because of sheer volume of words and short memories, predictions that are completely wrong never are revisited while those that are somewhat correct are regurgitated as proof of clairvoyance for next time.