Detroit debacle must be stopped

Detroit debacle must be stopped

By Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports 5 hours, 31 minutes ago

DETROIT – William Clay Ford Sr. has done more damage to the NFL brand than Michael Vick, Adam “Pacman” Jones and Travis Henry could ever dream.

If you consider it in football terms and football terms only, it isn’t even close.

It’s time for the league’s image protecting commissioner, Roger Goodell, to get as tough with an increasingly incompetent owner as he would with a misbehaving player. If the hard line approach is about protecting the NFL, then what’s worse for the league right now than the chaos and carnage of the winless, hopeless, helpless Detroit Lions?

Ford, the owner of the Lions since 1963, may be a low key, law-abiding 83-year-old – a far cry from the troubled players Goodell has made examples out of with stiff suspensions and demands of accountability.

However, you never saw them destroy football in a major market. They didn’t mismanage a franchise for over four decades only to kill it lately. They didn’t reward failure, excuse ridiculousness and insult paying customers with season after season of non-competitive teams.

Photo William Clay Ford Sr. has been the owner of the Lions since 1963.

They didn’t put together the worst team in league history, 0-15 heading into Sunday’s season finale at Green Bay. They certainly didn’t declare the front office would return anyway or that the hiring a general manager with full control wasn’t a priority.

“Let’s see who’s available and what experience they have and see if they fit in any of our slots,” Ford Sr. told Booth Newspapers.

Slots? Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse in Detroit.

By forcing the new guy to accept limited power and holdovers from the pathetic Matt Millen era, Ford is assuring no quality candidate will look twice at the position. The Lions will again get a desperate candidate willing to work within the illogical confines of the confused owner.

It’s why football in Detroit is dead until there’s a change at the top.

Goodell is doing the league and its fans a disservice by allowing such mismanagement. The Lions do not have NFL-caliber players or NFL-caliber coaches. It isn’t an NFL organization.

He needs to step in and if not move Ford out, then at least demand he accepts league assistance to help the franchise become legitimate.

Ford Sr. is so delusional he thinks a tweak or two will do it. He isn’t even considering following the path of the Miami Dolphins, whose response to last year’s 1-15 season was to give Bill Parcells total authority. The Dolphins are now one victory from the playoffs.

If Goodell can get tough with players for off-field misbehavior, then why not an owner for prolonged on-field crimes against the sport?

The best case would be to get Ford Sr. to transfer power to his son, William Clay Ford Jr., who at least had the wherewithal to push for the firing of Millen earlier this season.

Photo The Lions under Rod Marinelli in 2008 have been outscored 486-247 through 15 games.

If that’s not possible, then do what NBA commissioner David Stern did with the New York Knicks. He took self-destructive owner James Dolan (like Ford Sr. little more than a bumbling trust fund) and all but forced him to hire respected basketball executive Donnie Walsh. Half a season later the franchise has been stabilized.

Left to their own volition, guys like Ford Sr. or Dolan or Vick, Jones and Henry fall victim to arrogance and entitlement.

The players might break the law. The owner just breaks the will of the customers. Anger has been replaced by apathy for many in Detroit. Fans have given up on staging protest marches, wearing opposing colors to home games and screaming into talk radio lines.

In Ford’s 45 years as owner, the Lions have won just a single playoff game (1991 against Dallas). What was once a mostly mediocre franchise has lately produced historic futility.

The current team has lost 22 of its last 23 games and is actually worse than the record.

It lost all eight home games this season by an average 22 points. In a football mad area, the majority of the games were blacked out. Fans that did attend often spent most of the game booing.

Head coach Rod Marinelli spent the season shrugging off charges of nepotism for hiring his son-in-law as defensive coordinator. Even with a defense ranked last in the NFL, Marinelli said he never once thought of firing anyone or taking over the duties himself.

Why would he hold someone accountable? No one is ever accountable with the Lions.

“Loyalty is my strength,” Marinelli claimed.

This explanation came after a 42-7 defeat to New Orleans Sunday where the Lions didn’t make a single defensive stop. It’s little wonder plenty of irate fans thought local columnists should make more press conference jokes at Marinelli’s expense.

Yet Ford Sr. surveyed this toxic environment and deemed it unworthy of a front office housecleaning. He has no reasonable plan forward. He has no chance of getting proper help.

If earlier this season Ford Jr. hadn’t publicly ripped his father’s management, it stands to reason Millen, the bumbling broadcaster, might still be in charge. After all, he was in the middle of a five-year extension Ford Sr. gave him despite years of draft busts and losing seasons.

This is the worst run franchise in the league and the biggest black eye on Goodell’s operation. Ford Sr.’s actions have a far greater impact on the league than one player’s dog fighting ring.

If Goodell’s really so concerned about the health and image of the league, it’s time he held old men in suits as accountable as young players in strip clubs.

Lions lose and for an encore — Ford will stand pat!

December 21, 2008

Lions lose and for an encore — Ford will stand pat!

BY MITCH ALBOM
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

You’ve got to be kidding.

William Clay Ford Sr., with the garbage product he disguises as a football team, actually said he wanted his two-headed front-office team to RETURN next year?
It’s beyond belief, isn’t it?

On a day when the Lions players showed how truly awful they had become, the owner one-upped them in ineptitude. It was like the owner of the Titanic, as the ship was sinking, announcing, “Next I’m gonna build an airplane.”

Ford wins the prize. He is the worst. He is the biggest problem in this franchise and easily the most maddening. The fact he can contemplate returning anybody or anything from what already has tied the worst single-season losing streak in NFL history is incomprehensible.

And yet there he was, telling a Booth Newspapers reporter before Sunday’s 42-7 loss that he wanted Tom Lewand and Martin Mayhew back next year, possibly in their roles as chief operating officer and general manager. Those would be the current roles that have led to 0-15.

As for somebody new, somebody who could take total charge — the Bill Parcells-type guru fans have been praying for — Ford said: “Let’s see who’s available and what experience they have and see if they fit in any of our slots.”

What slots? Vice President of Losing? Chairman of Missed Tackles? General Manager of Blown Defenses?

There are no slots here. There is no organization. And nobody great will want to slide in beside Lewand and Mayhew. Mr. Ford, is there something about total failure that you simply can’t see? The place needs to be blown up.

And you first.

A time for bold action

Honestly. People have been waiting months for this hapless leader to say something. Show some direction. As NFL owners go, Ford already is perceived as Fredo in “The Godfather,” a guy with the right last name but little else to justify his power.

Now he proves it. This is the best he can do? Bring those two back?

No offense to Lewand, but he has been here 13 years. No offense to Mayhew, but he has been here eight. Both have been part of a lifeless machine that has sputtered, collapsed and crashed into historic failure. What on Earth qualifies them for next year?

This team needs a total makeover. Everybody out. Truth be told, it needs a new owner — but who can fire an owner? Among Ford’s many faults, the worst is his habit of staying with the wrong people too long. Russ Thomas. Matt Millen. And now, with the blinding glare of becoming the worst team in NFL history, he grasps for the same tilted steering wheel and says, in effect, “stay the course.”

Heck, he wouldn’t even knock Rod Marinelli.

“I’m leaving it open,” Ford said.

I thought that was how the Lions handled opposing receivers. Not how you ran a team.

The wrong side of history

But why expect anything else? On Sunday, the Lions’ utter incompetence was on full display, from men in ties to men in cleats. They began by giving up 60 yards on the opening kickoff, then allowed one Saints touchdown, another Saints touchdown and four more Saints touchdowns. New Orleans never had to punt.

“They’ve been fighting,” Marinelli said of his team. “They didn’t today.”

Right. Why fight today? Why fight when your pride and legacy are on the line? What possible motivation could they have had for playing hard Sunday at Ford Field?

No more pity. The Lions are not victims of cruel fate. They are simply bad. They lack the talent. They lack the coaching. Not to win a title.

To win a single game.

And Ford wants to keep things in place?

Blow it up. Ford has owned this team for 45 years and has one playoff victory. At that pace, he’ll be 118 when he gets another. Lions fans are like dogs jumping for a cat in a tree. The tree always will be tall, so the cat always will be safe. Ford owns the team. It drives you insane.

Perhaps the only answer is in the half-empty stadium Sunday. The games are already blacked out. Money is tight.

Why pay a dollar — or any attention — to this product anymore? The Lions are already the first NFL team to drop 15 of 15 in a season. Any thought that they would wake up from this bad dream before it really came true was silly.

And now, any thought that things will change may have been squashed by the blathering of an owner who, to put it politely, doesn’t have — and never has had — a clue.

Merry freaking Christmas.

Go Blue, Ohio State still sucks!

How Obama got elected.

The Deathstar is almost fully operational

Obama, Dems Seek to End 401(k) Plans

Yes that's right, the Government isn't happy that they are losing out on all of the tax money from your 401K's so guess what solution they've got for them? Get rid of them and replace them with a government sponsored "One size fits all" program. Don't believe me? Read this.

http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2008/10/24/obama-dems-seek-to-end-401-k-plans/

Well, it looks like we just bought ourselves a Monorail....

Yes indeedee sir! It's a bona-fide, certified, multi-racial, smooth talking, hope promising monorail!

Chant along with me!

Monorail, monorail, monorail! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!

Bill Bonds returns

What an Obama for President truly means

The Wall Street Journal had a really good article that everyone who is undecided in this election should read. It does a really good job of explaining to people what would likely happen from a policy standpoint should Barack Obama win the election.

This is because the Democrats already have control over both houses of the US Congress and they will then be able to pass a great deal of legislation that would likely not be approved if there was some opposition in the form of a Republican House, Senate or President.

Now if you happen to approve and be in favor of these issues than Obama is likely the person you should look for but if he isn't then you should hold your nose and look at McCain.

Just something everyone needs to understand prior to casting their ballots.



A Liberal Supermajority
Get ready for 'change' we haven't seen since 1965, or 1933.


If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.
[Review & Outlook] AP

Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.

The nearby table shows the major bills that passed the House this year or last before being stopped by the Senate minority. Keep in mind that the most important power of the filibuster is to shape legislation, not merely to block it. The threat of 41 committed Senators can cause the House to modify its desires even before legislation comes to a vote. Without that restraining power, all of the following have very good chances of becoming law in 2009 or 2010.
[Review & Outlook]

- Medicare for all. When HillaryCare cratered in 1994, the Democrats concluded they had overreached, so they carved up the old agenda into smaller incremental steps, such as Schip for children. A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.

Mr. Obama wants to build a public insurance program, modeled after Medicare and open to everyone of any income. According to the Lewin Group, the gold standard of health policy analysis, the Obama plan would shift between 32 million and 52 million from private coverage to the huge new entitlement. Like Medicare or the Canadian system, this would never be repealed.

The commitments would start slow, so as not to cause immediate alarm. But as U.S. health-care spending flowed into the default government options, taxes would have to rise or services would be rationed, or both. Single payer is the inevitable next step, as Mr. Obama has already said is his ultimate ideal.

- The business climate. "We have some harsh decisions to make," Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned recently, speaking about retribution for the financial panic. Look for a replay of the Pecora hearings of the 1930s, with Henry Waxman, John Conyers and Ed Markey sponsoring ritual hangings to further their agenda to control more of the private economy. The financial industry will get an overhaul in any case, but telecom, biotech and drug makers, among many others, can expect to be investigated and face new, more onerous rules. See the "Issues and Legislation" tab on Mr. Waxman's Web site for a not-so-brief target list.

The danger is that Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley. Something more punitive is likely as well, for instance a windfall profits tax on oil, and maybe other industries.

- Union supremacy. One program certain to be given right of way is "card check." Unions have been in decline for decades, now claiming only 7.4% of the private-sector work force, so Big Labor wants to trash the secret-ballot elections that have been in place since the 1930s. The "Employee Free Choice Act" would convert workplaces into union shops merely by gathering signatures from a majority of employees, which means organizers could strongarm those who opposed such a petition.

The bill also imposes a compulsory arbitration regime that results in an automatic two-year union "contract" after 130 days of failed negotiation. The point is to force businesses to recognize a union whether the workers support it or not. This would be the biggest pro-union shift in the balance of labor-management power since the Wagner Act of 1935.

- Taxes. Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for "the rich," substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP.

- The green revolution. A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority. Cap and trade would hand Congress trillions of dollars in new spending from the auction of carbon credits, which it would use to pick winners and losers in the energy business and across the economy. Huge chunks of GDP and millions of jobs would be at the mercy of Congress and a vast new global-warming bureaucracy. Without the GOP votes to help stage a filibuster, Senators from carbon-intensive states would have less ability to temper coastal liberals who answer to the green elites.

- Free speech and voting rights. A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. One early effort would be national, election-day voter registration. This is a long-time goal of Acorn and others on the "community organizer" left and would make it far easier to stack the voter rolls. The District of Columbia would also get votes in Congress -- Democratic, naturally.

Felons may also get the right to vote nationwide, while the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.

- Special-interest potpourri. Look for the watering down of No Child Left Behind testing standards, as a favor to the National Education Association. The tort bar's ship would also come in, including limits on arbitration to settle disputes and watering down the 1995 law limiting strike suits. New causes of legal action would be sprinkled throughout most legislation. The anti-antiterror lobby would be rewarded with the end of Guantanamo and military commissions, which probably means trying terrorists in civilian courts. Google and MoveOn.org would get "net neutrality" rules, subjecting the Internet to intrusive regulation for the first time.



It's always possible that events -- such as a recession -- would temper some of these ambitions. Republicans also feared the worst in 1993 when Democrats ran the entire government, but it didn't turn out that way. On the other hand, Bob Dole then had 43 GOP Senators to support a filibuster, and the entire Democratic Party has since moved sharply to the left. Mr. Obama's agenda is far more liberal than Bill Clinton's was in 1992, and the Southern Democrats who killed Al Gore's BTU tax and modified liberal ambitions are long gone.

In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today's left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for "change" should know they may get far more than they ever imagined.

Please add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.

What the hell is Jerry Jones thinking?

first, third and sixth round draft picks for Roy Freaking Williams?? Three draft picks for an under achieving head case wide receiver that is going to be a free agent after this season? My god what an absolute fleecing!

I think Roy will be a good, productive WR for Dallas because he will have no other choice but to be with all the other talent there. I just hope that WC Ford Sr. doesn't decide to keep the current leadership for making ONE astute move that basically fell into his lap.

I am more convinced then ever that this organization needs a complete top to bottom overhaul to purge all the evil spirits and lemmings from there. There are too many "Yes Men" and ass kissers surrounding and reporting to Ford and that needs to stop. Ford needs to cut the cord from the organization's day to day operations and hire someone with a proven track record to run things.

Back to the trade for a moment, this is a trade that had no reason not to happen and it is a good thing provided they take advantage of the picks, with Millen no longer there perhaps the odds improved slightly on that. We'll see how they handle the rest of the front office going forward then.

Do I really need to write anything for this that you don't already know?

Seriously, It doesn't matter anymore.

Ever wonder what your name would be if you were born into Sarah Palin's family?? Well, wonder no more!

By the way, mine was Goalie Sanka Palin

How to Save Detroit and $50 Billion Dollars

With the Big 3 car makers in Detroit asking for fifty billion dollars in "Low Interest Loans" from the government, I came across this article and thought it was worth a read. Judge for yourself.

BUSINESS WORLD
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.



How to Save Detroit
And $50 Billion
September 10, 2008; Page A13

For a sum small compared to their revenues but large in relation to their market caps, the Detroit auto makers were all over the two conventions. Their lobbyists had something to sell -- a plea for $50 billion in federal loans. Congress practically owes us this money, Ford, GM and Chrysler argue -- because Congress slammed us with new fuel mileage mandates that will cost us $100 billion to meet.

John McCain caved. The White House is in the process of caving. Barack Obama didn't need to cave. But before rushing to pass the legislation, there's an easy way to save $50 billion or whatever part of these loans wouldn't be paid back: Just repeal the fuel economy rules.

It must infuriate the auto makers how readily their critics attribute their problems to their own incompetence. Then how to explain that GM is thriving in Europe, selling small cars that get lots of miles per gallon? Buick is among the biggest selling brands in China. GM is running away with Latin America.

The Big Three's problem, to be blunt, is North America. They should have pulled out long ago.

Not only did history saddle them with a UAW labor monopoly that their foreign competitors have managed to avoid. Even that might not have been fatal had Congress not enacted its "corporate average fuel economy" rules in the 1970s.

Look at gallons consumed, miles driven, barrels imported or emissions emitted: CAFE has had no significant impact on energy consumption. Its sole practical effect has been to inflict on Detroit the need to produce, with high-cost U.S. labor, millions of small cars designed to lose money.

CAFE has to be the most perverse exercise in product regulation in industrial history. It confronted the Big Three with the choice only of whether to lose a lot of money, by matching Toyota and Honda on quality and features; or somewhat less money, by scrimping on quality and features and discounting, discounting, discounting. Rationally, they scrimped -- and still live under a reputational cloud in the eyes of sedan buyers. Yet notice that their profitable product lines, in which they invest to be truly competitive -- such as SUVs, pickups and minivans -- hold their own against the Japanese and command real loyalty among U.S. consumers.

Let us have a moment of nonflagellating realism. Toyota is as capable of poor market timing as GM or Ford -- witness its multibillion-dollar bet on the Tundra pickup. It flies in the face of human and business realities to imagine that, generation after generation, Detroit hired idiots while Toyota recruited geniuses -- though that's the usual explanation of Detroit's troubles.

Had CAFE not existed, there is no reason the Big Three today could not be competitive. As businesses do, they would have allocated capital to products capable of recovering their costs. Investments in fuel efficiency would still have taken place -- to the extent consumers valued those investments. That is, if they were profitable.

If Washington found this unsatisfactory, it could have done as the Europeans do and raised fuel taxes to coax the public to make different choices. Politically inexpedient? Well, yes, but that doesn't mean CAFE is an effective substitute. It isn't and never was.

"When exposed to the piercing light of economic analysis, the alleged benefits of more stringent CAFE standards burn away," Robert Crandall of the Brookings Institution wrote here last year. "Too bad these proposals will not be subjected to economic scrutiny before they become law."

Yup. We won't second-guess Detroit's political behavior during its 30-year fuel economy captivity, which consisted mostly of offering lip service to Congress's delusions. It might have done as Volvo, Mercedes, BMW and others did, and simply paid fines for failing to meet the targets. No doubt its friends in Congress advised that doing so would only make its political situation worse.

Having squandered the domestic auto industry's capital on millions and millions of cars that lost money, now Congress will squander the taxpayer's capital. It will lend the auto makers $50 billion to invest in fuel efficiency innovations that, by definition, won't command from car shoppers a price high enough to cover the cost of making them. Which makes it very unlikely we will get the $50 billion back.

Bottom line: Fifty billion won't turn CAFE into effective policy. It will do just fine, though, as an indicator of Washington's willingness to throw good money after bad rather than admit the folly of its own long-running handiwork.

See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.

And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum.

F@#$&*(@%cking Lions!!!!!!

What a disgrace. Week 1 was an embarrassment getting blown out by probably what is agreed upon as the worst team in the NFL. Although I didn't think it possible, Week 2 was worse in that they started to get blown out, came back to take the lead and then got blown out again. All in a days work for these sh*tty players.

These Lions came back from a 21-0 deficit to lead 25-24 with about seven minutes left in the game. What happened next can go on the list of one of the greatest QB melt downs in Detroit sports history. Jon Kitna threw three interceptions in a row, two of which were returned for touchdowns and in the process, giving up 24 points in the span of about 5 minutes.

NFL teams don't do this kind of shit! What we've been given by this pathetic franchise is not NFL football, it's not even football at all. It's a farse and a lie!

Everything about this organization sucks, from the arrogance of the front office and coaching staff to it's overpaid and over hyped players who insist upon being "Believed in and respected" when they continuously play like dog shit and commit the same stupid mistakes every game. I've Had it!

The Detroit Free Press's Michael Rosenberg wrote a column last week saying that it was not productive to boycott this team

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080913/COL22/309130001

but the reality is I can't root for this team or organization any longer. Not with a complete lack of organizational intelligence or knowledge of how to compete in the NFL. The Detroit Lions need an organizational enema to purge the arrogance and the business as usual approach that has characterized them as the "Same Old Lions" for my entire adult life. I'm taking back my Sunday's from bad football and blind support. I'm also taking back my dollars and not supporting any Lions merchandise for as long as it takes.

Now, I've just got to find another team to root for.

Kwame, almost out. Moving trucks in the driveway!

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080913/METRO/809130408

Thank god the nightmare is almost over, I only hope the city of Detroit get the honest leadership that they need and not more of the same. Have fun in jail Kwame! Merry Christmas!

So these are my choices for President?

So one side, I've got the great hope for Change in Barack Obama. A good enough speaker and seemingly a nice guy but with zero experience and no clout. I seriously wonder who from the Democratic party is pulling the strings behind him because I don't think he has any control over things any more. He may be a good leader down the road but right now he is an empty suit



On the other side we've got John McCain who the thought of voting for utterly makes me sick because of his demeanor, age and general smugness not to mention his positions on key issues. I don't believe he is capable of any of the change that this country needs either.

So where does that leave me? Like the rest of the country, screwed. I'd vote for a third party candidate if I liked any of them but I don't.

My grandma always used to tell me that voting for a third party was essentially throwing away your vote. Well, I am seriously considering doing just that.

At this point, I just can't wait for this election to be over. How sad is that?

Mr. Mayor, Enough!

This pretty much sums it up for King Kwame!

IN OUR OPINION
Mr. Mayor, Enough!

July 26, 2008

What's that old saying about when push comes to shove?
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Well, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has just pushed things too damn far. Enough already.

Mr. Mayor, for Detroit, for Wayne County, for the entire State of Michigan, which has been dragged into your mess: Shove off.

It's over. It's got to be.

Kilpatrick has lost it. His mental fitness must be called into question. He should have been thrown in jail for shoving a sheriff's deputy, and he sure as hell should not be telling anybody else what to do these days.

If he won't resign, the mayor ought to offer a public apology -- for whatever that's worth -- and explain to the city's children that police officers have a job to do and must be treated with respect. Then he should take a leave of absence at least until his preliminary hearing on felony charges in September. Let him stay in the Manoogian. It'd be a small price to pay to keep him away from the levers of power.

"Irrational" is how 36th District Court Judge Ronald Giles described Kilpatrick's assault on a deputy who was trying Thursday afternoon to serve court papers on a friend of the mayor. Good for Giles to finally take real charge of the mayor's criminal case Friday, after weeks of swaying in the hot air from Kilpatrick's defense team. The judge set a thug-like cash bond for the mayor, subjected him to random drug tests, and generally dressed Kilpatrick down for incredibly bad behavior. In short, he treated the mayor like the criminal defendant he is. About time.

Maybe now Kilpatrick's $700-an-hour lawyers will get serious with Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy about some kind of plea to end this nightmare, which has yet to reach even the preliminary hearing stage. Trial? Likely into next year. Cost? Millions of Wayne County tax dollars that could be put to so much better use.

With a cloud hanging over the City Council because of its own scandal on a sludge contract, there's a big ball sitting in Gov. Jennifer Granholm's court, too. The council asked her to use her constitutional power to boot the mayor; Granholm, ever judicious, has set up a legal procedure for decision-making. It is at least on a faster pace than the mayor's criminal case, but nothing official can really begin to happen until after Labor Day, and this, again, is going to take time and money from a state that has so many other major needs for its resources.

Even as Granholm's quasi-judicial cogs are turning, she ought to be privately leaning on the mayor to do everybody, including himself, a favor and quit. Whatever she may think of the legal grounds for removing him, Granholm can't be happy about the mayor's public conduct, the paralysis he has inflicted on Detroit and the damage he is doing to Michigan's image. Next time he calls to ask for a meeting on Cobo Hall, she just has to say: "Mr. Mayor, what's the point? I've been asked to sit in judgment of you. We have nothing else to discuss unless it's how you can spare us both a lot of grief."

There are other prominent Michigan Democrats who kept silent too long. Surely they can see the damage that Kilpatrick could inflict on the party's chance to carry Michigan in the presidential race. Isn't it time to give him the message?

There are Detroit-area business leaders who grumble privately about what Kilpatrick's continued presence is doing to the city. Yet for reasons that can no longer be valid -- if they ever were -- no one but Dave Bing has been willing to go public.

What are folks afraid of? More pushing and shoving? Is this going to be allowed to drag on until the '09 city elections, still more than a year away? Is everyone really content to let the criminal case "run its course," which means Kilpatrick dragging it out as long as possible?

What happens in the next episode of "irrational"? It's a scary thought.

How 2 ball boys stopped opponent's signal-stealing, saved U-M's 1997 title

It was a Monday morning like so many others since Jonathan Datz began working for the district attorney's office in Broomfield, Colo.
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His assignment this April day -- as a deputy DA in a town halfway between Denver and Boulder -- was to follow up on a minor theft, talking to the victim of a car break-in and prepping her for the trial.

But when the victim wasn't home, Datz and other members of his office were stuck killing time with her husband. And in just a few minutes, Datz learned the information he had craved for 10 1/2 years -- and it had nothing to do with criminal justice.

At last, he had confirmation that his quick thinking -- and that of two other student managers -- helped preserve Michigan's undefeated football season in 1997.
'Your heart skips a few beats'

In 1997, the Wolverines were coming off four straight four-loss seasons, the first two under Gary Moeller, the last two under Lloyd Carr. Datz, a senior from Philadelphia majoring in political science, was one of the bevy of managers assigned to handle the menial tasks associated with Michigan football.

"The job of a football manager probably hasn't changed much," said Eddie Magnus, who was a head manager that season. "They help organizing things during the week, the practices, setting up drills, making sure practice runs smoothly, all the way to helping out with travel and doing wakeup on the morning of the game days."

At home games, Datz and Mike Youtan, a senior from southern California, worked the opponents' sideline as ball boys, keeping their mouths shut and staying out of the way.

Until the fifth game.

It was unseasonably warm for Oct. 11. The day started in bright sunshine with Aaron Ward and Mike Knuble -- Red Wings who had played at U-M -- parading the Stanley Cup around the field at the Big House.

The Wolverines were ranked sixth in the country. Northwestern was 2-4.

But Michigan was struggling to move the ball, holding only a 13-3 lead at halftime.

Northwestern had upset Michigan the previous two seasons. Now Datz and Youtan had an idea why.

"There was a guy on their sideline that day, and he had our signals down pat," Datz said. "Every time, he would scream into the defense what we're going to do -- pass or run -- and he was almost always right. ...

"They were blowing up draws, calling our counters and destroying our screen passes -- all a big part of our plays that year. I was just screaming mad. Youtan and I are thinking to ourselves, 'This guy has us.' "

They somehow needed to inform the U-M coaches. So early in the third quarter, according to the managers, Youtan ran around the field to talk with Magnus.

Magnus' job was to hold the cords to Carr's headphones. He, too, was expected to keep his mouth shut, stay out of the way and keep the wires from entangling the boss.

But Magnus decided the information was so important that he had to approach Carr.

"Your heart skips a few beats," he said. "But it's a fairly stressful issue if they know all our plays."

So he took the plunge and told Carr what Datz and Youtan had observed.

"I absolutely remember that," Carr said recently. "The reason I do remember it is I don't ever remember anybody else offering advice or information during a game.

"Those are all bright guys that get into those positions. But that's the only time I remember one telling me something."

But that still wasn't enough for the coaches to change their signal calling. So later in the quarter, Datz said he ran around the field to repeat the message to Magnus.

The play that finally sold the U-M coaches on the need to adjust came on a third-and-25 with less than three minutes left in the third quarter. That's when U-M tailback Clarence Williams ran a sweep -- an odd call for that down and distance -- and two Wildcats grabbed him behind the line of scrimmage.

At the time, Scott Dreisbach, U-M's backup quarterback, was wearing a headset and signaling the plays. So to confuse the Wildcats, third-stringer Jason Kapsner put on a headset and started signaling, too. (Had the usual backup, Tom Brady, not undergone an appendectomy a few days earlier, he might have been added as well.)

The Wolverines opened the fourth quarter with a 12-play, 70-yard scoring drive over five minutes, capped by quarterback Brian Griese escaping a sack to hit tight end Jerame Tuman for a 20-6 lead.

"That gave us control of the game," Carr recalled.

It was just the fifth victory in a season that would have so many more highlights. But after two seasons of Northwestern handing U-M its first loss at the same juncture, when it was ranked sixth each time, the 23-6 triumph was vindication and more.

"We've had that on our minds all year," defensive back Charles Woodson said afterward.
'The ball boys are on to me'

Until Appalachian State knocked off Michigan last September, the Northwestern games in 1995 and 1996 rated among the biggest upsets in U-M history.

While those Wildcats had talent, it seemed improbable that a program that hadn't beaten U-M since 1965 would take out the Wolverines two years in a row.

Having an idea about U-M's plays certainly helped.

"That was what I would do," said David Hansburg, a Northwestern graduate assistant those years. "If I could see them signal in plays, I'd watch. This was no Spygate, and there was no video of anybody. I equated it to being like baseball when you've got a runner on second base; it's part of the game."

Using the naked eye to steal signals has been done for years in college football and is not illegal.

In 1995 and '96, Hansburg said, all he had to do was watch U-M center Rod Payne, a one-handed snapper who apparently placed his opposite hand on the ground for a running play and on his thigh for a passing play.

When the Northwestern coaches pointed at the ground or the sky, All-America linebacker Pat Fitzgerald spread the word on the field. (Fitzgerald, now Northwestern's head coach, declined to comment for this story.)

In 1997, Payne was in the NFL, so Hansburg spent his time watching Dreisbach and was pretty sure he had U-M's pattern down by halftime. But it wasn't easy to hide his knowledge.

"I remember thinking that the ball boys were snuggling up to me," he said. "There is no subtlety to it. If you get a run call or you know it's a screen, the only way to get it to the players fast enough is to yell.

"In the third quarter, (the Wolverines) scouted it out with their coaches watching; I had them dead to rights. But late in the third and early in the fourth, I remember thinking the ball boys are on to me. ...

"Finally, they moved to multiple signal callers. They figured it out and adjusted. I keep trying, but I'm dead."
'I don't even think I told my father'

The Wolverines, of course, continued marching to an undefeated season and a national championship, their first in 50 years. Before long, the Northwestern game was just a footnote. In fact, within hours, it wasn't even the biggest news on campus. Later that afternoon, athletic director Tom Goss announced he had fired basketball coach Steve Fisher in the wake of the Ed Martin scandal.

On Jan. 1, 1998, Datz, Youtan and Magnus celebrated in Pasadena, Calif., hugging each other on the Rose Bowl field after the Wolverines defeated Washington State.

Carr, whose four-loss seasons and consecutive bowl defeats hadn't won over fans, went on to become a Michigan coaching legend. Only Bo Schembechler and Fielding H. Yost had won more games by the time Carr retired after last season.

Hansburg stayed with Northwestern coach Gary Barnett, moving with him to Colorado and continuing to outsmart opponents until leaving college sports in late 2006. (For conspiracy theorists, he said Michigan State's plays were even easier to steal than Michigan's.) With his wife, Holly, Hansburg now runs the Rocky Mountain Day Camp for boys and girls ages 5-12 in Superior, Colo.

Magnus, a Framingham, Mass., native, works for a private equity firm in Chicago. Youtan is a business development manager for a Web development firm in the Los Angeles suburbs, near where he grew up.

Datz and Youtan stayed close, chatting often about the Northwestern game but almost never discussing it with outsiders.

"It became one of the things we were embarrassed to tell because it reeked of someone trying to enhance their importance," Datz said. "We kept that story and told it amongst ourselves, but I don't even think I told my father, who is an obsessed Michigan fan."

And that's where the story probably would have stayed -- until April 28.
'Now THAT is an unbelievable story'

Datz arrived at the Hansburg home in Superior to meet not with David but with Holly, who was nervous about testifying. Since she was expected in at any moment -- she was running morning errands -- Datz made small talk with her husband.

Because many Colorado residents are transplants, Datz asked how Hansburg got to Colorado (with Barnett), then began the rapid-fire rebuilding of the previous decade.

Did you work at Northwestern in 1997? (Yes.) Do you remember the Michigan game? (Yes.) Did you have a guy stealing our signs? (Yes.) Who was he?

"Until that moment, to him, it was legend in his own mind," said Hansburg, who proudly revealed himself. "He was so excited, he pulled out his cell phone and started calling someone."

That was Youtan, who got a voicemail saying, in effect, Datz had some incredible information.

"For 10-11 years," Hansburg said, "he was telling this story, and no one would believe him."

For the sign stealing to be discussed is one thing. But for the two principal figures to meet in a state where neither of them had lived previously, for such a random event to bring them together, and for Holly Hansburg to be just late enough for them to fill time ... what are the odds?

Greater than Northwestern beating Michigan in consecutive seasons?

"This is one of the stranger full circles you'll ever come across," Magnus said. "For two fundamental people involved in such a random way, that would be difficult to top."

On the ESPN broadcast of the game, with 13:38 remaining in the third quarter, you can see for yourself on the Northwestern sideline. There is a young man, with a backward hat and glasses, taking notes behind Barnett. Hansburg.

As coaches say -- the tape is the truth.

Within a few hours of the meeting, Youtan started an e-mail chain that swept the student managers from the '97 team. Some passed it on to friends. Someone sent it to a wide receiver from that Northwestern team, who hit reply and boasted of Hansburg's skill at stealing signals.

In the past decade, Carr thought he had heard every tale of Michigan's magical season -- from the team at their meetings and reunions, from his staff in private moments and from the thousands of fans who stop him at dinner, at the store and on trips around the world.

But when told of how Jonathan Datz met David Hansburg -- how the alert student manager met the clever graduate assistant -- even Carr paused.

"Now THAT is an unbelievable story," he said.

Contact MARK SNYDER at 313-223-3210 or msnyder@freepress.com.

NAFTA?

Load Up the Pantry

R.O.I.
By BRETT ARENDS



Load Up the Pantry
April 21, 2008 6:47 p.m.

I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food.

No, this is not a drill.

You've seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they're a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.

Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.

"Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can absorb higher costs." (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Quaker Strategic)

Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you'll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax.

Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year.

And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They're all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.

These are trends that have been in place for some time.

And if you are hoping they will pass, here's the bad news: They may actually accelerate.

The reason? The prices of many underlying raw materials have risen much more quickly still. Wheat prices, for example, have roughly tripled in the past three years.

Sooner or later, the food companies are going to have to pass those costs on. Kraft saw its raw material costs soar by about $1.25 billion last year, squeezing profit margins. The company recently warned that higher prices are here to stay. Last month the chief executive of General Mills, Kendall Powell, made a similar point.

The main reason for rising prices, of course, is the surge in demand from China and India. Hundreds of millions of people are joining the middle class each year, and that means they want to eat more and better food.

A secondary reason has been the growing demand for ethanol as a fuel additive. That's soaking up some of the corn supply.

You can't easily stock up on perishables like eggs or milk. But other products will keep. Among them: Dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables. The kicker: You should also save money by buying them in bulk.

If this seems a stretch, ponder this: The emerging bull market in agricultural products is following in the footsteps of oil. A few years ago, many Americans hoped $2 gas was a temporary spike. Now it's the rosy memory of a bygone age.

The good news is that it's easier to store Cap'n Crunch or cans of Starkist in your home than it is to store lots of gasoline. Safer, too.

Write to Brett Arends at brett.arends@wsj.com1

Why the U.S. cellphone system is un-American

Why the U.S. cellphone system is un-American

Any TV you buy will work with any cable or satellite TV service you have. Any PC you buy, even a Mac, will work with any Internet service provider you use. Any landline phone, wired or cordless, will work any phone company's landline service.

Duh, duh and duh, right? So can you buy any cellphone you want regardless of who your carrier is? Of course. Unless you live in the United States of America. Why? Because the FCC is a wuss and a monopoly enabler and can't even follow its own rules.

More on this after the Continue jump.

Earlier this month in Las Vegas, FCC chairwuss Kevin Martin announced his intention to dismiss a year-old Skype petition, which called upon cellphone carriers to completely open their networks and allow us to buy and use any handset we want, approved by the carriers or not.

The carriers have announced their intention to open up their networks, thanks in large part to pressure from Google's Linux-based open operating system, Android, and the resulting Open Handset Alliance. So Martin figures no additional government action is necessary.

Not surprisingly, the carriers haven't taken even a baby step to follow through on their announced open-network intentions. Without FCC jabbing, why should they? The only ones who agree with Martin's active non-action are the carriers. Everyone else in the industry from handset makers to retailers, along with Democratic FCC commissioner Michael Copp, think Martin's laissez-faire lethargy is loopy.
Soul Stealer
Why should you care? Because you're being cellphone short-sheeted, that's why. Take, for instance, the Samsung Soul. This beautiful metallic slider has a "magical touch" navigation pad with backlit touch controls that change depending on the application — play, fast forward and rewind icons for music, + - x ÷ symbols for the calculator, etc — but that's not the cool part. The Soul has a 5MP camera, collects data at 7.2 Mbps, and is just half an inch thin.

But your Soul is lost, along with dozens of the other advanced cellphones I saw in Vegas, because no U.S. carrier has agreed to carry them. The same happens with applications and services. Verizon, Sprint and AT&T Wireless each have their own music and video services. Theoretically, someone could develop a Rhapsody-compatible cellphone, but no carrier would carry it. The iPhone is the exception that proves the rule, since no handset maker has Apple's juice.

Several handset makers such as Kyocera are shut out from the major carriers, and many of Sony Ericsson's models are "unlocked," meaning they will work with any GSM carrier's network but are hard to find because U.S. carriers don't carry them. It's funny how Apple gets elbowed for its closed iPod/iTunes ecosystem, but the cellphone carriers and the FCC get off scot-free for perpetuating this stifling near-monopoly.
Law & Disorder
It's not like the FCC can't and shouldn't do something about this. On June 26, 1968, the FCC made what is known as the Carterfone Decision, which established the right of consumers to attach any device to the Bell telephone network, as long as said device did not harm the network. This precedent gives the FCC the legal cattle prod it needs to force the carrier doggies to move along.

In some ways the FCC has even more jurisdiction to cajole the carriers. Unlike the Bell System's arguably quasi-private landline network, cellphone spectrum belongs to you and I. Like TV broadcasters, cellphone carriers are granted slices of this free public spectrum, which they then use to strangle competition. I think the technically term for that is chutzpah.

There are those who argue open networks would have a deleterious effect on the market. Carriers would have no incentive to invest and improve network infrastructure. Without the revenue from services it sells, rates would go up. And without carrier subsidies — discounts and rebates you get when you opt-in to another two years of service just to buy a new phone — handset prices would jump like LeBron James for a backhanded stuff.
Bells & Whistles & Balls
These arguments, of course, are demonstrably wrong. Open networks and handsets in Europe and Asia are far more advanced than they are in the U.S. And increased competition amongst the various U.S. carriers and handset makers would keep prices for both devices and services if not low certainly not sky-high.

Even if prices do rise, we'd be compensated by a far wider selection of exciting both hardware and software. But bringing the carriers to heel will take more than logic and evidence. It will take balls, something the FCC clearly lacks.

Why China is the REAL master of the universe

Why China is the REAL master of the universe
By ANTHONY BROWNE


Cecil Rhodes, the businessman-imperialist of Africa, the creator of Rhodesia, suffered no flicker of doubt about who were the masters.

"To be born an Englishman," he mused, "Is to win first prize in the lottery of life."

It wasn't idle boasting. In the jingoistic triumphalism of the late 19th century, when waving the Union Jack was a simple pleasure, people sang: "Rule Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves" without any irony. It was a statement of fact.

A quarter of mankind lived under the British flag in the largest empire the world had ever known.

And many of those parts that weren't under Britain's rule - such as the U.S. - had been created by Britain.

British missionaries had opened up the Dark Continent almost unchallenged.

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The British Army found it easier to invade troublesome nations - or most of them - than it does nowadays.

Britain was the workshop of the world, dominating science, manufacturing and trade.

To many Victorians, unquestioning of the ideology that underpinned much imperialism, British supremacy was a simple matter of racial supremacy - Europeans, and the English in particular, were fated to be the masters.

The truth is that we are masters of the world no more.

The global power shift from the West to the East is no longer just a matter of debate confined to learned journals and newspaper columns - it is a reality that is beginning to have a huge impact on our daily lives.

What would those Victorian masters of old have made of the fact that Chinese security men were on the streets of London this week, ordering our own police about and fighting running battles with British protesters while bewildered athletes carried the Olympic torch on its relay through the capital?

It was a brazen display of how confident China has become of its new place in the world, just as the British Government's failure to take a firm stand on Chinese abuses of human rights shows how craven we have become.

The dire warnings from the International Monetary Fund this week that the West now faces the largest financial shock since the Great Depression, while the Asian economies are still powering ahead, simply underlines our vulnerability in this new world order.

The desperately weakened American dollar appears to be on the verge of losing its global dominance, in the same way as sterling lost it a lifetime ago.

The credit crunch has brought home to all of us in Britain how over-reliant our country has become on financial services. Meanwhile, the loss of our manufacturing industries to Asia continues unabated.

Last month, an Indian company, Tata, bought up what was once the cream of British manufacturing - Jaguar and Land Rover.

A couple of years ago, Nanjing Automotive, a Chinese company, snapped up MG Rover.

Just as the 19th century was the British century, and the 20th century was the American century, the 21st century is the Asian century.

But the handover of global power from the UK to the U.S. was trivial compared to what is happening now.

The U.S. was Britain's offspring, based on the same values and the same language.

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It, too, was an Anglo-Saxon country, and passing the baton across the Atlantic ensured the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon world order, based on democracy, free trade and a belief in human rights, upheld through international institutions that both powers supported.

But the world order we have grown used to - and comfortable with - over the last century is coming to an end.

Napoleon III compared China to a sleeping giant and warned: "When China awakes, she will shake the world."

After a long hibernation, China, and her 1.3 billion people - twice the population of the U.S. and EU combined - is awaking almost overnight.

And not just China. The world's second most populous country, India, is industrialising at a historically unprecedented pace.

Their economies are growing on a long-term basis about four times the speed of the UK's and that of the United States. Goldman Sachs, the bank, recently predicted that by 2050, China and India would have overtaken the U.S. to be the world's first and second biggest economies.

We have long heard about the benefits this brings, in terms of plentiful cheap goods from toys to TVs, and huge opportunities for Western companies to sell their wares in these booming markets.

But there are also downsides, which are becoming more apparent. Unskilled workers in the West have become unsettled by the threat to their jobs as production moves East.

The most vulnerable Western workers have found their wages stagnate as they struggle to compete in an increasingly global market place.

And competition for raw materials is pitting East against West.

The economic explosion of China, and to a lesser extent India, has given them an almost overpowering hunger for raw materials with which to build their factories, homes and cars.

Wherever you turn, the rise of Asia is making its impact felt on our existence.

Every time you complain about the price of petrol being over £1 a litre, it is to the Far East you have to look to find the culprits.

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There are even reports that manholes in Britain have been disappearing to feed the monstrous appetite for scrap steel in the other side of the world.

China is spending 35 times as much on crude oil as it did eight years ago, and 23 times as much on copper.

As it builds gleaming skyscrapers on its fields, China alone consumes half the world's cement and a third of its steel.

What is happening is so extraordinary that economists have had to invent a new word for it - this is not an economic cycle, but a supercycle, a shift in the world economy of historic proportions.

When demand increases and supply stands still, prices shoot up. Iron, wheat and oil are all at record prices, despite slackening demand in the faltering Western economies.

The cost of living in Britain is now rising faster than wages, making the British on average poorer year on year.

Asia's expansion means that its influence is starting to be felt more directly around the world.

Asian countries are not just buying up foreign raw materials, but as their companies try to become global leaders, they are buying up Western companies.

It is not just Land Rover, Jaguar and MG Rover. The Malaysian company Proton owns Lotus. Indian company Tata owns Corus, once British Steel, as well as Tetley Tea.

The hunger for raw materials is also making China lose its shyness and venture out into the world. Like Germany and Russia, China has traditionally been a land empire, focusing its expansionist energies on countries it had borders with, and it eschewed the world-conquering exploits of Europe's sea-faring maritime nations.

Europeans have, for half a millennium, been unchallenged as the global colonisers, but last month the respected Economist magazine dubbed the Chinese "The New Colonists".

While the Congo in central Africa was once over-run by Belgians, it is now the Chinese that can be found wondering around its mining belts.

In Lubumbashi, the capital of the Congo's copper-rich region Katanga, the Economist reported "a sudden Chinese invasion".

Troubled Angola recently shunned Western financial aid because of the amount of Chinese money pouring into it, in return for commodities.

From Kazakhstan to Indonesia to Latin America, Chinese firms are gobbling up oil, gas, coal and metals.

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Canadian authorities were recently alarmed to find the Chinese interested in exploring the Arctic Ocean, in a bid to get a share of the minerals beneath the thawing icecap.

In eastern Siberia, Russians worry that China is by default taking over their empty land.

The West has long seen Africa as its backyard, but Western diplomats now worry that not just Africa, but South America, too, is being lost to China.

And Western governments are concerned that the rules of the game are changing. Most worryingly, as China's brutal suppression of the once independent Tibet shows, this is not a superpower that respects Western standards on human rights.

From Darfur to Myanmar, China is cuddling up to murderous dictators.

At home, it holds mass executions of criminals with bullets in the back of the head while transplant surgeons stand by to harvest their still pulsating organs.

Yet Western governments have been in such awe of China's looming power that their response has not been to challenge its abuses, but to try to silence their own protesters at home.

From the UN to the IMF to the World Bank, the international institutions that attempt to govern the planet were made in the image of the victors of World War II. Now power is shifting from West to East, the whole liberal democratic world order will face its first serious challenge in decades.

Many fear that things could get ugly.

There is only one thing worse than an unchallenged superpower - it is a superpower with a victim mentality, which feels the world owes it a favour.

And the bitter truth is that, after centuries of humiliation in foreign affairs, there is a nationalist mood in China that the country's time has come again, that it can again claim its rightful place as the world's most powerful country.

Its comparative weakness over the last few centuries is, in fact, but a blip in the last 2,000 years, during which China was the world's most economically and culturally advanced nation.

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It is an accident of history that Europeans took advantage of their window of opportunity in the last half of the second millennium to take over the world.

The cause was a combination of factors such as the development of maritime technology in Europe, the competition between European countries that drove them to look outwards and find new ways to increase prosperity, and the fact China remained firmly locked in its agrarian, introspective past.

Now things have changed, and already the shift in the world economy is starting to have dramatic effects on migration patterns.

The emigration of poor people from China and India to the West is slowing down, as their citizens see more hope in their own rapidly advancing nations.

Instead, their expanding middle classes are paying large fees for their children to enjoy a Western university education, before returning home.

There are now 60,000 Chinese students in Britain, more than from any other country.

Westerners have become accustomed to being the only tourists in the world's tourist hotspots, but the Chinese and Indians want to enjoy the fruits of their labour by expanding their horizons, too.

Chinese tourists are likely to replace American tourists as popular irritants in Britain, and replace the Germans as competitors for the ski lifts.

As the opportunities flow from West to East, so too do the people.

India is luring the global Indian diaspora back, with laws that would be judged racist in Britain, offering visas to anyone living in the West with Indian blood in their veins.

Even some non-Indian Westerners are heading East for opportunities greater than they find at home.

The West's cultural supremacy is likely to be as challenged as its economic supremacy.

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As their economic confidence grows, Asians are discovering pride in their own cultures and are less inclined to mimic Western ones.

There is an infectious confidence in Bollywood, and the price of Chinese antiques is rocketing as the newly rich Chinese decide they want a slice of their history. Western culture, like the dollar, will soon find its heyday behind it.

But Western attitudes will change as well, with a likely shift to the political Right. White liberal guilt, the driving force behind political correctness, will subside as Westerners feel threatened by the global order changing, and their supremacy slipping away.

Anti-Americanism will disappear as Europeans realise how much better it was to have a world super power that was a democracy (however flawed) not a dictatorship.

There is even speculation that the intense economic pressure on countries such as Britain will cause them to trim down their bloated welfare state, simply because it will no longer be affordable at present levels.

Western attitudes of superiority to China and the rest of the East will also subside, as Westerners realise they are no longer the masters of the world.

The U.S. company Orient Express complained when Tata tried to buy it, that any association with the Indian company would damage the Orient Express's premium brand.

Responding, R K Krishna Kumar, a senior Tata executive, thundered that "Indian companies ... will take their rightful place in the international arena.

"Enterprises and individuals must recognise and adapt to these fundamental economic changes. We believe that those with a fossilised frame of mind risk being marginalised."

In a world in which we are no longer masters, it is a warning that we ignore at our peril.


Find this story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=559133&in_page_id=1811
©2008 Associated N

When will the Tigers win the game?

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Red Sox 5, Tigers 0
0000000h my! Will Tigers' skid ever end?
Trying to get on track, Tigers suffer seventh loss to start the season. But Leyland refuses to panic.
Tom Gage / The Detroit News

BOSTON -- Don't be so fast to label the Tigers a dead horse.

For more reasons than one, it's a sore subject.

Before the Red Sox sent the floundering Tigers to their seventh consecutive defeat Tuesday -- a 5-0 loss at Fenway Park that was every bit as hypnotically dull as the rest of their sorry season so far -- manager Jim Leyland couldn't have been more supportive of his winless team.

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He'd been down after Sunday night's embarrassing loss at home to the White Sox. And earlier than that, remember, he said the Tigers looked like they were dead. But now he was emotionally up again, buoyant and energetic.

"I'm not going to get down on this club," Leyland said. "I'll tell you that right now. I'll be the most positive person here. I won't sit around and pout just because a good Tigers' team isn't doing good right now. If you're looking for that, you're looking in the wrong area."

Later in the same conversation, when the topic turned to something other than what's wrong with his team, Leyland happened to mentioned his three thoroughbred horses.

Make that two, and here's why.

"Their names are My Miss Kellie (named for his daughter) and Little River Bob (named for his friend who trains them)," Leyland said. "They're a year old. At this point, I don't know if they can even run around a merry-go-round."

His third horse had been named Legendary Lloyd (named for Leyland's friend and Tigers hitting coach Lloyd McClendon). Legendary Lloyd met a far worse fate than the Tigers have so far.

"He ran through a fence," Leyland said.

He what?

"He ran through a fence, tore himself up, and had to be put down," Leyland said. "As in down and out."

So far, none of the Tigers has run through a fence. As a team, they've hit a wall, perhaps, with the constantly surprising way they've played, but at least they've lived to run another day unlike hapless Lloyd.

The problem, however, continues to be the hole they're digging for themselves. At 0-1, it was thought the Tigers couldn't possibly go 0-3 against the Royals.

At 0-4, it also was thought they couldn't possibly be swept at home by the White Sox.

And coming to Fenway, there always was the chance they might catch the Red Sox on the jet-lag end of a recently completed 16,000 mile to trip to Japan and back.

Some jet lag.

Instead of snapping out of it, the Tigers looked as befuddled as ever. Kenny Rogers (0-2), the sharpest of the starters through the first turn of the rotation, wasn't the least bit sharp this time, throwing 107 pitches in 4 2/3 innings.

The hitters didn't do much, either. The supposed Detroit powerhouse that had scored just 15 runs in six games now has scored just 15 in seven.

It took until the fifth before the Tigers put a runner on second against starter Daisuke Matsuzaka (2-0). It wasn't until the sixth, with the bases loaded, two outs and Carlos Guillen at the plate, that it looked like perhaps the either-or factor finally was going their way.

Instead of close calls and diving catches going against them, suddenly when the Tigers were down 3-0 but still in it, there was a ray of good luck. Coco Crisp in center trapped Placido Polanco's liner instead of catching it. Earlier, Polanco's record streak of errorless games ended at 186 with a bad throw to third, but in better times, his single would have led to something as consolation.

Gary Sheffield then was ruled safe at first with an infield single on a call that could have gone either way.

Hmmm.

Maybe a ray of light.

After that, Miguel Cabrera drew his second consecutive four-pitch walk off Matsuzaka.

Hmmm. Again.

A hit with two outs from Guillen would have gotten the Tigers back in it. A big hit would have tied it. Instead, he flied out to center and, of course, the Tigers didn't threaten again.

The Red Sox tacked on two more runs in their half of the sixth off Jason Grilli, including a bases-loaded walk. That not only ended the scoring but left the Tigers to their self-assigned blame

For instance, Leyland said Rogers pitched well enough to give the Tigers a chance to win, but Rogers was hearing none of it.

"I'm pretty sure that I'm expected to do a lot better," he said. "It's always about starting pitching and today I wasn't good enough to overcome the mistakes I made and give our guys a chance to relax and swing the bats the way they're capable of."

Rogers didn't sugarcoat the predicament of the team, either.

"It's frustrating in all aspects," he said. "But let's not kid ourselves, we haven't shown anything yet. There's not one phase of the game we've done even adequately. Right now, we're the worst team in baseball."

"Right now, we're the worst team in baseball."

But a dead horse?

Not even close.

You can reach Tom Gage at tom.gage@detnews.com.

King Kwame is a Goner!

Kym Worthy throws the book at the slimy mayor!

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080325/METRO01/803250347/&imw=Y

'Classic' Worthy delivers
Strong comments impress some, anger others
Francis X. Donnelly / The Detroit News

After Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced the filing of charges against Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick on Monday, a reporter asked if she had a message for His Honor.

"I think I just delivered it," she said.

It was classic Worthy: blunt, focused, confident, according to people who have known her a long time.

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Despite a quarter-century in public service, the televised press conference was Worthy's first lengthy introduction to much of Metro Detroit. Taking on a popular mayor with her own re-election looming later this year, the stakes were high.

Several residents said she handled the pressure well.

"She's a strong woman," said Bernice Walters, 43, while waiting for a bus outside City Hall. "No one is telling her what to do."

That's also the way other prosecutors and defense attorneys view her.

When it comes to the law, she sees things in black and white, they said. What's right is right and wrong is wrong.

"She's an intellectually honest person," said Detroit lawyer Ben Gonek. "In the end, she's going to fulfill the obligations to her office. She wasn't going to treat the mayor any differently."

It comes from a childhood steeped in the military and an adulthood filled with the law. Her father was a career military officer who was just the second black Michiganian to graduate from West Point.

Worthy, 51, became an assistant county prosecutor in 1984, a Wayne circuit judge in 1994 and the top prosecutor in 2004.

With such big leaps every 10 years, one wonders what awaits in 2014. But Worthy has said she wants to remain prosecutor a long time.

A trailblazer like her dad, she was the first woman and minority to lead a prosecutor's office in Metro Detroit.

She has viewed the law from three sides, as a prosecutor, judge and victim. During her first year of law school at Notre Dame, she was raped.

During the press conference Monday, Worthy also showed something that only her friends know about -- her sense of humor.

When a reporter asked whether she had spoken to the mayor, she quipped:

"We don't have discussions with defendants. That happens on television but not in real life."

Despite the enormity of the mayor's criminal charges, Worthy has said it wasn't the most pressure she's felt.

Worthy made her biggest mark as an assistant prosecutor in the nationally watched trial of white Detroit police officers Walter Budzyn and Larry Nevers in the November 1992 death of black motorist Malice Green.

She persuaded jurors to convict both officers, though an appeals court later granted each a new trial.

Because of the prominence from the case she was elected a judge in 1994.

As for the press conference Monday, residents responded to Worthy's televised appearance in different ways.

As they listened in homes and businesses, bars and barber shops, the message they received was colored by their feelings about the mayor.

Kilpatrick's supporters said Worthy was pressing charges to help her get re-elected later this year. The mayor's foes said justice was finally being served.

"This was not a legal decision. It was a re-election campaign announcement," said an angry Malik Shabazz, a Detroit civic activist and outspoken supporter of Kilpatrick.

Inside City Hall, workers declined to talk about Worthy.

Outside the building, residents lauded her for doing what they believed was the right thing.

For some residents, it was a relief to watch a high-ranking elected official on television who wasn't apologizing or rebutting criminal behavior.

From the outset of the press conference at Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, Worthy immediately cut a different figure from Kilpatrick's recent TV appearances.

"In this office, doing things right trumps doing things fast and easy every time," she said. "The only body that has told us what to do is the body of the law."

Some residents said they were not only impressed with Worthy but that her statements made them wonder about Kilpatrick's innocence. Retiree James Fields, 58, who had watched the press conference from a TV in a downtown restaurant, said he was ambivalent about the mayor until listening to the prosecutor.

"As a kid you know lying is wrong," he said, paraphrasing from Worthy's words earlier in the day. "You gotta pay the consequences."

Detroit News Staff Writer Mark Hicks contributed to this report.

A pretty good indictment on ESPN

http://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article.main&articleId=58375&requestTimeout=900

Taking aim at Bristol

Properties, rival networks anonymously take shots, but ESPN contends they miss the big picture
By JOHN OURAND
Staff writer
Published March 17, 2008 : Page 01

There is a PowerPoint presentation that has been making the rounds in league offices and among ad buyers for the past six months.

Distributed by multiple networks, the full color presentation uses a series of bar graphs to bash everything about ESPN. It describes ESPN’s multiplatform strategy as a flawed concept. It calls ESPN’s marketing machine a myth. It says that a sports property’s TV ratings consistently decline on ABC and ESPN.

The presentation, titled “The Emperor’s New Clothes: How ESPN’s Multi-Platform Strategy Hasn’t Improved Ratings,” looks to illustrate how sports properties such as the NFL, NASCAR and the NBA have seen significant TV rating and viewership declines on ESPN and ABC in the past year.

It’s a compelling read.
The PowerPoint presentation
making the rounds among league
execs and ad buyers attacks
ESPN on several fronts.

The report has made its way into ESPN’s offices, where it, obviously, does not sit well with executives. They aggressively take issue with its findings and dismiss the document as a product of network spin and corporate jealousy. They are angry at the networks that anonymously are distributing it, challenging those broadcasters to focus on their own sports business shortcomings rather than try to tear down others.

ESPN criticizes the report’s singular focus on TV ratings as myopic, and its top executives lampoon rivals that look only at TV windows and ignore the larger digital universe.

ESPN went so far as to prepare its own report to rebut the ratings findings that it called “ESPN Myth and Reality.”

The ESPN report referenced the original one, stating, “We’d like to set the record straight with some ESPN Facts,” it said.

But this isn’t just about what’s in those reports. Good network publicists can spin any ratings number to tell any story they want.

Rather, this story is more about the mere existence of the report. It’s telling that a document bashing ESPN has become so well read that some of sports’ top decision-makers quote from it, albeit, none of them will go on the record with SportsBusiness Journal, citing their current relationships with the company.

Still, the popularity of the report illustrates how ESPN, as the biggest kid on the sports media block, is attracting more criticism these days than it ever has in its 28-year history.
The complaints

It’s clear that ESPN, the 800-pound gorilla of the sports media marketplace, has a bull’s-eye on its back.

Rival networks are tweaked by the size, scope and perceived arrogance of the self-described “Worldwide Leader in Sports.”

Leagues also are critical of ESPN, complaining that ESPN’s vaunted marketing machine does a better job of promoting ESPN rather than its sports. Surprisingly and naively, they still are irked by ESPN’s news division, which often presents unflattering stories about various properties. Just two weeks ago, NBA Commissioner David Stern publicly blasted ESPN The Magazine for a package of stories leading up to the NBA All-Star Game.

This is a concern that is being voiced more frequently these days, as the company beefs up its editorial operation — TV, online and print — with top-flight journalists.
More from Bristol:
Batting down the buzz: ESPN executives
take on the most common industry complaints
Bloggers tee off, but they have their faves

On the buy side, ad executives have expressed frustration with what they call a bureaucratic process of buying time. They complain that ESPN doesn’t offer enough prime positions and is much more difficult to work with than broadcast shops.

And let’s not forget media critics and bloggers, many of whom have made names for themselves by bashing ESPN for what they deem over-hyped promotion, bloviating anchors, shrill analysts and badly behaving talent.

The breadth of the criticism is surprising. Much of it comes with being the dominant market leader. But some are questioning if the brand that breathed cool and hip into TV sports has become too cool and hip for its own good.
Does ESPN help leagues grow?

The main point of the original PowerPoint is that properties that go into business with ESPN do not see sufficient growth.

Television ratings will drop for sports that move from broadcast to cable, especially since ESPN, one of the biggest cable channels, is in nearly 20 million fewer homes than any broadcast network.

But ESPN has had little trouble enticing properties to partner with it, using the allure of its 24/7, multiplatform promotion machine of broadcast, cable, broadband, mobile, online and print.

Growth is neither promised nor guaranteed, but properties believe they will see viewer increases across ESPN’s platforms, even if their actual TV ratings suffer by moving to cable.

But the report tells a different story. It shows that viewer numbers for most sports drop not only on ESPN, but on ABC as well.
The AFL is Exhibit A for ESPN
detractors, but the network,
which moved radio hosts
Mike & Mike to the booth
for games, disputes the ratings
comparisons used by critics.

ESPN’s broadcast competitors are convinced that the drop-off in TV viewers far exceeds any gains made from ESPN’s multiplatform promise. The report concludes ESPN’s cross-promotion is a “paper tiger.”

It’s the criticism that probably cuts the deepest in the executive offices in Bristol, Conn.

ESPN’s detractors use the Arena Football League as Exhibit A in its argument. In 2006, the league was finishing a four-year broadcast relationship with NBC with tepid results.

Failing to land a consistent start-time on the network, the league posted an underwhelming 0.8 average rating for 15 games, drawing an average of 1.093 million viewers per broadcast.

In a heavily publicized deal, ESPN swooped in and took a minority stake in the league. ESPN installed its popular “Mike & Mike” morning radio team — Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic — as announcers, gave the AFL a prime-time spot on ESPN2 on Monday nights and signed Russell as a title sponsor.

It was clear that both sides expected growth.

The result was a 0.3 U.S. household rating over 28 games on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2, which represented a 62 percent drop in average ratings for the league.

More importantly, according to rival broadcasters, viewership averaged 349,000 viewers, down a whopping 68 percent from the 1.093 million average on NBC.

For the AFL, it’s not all about the ratings. It has consistently said that it is happy with the amount of coverage ESPN gives the league across platforms, which it says more than makes up for any ratings shortfall.

For its part, ESPN says the report’s comparisons are flat out wrong. AFL games on broadcaster ABC equaled broadcaster NBC’s 0.8 rating from the year before and brought in more average viewers (ABC’s two games averaged 1.111 million viewers last season). And ESPN/ESPN2’s 0.22 cable rating far exceeded the previous year’s AFL ratings on another cable channel, Versus (0.05). Both ESPN (397,000 average viewers) and ESPN2 (245,000 average viewers) far outpaced Versus (79,000 average viewers) in terms of reach.

“We didn’t do a one-year deal. We did a five-year deal with the AFL,” said John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president of content. “At the end of that deal, we will stand on our record. I think we will improve the exposure of the ratings. But we’re busy building businesses across all platforms and not stuck in an old-fashioned three-hour broadcast being the end-all and be-all.”

Ratings for other ESPN sports properties also saw significant drops last year.

“Monday Night Football” dropped 11 percent, the biggest year-to-year drop among all of the NFL’s broadcast partners.

NASCAR arrived on the ABC/ESPN scene amid great fanfare in 2007, but it couldn’t stem its ratings slide on the Disney networks, with the Nextel Cup ratings on both ESPN and ABC dropping 7 percent (4.2 to 3.9) and the Busch Series ratings on ESPN and ABC dropping 13 percent (1.5 to 1.3).

ESPN executives counter that NASCAR’s ratings had been dropping before ESPN telecast its first race. Plus, they stress that last year’s NASCAR ratings were down on the property’s other partners, Fox and Turner.
The Breeders’ Cup (with Kenny Mayne,
left, and Hank Goldberg in 2006) lost
total audience after moving from NBC,
but ESPN says it delivered more
coverage and more 18-34 males.

The NBA is another cause for concern. The league just has not found its fit on either ABC or ESPN since its deal in 2002. There are a variety of reasons, but one thing is certain: TV ratings have failed to show any growth. The NBA’s 2.0 regular-season rating on ABC for 19 games and the Finals’ 6.2 rating were all-time lows last year.

But ESPN executives point out that the NBA’s ratings decline is not unique to ABC and ESPN. Before the NBA left NBC, it had seen its ratings drop for six straight seasons, from a 5.1 in 1995-96 to a 2.9 in 2001-02.

ESPN’s biggest ratings drop — and another oft-mentioned example from rivals — comes in horse racing. The Breeders’ Cup was on NBC from 1984 to 2005. But when it moved to ESPN in 2006, its ratings tanked. The event posted a 1.5 rating/2.002 million average viewers on NBC in 2005, but dropped to an 0.7 rating/994,000 viewers on ESPN in 2006, losing more than half its audience.

ESPN, however, says the television ratings number does not tell the whole story. ESPN provides much more coverage than NBC, including Friday and Saturday windows, whereas NBC only provided Saturday coverage.

Though the total TV audience was more than cut in half, the male 18-34 demo actually grew on ESPN. NBC’s last Breeders’ Cup race in 2005 attracted 1.139 million 18-34 men. Last year, ESPN and ESPN2 reached 1.401 million men with its coverage.

“Horse racing organizers are sensitive to their aging demo,” an ESPN insider said. “They’re pleased to see growth in that younger demo.”
Battling dinosaurs

ESPN President George Bodenheimer has heard all of these complaints before. To him, it sounds like the early days of ESPN, when the network’s schedule was dominated by sports such as slow-pitch softball and tape-delayed college football. He remembers being ridiculed for that schedule.

He smiles and shakes his head, saying that arguments focusing only on TV ratings make broadcasters look like dinosaurs that don’t know anything about digital technology. He almost laughs at the priorities of his competitors.
Bodenheimer

The world has changed, and broadcasters are having a hard time giving up on the old way of doing things, he said. ESPN’s online, broadband and wireless offerings are far more extensive than anything the broadcasters’ sports divisions offer.

“Our ratings were laughed at. They still are,” he said. “People want to judge ‘Monday Night Football’ or a NASCAR race and judge it by what the rating was in a three-hour window, based on this technology — Nielsen ratings — that has been around for decades. Our business is so far beyond that.”

The problem is that the industry currently has no metric to quantify a surround approach of online, mobile and magazine use.

ESPN has teamed with Nielsen Media to try to measure viewership across all media, but a reliable tool isn’t expected for a few more years.

Still, the breadth of ESPN’s offerings — TV networks, Web sites, a radio network, a magazine and a wireless business — is what sets it apart from other broadcasters.
ESPN got a truckload of publicity when it
landed “Monday Night Football” starting in
2006, but ratings for “MNF” dropped
11 percent last season.

The enormity of ESPN’s offering is breathtaking. Take the Roger Clemens press conference Jan. 7, for example. According to ESPN’s internal data, 85 percent of the people who watched or listened to Clemens deny steroid use used an ESPN platform. Most saw it on live TV from ESPNews (38.9 percent) and ESPN2 (36.9 percent). ESPN.com (16.1 percent) and ESPN Radio (10.7 percent) also logged significant hits.

Leagues that cut deals with ESPN benefit from exposure on all of those platforms, network executives say.

“If you’re spending your time worrying about whether a three-hour broadcast in this day and age has gone up compared to a three-hour broadcast of a similar event last year or the year before, you’re kind of missing the point,” Skipper said.

He points to “Monday Night Football,” for example. ESPN produces several of its shows from the “MNF” site, which gives the league more promotion for one of its games than any other broadcaster can muster. Plus, it promotes the game heavily on ESPN.com, ESPN Radio and ESPN The Magazine.

“If you look at the aggregate number of people that watch ESPN, listen to the radio and read the magazine, it’s done nothing but go up,” Skipper said. “We think of the audience as the total number of people who watch it. That’s ultimately what we’re in the game of doing.”

Critics say that ESPN’s aggregated number is a sham, alleging that it is talking to the exact same user on different platforms. ESPN insists that that there aren’t as many duplicates as you might think. Right now, there’s no way to accurately measure who’s right.
When the NHL left for Versus, did it surrender
its place at “PTI”? ESPN says its executives
don’t try to make hosts take specific positions,
but critics have their suspicions.

Television ratings aren’t always rosy for leagues that leave ESPN. The NHL, for example, bolted ESPN for Versus last year and saw its ratings and viewership drop.

NHL executives want to get back onto ESPN, not necessarily to drive TV ratings, but to take advantage of ESPN’s surround approach.

Since moving to Versus, the NHL has been frustrated listening to “Mike & Mike” talk about the AFL or watching MLS Galaxy President and general manager Alexi Lalas discuss the league on “PTI.” Both the AFL and MLS are network partners. Properties that aren’t find themselves on the outside looking in, feeling like they’re caught in a conspiracy.

For example, witness the scene in a Versus production truck hours before the 2007 NHL All-Star Game in Dallas. Standing in the truck, a senior Versus executive complained about ESPN’s afternoon talk show lineup. He had spent the afternoon in his hotel room, watching the hosts of “PTI,” “Around the Horn” and “Rome Is Burning” bash Versus as a lower-tier network that lacks viewers, resulting in the NHL’s midseason game having no buzz.

The executive believed that the hosts were reciting talking points provided by ESPN executives. He thought ESPN wanted to make the NHL and Versus look bad.

ESPN dismisses that kind of criticism. Its executives say they have never asked its hosts or news anchors to take a specific position on anything. And given the journalistic chops of many of its hosts, it’s hard to believe that Tony Kornheiser or Michael Wilbon would agree to parrot a corporate line on their show.

But the example proves that rival networks and leagues don’t necessarily trust the folks in Bristol.
The producers

Setting aside the ratings debate, some leagues are critical of what ESPN does with the games once it has them. The NFL has complained to ESPN about some “Monday Night Football” guests that come into the booth during the game. In particular, league sources said the NFL was furious with Jimmy Kimmel’s appearance this year, where he openly discussed gambling with the game’s announcers.

ESPN executives acknowledge that the league has not been happy with some of the guests they have had, but insist that the NFL has no problem with the idea of including booth visitors during the broadcast.

Other leagues complain that it’s too easy to get lost in the clutter. With ESPN filling its networks with up to 65 different sports, it’s hard for specific sports to air consistently in time slots, gain traction and stand out.

ESPN, though, believes these arguments ignore the high quality of what’s being produced. For example, Skipper calls “SportsCenter” the best sports newscast, “Baseball Tonight” the best baseball highlights show and “PTI” the “best daily show on television right now.”

“It is inevitable that we have to balance the fact that the quantity we do is enormous,” Skipper said. “Anybody overly focused on the quantity of what we do is ignoring the fact that we do a remarkable job of making sure that all that quantity is done in a quality way.”
ESPN hopes the lineup of (from left) Stuart
Scott, Stephen A. Smith and Bill Walton
delivers TNT-style fireworks for its
NBA studio show.

ESPN officials privately acknowledge that some leagues, including NASCAR and the NBA, have complained that ESPN’s presentation hasn’t hit the mark. NBA officials privately complained to ESPN that its telecasts do not match the “event feel” that TNT or NBC brought to its games. The NBA’s complaints are mainly geared around the pregame shows on ESPN and ABC. The thought is that ESPN’s offering has the look and feel of coming off an assembly line, with little creativity or personality to distinguish them.

TNT, by contrast, uses big personalities — like Charles Barkley and Marv Albert — to effectively brand and distinguish their games.

NBC also brought more of an event feel to the games, mainly because it broadcast more of them than ABC. In the 2001-02 season, NBC aired 31 games. Last year, ABC aired 19. That gave NBC an incentive to promote the game schedules on its prime-time schedules and morning shows in a way that ABC doesn’t.

ESPN executives admit that the network has had problems with its NBA coverage, specifically with its seemingly endless rotation of on-air talent. This year, it put Stuart Scott, Stephen A. Smith and Bill Walton in a studio to try to re-create the atmosphere that Barkley brings to TNT’s studio. It’s still early, but ESPN clearly hopes that the new arrangement will pay dividends.
More lineup changes: Allen Bestwick (left,
with Rusty Wallace and Brad Daugherty)
hosts “NASCAR Countdown” while stick
-and-ball types Brent Musburger and Suzy
Kolber are out.

“Our production of the game — the cameras and the graphics on NBA games — is commensurate with a TNT production,” Skipper said. “They have a very, very fine production. But so do we. … I think we’ve made great strides in improving what we do with the production. Our goal is going to be to continue to get better at it.”

Similarly, NASCAR executives believed its ratings would rise last year solely because of its move to ESPN. When ratings dropped, NASCAR and the racing community pinned part of the reason on ESPN talent and executives that didn’t have a deep knowledge of the sport.

ESPN says it decided in conjunction with NASCAR to use mainstream talent such as Brent Musburger and Suzy Kolber last year. They wanted to appeal to non-NASCAR fans and give the races more of an event feel.

This year, ESPN decided to shed Musburger and Kolber in favor of talent that appeals to NASCAR’s core base, such as Dale Jarrett and Allen Bestwick.

In addition, ESPN’s NASCAR tune-in campaign also has changed direction this year, by targeting the sport’s core fan base, which is in line with NASCAR’s marketing campaign this year.
The news angle

In some respects, television ratings represent the least of the leagues’ concerns. The biggest leagues — the NFL and MLB — have been furious with ESPN at various times because of reports from the network’s news division.

Just a few weeks ago, it was Stern’s shot about an editorial package in ESPN The Magazine that examined image issues facing the league, telling The (Portland) Oregonian, “We’re having a great year, so ESPN decided that what you should do if you’re a magazine is you write an article going into All-Star about how terrible things are. Maybe its because (the game) was on TNT.”

Last year, ESPN had several well-publicized skirmishes with MLB — all of them starting in the news division. ESPN ignored an embargo and unveiled the names of baseball’s All-Star team too early, after the AP initially broke the embargo.

But ESPN is a partner with the league; the AP isn’t. That led to the league banning ESPN sets from inside AT&T Park, the site of the All-Star Game.

ESPN also infuriated the New York Yankees by broadcasting a press conference without permission.

Leagues have been getting upset with the timing of some of ESPN’s investigative reports. The network ran several pieces on disabled retired football players at the start of the NFL season. It ran an exposé on alcoholism in baseball during the MLB playoffs.

“Their excuse is that it’s a news division and it’s separate,” said a senior executive at one of the leagues. “It’s an excuse and they hide behind it.”

Though the leagues pay lip service to ESPN’s separation of its editorial and business interests, it’s clear that many leagues want better treatment from one of their biggest business partners.

But it’s hard to see what leagues expect — ESPN has its journalistic responsibility and continues to create compelling work with its shows such as “Outside The Lines.”

“We do many tough stories, and we’re in business with virtually everybody,” said Vince Doria, ESPN’s senior vice president and director of news. “Partners are everywhere we look … Because we have these partnerships, it makes us better at our jobs because we know when we go after various entities, they are business partners.”

Leagues and viewers have a tougher time with ESPN’s reports because all of the productions — news stories and game telecasts — carry the ESPN brand. The lines are constantly blurred. When ESPN reports on Michael Vick from a “Monday Night Football” game in Atlanta, when does the news reporting end and the game begin?

It’s easier to see a separation between CBS Sports and CBS News or NBC Sports and NBC News.

For ESPN, there is no such line. It has made the decision to produce games as news events, and floods its productions with top-flight broadcast, print and online journalists.

ESPN’s Skipper said the issue flares up on occasion. But he said leagues typically understand the separation between ESPN’s news operations and its league relationships. He said the leagues sometimes react to what he calls the “ugly baby phenomenon.”
Skipper

“It’s still sort of like when you call their baby ugly,” he said. “It makes them mad. Right? It’s the way of the world. That’s human nature.”

Skipper said his hardest judgments occur when he has to mediate between ESPN’s news editors and league partners who are upset.

“To suggest that they are anything other than extraordinarily complex and require constant management would be naive,” he said. “We are in relationships with the people we cover. The principle way that we try to handle that is to have separation between the people who are acquiring rights and managing the relationships with the leagues and the people who are covering the news and managing that process.”

In fact, ESPN ombudsman Le Anne Schreiber said how ESPN manages its relationships with the leagues it covers is the most significant problem the company faces. And that’s not just because of the inherent promotion that comes with producing games. It’s also because “SportsCenter” stories come from ESPN reporters, who typically are deployed to ESPN games.

So when the NHL complains that its games weren’t featured on “SportsCenter” once they left ESPN, Schreiber suggested they may have a legitimate complaint.

“ESPN’s greatest problem that arises from rights ownership is protecting news shows like ‘SportsCenter’ from the promotional pressures and letting the economic convenience of having all that footage from ESPN-produced games available dictate what gets on ‘SportsCenter,’” Schreiber told SportsBusiness Journal.
The ad sales problem

A similar church-and-state separation exists in ESPN’s ad sales, and it’s one that irritates several ad buyers.

While some media and viewers complain that ESPN has too much advertising intruding into shows, such as “SportsCenter’s” “Budweiser Hot Seat” and the “Coors Light Cold Hard Facts,” ad buyers complain that the network doesn’t go far enough and won’t offer the same kind of enhancements as broadcast networks.

Some media outlets criticized Fox for its Taco Bell promotion during the World Series and its “Jumpers” promotion during the BCS, but advertisers covet such branding.
Fans and media critics blast “SportsCenter”
sponsored elements but advertisers
want more.

When asked if ESPN would sell an ad like “Jumpers,” which showed the movie’s logo each time Fox went into a replay, Skipper said he would not.

“You’re confusing the viewer as to whether they are watching a promotion or they’re watching the game,” he said. “We’re not looking to confuse viewers about whether they’re watching the game or news and information or promotion or an ad.”

The sponsored elements on “SportsCenter” typically are with lighter topics — such as lists or question-and-answer sessions — and are not involved in hard news segments.

“If we want to attach a sponsorship to the top 10 fly balls of the year, and attach a sponsorship to that, I don’t have a problem with that,” Doria said. “I don’t necessarily want to attach a sponsorship to finding out that a school committed 17 recruiting violations. You draw the line there.”

Ad buyers also complain that ESPN’s buying process is too cumbersome, especially in comparison with broadcast competitors. Many buyers’ description of buying ads at ESPN echo an experience at the Department of Motor Vehicles: bureaucratic, red tape, inconvenient and exhausting. More than one ad buyer complained that ESPN is so focused on its multiplatform push, that he finds it hard to place single ads on one platform.

Given the amount of 24-hour networks it sells, as well as its digital platforms, ESPN executives acknowledge that some of the problems come with comparisons to the broadcast networks. With such a huge amount of inventory to sell — much, much more than network sports, which have to sell 10 hours or so every weekend — ESPN says it has to approach ad buyers differently.

“We recognize that we are a multimedia organization, and we try to make ourselves as flexible as we can,” said Ed Erhardt, ESPN’s president of customer marketing and sales. “You can’t compare us to a broadcast network provider because we have a different kind of relationship with our clients.”

Ad buyers complain that the sheer volume ESPN has to sell results in creative ideas that get swallowed in a sea of meetings. They unanimously describe Fox as the most creative and innovative partner at incorporating sponsorships into its telecasts.

ESPN says it has had success with creative alternative advertising. It points to sponsored short films it has sold to companies such as Miller and Domino’s. Earlier this year, ESPN ran four 90-second spots over eight weeks that featured Domino’s and sports parties.

“We like to offer advertisers an opportunity to create a short film around themed topics,” Erhardt said. “The response we’ve heard from these has been positive.”

Another criticism among buyers deals with a constant refrain: ESPN’s self-promotion detracts from sponsors’ messages. One ad buyer said he’d like to see less on-air promos, which would mean more “A” positions for his clients.

“ESPN has taken the most valuable positions — right as a show breaks into a commercial — and made them promos for ESPN,” one said.

Sean Bratches, ESPN’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, said most other cable channels run promos the same way. MTV, for example, runs promos much more frequently than ESPN.

Bratches also referenced “This Is SportsCenter” as a popular commercial campaign that has kept viewers from clicking away.

“It’s in our advertisers’ best interest to keep our content strong and our ability to promote our content creates an environment where our customers want their brands to resonate,” he said.
Business is good

There could be a larger issue at play here than simply ESPN’s ratings and production elements, according to a former executive with one of the leagues.

Many leagues have launched their own cable channels that wind up competing with ESPN. That competition breeds this kind of back biting, the executive says.

“The leagues have become media companies in their own right. Typically, the fiercest competitor they have is ESPN,” he said. “Leagues certainly like the amount they get paid.”

Right now, the biting criticisms are just talk. They haven’t affected ESPN’s business. To the contrary, the business is stronger than ever, delivering an astonishing 33 percent to Disney’s operating income in 2008, “making it by far the most important asset within Disney,” said Pali Capital analyst Rich Greenfield.

It’s a well-run organization led by admired executives like Bodenheimer, Skipper, Bratches and CFO Christine Driessen.

But the criticisms, coming from some of the most influential executives in sports, gnaw at ESPN executives. A few missteps here and there should not detract from the amount of ESPN’s high-quality work.

“There ain’tnobody at any other network working as hard as the people at ESPN,” Skipper said. “If you looked at the number of hours anybody else does and the number of employees they have, my guess is that we get two, three, four times the amount done that most other people get done.”

ESPN still is rolling out widely impressive numbers, particularly with ad sales. More than 70 percent of ESPN’s $2 million-plus ad buys have a medium other than television, which is proof that the multiplatform approach that is causing such angst among buyers is getting through to those buyers.

Though the number of households dropped for the flagship channel last year, ESPN’s four main networks — ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic and ESPNews — still performed well when aggregated together.

ESPN’s total-day audience dropped 6 percent in 2006 to 869,000 viewers, and ESPN Classic dropped 8 percent. But ESPN2 (up 5 percent) and ESPNews (up 23 percent), helped ESPN’s four main networks average more than 1 million viewers at any particular time during the day for the sixth straight year.

In 2007, Americans watched nearly 11.2 billion hours on the four ESPN networks.

But much like ESPN’s anchors freely rip away on the top stories in sports, company rivals recently have been more aggressive in taking on the company, but not on the record, for fear of affecting business relationships.
Changes in attitude

Last summer, Bodenheimer was sitting in a conference room in Bristol, when he reflected on the early days of ESPN. He spoke about working the overnight shift in the film library when he first started with the company, in 1981.

For decades, ESPN mimicked the young Bodenheimer. It was a plucky, young upstart, taking on the bigger and better funded broadcast networks.

It maintained that scrappy attitude even as it expanded, launching ESPN2 in 1993; ESPNews in 1996; and acquiring Classic Sports Network and renaming it ESPN Classic in 1997.

Eventually, Bodenheimer and his executive team found that it wasn’t possible to maintain that underdog role. Eventually, leagues started beating a path to ESPN’s door, and the network once on the outside was now a business partner with all the top leagues, including the NFL, MLB, NHL and the NBA.

That has understandably strained some of the relationships. Maintaining these business ties is crucial for ESPN, as leagues launch their own networks that eventually could carry the specific programming ESPN now pay rights for, potentially leaving ESPN out in the cold.

This also is the area where most leagues and conferences accuse ESPN of acting with arrogance. While no one suggests that ESPN’s top executives are arrogant, there’s a history from the tenure of former programming chief Mark Shapiro — and before that with former ESPN head honcho Steve Bornstein — which bred an our-way-or-the-highway mentality.

Since Skipper took over as head of content, ESPN has made a concerted effort to become less arrogant in dealing with others. ESPNers privately acknowledge that there’s more work to do on that front, but also say some of the criticism is unjustified. In some areas, ESPN already has tried an attitude adjustment.

ESPN made multiple executives available to SportsBusiness Journal over the course of three months to discuss this article and respond to these issues.
Gerber

Chuck Gerber, executive vice president of college sports for ESPN, said his job was created two years ago to present a nicer face to college conferences.

“Three years ago, there’d be nobody from ESPN who would sit up here and say, ‘I understand that some institutions will not play Thursday night,’” he said during a recent panel discussion. “I think the attitude was that, ‘We’re ESPN and you should play Thursday night.’”

A solid group of ESPN executives has been with the company from the early 1980s, when ESPN was a small fish in a big pond.

Even though Disney bought the company in 1995, longtime company employees kept a chip on their shoulder, truly believing that they were the little guy who had to work harder than their competitors.

Even today, many of these executives genuinely seem surprised and hurt by much of the criticism. For example, some ESPN executives could not understand why NBC’s Fred Gaudelli and Andrea Kremer publicly belittled ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” production in February. They were especially stung that the criticism came from former colleagues.

Today, as the unquestioned leader in sports media, ESPN executives slowly are getting used to some of the criticism and are trying to figure out how to operate as the big, established company, rather than the up-and-comer.

“We have become successful by following an astoundingly simply principle: serve fans,” Skipper said. “Criticism is one of the prices you pay for success at this level.”