So it looks like it's been five months since I've fired up a mailbag, so I have an idea: let's fire up a mailbag.
As always, I don't receive any questions, so I will be poaching them from other columns that do.
Megan F. asks the tennis mailbag at Sports Illustrated the following:
Should the tours offer protected rankings for mental-health breaks? I think so. I think it's to the benefit of the sport and players. Whom would it hurt?
Now this is a great question, and one I am going back and forth on.
Firstly, I am thrilled at the increased awareness and understanding of mental illness, and the importance of mental health, that we have seen these last few years not just in the world of sports, but in society in general.
In, say, the '50s, simply going to a psychiatrist was cause for stigma and ostracization. Many mental disorders (including one I suffer from, obsessive compulsive disorder), hadn't even been described yet. People whose primes were in the 1950s and thereabouts like to call us all a bunch of soft babies these days, but people were just as mentally ill back then. It's just then, they suffered in silence. Suffering is bad. Doing something about it is good. To hell with anyone who wants to make this sort of thing taboo again, or imagines it's new or new big deal.
I guess I'm evading the question, but despite my feelings overall about mental health, I am reluctant to fully embrace this idea. I think of tennis as a physical sport — one you may not want to play if you are in the throes of a bad mental health episode, but one you still are physical capable of undertaking. That's not the case if you have, say, a broken leg.
But, ugh, my very own argument is just like telling a depressed person, "Well, just get out bed!" when they are depressed, which is infuriating. Okay, yes, I'm on board for protected ranking breaks for mental health.
Sticking with Sports Illustrated, this question from Justin Banner to their NFL mailbag gives us a lighter note to work with:
Who would win in a fight: one Aaron Donald or four Patrick Mahomeses?
Definitely four Patrick Mahomeses. I would take as few as two Patrick Mahomeses against Aaron Donald. I would take as few as two uninjured NFL players — any of them, against any one other NFL player — any of them, unless the one has some pretty serious hand-to-hand combat training. These are some of the fittest dudes in the world, and the margins between them are not as wide as you seem to think — making having four arms, four fists, and four legs an incalculable advantage.
Pivoting to college football, over at The Athletic, Joe B asks:
What would be more surprising in Lincoln Riley's Year 1 at USC: a seven-win season or a playoff berth?
A playoff berth would be way way way more surprising. Lincoln Riley did a great job at Oklahoma and I have no reason to doubt his abilities, but going from the mediocre-by-USC-standards over the last decade or more to instant title contender is too much to ask of any coach in his first year. I would pick a seven-win season as more likely if USC hired an in-his-prime Bear Bryant.
We wrap up with another question, one from David C., to the same Athletic college football mailbag:
Why don't more teams play as independents? I would think that teams would want more control over the schedules that they would get with independence, and they also would not have to worry about splitting revenue with a bunch of other teams. It seemed like independence was much more popular in the '90s.
In the Athletic, where the college football mailbag is answered by Stewart Mandel, he says the answer is teams would make less money. He's right, of course, but still, this is a question after my own heart.
I would love it if more teams went independent and I would love it if teams would found more interesting non-conference games to play in October and November.
In 1988, when I was 12 (the world was at its best when any given any person was 12-years-old, as you know), there were 25 independent teams in Division 1-A, including four of the top five in the rankings.
In recent years, that number had dwindled down to three — Notre Dame, Army, and either Navy or BYU depending, on the year. Thankfully, that number has been on the rise again, but it has been orphans and not powerhouses going independent.
These days, we are up to seven independents, but a couple of those are en route to a new conference in the coming years. As I write this, there are five schools that are both independent in football and have made no announcements about joining a conference at a later date: the previously-mentioned Notre Dame, BYU, and Army, plus UConn and UMass, who are both terrible. It will be interesting to see how long they can survive at the FCS level with no success at the moment to build on, and no conference (I would think that would make recruiting more difficult, too. What are you telling kids they're playing for — a possible berth in the LendingTree Bowl?) to play in, but I'm rooting for them.
The situation is worse in college basketball. In 1989 there were 22 independents in Division 1. Now there are none, and haven't been for many years. Next year, we may have two in Hartford, who is in its last year before transitioning to Division 3 and has already left their conference, and Chicago State, who is leaving the WAC due to the high travel costs associated with playing in a primarily Western conference.
It will be interesting to see how Chicago State fares in the next few years, for the same reasons it will be interesting to see how UConn and UMass fare in football. But the deck is even more stacked against Chicago State.
For one thing, as an institution they struggle with financial shortages, very low graduation rates school-wide, and they periodically flirt with getting their accreditation stripped.
Secondly, the athletic program has a history of making short-sighted moves. I understand how much of a financial drain multiple trips out West can be, but how are you going schedule anyone in D1 in January and February, when no one takes on non-conference games (again, it didn't used to be this way and I lament it) outside of Covid-caused schedule weirdness? They also left the Summit League (then called the Mid-Continent Conference) in 2006, which was completely geographically suitable, without having a landing spot to go to until the now-dead Great West Conference, desperate to have enough schools just to stay viable as an athletic conference, snapped them up.
No conferences are in such dire straits now, and it's hard for me to imagine a Division 1 conference being willing to take on a program as wayward as Chicago State even though it could open up that conference to a very large and attractive media market. I haven't even yet mentioned another problem, they are terrible at basketball. I'll be rooting for them, too.
Leave a Comment