Daily Archives: January 5, 2007

The Houston connection to the Alabama-Saban deal

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airliner6.jpgThe college football world is abuzz this week with the lucrative deal that the University of Alabama rolled out to attract Miami Dolphins head coach Nick Saban to Tuscaloosa, which is yet another example of the market distortions that result from the NCAA’s excessive regulation of big-time college football. But that’s an issue for another day. Turns out that, as usual, there is a Houston business connection to the Saban hiring at Alabama.
You see, Alabama fans were highly interested in the University’s behind-the-scenes courtship of Saban, so Houston-based FlightAware.com — a web-based company that allows users to track flight activity — became one of the favorite sources of information for Alabama fans following the Saban saga:

Before Nick Saban announced Wednesday that he was leaving the Miami Dolphins to take over at Alabama, fans had flocked to FlightAware.com, a Web site that allows users to track flight activity. Was South Carolina Coach Steve Spurrier flying into Tuscaloosa Regional Airport? Was a plane owned by the University of Alabama departing for Norman, Okla., perhaps with university officials on their way to court Sooners Coach Bob Stoops?
ìWhen you set out a vision for how you can help people, you can envision a whole lot of things,î said Daniel Baker, the founder and chief executive of FlightAware.com. ìWeíd like to claim we had unlimited foresight into how our service would be used, but this certainly is an unusual use for FlightAware.î
Coaching searches at other prominent college programs have also sent fans scurrying to glean information from online flight data. Internet message boards revealed that fans from Michigan State, Cincinnati and North Carolina State turned to the Web site. [. . .]
Baker and his staff could not have anticipated those uses by fans. Neither could Wayne Cameron, manager of the Tuscaloosa airport. He said that after Mike Shula was fired, he fielded dozens of inquiries about activity at the airport.
ìEverybody in the country has been tracking the universityís plane and Paul Bryant Jr.ís plane,î Cameron said. Bryant, the son of the renowned Alabama football coach Bear Bryant, is a member of Alabamaís Board of Trustees and the boardís athletics committee.
ìThey would ask who Iíd seen get off planes, or if Iíd seen Spurrier, or if I knew where the university plane was going,î Cameron added. ìIt was kind of like a feeding frenzy there for a few days.î
John Howard, a 25-year-old Crimson Tide fan, created the blog hirebobstoops.blogspot.com after he determined that flight activity he traced on FlightAware.com indicated that Alabama may be interested in hiring Stoops from Oklahoma.
ìYou have a lot of activity between Norman and Tuscaloosa,î Howard said in an interview in early December. ìI have no clue if itís all connected, and Iím not saying it is.
ìI just think itís real interesting that all these planes and these cities are connecting.î
By this week, however, signals were pointing elsewhere. Flight data turned Alabama fansí attention to Saban when reports emerged that Mal Moore, the athletic director, had flown to Miami.
Doug Walker, the universityís associate athletic director for media relations, said Moore and others involved in the search knew that flights were being tracked.
ìWeíre aware of it, but itís not affecting the way weíre conducting our business,î Walker said. ìWeíre not trying to conduct a world war here, weíre just trying to hire a football coach.î
And Baker is only trying to operate a flight-tracking service. If fans visit his site, so be it.
ìIf itís all in good fun and everyoneís happy, itís always a good thing,î Baker said.
ìBut I wouldnít be surprised if people are losing sleep by hitting refresh on the page.î

Texas’ best golf course designer

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Ben Crenshaw.jpgThe PGA Tour kicks off its season this week with the Mercedes Championship at one of the most beautiful places in the world, Kapalua on the island of Maui, Hawaii. This Lorne Rubenstein/Golf Observer article examines the work on Kapulua’s Plantation Course of the golf design team of Austin’s Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, who have steadily become the best design team in the golf business over the past two decades:

Coore and Crenshaw are at the top of their games. Compared to some of the big names in course architecture, they’ve designed relatively few courses. That’s by choice. They keep their staff small, seven people just now, but, to appropriate a line often used about the late James Brown, the hardest-working man in show business until he died the end of December at 73, they might be the hardest-working men in the architecture business. Their projects are few, their commitment to each is huge, and personal.
Just about every one of the courses they’ve done since they met in the early 1980s is a must-play for architecture aficionados. . . . These are courses that almost uniformly are without affectation. They tend to sit low to the ground, offer multiple options for shots, include short, driveable par-fours, room to drive the ball, angles, and above all, they’re fun to play. Crenshaw’s two Masters wins came on an Augusta National course that hadn’t yet undergone the recent revisions that added length and rough and compromised the vision that Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie laid down on the property. It’s fair to say that the course provided his philosophical grounding.

By the way, Crenshaw is also an expert on golf history, which assisted him in becoming quite a good story-teller, too.
Meanwhile, the Chronicle’s excellent golf writer, Steve Campbell, previews the PGA Tour season here, and uses that article to pass along the following Tiger Woods crack about the always-entertaining John Daly:

What’s the career prognosis from here for fan favorite John Daly?
Bleak. Daly was 193rd on the money list last year, never cracking the top 25 in a stroke-play event. He has been down before, but now back problems are part of the equation. Given Daly’s distaste for work and fitness, don’t look for his talent to get him out of this mess. As Woods cracked last month at his offseason event, “Well, his back is bothering him because he’s got that front to deal with.”

Lou Dobbs’ misunderstanding of the trade deficit

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trade deficit.jpgCNN’s financial news anchor Lou Dobbs is arguably the highest-profile critic of the U.S. trade deficit, which demagogues often use as justification for increased regulation of free trade. Cafe Hayek’s Don Boudreaux has written extensively on how the U.S. trade deficit is really no big deal, and in this Christian Science Monitor op-ed, he takes on Dobbs over his complaints about the trade deficit. It’s not a fair fight:

Perhaps you miss this fact because you are misled by familiar trade jargon. In your book, “Exporting America,” in your columns, and on your television show you complain vigorously and often about America’s trade deficit. You call it “staggering,” and wonder how long America can continue to run such deficits.
Admittedly, the word “deficit” sounds ominous. In fact, though, America’s trade deficit is evidence of its economic vigor and promise. Here’s why:
When Americans buy foreign-made goods and services, foreigners earn dollars. The only way America would run no trade deficit is if foreigners spent all of these dollars buying goods and services from Americans. Instead, though, foreigners invest some of their dollars in America. They buy American corporate stock, they build their own factories and retail outlets in the US, they lend dollars to Uncle Sam, and they hold some dollars in reserve as cash.
Aren’t you proud that so many people the world over eagerly invest their hard-earned wealth in America?
As an American, I’m proud and optimistic. Foreigners invest in the US so readily because its economy is so strong. And even better, these investments strengthen the economy by creating more capital for American workers. These investments raise workers’ productivity and wages.
Remember: A trade deficit is not synonymous with debt.
I’m writing this letter on a new Sony computer that I bought with cash. I owe Sony nothing. If Sony holds the dollars it earned from this sale, or if it uses these dollars to buy stock in General Electric or land in Arizona – that is, as long as Sony invests its dollars in America in ways other than lending it to Americans – the US trade deficit rises without raising Americans’ indebtedness.
Americans go more deeply into debt to foreigners only when Americans borrow money from foreigners. Uncle Sam, of course, borrows a lot of money, from both Americans and from non-Americans. I share your concern about the reckless spending and borrowing practiced by politicians in Washington.
Foreigners, however, are not to blame for this recklessness. Indeed, I’m grateful that foreigners stand ready to help us pay the cost of our overblown government. Fortunately, Washington’s spending binges are not serious enough to cripple America’s entrepreneurial economy. If they were, foreigners would refuse to invest here.
If you’re still skeptical that America’s trade deficit is no cause for concern, perhaps you’ll be persuaded by Adam Smith, who wrote that “Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade.”
Smith correctly understood that with free trade, the economy becomes larger than any one nation – a fact that brings more human creativity, more savings, more capital, more specialization, more opportunity, more competition, and a higher standard of living to all those who can freely trade.