1. If you could take away any sport which one would it be and why?

Without a doubt, I would pick football, the sport with no off-season.

Don't get my wrong.  I'm not one of those anti-Kiper types who think the NFL draft shouldn't overshadow "real" sporting events or that live television coverage of the Combine is a sign of the impending Apocalypse. 

The problem is I love football too much. 

I start every morning by checking out the sports pages on the Philadelphia Inquirer's website.  It's baseball season, so the previous night's box score should be my first stop, right?  Nope.  Straight to the Eagles section.  And I read every piece.  Even those stupid puff pieces about how much the players give back to the community. 

(In some cases, the same players who will claim that the media "never writes about any good things" the next time they get in trouble with the law.)

Then I check out ProFootballTalk.com, which has some of the best football gossip around.  But in the off-season, they don't have much to talk about, so they end up writing multiple 600-word posts about the search process for the new GM of the Houston Texans.  I'll read that too.

At lunch time, I'll read everything else.  Peter King and Dr. Z.  Mini-camp reports.  Interviews with fourth-string tailbacks on PhiladelphiaEagles.com. 

Heck, I'm so desperate I'll even see what the writers on FoxSports.com have to say. 

It's an addiction.  A sickness.

Please. Make. Football. Go. Away.  For a little while.  Come back in August, with training camps.  Until then, let me be. 

2. You could go into the past and meet with someone who would it be?

Jim Fregosi, October 22, 1993.  I'd buy the man a beer and tell him under NO circumstances should he consider putting Mitch Williams into the next day's game.

If that didn't work, I'd take a bus over to the Blue Jays' hotel and knee-cap Joe Carter. 

3. If you played in a sport, what position would you want to play at?

I covered this pretty extensively in a previous blog post, but I would definitely pick starting quarterback of a Super Bowl team.  Unfortunately, if I were a character in Madden, my speed, arm strength/accuracy and pain threshold figures would all be in the medium-to-low single digits.  So that was never going to happen.

Had I not grown up in the United States, I think winning a gold medal in a sport that was typically associated with my country and its people would be just an incredible moment.   

One of the many, many reasons I don't like soccer is that there's no clock.  Or rather, there is a clock, but it doesn't really matter that much.  If the referee thinks there should be a couple of minutes added to the end of the game, he goes ahead and tacks them on while viewers and participants wonder when the game will end. 

Can you imagine if we played other, better sports the same way?  In football we'd have the two-ish minute warning.  NBA fourth quarters would take e v e n  l o n g e r.  Hockey would still go unwatched.  It would be chaos. 

Of course, there are some sports that are even worse.  Figure skating, gymnastics and synchronized swimming all have judges to tell us who won, since they don't have actual scoreboards.  It's the difference between swimming and diving.  Swimming is a sport.  Diving is an art - and art is always subjective. 

The only thing that saves these "judgment events" from complete irrelevance is that the governing bodies try to ensure the evaluation process is as open and straightforward as possible. For example, after a major scandal involving a French judge in the 2002 Olympics, figure skating overhauled its judging system to base it on more objective criteria.

Growing up, I remember getting steamed over some of the unusually high scores the Warsaw Pact judges seemed to give each other's athletes, but the fact that all scores were made public meant that truly ridiculous machinations were out of the question.

Which brings us to the FOXSports.com Next Great Sportswriter competition.

I'm kind of new around here, but I've been around long enough to realize that the people running this contest make the Bush administration look like a bunch of gossipy, loose-lipped neighbors by comparison.  Let's just say communication and openness are not their strong points.

The latest brilliant move by the judges is not releasing their scores for the assignments, preferring instead to offer some vague high-medium-low groupings.  The problem is that this closed process lends itself to all kinds of mischief.

There's an old joke: "Of course this is a democracy, it's just that I have 51 percent of the votes."  Well that could be what's happening here.

Consider two bloggers, we'll call the first one "Blogger A" and the second one "MooreSports."  Let's say these two folks turn in their second NGS assignment and after all the reader judging is in, Blogger A has an average rating of 3.1 points while MooreSports has an average rating of 4.0 points.  Seems like a runaway, right?  After all, that's a pretty huge difference and the judges only have 50 percent of the vote. 

But what if the judges decide - for some reason - that they don't want MooreSports to move on to the next round?  Well then, assuring that result really isn't that hard. They just give Blogger A a rating of 4.0 and give MooreSports a rating of 3.0.  After you average the scores together, MooreSports will be at 3.5 and Blogger A will be at 3.55.  A close call, to be sure, but Blogger A moves on, while the people's choice, MooreSports, is crying in his beer. 

But that's a pretty minor case.  What if MooreSports was actually at 4.2 after the "fan" voting and Blogger A was at 2.9?  Well, it's a bit tougher, but the omniscient judges can get their preferred result just by giving MooreSports a rating of 2.5 and Blogger A the same 4.0 rating.  That gives us a blended score of 3.35 for Moore and 3.45 for Blogger A.  Another close race, but once again Blogger A moves on.

And because the judge's scores are secret, no one will ever be the wiser.

So let's be honest.  In reality, the system the judges put in place allows them to pick whomever they want as the winner - despite their claim that they "only" have half the votes.  It's just like that presidential election a few years back, where millions of people went out and voted, but the only result that mattered was whatever the nine geezers on the Supreme Court decided.

The only safeguard against this kind of blatant score-fixing is the community's outcry over such obvious manipulation.  The problem is that - without knowing what scores the judges gave - even this minimal protection is nonexistent. 

So here's the thing.  Judges, I'm sure you have your reasons for not releasing the scores, but you're wrong.  Do the right thing here.  For once.  Have an open process.

And all you other bloggers who aren't in the contest, speak up.  Let your voices be heard.  The remaining 12 contestants can't say very much without risking the wrath of the judges.  Their hands are tied.  It's up to the rest of us to raise the issue and help ensure Fox runs a fair contest. 

The folks still in this thing deserve nothing less.  Agree?

Chuck Klosterman is a fantastic writer.  Although his subject matter is the epitome of ephemera, he manages to tease out deep causal connections from the most banal of pop culture material.  I love the guy.  He makes me think.

But today I think he's wrong. 

Klosterman has an article over on that other, lesser sports website where he manages to tie together hallucinogenic mushrooms, the Apocalypse and the expanding use of the 3-point shot in NBA basketball.  Read it - it's fantastic stuff.

The problem is that his underlying theory doesn't add up.  Klosterman suggests that the main reason players shoot so many long-range shots today is because the league briefly changed the rules by bringing in the 3-point line before the 1994-1995 season.  The new, shorter line only lasted three years (not the two Chuck claims), but it changed the game forever.  I'll let him tell it:

"The 3-pointer became a viable shot for everyone, which was bad for the game... But this, in its own way, was the equivalent of prehistoric apes getting stoned and making art. This brave new world of indiscriminate 3-launching was way more interesting; the players loved it, and they were never going to return to the way things were. So they just kept shooting them, even when the line was moved back. And because this felt normal, it became normal. The game changed in order to reflect the way its participants perceived it."

It's a great theory, but once we give those mushrooms some time to wear off, we find it's not supported by the evidence.  Here's a graph depicting the percentage of 3-pointers taken each year in the NBA since the introduction of the 3-point line before the 1979-1980 season (sources: here and here):

Klosterman's right.  When the league moved the line closer, 3-point shot attempts went way up, as we would expect.  And when the league reverted to the old 3-point distance of 23 feet, 9 inches, attempts went down, but not all the way back to pre-rule-change levels.

The problem is this neat story masks a much larger trend.  After the 3-pointer was introduced, it took a few years for it to catch on, but since that time, 3-point attempts as a percentage of total field goal attempts has increased at a continuous, mostly regular rate. 

In fact, if you took out those three outliers and just looked at the rest of the graph, you would find that the trend line really didn't seem to change much at all.  Someone with a better statistical background could do some fancy math to better prove that point, but the relationship is strong enough to eyeball.

So what does this tell us?  First, that 3-point attempts have been going up since well before 1994.  Second, that Chuck Klosterman isn't always right.

And third, stay away from those magic mushrooms.