On Jenkins, NCAA

The gist: A group of college student athletes filed an antitrust suit against the NCAA to challenge the limits placed on athletics aid.

The players: Former Clemson football player Martin Jenkins and two current Wisconsin athletes: basketball player Nigel Hayes and football player Alec James (and they’re reppin’ football and men’s basketball players in the power conferences). The group scooped antitrust/labor lawyer Jeffrey Kessler — the same dude representing the NFLPA and NBPA in his spare time — to handle the case.

The quirk: Jenkins & Friends are not arguing that student-athletes should receive athletics aid up to the full cost of attendance. They claim they’re entitled to a paycheck and the athletics scholarship model is a price fixing restraint on athlete compensation.

TL;DR*: Jenkins seeks to end all financial restrictions on college athletes.

Losing Jenkins could mean that the NCAA could no longer enforce scholarship limits or the amount schools could pay for scholarships. It would be an open market, and the finances could change considerably.

Story Ideas:

How could the NCAA set up a ‘lockbox’ with funds for student-athlete to receive after they’ve graduated, or gotten drafted to the NFL?
- Would such a lock box also apply to other sports besides football, even if they don’t receive TV attention?
If players were payed, would there be a fraction allocated to tuition to help fund the athletics department?
Only a slim percentage of college athletes actually are ‘worth’ a full scholarship — would there a pay grade and ‘cap’ set on the amount student athletes could receive?

*too long; didn't read

Revised Story Memo

Given the time constraints of the semester, I think the best angle for my personal story would be to focus on the have/have-not issues in terms of NCAA compliance. This would likely manifest as a case study type of story, comparing the programs at Georgia and a smaller NCAA school in the area.

I would still like to explore the bigger picture questions I listed in my first memo, but it will be on a smaller scale and focused on just a few scales. I’m hoping to find some valuable statistics and information from the NCAA to extrapolate on trends I might find, but my reporting will be focused on compliance programs at UGA and another school, like Savannah State or wherever I can get access.

Key questions

Which schools have NCAA compliance programs? Is money a major factor?

Are these programs effective?

What do compliance directors do in their daily work?

How are athletes and athletics affected by these programs?

Does the NCAA view Power 5 schools differently than smaller schools in terms of compliance and enforcement?

Election Story with data and infographics

I used a story that I found on NYT’s Upshot vertical to examine how the story uses the principles that we read about. This story written by Josh Katz is examining who will win the election in November.

Tuft said these were the fundamental principles of analytical design:

Should compare something
Causality, mechanisms, structure, explanation
Multivariate
Integration of evidence
Documentation
Content matters most

By going down the list, lets look at this article… This article is comparing Hilary Clinton vs. Donald Trump and looking at different ways to come to an overall statement that they believe Clinton has an 83% chance of winning. They’re also comparing different charts and different ways to calculate this by looking at how states normally vote, how other sites post election predictions, different outcomes that could happen due to electoral votes, etc.

This story has structure and the infographics are explained well but the reasoning behind the statistics isn’t. That would change the whole purpose of this piece if everything in the political sphere was explained. This piece is multivariate (more than three variables), as mentioned before it looks at Clinton winning by state in different aspects. Evidence is present and as is documentation.

The most important is content. The graphics are visually appealing, but also easy to understand – this was an important made in last article we had to read for this assingment. I really like the interactive graphic at the end, showing how difficult it will be for Trump to win.

Lacrosse Growth in Georgia Surprised me

The amazing thing about the “thing that surprised me” was that I was literally living within it. For the longest time, lacrosse has been associated with as a northeast sport. Little by little though it’s made its way out of that region and into the southland — especially Georgia.

Lacrosse has been n Georgia for a while, mainly substantiated by club teams representing high schools. But in the 2005 it’s popularity grew so much that the Georgia high school Association was forced to make it a sanctioned sport. And since then it has only caught on like wildfire. In 2005 there were 45 total teams (boys’ and girls’) competing in the ghsa. Next year, there will be 100 boys’ and 104 girls’ varsity programs.

Lacrosse Magazine recently did a piece chronicling the journey of one former Georgia high school player Scott Ratliff who went to Walton high school and graduated in 2009. His dream was to come back from Loyola University and increase the popularity of the game where he was from. But to his surprise, when he got back the popularity had skyrocketed. Similar to Ratliff, Liam Banks was on a mission to spread the sport of lacrosse. The former Syracuse all-American saw an opportunity to pioneer lacrosse in Georgia, which is why he started his club, LB3, back in 2006.

And although everyone can see that lacrosse is trending upwards in Georgia, no one has really done research as to why. This is what I would like to do for my solo project. The numbers are there, but why is this happening? I think it is something interesting to look into and see how this could be affecting other sports as well.

Sandusky Reaction

“Who’s Joe Pa? and who’s Sandusky?”

Those were the main two questions floating in my head when the Penn State news broke. At the time, I didnt care for NCAA football. So while it was a big deal that a coach was molesting his players – children – for decades, I didn’t know who the hell he was (which made it a bigGER deal.) Ran a wiki on him, and I had questions.

– Why?

– How did he get away with this for so long?

– How do you convince someone you’re not a child molester ?

Child molesters come in all forms. As a player, you don’t think “I hope my coach doesn’t touch me at some point.” He broke a sacred code. And the fact that he looks like he could be the Pope made it more damning. Or weird.

The most surprising part was hearing Sandusky try to describe what he doing to the players as anything but sexual. Like he couldn’t find the right word for it, but ‘sexual’ didn’t fit the bill.

Stories like become personal to people, and their back stories to come out. Abuse against children are prevalent, but aren’t spoken on.

Vox – 7 Myths about Isis

I knew what ISIS was – is – before reading the cards. I just didn’t know myth from facts.

Like the idea that ISIS is crazy and irrational. In theory, ISIS isn’t irrational. The rationale behind all it’s activity : “to establish a caliphate governed by an extremist interpretation of Islamic law”. Violent methods? Sure. Psychopathic? Yes. But not irrational.

Or the myth (i didnt know was a myth) that ISIS is afraid of fighting all-female military units. The theory is that ISIS fighters believe that if a woman kills you, you don’t get to go to paradise. ISIS actually has its own female brigades, and the group uses them to push its misogynistic ideology.

The information was succinct, yet info-packed. Detailed, yet streamlined. Easy-to-read, but long enough to skim.

Not sure when Vox started this, but it has a good thing going.

Vox

I chose the “The Baltimore protests over Freddie Gray’s death, explained” stack because I didn’t much about who Freddie Gray was or all of the protests in Baltimore and I was interested in this stack of cards.

Not only did I find this stack of cards very interesting, I think Vox is a really cool website. It was super easy to use and had a lot of relevant and useful information. The stacks aren’t terribly long and are easy to read. I really like how you can click through out the cards and start on card #5 if you chose to. It’s also nice how you can rate a page with a thumbs up or down if you found the card helpful or not. Also throughout the cards there could be links to other articles related to the story, if you needed more information on the topic. That is also very cool.

Vox Cards: The 18 best TV shows airing right now

Being an avid TV watcher, the pop culture box set of The 18 best TV shows airing right now caught my eye to see what was upcoming and currently being considered as the best of the best on television. Also, I’m always interested in what people take into consideration when comparing television shows due to production costs and narratives within an hour. Production costs due to the fact TV traditionally has lower production cost than movies.

In order to rank, a TV show must have been airing for six weeks. However, the TV shows are listed alphabetically and not actually ranked in order of quality, which I was looking forward to seeing what they thought was the best show.

I found that some shows I had heard of such as Full Frontal with Samantha B and Stranger Things on Netflix. Other TV shows such as The A Word about autism had a compelling description and is something I am intrigued to look into.

Some TV shows are featured only on new streaming sites such as Netflix and Hulu which reflects the changing platform of television and a shift away from cable. As a millennial still paying for cable, I was shocked to see that six of the 18 listed were on online sites only.

Journalist I Admire: Bill Simmons

It’s hard for me to explain why I like Bill Simmons because originally I thought he was a pompous, arrogant journalist who thought banging his chest would get him noticed. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. I understand Simmons may be considered more of a blogger, but he goes about it in a journalistic way — reporting facts and using observation at live events instead of making assumptions.

My favorite article by Simmons was “Daring to ask the PED Question.” The article came out in 2013 addressing the often under-talked about use of performance enhancing drugs in sport. I got really into this article because he cited examples of possible PED usages that all my friends commonly talk about. And just like Simmons and his co-workers, the topic is rarely publicly brought up.

Simmons goes into examples of league’s that use different methods to make it harder for their athletes to get caught cheating. While this has changed, Simmons is able to pinpoint scenarios that make you question both athletes and the leagues they play for.

My second favorite Simmons article was the “Consequences of Caring.” While this one is more of a relaxed story, I still found it refreshing for the impact that sports journalists can have on people. He tells the story of being a sports fan through his daughter’s eyes and the passion and mostly heartbreak that goes along with it.

As the article gets into its latter stages, he reverts back to why he wanted to become a sports journalist in the first place — sports have the ability to move people in a way unlike anything else in our society. It reminded me of why I wanted to get into sports journalism too.

Interestingly enough, Simmons brash attitude is what eventually drew me back to his writing. He wasn’t afraid to make people uncomfortable or point out the elephant in the room. He’s made many people angry in his time as a sports journalist and that is something I feel like many journalists struggle with. They are afraid about being everyone’s friend instead of reporting what needs to be said and Simmons just isn’t like that.