It’s hard to beat the weather in Texas during Autumn when the oppressive heat of Summer gives way to delightfully cool mornings and warm days.
Here is a slideshow of photos (music by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, Through the Morning, Through the Night) that I took during a recent early-morning round at the Tournament Course at The Woodlands, which is in great shape preparing to host the local Champions Tour tournament the weekend after next.
A very nice walk in the park indeed.
H/T Radley Balko.
As I’ve noted many times over the years, big-time college football is an entertaining form of corruption, but corruption nonetheless.
Several recent articles reminded me of this corruption and the almost pathological obsession of the mainstream media to avoid addressing it, particularly during the highly entertaining football season.
First, there was this Joe Draper/NY Times article on how the highly valuable Big Ten Network is changing the financial landscape of college sports.
Not once is it mentioned in the article that the people who are actually creating most of that value – i.e., the young athletes – are forced to compete under a system of highly-restricted compensation while some bastions of higher learning profit from the value that they create.
In their honest moments, how do the academics rationalize that sort of exploitation, particularly when much of it involves undereducated, young black men?
Meanwhile, this breathless Pete Thamel/NY Times article reports on how the regulator of this corruption – the NCAA – is really cracking down now on coaches who have the audacity of attempting to provide to the athletes a pittance of the compensation that the bastions of higher education are preventing them from receiving. Not once in the article is it mentioned that the system is exploiting these athletes for the benefit of the NCAA and its member institutions.
Finally, this William Winslade-Daniel Goldberg/Houston Chronicle op-ed thoughtfully points out the ethical issues that arise as a result of exposing young athletes to serious and often undisclosed risk of injury and loss of potential future compensation.
So, what is it about football that generates such cognitive dissonance when young professional athletes in other sports such as golf, tennis, and baseball are not subjected to such arbitrary restrictions in compensation?
Are we concerned that the sacred traditions of college football might change if the current system is altered to compensate the young athletes fairly for the risks that they take and the wealth they create? Are those traditions truly worth the perpetuation of such a parasitic system?
There is nothing inherently wrong with universities being involved in the promotion of professional minor league football if university leaders conclude that that such an investment is good for the promotion of the school and the academic environment.
But do so honestly. Allow the players who create wealth for the university to be paid directly. If they so desire, universities could establish farm team agreements with NFL teams and cut out the hypocritical incentives that are built into the current system.
Not only would such a system be fairer for the players who take substantial risk of injury in creating wealth for the universities, it would obviate the compromising of academic integrity that universities commonly endure under the current system.
So, why are the leaders of our institutions of higher learning not leading the way toward a fairer system?
Perhaps the problem is that they are really not leaders at all?
Regular readers of this blog know about my opposition to the now entrenched third party payor process of even routine health care costs in the U.S. health care finance system.
Removing the consumer from controlling the complex decisions that go into paying or attempting to avoid such costs has had far-reaching consequences, not only on the cost of health care, but also on the way in which consumers view their responsibility in regard to maintaining their own health.
I was reminded of those implications recently when I came across this Pauline Chen/NY Times article on the vagaries of third party payors compensating doctors based on patient performance, and this Happy Hospitalist post on the difficulty of telling a patient who is expecting a cure regardless of the cost that the doctor really doesn’t know what’s wrong with with the patient.
These items prompted a friend of mine – first-rate hospitalist and internist – to pass along his experience on the unrealistic expectations of many patients:
Here is an insight into what the practice of medicine has evolved into.
Because hospitals and other corporate organizations are so focused on "customer satisfaction" these days (with Press-Gainey satisfaction survey scores and the like), the opinions of persons like the one the Happy Hospitalist describes get far more purchase than they have in the past.
Often times, I see drug-seeking persons like this get all the testing and all the Dilaudid they want (bad medical practice on multiple levels) because a doctor may not want to set himself up to get "dinged" on a patient survey – some places tie physician bonuses to patient satisfaction scores – some docs even get fired for bad scores.
And, unfortunately, patients like this are not a rare occurrence. I see at least one or two every week I work in the hospital.
I had a patient tell me, "Screw you" last month when I suggested that she might have a bit more money for medicines if she were to stop smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. This is after I had admitted her for treatment of accelerated hypertension and uncontrolled diabetes, found her previously undiagnosed high cholesterol, and got those all under control with medications she could get through the WalMart $4 program. There was no "thank you", and certainly no payment to me or to the hospital for our expertise.
It’s really disappointing to see how frequently the patient-physician interaction has deteriorated into something like this. I guess that other professions are subject to similar abuse, but I don’t see any other examples as severe as what I am seeing in medicine.
I’ve always thought that the best approach is to do what’s right for the patient, even if it is not necessarily what the patient wants. In this current climate, this has at times put me at odds with hospital administration.
What do you think Walt [my late father] would do if faced with this deterioration of patient-physician interaction?
I think my father’s reaction would be the following:
1. When you remove from the patient the responsibility to pay – or at least contributing to pay — for their health care, patients tend not only to become more irresponsible regarding how they spend money for their health care, but also less interested in understanding how to avoid those costs.
2. Doctors share a big part of the blame for the foregoing problem because they encouraged (and previously got rich by) over-billing of third party payors who insulated the consumer from the cost of health care. Now those chickens are coming home to roost.
I continue to believe that the solution to these problems is not by adding complexity to the health care finance system. Rather, take away insulation of routine health care costs and require consumers to pay those costs, allow insurers to provide true insurance for catastrophic illness or injury and use government as a reinsurer of true health insurance and an insurer of last resort for folks who cannot afford health care or private insurance. Allow such a system to develop over a generation or two and we might bring some semblance of consumer education and price stability through market forces back to the health care finance system.
But I’m not counting on it.
This Kathryn Schulz/The Wrong Stuff blog post provides an insightful interview with clinical researcher Barry Marshall, the 2005 Nobel Prize winner who, along with colleague Robin Warren, proved that up to 90 percent of peptic ulcers are caused by a bacterium and not by stress as medical “wisdom” had long held.
The entire interview is interesting, but the most fascinating part is where Dr. Marshall explains the difficulty of attempting to persuade the scientific establishment to abandon the conventional wisdom about ulcers even when he could provide clinical evidence that the conventional wisdom was wrong. As with much of the progress in medical research over the past 50 years, Marshall’s breakthrough in changing the conventional wisdom emanated from Houston:
When and how did you start to convince people?
Part of it had to do with David Graham, who was chief of medicine at [Baylor College of Medicine], in [Houston] Texas, and a thought leader in gastroenterology. Graham started off as a real skeptic but quickly turned around. To his credit, Graham never said that I was wrong. He said, "I don’t know, and I’m going to find out." And a couple of years later, he said, "I’ve checked it out and it looks pretty good, it looks like it could be true."
And then in 1993 or ’94, the NIH had a consensus conference, and Tachi Yamada summed it up. Yamada is currently the head of [the Global Health Program of] the Gates Foundation; he’s a very, very smart guy, and he said, "Looks like it’s proven: Bacteria cause ulcers, and everybody needs to start treating ulcers with antibiotics."
It was just like night and day after that. The whole thing just went ballistic.
So, why do we cling to conventional wisdom even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary? Is embracing the truth not as important as being comfortable with the beliefs – regardless of whether they are right — of what we want to be the truth or what those we live with believe is true?
In our ongoing series of innovative commercials, Cindy Crawford reminds us of how good those old Pepsi commercials were.
Finally, over on Cullen Avenue, the University of Houston has endured the most disheartening start of the college football season. But with that disappointment comes a fascinating challenge.
The disappointment is the college career-ending injury to QB Case Keenum, who had one of the best seasons in college football history last season and who was primed to improve on that performance this season.
After directing UH to two easy wins against overmatched opponents, Keenum blew out a knee attempting to make a tackle in the third game against UCLA and – “Poof” – the collegiate career of one of the best college QB’s of this era was ended.
To make matters worse, a hard-hitting UCLA defense subsequently ended the career of Keenum’s backup – Chase Turner – about a quarter later. That leaves a good UH team with no experienced QB going into the meat of their schedule, which is not remotely where the Cougars expected to be after four games this season.
In addition to being a fine young man and a team leader, what made Keenum so much fun to watch was his uncanny field presence. He was literally a coach on the field during the game.
UH opponents often dropped eight defenders into coverage in an attempt to slow down the Cougars’ high-flying passing attack, so Keenum simply checked-off at the line of scrimmage and unleashed Houston’s formidable rushing attack. Then, when opposition defenders crept closer to the line to stop the run, Keenum scorched them with quick-hitting passes to over a half-dozen different receivers.
With a quick release, excellent reading skills and a commanding field presence, Keenum may be that special combination of talent – similar to Drew Brees – who can overcome physical limitations (he is just a bit over 6 feet tall) to make it in the NFL. Everyone in Houston will certainly be pulling for him.
But aside from Keenum’s future, there is an interesting subplot arising from the Cougars’ troubled start.
Cougars head coach Kevin Sumlin – one of the top up-and-coming coaches in the college game – now faces the toughest challenge of his three year head coaching career.
That’s not to suggest Sumlin hasn’t faced difficult challenges before. In his first season as UH coach (2008), he somehow kept his team and coaching staff together when Hurricane Ike pummeled the Houston area and a clueless UH athletic administration inexplicably forced the Cougars coaching staff and players to play two road games while their families were dealing with the difficult aftermath of that devastation.
After enduring that, Sumlin gamely guided the Cougars to a successful season and their first bowl victory in almost 30 years, primarily on the back of Keenum and Sumlin’s innovative variation of the Spread offense. Sumlin’s scheme continued UH’s legacy of being an incubator for creative football offenses that began with Bill Yeoman’s Veer 50 years ago, then Jack Pardee and John Jenkins’ version of the Run n’ Shoot in the late 1980’s and early 90’s, and more recently, Art Briles’ idiosyncratic version of the Spread.
Houston’s successful campaign in Sumlin’s first season set the stage for last season’s even better UH team that was one of the best non-BCS teams in the nation. The Coogs beat three teams from BCS conferences, two of which (Texas Tech and Oklahoma State) ended up in post-season bowl games. Even though the season ended on down note with a close loss in the CUSA championship game and a dispiriting loss in a meaningless bowl game, Sumlin had reason to expect big things this season with Keenum and many other offensive stars returning.
Alas, with Keenum’s injury, those high expectations have been downsized considerably. Sumlin and the Cougars now must face the remainder of their schedule with two true freshman QB’s, Terrance Broadway of Baton Rouge and David Piland from the Southlake Carroll QB factory near Dallas.
Broadway got the nod in UH’s first post-Keenum game this past Saturday against Tulane and the results were about what you would expect from a freshman making his first collegiate start. Broadway generated about a third of Keenum’s usual production and had three turnovers in a 42-23 Cougar victory over a team that would probably rank about 110th out of the 120 major college teams.
To make matters worse, UH’s schedule gets much tougher quickly with SEC opponent Mississippi State coming to town next Saturday. In fact, the Cougars will probably be favored to win only two (Rice and Memphis) of their remaining eight games.
Thus, the Cougars have gone quickly from the expectation of a 10+ win season to one in which four or five wins is a distinct possibility if their freshman QB’s struggle. Moreover, Sumlin was already dealing with other issues before the injury to Keenum.
For example, Sumlin is in the initial season of working with a rearranged coaching staff. After losing talented offensive coordinator Dana Holgorsen to Oklahoma State after last season, Sumlin decided to replace his defensive coordinator, John Skladany, who specialized in coaching up undermanned defenses such as the one that Sumlin inherited at UH from the Art Briles coaching staff.
Although Sumlin’s replacements are all experienced coaches (Jason Phillips and Kliff Kinsbury on the offensive side, Brian Stewart on defense), Sumlin must now also replace an effective on-field coach in Keenum with an inexperienced freshman. And three years of recruiting defensive players and the hiring of Stewart has not yet produced any better defensive performance than what Skladany generated for the Cougars with inferior talent to what the Coogs have on defense now.
Accordingly, it’s reasonable to ask whether there is any hope for the Cougars this season?
Well, except for the UCLA debacle, the Coogs’ offensive line has played capably in the first four games. As a result, the Cougars RB tandem of Bryce Beall and Michael Hayes has been quite effective. Moreover, Houston’s receivers – who also man the Cougars’ formidable kickoff and punt return positions – remain one of the fastest and most dangerous groups in all of college football. And maybe, just maybe, the Cougars defense will finally start to realize some of the potential that Sumlin and his staff have recruited over the past three years.
So, the Cougars are not without weapons. But without an experienced triggerman, will Sumlin be able to figure out a way for the Cougars to harness those weapons effectively?
The answer to that question may well be the defining moment in Kevin Sumlin’s bright coaching future. Yet another reason why this football season is shaping up as one of the most interesting in years.