From Saturday’s Washington Post:

[New stadium opponents] said that although the stadium proposal calls mainly for taxing stadium services and big business, they feared that businesses would simply pass those extra costs on to consumers. [emphasis added]

Free hint: the businesses will pass those extra costs onto consumers, either through increased prices or lower levels of customer service (i.e. reducing payroll). Or they’ll leave Washington entirely.

As others have mentioned, it appears that the Montréal Expos are headed to Washington. But, while I’m generally not in favor of Congress meddling in D.C.‘s business (and think some sort of resolution needs to be made to the district residents’ lack of congressional representation), I think I could make an exception for a law blocking the district government’s ill-conceived and completely unnecessary handout package for the team. You don’t have to believe me; believe AEI’s Scott Wallstein, or Cato’s Doug Bandow, to name just two experts, virtually all of whom have concluded that stadium subsidies don’t lead to worthwhile economic benefits—and, particularly in the case of D.C., divert resources that could be better spent on serious social ills.

Jeff Quinton notes that the AA West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx may be headed to Greenville, South Carolina, as a result of their AA team being headed to the greater Jackson area (specifically, Pearl, just across the eponymous river from Jackson) and becoming the Mississippi Braves.

Incidentally, the Diamond Jaxx franchise started out as the Memphis Chicks, who hit the road after no new stadium was forthcoming in Memphis; the Bluff City came out ahead on the deal by luring the Cardinals into awarding a AAA franchise, the Memphis Redbirds, and building a privately-financed, state-of-the-art baseball stadium, AutoZone Park.

The drawback of rooting for two football teams is that you get doubly-annoyed when they both lose on the same day. Ole Miss (1–3) somehow managed to lose to Wyoming, 37–32 in Laramie on Saturday afternoon, while Millsaps (1–2) lost to Belhaven, 26–10* on Saturday night.

The only good football news is that I won my second consecutive national title (in three years) playing as Michigan in Dynasty Mode of NCAA Football 2005, based largely on the obscene 19-game win streak I have going.

The interesting thing about Mississippi State’s Saturday loss to division I-AA Maine isn’t that it happened—it’s that I had to learn about it from the Clarion-Ledger. Surely ESPN, only two weeks out from its hagiographic profile of “history-making” Bulldogs coach Sylvester Croom, just was too busy during “College Gameday Final” to mention the upset and the Bulldogs’ fall below .500; after all, there were critical highlights to be shown from Florida Atlantic’s win over Middle Tennessee State.

I made the decision last night not to bother going up to Oxford for the game—the idea of driving five hours and using $20 of gas to watch a three-hour game I could watch on TiVo-delay in the comfort of my apartment outweighed my desire to hang out in the Grove with past grad-school colleagues. As BigJim indicates, it didn’t start out all that well, but I think Ethan Flatt settled in and solidified himself as the starter, and the Rebels did pull out the win 26–23 in the first overtime (once Vanderbilt started actually playing like Vanderbilt normally does in the fourth quarter, instead of the halfway-decent play they showed in the first three). Micheal Spurlock probably didn’t help his cause by having a snap blow 20 yards past him in his only series under center.

The good news for the Rebels is that they next face Wyoming (in Laramie) and Arkansas State (at home), so there’s a reasonable chance they’ll be over .500 by the time SEC play starts up again. The bad news is that they’ll have to get one hell of a lot better to do much once the real teams start showing up on the schedule.

Update: More on this theme here.

Doug at pretense.org writes:

Vandy at Ole Miss on Saturday, so keep your fingers crossed. I smell an upset brewing.

What’s truly scary is that the Rebels are 0–2 and still favored by a touchdown. (Mind you, even if I did bet on sports, I wouldn’t go within a mile of this one.)

It’s official: there’s a QB controversy in Oxford. I think I’d give Spurlock the nod at least starting against perennial SEC punching bag Vanderbilt, but I don’t think I’d give him more than three drives to get his act together. I’m not sure Flatt is much of an upgrade, but he did manage to accomplish something against Alabama, which is more than Spurlock can say. (The question mark in all of this is blue-chip recruit Robert Lane out of Louisiana, currently #3 on the depth chart but poised to move up if this turns into a “rebuilding season” after the trip to Wyoming.)

One thing’s for sure: Rebel fans should get their EV1.COM Bowl tickets early!

Two of the three “local” ads during half-time of the Giants-Eagles game here in Jackson featured Eli Manning (including a cringe-inducing ad for BankPlus that also had Archie in it).

My thoughts on the 0–2 performance of the Ole Miss Rebels (originally posted here):

I think Cutcliffe has a four-year contract that was renewed over the summer (the state government doesn’t permit contracts for more than four years). No idea what the buy-out is.

That said, Cut will have to really screw up—i.e. get nailed by the NCAA or not be bowl-eligible for two straight seasons—to be fired. Realistically, Ole Miss is a 7 or 8-win program on average, and he’s never done worse than seven wins. I can see the coordinator (Latina) getting the boot, or even a Tuberville-style mass slaughter of the coaching staff, but not during the season. Plus, I think the prestige bump from last year’s 10–3 season won’t translate on the field until 2005 when this year’s recruits are off the scout team.

Besides, who are you going to bring in to rebuild? Petrino has a better shot at a BCS bowl in Louisville (once they enter the Big East) than he would ever have in Oxford. More than likely you’d have to bring in someone for a first head-coaching job (cherry-pick someone off Saban’s staff at LSU, for example), and there’s no guarantee that will work better than Cutcliffe.

I think a lot of what we’re seeing is the result of Cutcliffe not playing Spurlock enough last season—I don’t think Spurlock saw a single snap in an SEC game until Saturday—and some of it is growing pains with working with what Spurlock’s strengths are. Flatt, who does a lot of the same stuff Manning did (not to mention having another half-foot on Spurlock), is actually a better fit in the playcalling “package.”

One thing’s for sure: Spurlock’s leash is pretty short by now, and if the Rebels aren’t pounding Vanderbilt by halftime this coming week, he may never see the field again in an Ole Miss uniform.

The last part is probably hyperbole, but if Spurlock can’t figure out how to settle down and complete passes in a game, he’s not going to be on the field much.

The Majors shut out the Mississippi College Choctaws last night, nine to nothing. It wasn’t an offensive showcase by any means, but the important thing was that it was football!

Apropos of Hurricane Frances: Why don’t we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?

Environmental and physical problems aside, I think Florida and Florida State fans could also get behind this plan.

As James Joyner notes, Nomar Garciaparra was traded from the Red Sox to the Cubs in a 4-team deal that would seem to put the Cubs in a pretty good position, but which looks to David Pinto like something of a firesale for the Sox—even though they did get Doug Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera in the deal.

I suppose this also means that Jimmy Fallon will have to learn to play another character than “annoying Boston guy who screams ‘Nomar’ and makes out with Rachel Dratch at the drop of a hat.” But given SNL’s track record on such things, maybe not…

Ex-Texas Tech star Ricky Williams has lucked into some good news; the former Texas running back who shares his name is apparently retiring from the Miami Dolphins, at least according to the “hateable” Dan Le Batard* of the Miami Herald. The retiring Williams, you may recall, was the object of the foolish New Orleans Saints trade that gave away all their draft picks for about a decade or so; he was eventually traded to the Dolphins when New Orleans managed to acquire former Ole Miss RB Deuce McAllister.

Say what you will about Formula 1 racing, but Michael Schumacher has taken things to a whole new level; as BigJim points out, he’s won nine of the ten F1 races this season. This past weekend, he managed to take one more pit stop than the rest of the field and still left everyone in his dust. This guy is simply unreal.

Though you have to hand it to his teammate, Rubens Barichello, for the most audacious on-track move of the race, a nifty pass that gave him third place on the next-to-last turn before the chequered flag.

The slo-mo breakup of the Lakers finds no regret from either Big Jim or Matt Yglesias, although Kevin Drum is probably crying on the inside.

In an interesting twist, the Shaq trade scenarios (dictated largely by cap considerations) strongly suggest that the big man will return to the team that drafted him way-back-when, the Orlando Magic, in (nominal) exchange for Juwan Howard and/or Grant Hill. In a not-so-interesting twist, Lakers owner Jerry Buss is apparently betting his franchise on the possibility that a Colorado jury—fresh on the heels of the UC-Boulder sexual harassment and rape allegations—will be sympathetic to an out-of-state athlete accused of raping a local woman. Glad it’s his money and not mine.

Steven Taylor:

Can we say “matching funds are dead”? I bet we can. There can be no doubt that after Bush in 2000 (and ‘04) and Kerry and Dean this time, that the presidential primary matching-fund process created by the FECA is essentially dead. At best it is campaign welfare for medium-to-low wattage candidates.

While we spend a while hashing out what we’re going to do about this travesty, Congress and the Federal Election Commission might do well to heed the words of baseball guru Bill James, on a completely unrelated topic, the balk rule:

Q: Can you elaborate on how/why the balk rule doesn’t work? Thanks

Bill James: The rule manifestly fails to achieve its goals. It’s one of those rules that, when it didn’t work, they tried to fix it. When that didn’t work, they fixed it again, and they fixed it again, and they fixed it again.

At some point they should have stopped and tried something else, but they didn’t, so they stuck history with a rule which (a) is almost totally unintelligible, and (b) is arbitrary in its enforcement.

In principle, trying to prevent one player from decoying another is a dumb idea. The balk rule is like a rule in basketball that says (a rule that would say… theoretical example) that if you fake a shot, you have to take the shot; otherwise it is travelling. That would be a dumb rule. The balk rule is basically the same thing, only applied to baseball. [emphasis mine]

I think the bolded passage pretty much sums up the state of campaign finance law in the United States in 2004.

Please, for the love of God, will someone tell Tom Tolbert that his suit is the most hideous thing ever seen on American television.

Len Cleavlin has a classic example (albeit probably apocryphal) of the dangers of the arithmetic mean:

There’s an old joke that the Geography Department at the University of North Carolina would tell prospective majors the average salary of graduates with a bachelor’s degree in geography from UNC, without telling them that UNC alumnus and NBA star Michael Jordan received his bachelor’s in geography….

Ole Miss’ criminal justice department might consider employing this trick, as New Orleans Saint Deuce McAllister was a CJ major (though I’m damned if I know whether or not he actually graduated); even given the number of CJ majors who’ve matriculated, Deuce’s NFL salary would probably bump up the mean by a few grand.

David Pinto doesn’t think much of ESPN’s continued plugging of its “productive outs” statistic, and in particular Buster Olney’s justification thereof, as summarized by Pinto:

The basic argument is: here’s a stat, this team is good at it, this team won, so it must be important to be good at that stat.

I’m all for inductive reasoning, but inductive reasoning from a single case is, generally speaking, not a very smart idea…

In other baseball news, Ole Miss finally got off the schnide with a 2–1 victory over Murray State on Wednesday (snapping a six-game losing streak); let’s hope they can stay on track this weekend at South Carolina.

The Commercial Appeal (reg. required) yesterday took the admirable, if belated, stand that tossing a ton of public money at yet another publicly-funded sports facility wouldn’t be a great idea (at least, not for now). At issue is the deteriorating 1965 Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium (which dates from prior to my parents’ attendance at then-Memphis State University). The editorial says:

A major overhaul could cost 125 million or more. …

Councilman Rickey Peete suggested spending 5 million for minimal repairs if the work would buy a few more years of use.

The CA endorses the third option. But let’s go look at the benchmark for comparison:

It should be noted that the University of Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, one of the largest stadiums in the country, has seen 16 renovations since 1921, according to the school’s web site. Renovations apparently have served UT well, since there are enough seats for 104,079 fans.

By comparison, the 62,380-seat Liberty Bowl has been twice renovated since it was built, according to the university.

To the best of my recollection, Neyland’s renovations were financed with money from boosters… and UT, which attracts 100,000 fans per game, needs the space—heck, they could probably sell another 20,000 seats if they had the space to install them. The Liberty Bowl, however, is lucky to attract 30,000 fans per Memphis home game in a typical season: last year, the team set a record by attracting an average of 40,262, a figure skewed by both the presence of the Ole Miss home game on the schedule (which attracted 51,914 fans, many of whom weren’t big Tigers supporters) and the Tigers’ atypically good performance in 2003. Don’t count on more than 35,000 per this year. (Stats from here.)

More to the point, the editorial doesn’t mention the real driving force behind a new stadium for the Tigers: keeping up with the Joneses. Or, in their case, keeping up with the Louisville Cardinals and their privately-financed Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium, which manages to seat 42,000 fans in comfort (i.e. still above the realistic attendance level the Tigers can expect regularly) at the bargain price of $65 million—half the estimated cost the CA cites for an all-new stadium. (Louisville’s stadium is actually a “horseshoe” that can eventually be expanded with additional end-zone seating, similar to the current configuration of Ole Miss’ larger 60,580-seat Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, also paid for by private donations.)

Unlike Louisville’s boosters, however, the Highland Hundred want to dig into their fellow citizens’ pockets to pay for their new deluxe stadium. Why shouldn’t they? Michael Heisley, a man with no ties to Memphis at all, was able to schmooze and finagle his way into getting taxpayers to pony up for the FedExForum, leaving the Pyramid (which, admittedly, is a horribly designed basketball arena building) to do nothing except blind passing airline pilots with the reflection from its roof. Now all the Hundred have to figure out is how to shoehorn a football stadium west of Danny Thomas Blvd. and they’ll be all set!

Shouldn’t the real story in this account be that Aggie football player Geoff Hangartner was charged with driving while intoxicated—a criminal offense that endangers the lives of others, I might mention—and not whether or not he used “racial slurs”—a form of vile and offensive behavior that might have endangered his own life but doesn’t lead to physical danger to others?

Steven Taylor’s bracket is hosed. So is my entry in The Kitchen Cabinet’s annual tourney, as I picked Kentucky to win it all. Damn that siren Ashley Judd!

In other NCAA news, the Ole Miss Lady Rebels got beat by Villanova in the first round of the NCAA Womens’ Tournament tonight. The good news: the Rebel baseball team swept Vandy in this weekend’s three-game series, improving their record to 17–1 on the season. Oh, and I heard that Starkville A&M Mississippi State got their asses kicked by Xavier too.

Here’s the bracket update.

I just got back from the second game of this weekend’s three game series against Vanderbilt; like last night’s game, the Rebels trailed 5–3 coming into the ninth (and were down 5–0 entering the 7th), but pulled out the 6–5 win with an effective 9th inning from the bottom of the order, including pinch hitter Charlie Babineaux, to improve their record to 16–1 on the season. Vanderbilt closer Ryan Rote was hung with his second loss in as many days (despite coming into the series 1–0 with 8 saves). And, as an added bonus, it was a beautiful day at the ballpark.

Update: Here’s the full account of the game.

Lily Malcolm asks:

Why do they call it a “game reset?” What is being reset?

My guess is that, theoretically, during the timeout the players are supposed to “reset” themselves into their designated positions on the court; thus, the “set offense” that Jim Woods refers to in this piece requires a “reset” to establish. However, since basketball—particularly pro basketball—is much more of a free-form game these days, I’m not sure the term retains much meaning.

Of course, I could be wrong; maybe they used to reset the shot clock on a timeout, and the term just stuck after the practice was abolished. A Google search found little besides hints on how to cheat in various basketball games for videogame consoles.