Teasip Bingo!

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bingo23.jpgFootball during autumn is an indelible part of Texas culture, and the University of Texas Longhorns tend to dominate the state’s college football scene, particularly coming off of a national championship season.
So, when the Texas Aggies rise up and achieve one of their relatively rare wins over the Horns, the Aggies really enjoy it. This year, the Aggies have developed the Teasip Bingo game below (pdf here) in which “each time a ‘friend’ throws out one of those ridiculous excuses for A&M’s victory over UT in Austin, mark it off your list. Get the most marks and you can say Teasip Bingo!”
We play hard down there in Texas.
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Epstein on the deferred adjudication racket

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handcuffs112006.jpgRichard A. Epstein of the University of Chicago and the Hoover Institution authors this WSJ ($) op-ed that takes up a common topic on this blog over the past couple of years (see also here) — the improper use of deferred prosecution agreements by prosecutors to blackmail companies into agreeing to absurd fines and “corrective” measures to avoid a deabilitating indictment. Professor Epstein notes one particularly egregious such arrangement:

In one such notable agreement, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Christopher J. Christie, put the screws to Bristol-Myers Squibb, which got into hot water because of a potential securities violation for inflating its quarterly earnings by a business practice known as channel stuffing. BMS told its distributors that they had to take into inventory large amounts of BMS products immediately, with the understanding that down the road they could return the excess for a refund. The alleged securities violation arises from the overstated earnings quarterly reports, without indication of any expected future write-offs.
The naÔøΩve reader might think that a DPA should prohibit the firm from engaging in future conduct of the sort that got it into hot water in the first place. But Mr. Christie had larger ambitions. The most striking evidence of the abuse of power is paragraph 20 of the agreement, which requires BMS to “endow a chair at Seton Hall University School of Law,” Mr. Christie’s alma mater, for teaching business ethics, a course that he himself could stand to take.

And Professor Epstein understands precisely what needs to be done to correct this prosecutorial misconduct:

[T]he Department of Justice should engage in unilateral disarmament by disavowing the odious Thompson memo, and rethinking why it ever needs to threaten the nuclear option of a corporate indictment. For its part, our new Congress should repeal by statute the doctrines of vicarious liability for criminal conduct in a corporate context — because these give the government unwarranted and arbitrary power over corporations.
At bottom, corporations are just individuals tied together by an elaborate network of contracts; and we don’t need yet another sorry reminder of how mindless government policies harm the innocent shareholders whom they are supposed to protect. The government has a vital role in criminal enforcement. So let it go after real, i.e., human, criminals the old-fashioned way, by careful investigation and skilled prosecution.

Epstein makes his point without even mentioning the Enron Task Force’s irresponsible destruction of wealth in connection with prosecuting Arthur Andersen out of business. As Geoffrey Manne asked awhile back — Where’s the outage?

NFL Network draws a big yawn

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yawn.jpgThis earlier post noted that the dispute between the fledgling NFL Network and various cable companies has kept the network off of most the nation’s homes that are wired for cable or satellite television.
Now, this NY Times article indicates that the inability to see the NFL Network’s first game on Thanksgiving Day evening was met with a huge collective yawn by viewers.
As noted in the earlier post, the Los Angeles area gets along just fine without its own NFL team. This WSJ ($) article notes that that there is a buyer’s market for advertising time to this year’s Super Bowl. There is no need for regulatory action in regard to the NFL Network’s petulant stance with the cable companies. Just let the markets give the NFL owners the message that there are other things to do on weekends and holidays than watch NFL games.

More Friedman anecdotes

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milton-friedman-11.jpgThe fine remembrances of the late Milton Friedman continue unabated.
In this post, Professor Friedman’s son, David Friedman, explains how Time Magazine came to misquote Professor Friedman’s comment that ìWe are all Keynesians now.î
Then, in this WSJ ($) letter to the editor, Professor Marina v.N. Whitman of the University of Michigan passes along a fun story about cocktail party chatter with Mr. Friedman:

Nearly 30 years ago, my husband and I were guests at a dinner party . . . Among the other guests were Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose. Milton was having a fine time baiting the wife of the dean of the Business School, a feminist whose conviction was unleavened by any sense of humor, by proclaiming the foolishness of affirmative action.
“If businesses are forced to hire and train young women, many of whom will leave for marriage and family,” he proclaimed, “they should at least be allowed to discriminate in favor of homely women, whose opportunities for marriage are below average.” As the dean’s wife reddened with fury, I leaned over and said softly, “Thank you, Milton. I’ve always wondered what accounted for my professional success. Now I know.” Milton, always the courtly gentleman where women were concerned, was speechless.

By the way, Professor Friedman’s class television show — Free to Choose — can be viewed here.

Chizik leaves Austin for Ames

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Chizik.jpgLet me see if I’ve got this straight.
Iowa State University has hired former University of Texas defensive coordinator, Gene Chizik, as its new head football coach to replace my old friend Dan McCarney, who resigned under pressure a couple of weeks ago despite being the most successful coach in Cyclone football history.
Chizik is essentially the same age as McCarney was when ISU hired him in 1995. Moreover, Chizik’s background is basically the same as McCarney’s was at the time that ISU hired him, except that McCarney had far superior experience to Chizik in the Midwestern recruiting areas that are key to the ISU program.
Chizikís deal is worth a guaranteed $6.75 million over six years ó with incentives that could increase that to as much as $10 million over those years ó while McCarney’s contract was worth about $4.4 million, but only $780,000 guaranteed, through 2010.
More notably, however, is that ISU is guaranteeing Chizik $1.5 million annual budget for compensating his assistant coaches, which is one of the highest of such budgets among Big 12 Conference members. On the other hand, McCarney constantly requested ISU throughout his 12-year tenure for a budget sufficient to pay for the best assistants available on the market, but he was continually rebuffed by ISU’s athletic administration. As a result, McCarney’s budget for paying his assistants was in the lower tier of such budgets among Big 12 Conference members.
My question is this ó why didn’t ISU simply increase McCarney’s assistant coach compensation budget, and then avoid the extra money and risk involved in hiring Chizik? Maybe this all works out, but it sure looks to me as if ISU has taken a huge risk where a much smaller one would have been more likely to continue the most successful era in ISU football history.
By the way, UT’s defense gave its two most uninspired defensive performances of Chizik’s two seasons in Austin during losses to Kansas State and the Texas Aggies in its final two games of this season. Did Chizik’s distraction with negotiating a deal with ISU have anything to do with that? Mark Wangrin of the San Antonio Express-News observes:

Chizik has been more careful in his choice of destinations. Now, though, with the shine off his reputation, he may not have much of a choice. He must decide whether to jump toward a more mediocre program or stay at least another year and try to rehabilitate his reputation as a defensive mind. He must prove this season hasn’t exposed his thinking as only working when he has exceptional talent at safety. He must show he can adjust.

Bainbridge Cubed!

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s_bainbridge_5_x_7.jpgA month or so ago, Clear Thinkers favorite Stephen Bainbridge took some time off from blogging while revamping his blog site.
Now, he’s back. And he’s tripled!:

Professor Bainbridge’s Business Associations Blog
Professor Bainbridge’s Journal (Politics, Religion, Culture, Photography, and Dogs)
Professor Bainbridge on Wine

The UH Memorial Service for Ross M. Lence

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In a fitting tribute on the final day of classes for the fall semester, the University of Houston will host a memorial service for its late and beloved Professor, Ross M. Lence, at 1:30 p.m., this Friday, December 1 in the AD Bruce Religion Center on the UH campus. Dr. Lence died this past July after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer.

UH Honors College Dean Ted Estess and several of Ross’ colleagues, former students and friends (including me) will give short remembrances of Ross during the service, which will also include music performed by Honors College students. A reception will follow the service at the Commons of the the Honors College, which is a short walk from the Religion Center. Later that day at 7 p.m., the University of Houston football team will play Southern Mississippi in the Conference USA Championship game at Robertson Stadium on the UH campus, a game that Dr. Lence would not have missed.

Ross Lence was one of the most gifted teachers of our time and a selfless mentor to hundreds of students and colleagues. If you were touched by Ross or simply want to pay tribute to a treasure of our community, then come by the service and reception on Friday afternoon. You will be inspired.

Houston’s Mr. Fix-It returns to Washington

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baker112606.jpgThis NY Sunday Times article reviews Former White House Chief of Staff, Secretary of State and Secretary of Treasury James Baker, III co-chairmanship of the Iraq Study Group, which is currently scheduled to deliver its report to the President by mid-December. Mr. Baker, who spends most of his time these days at the Baker Institute at Houston’s Rice University, is described in the article as wanting the chairmanship of the Iraq Group to be the template for his role as an elder statesman in the coming years:

Now, at 76, Mr. Baker is in high diplomat mode, on a mission, friends and supporters say, to aid his country and his president ó and, while he is at it, seal his legacy in the realm of statesmen, a sphere he cares about far more than politics.
ìI think heíd like to be remembered as a 21st-century Disraeli,î said Leon Panetta, a Democratic member of the group, referring to the 19th-century British statesman and prime minister. ìI think deep down he is someone who believes that his diplomatic career, in many ways, helped change the world.î

Read the entire article.

2006 Weekly local football review

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mcgee-06tu10.jpgTexas Aggies 12 Texas Longhorns 7

In the signature moment of Dennis Franchione’s mostly rocky tenure at A&M, the Aggies (9-3, 5-3) rode a magnificent defensive performance and an already legendary 16-play, almost 9 minute, 88-yard fourth quarter TD drive to hand the Longhorns (9-3, 6-2) a BCS bowl-bashing loss. The Aggies surprisingly battered the Horns nation-leading run defense with almost 250 yards rushing, while the Aggie defense gave up only about 160 yards after the Horns came up empty on their initial 75 yard drive to open the game. Horns QB Colt McCoy did not look sharp coming off his injury in the Horns’ previous loss to KSU, and Horns coach Mack Brown’s decision to go with McCoy in the game re-triggered discussion of Brown’s often dubious QB decisions during the pre-Vince Young era. Both the Ags and the Horns will be going to top-flight bowl games, but it won’t be determined which ones until after the Oklahoma-Nebraska Big 12 championship game next week.

Rice 31 SMU 27

Placing an exclamation point on the one of the best stories of the college football season, the Owls (7-5,6-2) pulled out another come-from-behind win to qualify for a post-season bowl game for the first time since the 1961 season. The win was particularly impressive given that the Owls played without star QB Chase Clement, who sat out the game (except for one pass) with an injury. The win also prompted the Chronicle to notice the Owls by finally giving them a headline and a couple of well-deserved front page stories. Heck, the Chronicle even ran a story on another remarkable story that it has ignored for most of the season, Houston RB/WR Anthony Alridge. Better late than never, I guess. The Owls now wait a week or so for their bowl assignment, which quite likely will be in Ft. Worth.

Jets 26 Texans 11

In a game that was unwatchable, the Texans (3-8) rode the incessant mediocrity of QB David Carr to yet another loss in the weak portion of their schedule. As usual, Carr — who appears to be a very nice young man with almost no leadership skills whatsoever — was 39 for 54 for 321 yards with a late TD, one interception, and four sacks, but that included a 19-of-24 performance for 162 yards in the final 8 minutes when the game was largely out of reach. That works out to around a 4.63 yards per pass (YPA), which is horrible and not close to a rate that is required to win consistently in the NFL. In this Weekend Journal article from over the weekend, Allen St. John explores YPA, a simple statistic that is a far better measure of a QB’s true effectiveness than the NFL’s arcane and misleading QB rating. Carr’s YPA is pedestrian this season, as it has been for his entire career. Even more revealing, though, is that Carr’s offensive teammates simply do not respond positively to Carr. It’s time for the Texans to make the change at QB and let Carr attempt to create a productive NFL career for himself elsewhere. It is not going to happen here. The Texans go to Oakland next week to play the equally hapless Raiders (2-9) before returning home the following week to play Vince Young Bowl II against the Titans (4-7).

Does anyone have a radio?

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nfl_large.gifUnless you are among the very small percentage of citizens who thinks that there are not enough National Football League games on television already, you may not have noticed that the NFL owners have started their own network to televise certain NFL games. And as if on cue, a dispute has arisen between two particularly distasteful business interests — the NFL owners and some of the country’s biggest television cable companies. The two sides are effectively playing a high-stakes game of chicken over whether the NFL Network is going to be available to a large part of the country.
The NFL reportedly left about a half-billion on the bargaining table in its last round of television-rights negotiations to reserve for the NFL Network eight late-season prime-time games featuring attractive teams with wide followings. The first took place on Thanksgiving night between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Denver Broncos, but it was available in less than half of the 90 million or so homes wired for cable or satellite.
Indeed, in an absolutely appropriate bit of fate, ailing Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt — who has lobbied his fellow NFL owners for 37 years to put a Thanksgiving Day game in Kansas City — had to listen to his Chiefs beat Denver on this past Thanksgiving Day night over the phone in his hospital bed. As with most NFL fans, Hunt was unable to view the game because the hospital he had been admitted to is not hooked into the NFL Network. So, his daughter held the phone near her television while he listened on the other end.
Cable operators such as Cablevision Systems Corp. and Time Warner Inc. are balking at carrying the network because the league wants to boost what it charges them each month to carry the network to a reported 70 cents per subscriber. The NFL currently charges those companies a the fee of about 20 cents per subsciber to carry its non-NFL Network games. Moreover, NFL owners are not only insisting on a high price for the NFL Network, but they are also pushing to have the network included as a part of each company’s standard cable package, which doesn’t charge subscribers premium fees to get the network. Cable companies are contending that customers who do not watch the NFL should not be required to foot the bill to indulge those who want those games.
The NFL owners are banking on cable company customers pitching such a fit that there companies will give in to the NFL owners’ demands. On the other hand, some publicity-seeking politicians are already using the spat as a reason to attempt to extend the government’s regulatory power over the “key” issue of whether a few NFL games will be televised. From my viewpoint, I hope the cable companies hold firm, the NFL owners put even more games on their little network and that market forces inform NFL owners what millions in the Los Angeles area have already discovered with regard to live NFL games — that life without the NFL is not all that bad.