The Eleventy Billionth Blog

Before We Have One More UT-OU Game

Before we have another UT-OU game in the Cotton Bowl (the real one, not the Jerrydome usurper), I think we're all in agreement that DART and the State Fair need to figure out a better way than last year's debacle to get everyone there.

 I was just as stymied as everyone else as to what the solution to overcrowded trains full of angry fans opening up to platforms equally full of angry fans might be. And then, last weekend, the answer came to me, by way of Memphis.

Specifically, the Memphis Area Transit Authority. Now, I know DART has already said it has a plan for the 2010 game. But frankly? It's unwieldy and confusing. MATA came up with a plan to get fans to the Liberty Bowl efficiently (save a little signage issue that was cleared up with a phone call), and get them all back, too.

And it didn't involve any trains. None at all. Which, to me, is key.

Trains break down on tracks. If they get full, you can't get any more people on them. They can't circle back around quickly. 

But you know what is more flexible? A bus. More can be dispatched if necessary. They can circle back and pick up more passengers. This is what MATA did for the Liberty Bowl, which had an attendance of more than 62,000. Dedicated bus shuttles from specific pickup points in Germantown, downtown Memphis, northeast Memphis, south Memphis, etc., came at specific times. MATA workers were also out in cars driving by to assess the need, likely to make sure that extra buses got to places that needed them.

They were prepared for the influx. I'm guessing if fewer people had opted for the shuttle, those buses would've been sent back to the barn. If they needed more, more were available.

Now, I know this could be seen as negating the whole super-duper Green Line. But no, not really. Fairgoers can still take advantage of the Green line, which more may do if they know it's not going to be super-congested with UT/OU fans. Make the shuttles just for TU/OU ticket holders. Charge $5 round trip, like MATA did. Have a pickup in Plano, one in South Dallas, one in the Irving/Las Colinas area, etc. 

But after watching happy fans get on the shuttle to go to the Liberty Bowl, and coming out of the game to find them all lined up like soldiers waiting to take them back, I know this for certain: This solution can't be any worse than last year.

Dear Kay Bailey Hutchison:

Are you trying to lose this, or do you really want to know if we'd like government-issued GPS units in our cars that can not only record "taxable miles" (whatever the what that is), but also give the state a whole lot of other information it doesn't need?

Please tell us your Facebook account got hacked. Because this? This makes Rick Perry look smart and snuggly.

 

Being a Leach Means Never Having to Say Sorry

 Mike Leach. Where to start? I could start with the hairstyle that even Vince Gill, the originator, gave up several years ago. I could start with the insane pirate thing he came up with, or the "fat little girlfriends" comment.

But all that is quirky and harmless. But it's this new stuff that has everyone up in a tizzy, and has me aching to point out the heart of the matter:

Mike Leach is a bad example to his players, and other players on other college teams.

It's not just that he allegedly pooh-poohed medical advice and sought to humiliate Craig James, although Leach says he was doing him a favor. Putting him in a dark shed/electrical closet/media room/Hanoi Hilton/luxury suite/outhouse/hen house/dog house may have been his way of keeping him out of the sun he said he needed to avoid as part of his treatment for a slight concussion, but that wasn't how he and his family perceived it.

And that is the point where Leach, as a coach, should be checking his ego. After all, isn't that what teamwork is about? Last I checked, a coach is part of the team as well. If this is still the case, a whole lot of this could've been mitigated by a simple apology.

Leach says that the school wouldn't tell you who complained. How many athletes get sent to solitary when they are injured, Leach? He couldn't maybe remember on your own that he sent Craig James' kid to the hole one time when he came to practice with sunglasses on and complaining of a concussion? Were there that many that he's just a blur in a long line?

So let's say we give Leach the benefit of the doubt, though, and say maybe he couldn't remember which one of his players had a concussion this season and was sent to a dark shed/electrical closet/media room/Hanoi Hilton/luxury suite/outhouse/hen house/dog house. He had no clue who it was, so he couldn't apologize directly.

That still doesn't mean he couldn't say, "Please tell the family I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, and find out if there's some way we can work this out." 

Instead, he lawyers up and has the guy give the media a tour of the dark shed/electrical closet/media room/Hanoi Hilton/luxury suite/outhouse/hen house/dog house, and then proceed to slander the student athlete who levied the complaint to begin with.

Maybe Craig James is a helicopter parent. Maybe Adam James just isn't that good, and is inconsequential to the program in the grand scheme of things. 

But none of that really matters. What matters is that Leach began looking out for himself, and not his team. Some might argue that by fighting to coach the Alamo Bowl game, he is looking out for his team. Maybe so.

But it also sends a message to his players. Suspensions can be circumvented. Punishment and apologies are for people who can't figure out how to throw someone under the bus and move on. If someone tells you that you're suspended for your actions, don't man up - lawyer up. You'll be back on the field by morning.

Football - from the NFL right down to the high school level - has been a case study in medical negligence when it comes to head trauma. It took a lot of time and convincing to make the NFL take concussions seriously, and that's hopefully trickling down to the collegiate level. Even just two concussions in a short span of time can do grievous harm, possibly even death. 

So this was Leach's opportunity to do something good. He could've easily said to the family, "I'm sorry there was this misunderstanding about the injury. When I did what I did, I thought I was helping. Why don't we work together to promote some awareness of concussions and what coaches SHOULD do in response to one?" 

That would've been a response that would have made all of this a non-story. It would have been a story with a productive ending. 

But instead, we have a mess. And ultimately, Tech's program will suffer the most. If Leach stays, there will always be those parents that steer their kids to other schools, other programs, because they're unsure of the well being of their child. That seed of doubt has been planted. 

If he goes, the program loses the one coach who can make that quirky Lubbock situation work and draw decent talent over to that corner of the world, and then coax out offensive wonderment.

And all because being a Leach means never having to say you're sorry.

Update: Local Texas sources are now reporting that  Texas Tech fired Mike Leach this morning.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Dallas ABC affilate WFAA verified that this video, shot by Adam James, is real. What do you think?

Wherein a Vaguely Nauseous Feeling Settles In

 

I will admit - I have been a fairly vocal critic of the Dallas Morning News, the paper of record for my city. But I've never really talked about why, but today - upon learning something that left me with that day-after-four-Mambo-Taxis feeling - I feel as if I must.

Every young journalist (well, at least in the past) dreams of moving up to a large metro daily. You toil in smaller cities. You even do some time in community journalism, at some small-town paper, but eventually, you think, you'll get that call-up. 

Think of it as slogging away in the farm team before Ron Washington calls you and asks you to come play short stop for the Rangers. 

Well, when I got that call, I was excited. I'd worked hard my entire career to work at a big daily. Granted, it was a editing a weekly section that everyone was mocking at the time, but to me, that was a challenge. If I could get my coverage area to buy in, if I could turn it around, I'd consider my venture a success.

The pay was infinitesimal. I wagered that with my savings I could survive a year. After that, I'd re-evaluate. Within a year, I had another job, won in part because of that DMN experience on my resume - and I'd like to think that I did accomplish my goal of making my section less mock-worthy.

It's no secret that the DMN - along with the rest of the industry - is hurting. As I've said before, I think that it has less to do with any perceived political leanings and more to do with the negligence when it came to being early adopters of the Web. If newspapers - singly or collectively - had worked harder in the beginning to monetize online news, perhaps this slump would be a different story all together. People at that time were used to paying for a newspaper to get their news, or waiting for the local television news - likely, they'd be comfortable with paying for news online, too. Instead, newspapers by and large treated the Internet as a fad for basement dwelling nerd herders. 

And now they flounder, trying to tread water in quicksand while simultaneously figuring out how to get online readers to pay for something they've been getting for free for decades. Some newspapers have been more successful than others at doing this. But since there's no cohesive effort to monetize sites, it's like running down to Wal-Mart for milk because it's cheaper than Target. Why pay for content from newspaper A when I can look at newspaper B and get that information?

But the Dallas Morning News' latest restructuring effort, where sales staff are named GM's of sections and oversee senior editors, makes me wholly uncomfortable. I frequently yell at the dead tree product as if it was a live person, but never have I had a visceral reaction to a decision like I had today. 

I literally wanted to puke. 

I know times are tough. I know newspapering appears to be a dying art. But this? This is rearranging deck chairs at the most obvious level. Instead of looking at the issues pulling the paper down, the powers that be create more bureaucracy, and more ways for their readers to question their ethics.

Instead of this, why not rid yourselves of employees that refuse to pick up more than one oar? You have a whole passel of Metro columnists that don't do much or any reporting. You have a bloated editorial staff that could be shuffled to cover things people care about. You can't decimate a newsroom without a gut check, and I do not think that gut check has been performed.

I worked for a guy who was in sales once. When it became obvious that he felt ad sales should dictate content,  I was eventually faced with three choices: Battle every day, give in, or quit.

I tried number one for a while, till it landed me in the hospital. After that, number three became my choice. 

I just hope that my former co-workers at the DMN aren't faced with the same three choices.

Going to the Chapel

Last night, voters in Maine were narrowly in favor of repealing a law permitting same-sex couples to marry. 

We prevailed because the people of Maine, the silent majority, the folks back home spoke with their vote tonight," said Marc Mutty, the campaign chairman for Stand for Marriage Maine.

Gay marriage has been defeated in all 31 states where it has been brought to a ballot measure. Every. Single. One. Including Texas. 

And maybe it's not about hate. Maybe it's just about denying someone the right to marry whom they want, the old box-turtle defense - which, wait, isn't any better than hate. 

Maine Gov. John Baldacci said that gay marriage will be approved some day by the state's voters, saying that it might not come as soon as supporters want, "But we're going to get there because that's the future."

But does it have to be? Truthfully, I do not want the government's mitts on my marriage. A marriage ceremony is a religious rite, and should be up to individual religious bodies to determine their comfort level when it comes to who they perform marriage ceremonies for. There should be no state-sponsored marriage - for anyone.

What should follow under the government's purvey? Civil unions, which should address the business part of a marriage - the part that needs to file taxes, draw up wills and apply for mortgages. And since the government doesn't need to set rules about who can enter into business together - other then that they're both consenting adults - why should it limit who can enter into a civil union to satisfy federal and state legal requirements?

Already, the disparity from state to state in regards to same-sex marriage has caused a legal morass. In many states, couples that ran to get married in other states come home to find out that nothing's really changed. Later, perhaps things don't work out (just like it happens sometimes in heterosexual relationships), and they want a divorce. 

The only problem? Their home state doesn't recognize their marriage, and the state they married in has residency requirements associated with divorcing.

But maybe the issue will be addressed by the Supreme Court in the next few years. And maybe the state with the Senator whose staff worries that gay marriage will open up all manner of box turtle marriages will lead the way, because just last month a Texas judge ruled that two men married in another state can get divorced, and furthermore, the state's gay marriage ban is unconstitutional.

An Open Letter to the DMN Editorial Board:

Today we find on the pages of the Dallas Morning News that Mayor Tom Leppert is a bastion of ethics reform, and the soon-to-be-voted on rules were all his idea.

Let's be clear: Angela Hunt proposed it first. The mayor came in later, acted as if it was his idea, and then tried very hard to ram a watered-down version designed to placate voters through the machinery at City Hall.

So to praise Leppert for this nearly toothless bit of spun sugar is as believable as praising the Pope for the Bible. To rail against Hunt and say she was trying to stop the vote - when it's already been reported in your own paper that it was a) her idea and b) she merely wanted more teeth in the thing - is disingenuous at best and patently misleading. 

Noooo ... We Don't Put Innocent Men on Death Row

As we've discussed here before, Rick Perry is pretty damned insistent that he did not kill an innocent man. For a millisecond, it seemed like he might be right, because Cameron Todd Willingham's ex-wife said he confessed to her.

But she's a liar. Other places won't say it, but I will. She lies. She's a lying liar who lies. Maybe he did confess, but it contradicts everything else she's ever said. So she lied then, or she's lying now. But by any definition, she's a lying liar who lies.

Grits for Breakfast has an excellent breakdown of her inconsistencies, but let's just take one - her statement to the Corsicana Daily Sun in 2004. In that story, she said she became convinced of his guilt, but that even a pre-execution visit didn't result in a confession to her.

She either lied then, or she's lying now. 

Why If You Are Rich, You're Gonna Need Some Caller ID

So it's like this. Bill Lively, president and CEO of the North Texas Super Bowl 45 Host Committee, has this insane amount of money to raise. Like, $30 million. 

And he and the rest of the committee members have been hitting the bricks for several months now. And they're really leaving no wealthy person unturned. Because $30 million is a lot of money. I know, because I have nowhere near $30 million. 

Now, before I talk about the Super Bowl, I need to tell a story. A few years ago, I was working at an IPTV company that was trying to branch out to cover sports (for some reason) and entertainment in addition to the stock market. I was charged with getting our newly-minted sports guy credentials with the various teams.

Fiscally Conservative - and Pro-Death Penalty?

Today, we learned that the death penalty, on average, costs about $10 million more per year per state than life without parole, according to The Death Penalty Information Center.

So let's talk finances. Texas now has an unemployment rate of 8.2 percent, a 22-year high. As people move out and businesses shut down, that's less in both property taxes collected and in sales tax revenue. If building slows down, as it seems it may, we're looking at further slow down.