Author Archives: Kent Sterling

NBA discourages toughness, rancor, and fan engagement by suspending Embiid and Towns

This was compelling, and the NBA needs to tolerate compelling content!

The greatest explanation of toughness and competition in sports is communicated in a speech by Sean Connery’s character in The Untouchables:

“You want to get Capone? Here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone! Now, do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?”

That’s sports.  That’s competition.  How far are you willing to go?  How much can you tolerate being disliked by your opponent?  Are you willing to anger a teammate by demanding more of him?  Can you assume a role that will bring wins but cost dollars?

It’s not about fighting.  It’s about competing.  And if players are willing to sacrifice everything in order to win, they are going to win more often.  If that means a few fights, well that’s the cost of doing business, and the NBA (NFL and MLB too) should support that.

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Joel Embiid and Karl-Anthony Towns got in a little wrestling match the other night after competing like the result mattered.  Neither landed a punch or suffered an injury – other than their pride.  Both were suspended for two games, and I don’t understand why.

Love and respect between opponents just feels wrong.

Sports contests shouldn’t be friendly and social tests of skill where adversaries congratulate one another before, during, and after.  Games should be wars won by teams willing to be tough, rancorous, and unforgiving.

Fans wants players getting off the team bus looking forward to competing against each other – not anticipating a chance to reconnect.  Tough ass guys willing to go just a little bit farther than their opposite numbers are fun to watch.  Losers trying to join a fraternity of stars during postgame socialization makes fans nauseous – or they should.

I’m not advocating fights, but watching competitors push each other far enough outside their comfort zones that it occasionally spills over into ill-tempered chaos is great fun.  If players appear to care less about the result of a game than we do as fans, that makes us feel stupid.  Suspending players for a meaningless wrestling match penalizes Embiid and Towns for exactly the level of malice fans crave.

Friction causes heat.  That’s physics.  People love watching a fire.  They’re fascinating.  What’s not fascinating is watching a bucket of water.  People don’t sit around a bucket of water in November sipping hot chocolate with a splash of something a little more adult.  They sit around a fire.  Why does the NBA keep throwing water on their fires?

NBA popularity exploded when Larry Bird and Julius Erving tried to strangle each other, Michael Jordan and Reggie Miller squared off, and Bill Laimbeer became the most hated player in NBA history by trying to bait everybody into a fight, and succeeded many times.

Every once in a while fate smiles upon leagues, and teams nobody cares about become interesting because of a rivalry between players.  No one on this planet cared about Karl-Anthony Towns and the Timberwolves before the wrestling match, but we’ll be watching when Embiid and Towns square off next on March 24th.

 

Here is video of some historically relevant NBA dust ups (tell me these were bad for the NBA’s popularity):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoDkFE2IbO8

Mitt Romney wants to protect college athletes from being paid what they are worth

Professional twit Mitt Romney has rarely made less sense than in his comments about college athletes earning cash from endorsements. And that’s saying something.

“What you can’t have is a couple athletes on campus driving around in Ferraris while everybody else is basically having a hard time making ends meet.”

That’s republican United States senator Mitt Romney decrying a free market economic model for college athletes.  If “rich elitists in our suburbs” was substituted for “a couple of athletes on campus,” that quote could have come from socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

When Romney starts sounding like Sanders, common sense has taken a holiday.

People like Romney, who is worth roughly a quarter of a billion dollars, love griping about others being paid what they are worth while they live the high life.  There is no better definition of hypocrisy than rich people extolling the virtues of poverty.

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And Romney wasn’t done advocating for the NCAA’s ability to restrict athletes’ ability to monetize their image in a free market, “While they’re at school, they’re still a student-athlete, and there has to be some limit to how much money is coming to an individual and there has to be a way to get compensation to other members of the team.”

Why?

Brand values vary.  That’s life.  Former Colts quarterback Peyton Manning earns a hell of a lot of money with endorsements while I’m not sure left tackle Tarik Glenn has ever cashed a check for the use of his image.  Tom Brady is married to Giselle Bündchen.  I don’t know who his offensive linemen are married to, but none of them are Giselle Bündchen.  Joe Namath is still coveted as a spokesperson.  What former Jets running back Emerson Boozer is doing, I don’t know.  The NFL world keeps spinning.

People know who the quarterback is, and linemen toil in obscurity.  All things are not equal, and the fairness Romney demands for collegiate athletes does not exist anywhere else.  Some are born into great wealth, while many live in poverty through no fault of their own.

Coaches earn millions for leading college programs.  They are paid to their value.  Athletic administrators are paid to their value.  Conference commissioners are paid to their value.  NCAA president Mark Emmert earns $2.4 million per year, which is a lot of cash for overseeing athletes who should be thrilled with a scholarship regardless of their value.

College sports is a professional endeavor for everyone but the athletes.  No one moans about the sanctity of the amateur model being crucial to the survival of college sports as a reason John Calipari should be paid as a professor instead of his $8-million per year.

This isn’t a conversation about athletes becoming university employees – that’s a whole different matter.  This is about athletes pursuing compensation for their likeness just as every other student can.

Romney’s life was not ruined when he bought this ski lodge, and college athletes would survive owning a nice car.

Romney is a paternalistic and pious twit playing to constituents who enjoy watching college sports played by athletes who are governed by a “plantation mentality” (not my words, by the way – they belong to Walter Byers, the man who invented the NCAA as we know it today as its executive director from 1951-1988).

Byers wrote in his memoir, “The college player cannot sell his own feet (the coach does that) nor can he sell his own name (the college will do that). This is the plantation mentality resurrected and blessed by today’s campus executives.”

In the book, he championed the federal government dissolving the NCAA as a cartel, “Collegiate amateurism is not a moral issue; it is an economic camouflage for monopoly practice. . . , operating an air-tight racket of supplying cheap athletic labor.”

Again, that’s from the guy who invented modern collegiate athletics and ushered it into the prosperous age in which it exists today.

The world and our country would be a much better place if bureaucrats stopped embracing greed as their principle ideology.  If they stopped worrying about feathering their nest by stripping bare the nests of others, problems like the exploitation of “student-athletes” would vanish and men like Romney would stop blathering incoherently about how wealth ruins the college experience.

Indiana beats Gannon 84-54 in a game where the Hoosiers competed only in the second half #iubb

Justin Smith was efficient last night, but is he capable of being tough?

IU Basketball has brought a mixed bag to fans during the past three seasons, and last night’s meaningless exhibition played in front of friends and family at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall was no different.

The Hoosiers played well in the second half, overwhelming Gannon by 30 points, but Gannon actually led late in a miserable first half.

There are two ways to look at this game, and these two views go a long way toward defining what kind of Indiana Basketball fan you are.

  • A win is a win, and beating anyone by 30 is a good thing.
  • Passion or toughness were lacking in the first 20 minutes.

Perhaps no fan base is as nutty as Indiana when it comes to the demand for tough guy basketball.  For many years, toughness was a foundational quality of the program.  The Hoosiers might get beat, but there was no doubt if it was because of a lack of toughness, players would be held accountable.

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For a few years under Tom Crean, it seemed like Bloomington was a rest stop for superior athletes from the east coast as they waited for their turn to bounce to the NBA.  Indiana was a lot of things – tough was not among them.

When Archie Miller was hired, it was assumed the demand for toughness as a point of emphasis for Indiana Basketball would return.  Seemed like Miller was tough.  How else could a little cherubic point guard from Pittsburgh start for an NC State team good enough to beat Michigan State in the NCAA Tourney?

But Indiana through Miller’s first two seasons looked very similar to Crean’s teams.  Last year, the Hoosiers appeared to be respectful and well-rounded kids playing basketball instead of competing.  When shots fell, they won.  When they didn’t, they lost.  Romeo broke his thumb.  Race Thompson and Rob Phinisee suffered concussions.  Indiana wobbled – losing 12-of-13 during one brutal stretch, and they failed to qualify for the NCAA for the third straight year.

Each season, expectations are that IU will find a way to recapture toughness and become feared again – like the teams that prowled Assembly Hall when it was new and quirky rather than historic and revered.

Last night’s win against Gannon showed another IU team unwilling to compete until it was forced to, which is another disappointing hallmark of recent squads.

November will bring fits, spurts, injuries, development, stretches of good, and moments of malaise.  The Hoosiers will win because losing to Western Illinois, Portland State, North Alabama, Troy, Princeton, Louisiana Tech, or South Dakota State is unthinkable.  At least it used to be.

It will also bring a multitude of complaints, praise, predictions, joy, and angst.  That’s Indiana Basketball in a nutshell as fans wait for the Miller rebuild to finally bear fruit.

Maybe this is the year for Indiana to find a way to meet the expectations of a fanbase that is among the toughest to please in college basketball.

Hey, somebody associated with Indiana Basketball has to be tough, right?

While the NCAA evolves forward, US Senator Richard Burr regresses into ignorance and racism

There is an old rule in the U.S. Senate – “Every reasonable thought must be answered by an idea inversely idiotic.”   Senator Richard Burr (North Carolina) proves that axiom true with the tweet below:

From this point forward, let’s refer to that rule as the Burr Razor.

The problem with Burr’s idiotic counter measure to the NCAA’s acknowledgement that college athletes should be able to profit from their own likeness is that the NCAA is steadfast in its refusal to classify student-athletes as employees.

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The NCAA reiterated again today in the document that spurred Burr’s tweet that students are not employees.  Because the students are not employees, the scholarships are not income.  That seems fairly straight forward.

What also seems straight forward is that coaches and administrators make obscene amounts of money for participating in what the NCAA would like everyone to believe is a purely educational endeavor.  The compensation for student-athletes and their families is that they do not have to pay tuition or room and board.  They also receive a cost of attendance stipend.

That’s a pretty good deal.  Nothing wrong with an education that doesn’t come with a massive student loan bill with the degree.  And some of those stipends are more than pocket change.

What isn’t quite as obvious is that Burr’s proposed tax unfairly penalizes African-Americans who comprise the vast majority of the student athletes who might be able to monetize their image through endorsements.  There are outliers like Tim Tebow, Baker Mayfield and Grayson Allen, white athletes who forged a fanbase worthy of monetization, but look at the Heisman finalists and first team All-Americans in basketball and tell me that race doesn’t enter into this somehow.

I understand people who have not thought through the inequity of refusing to allow athletes to profit from their gifts in the same way music, engineering, or business students can, but for a United States senator to threaten legislation as a response to the NCAA’s evolution toward fairness and sanity, well, that’s just about what we expect from politicians.

Will the music, engineering, and business students who are on scholarship while being paid for their gifts be taxed?  We should ask Burr the same question we have asked the NCAA for a generation – what makes athletes unique other than the amount of wealth they generate for schools and administrators?

Why are athletes a sub-class for whom rules are always different?

And it’s always worth asking politicians whether it’s worth leaping headlong into a debate they don’t understand and cannot win to earn the votes of a few thousand racist boobs?

 

 

All quiet on the Colts front – as anyone who pays attention to Chris Ballard would have guessed

Colts GM Chris Ballard did nothing today, and that was the prudent play.

The Indianapolis Colts are not about winning news cycles and making headlines.  Under GM Chris Ballard, the ship steadily heads toward prosperous waters without jerking the wheel toward choppy seas.

Trade deadline day is a day where the waves crest higher than usual.

So while other teams moved players for draft picks and others overpaid for that one guy that might put them over the top, the Colts stayed quiet.

If the phone rang, it was answered.  But the Colts don’t show up for work on a day like this trying to earn mentions on ESPN’s tedious NFL Trade Deadline special.  Chris Mortensen and Adam Schefter treat the Colts like a CFL franchise on a day like this, and that’s just fine with Ballard.

So four o’clock came and went without a whisper from West 56th Street.

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Hell, the Colts are 5-2 after their franchise quarterback retired 15 days before the season opener.  Seems like Ballard is about preparing his team so deals on days like this don’t have to be made.

What holes do the Colts need to plug with a Hail Mary deal anyway?

They could use a #2 wide receiver, but have Devin Funchess coming off the injured list.  They need to put more pressure of the quarterback, but have Justin Houston and Ben Banogu improving every week.  They’ve had a hole at free safety, but just got Malik Hooker healthy.

Plugs are coming from within, which is the way Ballard likes it.

The only trade I thought Ballard might pull the trigger on was to sell off a player or two for draft picks, but how much sense would that make for a team leading its division?  He loves draft picks, but not at the expense of a roster that appears headed for the playoffs.

Like Norman Dale in Hoosiers, Chris Ballard’s team is on the floor – or field.

Hey IU fans – Big 10 commissioner Jim Delany is here for more of your cash – IU vs. Gannon on BTN+

Why is Jim Delany always smiling? Because he knows IU Basketball fans are idiots ready to part with $10 for BTN+!

Tonight’s exhibition between Indiana and Gannon will not be on BTN, available on almost all basic tier cable/online packages.

If IU fans want to watch Indiana open its basketball season, they will have to subscribe to BTN+ for at least one month at a cost of $9.95 or if you have nothing better to do with your cash – $79.95 for the year.

What will BTN offer viewers instead of Indiana Basketball?  Tonight, it’s mens soccer games between Maryland and Penn State, and then Michigan and Michigan State.  Nothing against soccer, but guess which has a larger fan base – IU Basketball or the four programs featured tonight.

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So IU fans will pony up tonight for a service that’s needed to receive a game that should be carried on a network we already receive.  But the Big 10 wants more of your cash, because $750 million in annual revenue isn’t enough.

To rub salt in the wounds of IU fans, if they subscribe today to receive the feed of the IU vs. Gannon contest, they may have to renew for an additional month in order to watch the IU vs. South Dakota State game on November 30th.

See, the game tonight is on the 29th, and the SDSU game is one the 30th – one day outside the one month covered by the original $9.95.  Nice!

Greed sucks, and the Big 10 is showing itself to be exceptionally greedy.  Eventually, the greed will cause a switch to flip in fans that will drive them from sports as a passion.  People will decide to do something else with their time rather than admitting to themselves they are dullards.

For now, we’ll figure out how to subscribe to this BTN+ service that outside of IU Basketball has no value beyond being a service to parents of student-athletes who play olympic sports.  Thirty eight people will watch soccer tonight while thousands subscribe to BTN+ and tune in for IU vs. Gannon.  The cash register will ring, and Big 10 commissioner Jim Delany will pat himself on the back for screwing passionate fans out of their money.

Fans will feel like idiots for ponying up $10 with the potential for another $10 a month from tomorrow.  Delany will grin, and fans will watch while a feeling of stupidity gnaws at them.

At some point, the scales will tip and Delany will smile from the first tee of his country club because he will have retired with a bank account filled with our cash.

Colts are a fortunate & fun to watch 5-2, so enjoy the moment without thinking Super Bowl

Frank Reich is a good coach, but if forced to scheme against the New England Patriots in an AFC Championship game, his brain will melt.

Visions of a 2019 championship are dancing in the heads of Colts fans after another narrow victory.  They need to slow their roll.

The Colts are 5-2, but are no better than middle of the pack when you dig into the numbers just a little bit.  The clearest indication of the Colts mediocrity is in their +7 point differential.  I wasn’t a math major, but a +7 after seven games means the Colts have outscored their opponents by an average of one point.

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Part of the 5-2 can be attributed to Frank Reich making the right calls late in games.  Adam Vinatieri being trusted to make the game-winning 51-yard field goal yesterday is a great example.  Reich stayed conservative instead of trying to get Vinatieri closer, the kick was made, and the Colts celebrated.  If the kick sails wide, Reich screwed up.  He didn’t, so the Colts are 5-2.

Here are some stats to back up my thoughts about the Colts mediocrity:

  • The Colts seven opponents are a combined 23-32.  The good news is the record of the Colts remaining opponents totals 32-34.  If you eliminate the Saints 7-1 from that group, the record falls to 25-33.
  • Colts have been outgained by opponents 2.446-2,421.  Not bad, not good.
  • Colts Simple Rating System ranks 17th.  Right in the middle of the 32 teams.
  • In turnovers – the Colts have battled opponents to a 7-7 stalemate.  They are 2-0 in games without forcing a turnover, which is not sustainable.

I could go on, but you get the idea.  Colts nestle right in the middle in almost every stat minus their record.

Despite yesterday’s 10 sloppy penalties for 103 yards, the Colts one area of significant advantage is in penalties against (66-43) and yards awarded as a result (570-347).  That doesn’t seem like a lot, but 31.9 yards per game when all else is equal is a hell of an advantage.

The key to the Colts success is not beating themselves.  Penalties and turnovers are killers in a league where talent is mostly equivalent.  The defense is young and the key to winning with that youth is to not expose them in high leverage situations.  Because the Colts control the ball and are stingy with turnovers, the team survives week after week.

This team is just a sliver less flawed than its competition, and continuing to win at a 71% clip given their level of play is impossible to maintain.

In the AFC South, that means the Colts are a coin flip to win the division crown.  Every team in the AFC South is at .500 or better and all have a positive point differential.  They are good, not great – just like the Colts.

The great teams are in the NFC – minus one.  The Saints, Packers and 49ers are playing great football. Unfortunately, the New England Patriots are the best team in the NFL, and it’s not even close.  They play defense at a level we have never seen.

Yesterday, the Patriots forced three Browns turnovers on three consecutive plays, and have forced an outrageous 25 for the season.

I’m not trying to be a kill joy, but in an AFC with the New England Patriots who are playing dominating football, the Colts simply don’t measure up as an opponent.

The Patriots point differential after eight games is +189 – that’s an average ass-whuppin’ of 23.6 points per game – and they have allowed only 61 points.  As a comparative, the 1985 Bears allowed 198 points and the 2000 Ravens surrendered only 165.  If the Pats stay on their current pace, offenses will score 43 points less than that historically great Ravens unit.

Again, not trying to douse your enthusiasm – just steering it toward more reasonable waters.

AFC South Championship?  Sure.  Super Bowl?  Not yet.

Indiana Football – bowl eligible and deserving of a heartfelt apology

Tom Allen celebrates – and wins.

I’m sorry.  I was wrong.

My evaluation of Tom Allen as Indiana’s football coach has been proven wrong by the 6-2 record the Hoosiers have put together this season.  There is still work to be done, but 6-2 gives the Hoosiers bowl eligibility before Halloween for the first time since 1993.

If Indiana can beat Northwestern and Purdue – two games they are projected to win, that would guarantee their first season without a sixth loss since 1994.

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When Allen was elevated to the head coach position immediately following Kevin Wilson’s removal, I saw Allen as a strange choice.  His only experience as a head coach was at Ben Davis High School, and his penchant for enthusiastic celebrations throughout a game belied a mind locked into what had been instead of what’s coming.

In my world, grumpy coaches never satisfied with what had just happened are more likely to succeed (think Belichick, Saban, Knight, Meyer and Krzyzewski).  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen those five coaches smile, much less jump up and down thrusting their fists in the air.

Allen also admits to being intimidated by media, which is bizarre if you know people in sports media.  They are a lot of things, and intimidating is not among them.

I thought Allen would be the latest in a long line of failed experiments in leadership for college football’s losingest program.

Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.

I apologize to Allen, who is clearly a better coach and leader than I believed.  I apologize to Fred Glass, who I thought had taken leave of his senses when he said before this season that the next major athletic investment would be an extension for Allen.  I thought at the time Fred was living in hope and about to die in desperation.

I apologize to Peyton Ramsey, who was 27-40 for 351 yards at Nebraska in leading the Hoosiers to the bowl guaranteeing win.  My thoughts about Ramsey as a Big 10 starter were not generous.  While it’s true Ramsey doesn’t have a fastball, he is proving it’s possible to win without one.

Indiana is on the precipice of doing many good things undergrad students on the Bloomington campus have never seen or lived through.  If they win nine games, they will have done something alums under 60 can’t recall.

Cynicism toward Indiana Football has been rewarded since the early 1990s, and so it was easy to fall prey to the demons that filled IU fans with doubt and dread as they looked toward the last five games of the season.  But the win against Nebraska showed Allen and the Hoosiers as a legit Big 10 team for the first time in a generation.

That makes Allen a legit Big 10 coach, Ramsey a legit Big 10 quarterback, and Glass a legit Big 10 AD.

My negative assessment of Allen’s celebrations and “Love Each Other” mantra was clearly flawed.  There’s more to him than LEO and jumping up and down like a madman who just won Powerball.  He can coach because if he couldn’t, Indiana wouldn’t be 6-2.

Indiana is what its record says it is – a bowl team.  Allen is a coach leading IU to a bowl for the fourth time since 1993.  Glass is the guy who saw something in Allen that most of us missed.

There could be more – much more – to come.

Only losing to Indiana should make Harbaugh’s seat at Michigan REALLY hot!

Jim Harbaugh is as good as it can possibly get for Michigan.

Is Jim Harbaugh’s seat going to get hot as Michigan’s head coach if the Wolverines lose to Notre Dame tomorrow night at the Big House?

Given the strange ideas kooky Michiganders have about their football program, it probably will, If the bigwigs in Ann Arbor are thinking clearly, they will realize Harbaugh has the program operating as well as possible.

In other words, this is as good as it will get.  If Michigan fans don’t get that, there are plenty of Rich Rodriguezes and Brady Hokes out there.

I’m no fan of Harbaugh as a coach, human being, or member of the Indianapolis Colts Ring of Honor, but replacing him would be an absurd reaction to Harbaugh’s success.

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The Wolverines are 21 years removed from their last national championship and season with less than three losses.  Expectations that Michigan should beat Ohio State and be in the College Football Playoff conversation are unrealistic.  Michigan will never again be as consistently excellent as they were under Bo Schembechler.

The game has changed, and Michigan will never be able to recruit speed at the level of programs that routinely compete for a CFP berth.

Michigan hasn’t been great under Harbaugh, but they have always been good.  That counts for something given the grim runs authored by Hoke and Rodriguez – Harbaugh’s two predecessors.

Even if Michigan loses to Notre Dame and then in the season finale to Ohio State, they have a good shot at finishing the season 9-4.  Minus one miracle season under Brady Hoke, that would tie for being the best non-Harbaugh win total going back to 2006 when Lloyd Carr’s team finished 11-2.

Harbaugh is arrogant and annoying, but he’s also won 10 games three times in four seasons.  The two previous four-year runs with that level of success were from 1997-2000 and 1977-1980.

If Michigan fans want a change at the top, they need to consider who would replace Harbaugh.  What coach is out there who could do it better – and if you find one, will any of them take the job?

Michigan has a tough road to the kind of success fans crave.  In the Big 10 East with Ohio State, Penn State and Michigan State, getting to the Big 10 Championship Game in Indianapolis is a very difficult putt.  And winning that game is a coin flip.  That is the minimum necessary to join the Alabama & Clemson Invitational.

Losing to Notre Dame and Ohio State would be understandable and forgivable.  Losing to Indiana in Bloomington on November 23 would be an entirely different issue.  Lose to Indiana, and Michigan is looking at a 7-5 regular season at best, and fans might start to be irritated rather than charmed by Harbaugh’s quirks.

Critics of David Ross being hired as Cubs manager are wrong, but it’s not their fault

The torch being passed from Maddon to Ross makes perfect sense. It will be up to Ross to validate it.

The Chicago Cubs have just completed their most successful five-year regular season run in 80 years which included their first World Championship since 1908.

In 2019, the Cubs continued their backslide from the glorious heights of 2016 by failing to reach the postseason for the first time since 2014.  Joe Maddon lost his job because that fall from grace was due to a lack of adherence to baseball fundamentals.  Maddon was seen as a hands-off skipper, and the Cubs stopped responding to his motivational gimmicks.

As the search for Maddon’s successor progressed, two factions formed – those who wanted a new voice from the outside to serve as a catalyst toward a new way of thinking and playing, and those who favored former Cubs catcher David Ross.

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For many, Ross represents the Cubs trying to cling to the glory days of 2016.  For others, Ross is the guy who ran the 2016 clubhouse and brought accountability to those who neglected to run out ground balls, hit the cutoff man, or run the bases with prudent aggression.

The slide toward sloppy baseball began with the 2017 season, the first without Ross as the guy who could turn red-assed with teammates who indulged in mental lapses.

Many in the media hoped the Cubs would try to take the next step by stepping out to hire Astros bench coach Joe Espada.  He embodied the hope for the fresh voice, but most couldn’t have pointed him out in a lineup.

Ross is seen as the status quo.

The Cubs made their choice to hire Ross, and many are critical.  They see it as obvious, underwhelming, and even weak.

It’s not weak, but I understand why Cubs fans and media believe it is.  Bad habits are hard to break.  They have never learned how successful teams operate because the Cubs were never successful.

For those who still believe the Cubs should have hired someone other that Ross, let me explain why you are wrong.

Why would Cubs president Theo Epstein try to reinvent the wheel with this hire?  Ross has been a part of the Cubs front office since his retirement, knows many of the players from their days as teammates, and is quite familiar with the reasons the Cubs failed to qualify for the playoffs this season.

The Cubs need to be confident in what they are.  The culture that has been built has been successful during four of the last five seasons.  Throwing it out the window to pacify fans and media who have been conditioned to demand change every three or four years as the team sputtered would be idiotic.

Consistent culture is what allows programs, teams, and franchises to maintain their competitive position.  Staying within the family is how cultures are maintained.  A voice within the organization can still be a fresh voice.

Think of the St. Louis Cardinals as they shifted from Tony LaRussa to Mike Matheny.  The Cards made the playoffs during each of his first four seasons, and his era lasted as long or longer than any Cubs manager since Frank Chance (1905-1912).   In central Indiana, think Butler Basketball over the last 20 years – Collier to Matta to Lickliter to Stevens to Holtmann to Jordan.

If the Cubs won 66 games last year, replating would make sense.  Temporary regression from bad to worse is not only tolerable, it’s prudent.  Cratering requires boldness that might take years to flower.  The Cubs did that when Epstein took over the Cubs baseball operation.

There is no reason for the Cubs to crater again.

Cubs fans and media need to understand that a steady hand is needed to bring sustained success.  The torch being passed from Maddon to Ross represents precisely the stability required to keep tides high.

That Ross was the obvious choice doesn’t mean he isn’t the right choice.