Two Takes on Muschamp Firing

I am always intrigued when big time programs make big time hires and then have to make a changes. In my mind selecting a coach is so much more than finding the top assistant on a successful staff. Years ago LSU struck out with the hire of Curley Hallman. Turned out his "old school ways" didn't play to well with SEC caliber athletes, and no Brett Favre didn't help either. He did, however, have Divison I head coaching experience. Even Urban "fraud" Meyer earned his srtipes at Utah before moving to the swamp. Choosing an assistant is a risky proposition. Below are two takes on the firing of Florida coach Will Muschamp. The first is by Kim Klement of USA Today Sports and the second by Matt Hinton, a staff writer at Grantland. Really good assistants don't necessarily make great head coaches.

The Sad Reality Behind Will Muschamp’s Departure
by Kim Klement

Prior to Sunday, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the last time the sports world had legitimately made me sad. Excited, enthralled, intrigued, frustrated, disturbed: those all come and go on a weekly, if not daily, basis. But saddened? I figured myself to be too old, too jaded, and too desensitized to feel such a tangible emotion.
I’ve never met Will Muschamp. The closest I ever came was when I delivered 100 Jimmy John’s subs to his brother Mike’s Lovett Lions football team on a random August afternoon in 2012. I’ll probably never meet Will Muschamp.
And yet I feel badly for him.
It’s interesting to read all of the eulogies on Muschamp. Each one parses his record at Florida – all that went wrong, and how things could’ve been different – while also propping up “Will Muschamp The Man.” This golden-hearted figure who did things the “right way” and whose only flaw was that his team didn’t win games. It’s as if his personal and professional lives are mutually exclusive. That only Coach Muschamp wore the weight of the program; Man Muschamp was absolved from any criticism.
I don’t know Will Muschamp – The Coach or The Man – other than from what I’ve viewed on television, and the one thing that always struck me was that, on the sidelines, he’s an id personified. There was never holding back any emotion – happy, mad, glad, sad: he felt it, you saw it. In the computer world it’s WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get.
Muschamp’s no bullshit approach was the same behind the podium. He understood the scrutiny and the pressures, and accepted them all. He wore every loss across his broad shoulders, bloodied knuckles, and deadened eyes. He was a man who understood his own mortality.
And that, I think, is what makes his firing so difficult. It wasn’t lack of effort. It wasn’t lack of passion. It wasn’t NCAA sanctions or legal issues or seedy incidents with coeds. There’s no reason to hate Will Muschamp for anything other than failing to score a few more points.
Anyone who has ever failed can feel empathy for Muschamp. Sadly, in life, how hard you try is only one part of the equation. It is a results-oreiented world in which we live.
Similarly, anyone who has ever been in management can feel empathetic towards Jeremy Foley. Sometimes you hire a guaranteed winner, only to later learn of their tragic flaw. Stripping away admiration, exorcising emotions and confronting the cold reality of an employee’s unmet goals is agonizing.
Monday’s press conference was not a firing, but rather a divorce. It was two parties who came together in love and youthful exuberance. Yet, despite their lingering affection, they could never steady the business end of their relationship. The only villain in this tale is unrealized expectations.
And there is where the sadness resides. If Muschamp’s tenure has taught us anything, it’s that no matter how hard you try, how much you invest, how nice you are, and how strongly all parties involved want something to succeed, you can still fail.
However, in the run up to his departure, Muschamp is leaving perhaps his most indelible lesson: “life is 10 percent of what happens to you and 90 percent how you respond.”

Coach Boom Finally Goes Bust at UF

By Matt Hinton

To no one’s surprise, Saturday’s 23-20 loss to South Carolina marked the official end of the Will Muschamp era at Florida, a four-year odyssey that will soon be remembered for nothing in particular. Blessed with enviable talent and resources even by the rapidly escalating standards of the SEC, Muschamp’s teams achieved a record of almost perfect mediocrity, going 27-20 overall and 17-15 in conference play. Say what you will about Muschamp as an entertainingly volatile presence on the sideline: On the field, win or lose, the product was never interesting.

If anything, the Gators’ commitment to mundanity was a kind of spectacle in itself. The prosaic persona was, of course, by design: Although he worked for several high-profile head coaches prior to landing the top job at Florida — most recently as Mack Brown’s defensive coordinator and official successor-in-waiting at Texas — Muschamp’s basic coaching instincts were forged under Nick Saban’s wing at LSU, and his M.O. in Gainesville might be best described as a full-scale Sabanization in spirit, if not in results. At best, Muschamp’s Gators took care of the ball on offense, clamped down on defense, and seemed generally content to win with as little scoring as possible. At worst, the pedestrian offense melted down in a flurry of turnovers not even the top-shelf defense could overcome. When the results fell somewhere in between, as they usually did, there was very little to do except compare Muschamp’s outfit with much better Florida teams from the recent past.

The Gators’ best by far under Muschamp came in 2012, when they validated their coach’s close-to-the-vest template with an 11-1 regular season and an at-large Sugar Bowl bid. Offensively, though, even that campaign was a disaster: Florida ranked 12th out of 14 teams in the SEC and 104th nationally in total offense, and failed to top 400 yards in any of its last seven games. But the same offense committed only six turnovers in its 11 wins, which was more than good enough opposite a top-10 defense stocked with future draft picks. Despite a collapse in the bowl game, the Gators finished the season ranked ninth in the final AP poll.

But that success was an aberration, not the norm. In 2011, Muschamp’s first season, Florida finished last in the SEC in turnover margin and won just seven games. In 2013, the Gators won just four games amid an injury epidemic that methodically struck down quarterback Jeff Driskel, his top backup, and five other offensive starters over the course of the season, as well as its best player on defense. Florida averaged fewer yards per game than any other SEC offense last season, failed to exceed 20 points in the course of a seven-game losing streak to close the year, and subsequently sacrificed offensive coordinator Brent Pease, buying Muschamp a temporary reprieve.

The Gators got healthy entering 2014 and replaced Pease with Kurt Roper, who arrived from Duke with an ostensibly up-tempo scheme that promised increased  balance. The result: Florida still ranks 12th in the SEC in total offense, having failed to top 100 yards passing in four of them. Driskel, a fourth-year junior, was benched in favor of a true freshman, Treon Harris, after the veteran delivered successive meltdowns against Alabama (9-of-28 passing for 93 yards, 2 INTs), Tennessee (11-of-23 for 59 yards, 3 INTs), LSU (14-of-25, 183 yards, 2 INTs), and Missouri (7-of-19, 50 yards, 2 INTs).

The loss to Mizzou, a rock-bottom, 42-13 humiliation fueled by four non-offensive touchdowns for the Tigers and six Florida turnovers in all, ended with the remnants of the home crowd in the Swamp chanting “Fire Muschamp.” Less than a month later, they got their wish.

So let it be written: As a head coach, Muschamp made for a great defensive coordinator. Florida ranked in the top 10 nationally in total defense in each of his first three seasons, and currently ranks 20th in 2014, with the decline due mainly to an uncharacteristic lapse against Alabama in September. He’s only 43, and he’ll land on his feet as an actual defensive coordinator in short order. We haven’t heard the last of Coach Boom.

Ironically, between the nadir against Missouri and the pink slip over the weekend, Florida turned in the most fully realized offensive performance of Muschamp’s tenure: a 38-20 smackdown of his alma mater, Georgia, in which the Gators ran 60 times for 418 yards with no pretense of “balance” whatsoever. (Harris, making his first career start, was 3-of-6 passing against UGA for 27 yards.) For a single, solitary afternoon, against a despised rival that boasted a 3-0 record in the series in Muschamp’s first three seasons, his ideal vision for the program was a reality. It couldn’t save his job once Florida eliminated itself from the SEC East race against South Carolina, but just the once, he got to coach exactly the game that played out in his head.

Meanwhile, despite reports to the contrary, it seems inevitable that Florida will move forward with a list that includes Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen and [insert candidate here]. Mullen is the dream candidate: As an offensive coordinator, he was an integral part of Florida’s SEC/BCS championship runs in 2006 and 2008 under Urban Meyer and has succeeded in turning a perennial SEC doormat in Starkville into an emerging powerhouse. Not that it’s necessarily going to be Mullen — Michigan will likely be entering the Mullen sweepstakes in a few weeks as well, and it remains to be seen if he’ll even be interested in leaving Mississippi State while quarterback Dak Prescott still has eligibility remaining in 2015, or parting when he’s (presumably) in line for a substantial raise at MSU.

Still, at this point, any preliminary list of candidates that includes names other than Mullen is spitballing for clicks. Florida’s best teams under Meyer in the past decade and Steve Spurrier in the ’90s were always defined by their prolific offenses, and the SEC in general has been dragged kicking and screaming into the up-tempo spread era. There’s very little patience left for slugging it out in battles of attrition, and this time around Florida isn’t in the market for another coach who won’t acknowledge that reality.

Ray Lewis is Not a Good TV Analyst

By Chad Finn

  | GLOBE STAFF   SEPTEMBER 22, 2014

REPRINT FROM BOSTON GLOBE

Say this for Ray Lewis: He’s relentless, and it’s served him remarkably well.

His nonstop motor as a Baltimore Ravens linebacker for 17 seasons helped him become one of the more prolific tacklers in league history. His tireless pandering to the cameras should have made him a parody. Instead, it made him a coveted personality by NFL rights holders when he retired following the 2012 season.

ESPN landed Lewis with a primo deal that included immediate prominence on “Sunday NFL Countdown” and its “Monday Night Football” on-site pre- and postgame programming. It was fair to wonder, then, whether he was deserving since his history suggested he didn’t always pursue truth and justice with his typical vigorousness.

He carried some curious baggage into his second career. Murder charges against Lewis stemming from a January 2000 fight in Atlanta in which two men were stabbed to death were dismissed when he testified against two men who were in his company that night. He ultimately pled guilty to a misdemeanor obstruction of justice charge.

What has become obvious — never more so than during his shameful performance on yesterday’s morning edition of “Sunday NFL Countdown” — is that no matter what you think of Lewis’s self-aggrandizement and cloudy past, he lacks every rudimentary quality expected of an analyst.

The list of what he has working for him ends at two: He’s a big-name ex-player, and he has an intense charisma. The former is hardly scarce — the NFL pregame show landscape is speckled with semi-charming former stars. And the latter gets old as soon as you realize how phony it is.

Lewis emphasizes and over-enunciates random words. He is addicted to the pregnant pause. He prosthelytizes to obfuscate. He requires these affectations in a desperate attempt to give his words the weight they lack. It works only on the already converted. He’s the same bad actor he ever was.

Bad dancer, too. That’s not a reference to his ridiculous look-at-me pregame routine during his playing days, which resembled an enraged squirrel having a conniption after his acorn supply had been stolen. It’s a reference to how Lewis responds when challenged, how he clumsily tap-dances around his conflicts of interest and contradictory statements.

The Ravens cut Ray Rice on Sept. 8 after the website TMZ released video of him punching out his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Janay Palmer. When Lewis was asked about the incident that night by Suzy Kolber on ESPN, he categorically dismissed any comparison to his own legal situation 14 years earlier, then went about praising Baltimore owner Steve Bisciotti, whom he had talked to earlier that day.

“The reason why Ray Rice will never play for the Ravens again is because when [Steve] saw this video himself, he put his daughter, he put anybody that’s connected to him that’s a female, he put them in that position,’’ Lewis said.

That loyalty to the man who signed his paycheck for so many years left Lewis in a difficult position Sunday. ESPN has delivered some extraordinary journalism in the aftermath of the Rice and Adrian Peterson situations, never more so than after commissioner Roger Goodell’s hapless press conference performance Friday.

Reporters Don Van Natta Jr. and Kevin Van Valkenburg dropped a bombshell on the program “Outside The Lines,” revealing that the Ravens security director knew the full, ugly details of the Rice incident hours after it occurred. Presented with the information four days before any video of the incident surfaced, Ravens coach John Harbaugh pleaded to release Rice but was overruled by Bisciotti and team president Dick Cass.

Lewis is no stranger to a story with holes. But when asked by Chris Berman what he made of Friday’s revelations, he essentially went on a winding four-minute, 361-word speech/filibuster that established only what we already knew: that’s he’s indebted to the Ravens.

I’m not about to waste time and space here parsing every ridiculous word.

I believe these three quotes give you the gist of just what Lewis brought to ESPN Sunday.

On Biscotti and general manager Ozzie Newsome: “If this incident, what we’re dealing with, if they could do this all over again, they would.”

Well, sure. That’s what everyone who gets caught in their own web of deceit says, right?

Lewis again: “Ray Rice put a lot of people in jeopardy because of his actions. A lot of people in jeopardy. Not just himself. He needs to understand that. Because none of this happens if what happened that night in that elevator don’t happen. If I ask anything in this whole thing, I ask, let there be light.”

You’d think that would be the most absurd quote, given that the one person put in the most jeopardy, the one who needs light, was the woman Ray Rice punched into darkness. And yet there’s this context-free doozy:

But at one point he said: “There’s some things you can cover up. And there’s some things you can’t.“

Yes, Ray Lewis actually said that on national television. I’d suggest ESPN should dump him, but he’s famous and entertaining and I know that’s not going to happen.

So I’ll just wait until he says or does something so offensive that ESPN has no choice. Lewis will have to respect that approach. After all, it’s how his Ravens do things, too.

Welcome to the Show, Mickey

This column by master sportswriter Red Smith originally ran in the New York Herald Tribune on April 18, 1951, and depicts Mickey Mantle’s auspicious first day in the big leagues. It is excerpted from the new book American Pastimes, an anthology of Smith’s work from the 1940s through the 1980s.

An hour and a half before the New Year dawned, Mickey Charles Mantle—he was christened Mickey, not Michael, after Mickey Cochrane, whose name is Gordon Stanley—was standing on the top of the Yankees’ dugout looking back into the stands where a kid in a bright windbreaker brandished a homemade sign fashioned from a big pasteboard carton. The sign bore a photograph of Phil Rizzuto, cut out of a program, and crude lettering read: “C’mon, Lil Phil. Let’s go.”

Sitting on the bench, Casey Stengel could see his newest outfielder only from the chest down. The manager grunted with surprise when he noticed that the sole of one baseball shoe had come loose and was flapping like a radio announcer’s jaw. He got up and talked to the kid and came back shaking his head.

“He don’t care much about the big leagues, does he?” Casey said. “He’s gonna play in them shoes.”

“Who is he?” a visitor asked.

“Why, he’s that kid of mine,” said Mr. Stengel, to whom proper names are so repugnant he signs his checks with an X.

“That’s Mantle?”

“Yeh. I asked him didn’t he have any better shoes and he said he had a new pair, but they’re a little too big.”

“He’s waiting for an important occasion to wear new ones,” the visitor said.

Casey is not unaware of the volume of prose that was perpetrated about this nineteen-year-old during his prodigious spring training tour, when he batted .402, hit nine home runs, and knocked in 31 runs.

“How about his first game in a big league park?” a kibitzer said. “Saturday in Brooklyn, when he got only one single. What was wrong?”

“My writers,” Mr. Stengel said, “had an off day.”

Mr. Stengel told about Mantle asking him how to play the right-field wall in Ebbets Field.

“It was the first time the kid ever saw concrete,” he said. “I explained how the ball hits the wall like this and bounces like this and how you take it as it comes off the wall. I told him, ‘I played that wall for six years, you know.’ He said, ‘The hell you did!’ ”

“He probably thinks,” Mr. Stengel said, “that I was born at the age of sixty and started managing right away.”

A couple of newspapermen were talking to Bill Dickey. About Mantle, naturally.

“Gosh, I envy him,” one of them said. “Nineteen years old, and starting out as a Yankee!”

“He’s green,” Bill said. “But he’s got to be great. All that power, a switch hitter, and he runs like a striped ape. If he drags a bunt past the pitcher, he’s on base. I think he’s the fastest man I ever saw with the Yankees. But he’s green in the outfield. He was a shortstop last year.”

“Casey said that out in Phoenix he misjudged a fly and the ball stuck on his head.”

“It hit him right here alongside the eye,” Bill said. “He’s green, and he’ll be scared today.”

“If anybody walks up to him now,” a newspaperman said, “and asks him if he’s nervous, Mantle should bust him in the eye. Golly, Bill, do you realize you were in the big league before he was born?”

“He was born in 1932,” Dickey said, “and that was the year I played my first World Series.”

“And I’d been covering baseball years and years,” the guy said. “What’s been happening to us?”

After that there was a half-hour of relentless oratory at the plate, and then Whitey Ford, the Yankees’ prize rookie of last year, walked out in his soldier suit to pitch the first ball, and then the season was open and it was New Year’s Day.

Mantle made the first play of the season, fielding the single by Dom DiMaggio which opened the game for the Red Sox. He broke his bat on the first pitch thrown to him and was barely thrown out by Bobby Doerr. He popped up on his second time at bat.

When he came up for the third time the Yankees were leading, 2 to 0, with none out and runners on first and third. Earlier Joe DiMaggio had started a double play with an implausible catch of a pop fly behind second, as if to tell Mantle, “This is how it’s done up here, son.” Now Joe, awaiting his turn at bat, called the kid aside and spoke to him.

Mantle nodded, stepped back into the box and singled a run home. Dickey, coaching at third, slapped his stern approvingly. When the kid raced home from second with his first big league run, the whole Yankee bench arose to clap hands and pat his torso. He was in the lodge.

“New Year’s Baby” by Red Smith copyright © 2013 by the Literary Estate of Water W. “Red” Smith, reprinted from American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith 

Ray Rice just latest in parade of NFL law-breakers

Reprint from New York Post September 12, 2014

By Phil Mushnick

“Shocking Video!!!”

This week the news and sports media, on behalf of those who need help with two-plus-two, revealed there are two kinds of domestic violence:

1. The not-too-bad, the kind described only in words and a cost-you-only-two-games video of a woman being dragged from an elevator, and …
2. The shocking, throw-the-bum-out kind, as seen in this week’s inside-the-elevator, what-happened-in-Atlantic City-didn’t-quite-stay-there Ray Rice video.

Some of us, however, know better than to be shocked by common sense. After all, how else did the soon-to-be Mrs. Rice, as seen months ago in the first surveillance video, become unconscious, left for Mr. Rice to drag her from the elevator, if she hadn’t been cold-cocked — admittedly — by the other person in the elevator?

Shocking? What did we expect it to look like, a pillow fight?

There’s nothing shocking here. Even this week’s “shocked” reactions fall into their logical place given that the absurd now comes prepackaged and pre-programmed, as per a shamelessly short-sighted game plan.

On ESPN, Ray “Cold Case” Lewis sensitively spoke of his former Ravens’ teammate and ex-Rutgers star, Rice. While condemning Rice’s conduct, he said he had tried to “mentor” Rice.

That’s nice, but how could Lewis have been “disappointed” to see, in this latest video, what Rice did to her? Or was he “shocked” by it, too? What did he previouslythink had happened in that elevator to render her unconscious? Plus, according to reports, Rice already had admitted it!

Last week, just outside their stadium, the Ravens unveiled a statue of Lewis, one readers have suggested should be named, “The Statue of No Limitations.” Lewis remains a suspect in a double-homicide, one in which he pled guilty to hindering the investigation to determine who murdered those men.

Did it matter to the Ravens that if Lewis had nothing to do with the early-morning — always early morning — outside a night club — always a night club — murders why he made a financial settlement with their families? No more than it did to ESPN or to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell — who was seen in a long, warm embrace of Lewis on national TV before his last game. How video sticks to the bones!

It didn’t matter to Goodell, the Ravens, ESPN or the NFL’s marketing strategists that Lewis played as an unrepentant concussionist, often penalized and fined for illegal, needlessly brutal attacks to the heads of opposing players, then stomping around their flattened bodies to perform self-smitten, ritualized blood dances.

And that blood dance is what this statue depicts! World gone nuts!

Yet, although the last guy any right-headed entity would choose to publicly represent it, Lewis immediately became ESPN’s gotta-have guy. ESPN didn’t even care if he were weak on discernible English; it snapped him up. Perhaps, as an unpaid star of the mirthfully brutal “He Got Jacked Up!,” ESPN owed him.

The NFL chose him to sell merchandise, Goodell hugged him, ESPN hired him, the Ravens placed a statue of him at their front door.

He pled guilty to obstructing the investigation of a double-homicide! He paid off the victims’ families! He claims he has no idea what happened to his bloodied white suit in which he fled the murder scene! Eyewitnesses recanted! Does that mean zilch to those who can think logically, responsibly?

What happens to that statue if … you slap bronze cuffs on it? But he’s not Ray Rice; there’s no video of those murders.

So Ray Lewis, now with ESPN and with six children from four women, appears on national TV to provide his sage opinion on matters of social responsibility and comportment by NFL players.

The complicity of sports’ shot-callers in shoving us backwards while destroying the integrity of their own products continues its gangrenous growth. Players and coaches who should be disqualified are jumped to the front of the “qualified” line.

Yet, the same networks, leagues, advertisers and even the makers of kids’ video games that hard-sell the worst acts are now bound to make shame-shame at Ray Rice.

Recently, SNY hired Plaxico Burress to talk football. He was twice hit with restraining orders following domestic disturbance police calls. He was 31 — four years older than Rice — when, early one morning, he illegally carried a loaded Glock into a night club. You know the rest. He did two years.

“Plax, as we take another look at this Ray Rice video, give us your thoughts.”

And the guy who was with Burress, left the scene with the gun then ducked cops for two days — Giants teammate Antonio Pierce — was hired by ESPN!

After doing hard time, Michael Vick was hired to star in commercials, including one for an insurance company. WFAN recently reached out to hire him!

What did FOX like about Randy Moss? A career so soaked in selfishness that not even his enormous talent as a receiver could prevent him from being good-riddance expendable; he changed teams six times. Or was FOX equally impressed by his arrests and convictions?

By the time Subway, Omaha Steaks and Chrysler chose Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh to star in its advertisements, Suh had a rep and record as a reckless driver and for any-old-time lawlessness. He was voted by his peers the “NFL’s Dirtiest Player” — with a suspension and more than $200,000 in fines to prove it.

But he chose a 2012 Thanksgiving Day game to kick Texans quarterback Matt Schaub in the groin. That he previously was known as a bad guy landed him the endorsements, but now there was a shocking video — seen and repeated all week on national TV. So what they paid him for next would cost him.

I don’t know when sports first determined to make bad guys good guys, but I do know that it’s time to stop what never should have started. And that includes choosing the most vulgar, women-trashing, gun-loving, rap-sheeted rappers — 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, Kid Rock — to serve as sports’ VIP cross-promoters.

Sunday on NBC, studio analyst and ex-NFL defensive back Rodney Harrision on Cowboys’ quarterback Tony Romo: “He’s so reckless with the ball. If I’m a teammate of his, I’m very disappointed.”

Really? Before Suh, Harrison was voted the “NFL’s Dirtiest Player.” He was regularly penalized and fined — more than $200,000 — for late or excessively dangerous hits. He was suspended for HGH use. One wonders if his recklessness was disappointing to his teammates.

Apparently, though, it all looked so good on Harrison’s résumé that NBC couldn’t let ESPN beat it to the hire. For shame, Ray Rice. “Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

Two-plus-two equals four. Shocking!

Uptown Swing: Can Tulane Football Win Over New Orleans?

Reprint from Grantland SEPTEMBER 5, 2014

by MATT HINTON

For big events, like Saints games, or the Sugar Bowl, the Superdome is a facility par excellence. It’s a cauldron in the best possible way. I had the privilege of being in the Dome when Az-Zahir Hakim dropped the ball in 2000, sealing the Saints’ first playoff victory, and when Steve Gleason blocked a punt in the team’s first game in the Dome after Hurricane Katrina, indelible moments of raw, ear-splitting pandemonium. I saw Virginia Tech’s redshirt freshman quarterback, Michael Vick, run figure eights around Florida State’s defense in the 2000 Sugar Bowl, his talent so expansive it seemed to fill all 162,434 square feet even in a losing effort. When the Superdome experience is good, there’s nowhere better.

When it’s not good … well, it’s a Tulane home game. I’ve taken in a handful of those over the years, too, and the juxtaposition in energy is so palpable it’s disorienting. Just as the Dome amplifies the combined electricity of 70,000 people, it also amplifies the overwhelming void of 60,000 empty seats. Sounds echo. The air conditioning, set for capacity, blasts away like an industrial Aeolus. Conversations can be overheard from sections away. Once, I picked out the sound of popcorn popping at the concession stand, from my seat. Cheering is less a collective compulsion than a self-conscious initiative. Everyone can hear you, and it feels slightly silly and inappropriate — not to yell, necessarily, but to be noticed caring enough to yell. The marching band, while enthusiastic enough, is bite-size for a college outfit, presumably so as not to alarm people when the brass section pierces the chatter.

There were more alleged Tulane fans milling in the background of Treme scenes than there were in the stands in that clip — although admittedly probably more people than actually watched Treme.

For nearly four decades, playing in the shell of one of the most iconic venues in sports has been Tulane’s unique burden, an omnipresent reminder of just how far from the big time Green Wave football actually resides. On occasion, the school has opted to host homecoming games in a local high school stadium built in 1937, ostensibly because it offers better tailgating. The truth is, the neighborhood setting just feels right.

This is around the point when I might start to worry about sounding condescending, if Tulane hadn’t just spent three years and $73 million based on that very premise. No, the school fully agrees: On Saturday, the Green Wave will host Georgia Tech in the first game at 30,000-seat Yulman Stadium, the “crown jewel” of the university’s effort to embed Tulane football more deeply in the culture of the city.

At first glance, everything about the move feels right for an aspiring program. The location feels right: The stadium is part of the university’s main Uptown campus, only a few miles from the Superdome but a world apart in terms of logistics and aesthetics. (Tulane’s campus is in the middle of a largely residential area, adjacent to Audubon Park; the Dome is downtown, adjacent to I-10.) The size feels right: A real estate agent might describe a capacity of 30,000 as “cozy,” but cozy is of a piece with the urban campus, and with the realities of the fan base; according to the NCAA, Tulane averaged just shy of 20,000 people for home games in 2013, and has only exceeded 30,000 since the turn of the century for games against in-state rivals (LSU, Southern) and high-profile opponents from adjacent states (Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Texas). The timing feels right: The Green Wave are coming off their first winning season in more than a decade, which came under then second-year coach Curtis Johnson, a New Orleans native, and they’re in their first season in the American Athletic Conference after 18 years in Conference USA.

And so far, at least, the response has felt right: The maiden voyage against Georgia Tech is sold out, according to athletic department spokesman Roger Dunaway, making this the first sellout for Tulane football since the program abandoned Tulane Stadium (capacity: 81,000) in the early ’70s. Single-game tickets for the opener went on sale on August 15 and sold out in 14 minutes. Students have claimed 4,800 tickets, per Dunaway, and if they all show Saturday it will mark the most students at a Green Wave game in more than 40 years. The stadium is the most positive development for the long-term potential of Tulane football in those students’ lifetimes, or in the lifetime of just about anyone who can remember having once been a student.

In another lifetime, Tulane had the makings of a Depression-era powerhouse. In 1922, the program was a founding member of the Southern Conference, the precursor to the SEC, and it won or shared six SoCon/SEC championships in the subsequent two decades. From 1930 to 1939, the Wave racked up a 73-22-6 record,10th-best in the nation in that span, and played in both the Rose and Sugar Bowls when the concept of a “bowl game” was still a recently concocted novelty for the sake of boosting tourism.

Since the early ’50s, however, there has been only depression. In 1951, new university president Rufus Harris effectively withdrewTulane from the burgeoning SEC arms race by reducing coaches’ salaries, cutting scholarships, and demoting physical education from a major to a minor, vowing not to allow athletics to overshadow academics; after 15 years of futility, the Green Wave formally left the conference in 1966 in favor of independence and, as far as football was concerned, irrelevance.

From 1952 to 2011, Tulane’s winning percentage (.353) ranked 95th out of 98 schools that competed at the highest level over that entire span, ahead of only Northwestern, New Mexico State, and Vanderbilt. On more than one occasion — most recently in 2005, following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina — the university has flirted with the possibility of dropping out of Division I sports altogether.

For most coaches, the job has been a kind of Bermuda Triangle. Before Johnson, 10 of the previous 11 head coaches left Tulane with a losing record during their tenure, a list that includes a young Mack Brown and a lot of other guys who may as well have disappeared in Lake Pontchartrain. Besides Brown, the only other man to escape the spiral of futility in the last six decades was Tommy Bowden, who arrived with innovative offensive coordinator Rich Rodriguez in 1997, oversaw what has to be the most improbable undefeated season in NCAA history in 1998, and hopped the first plane to Clemson ahead of the bowl game. Before last year, the Green Wave had made exactly one postseason appearance since Bowden’s departure, in 2002, one of two winning seasons since his breakthrough.

Johnson knew the record he was inheriting intimately, because he knows New Orleans. He grew up in the city and spent the last six years before landing the Tulane job on Sean Payton’s staff with the New Orleans Saints. He won a Super Bowl ring in the city. As wide receivers coach at Miami, he won a national championship ring with Ed Reed and Reggie Wayne, two star players he recruited from the city. At an earlier stop, Johnson was the guy who convinced fellow New Orleans native Marshall Faulk to leave home for the far-flung locale of San Diego State.

Johnson knows the neighborhoods where these guys live, and he knows their high school coaches, some of whom he grew up with. When he first took the job, Johnson pitched academics: “At Tulane, we’re not talking about a four-year plan,” he told me before his first season, in 2012. “We’re talking 40-year plans.” If anything, though, his short-term goals are ahead of schedule. At that point, the new stadium was still two years away and the prospect of a winning season even more distant; the departure for a more attractive conference was not yet conceivable. Would he even survive to field a team in the “crown jewel”?

He has, with a win-loss record and a tangible selling point his predecessors can only envy. Now comes the hard part: Convincing the locals the hometown team is finally worth the price of admission.

Notre Dame Was Never Special And Never Will Be

The following is a reprint from DEADSPIN by Drew Mcgary

Leave it to Notre Dame to take a cheating scandal (if the skylarking of college athletes can even be called a scandal anymore) and somehow use it to buff its own halo. No one does exceptionalism and shabby gentility quite like the Domers, who were always less exceptional and a little shabbier than they would have us believe. Here they are in The New York Times, crying, "Gosh, this is so unlike us!"

Notre Dame football stands apart in many ways. It is the only university that commands its own network television deal. It has the only major program that remains independent. And it demands unusually rigorous academic performance compared with other top programs. "I've said this, and we say it in recruiting: It's harder at Notre Dame," Coach Brian Kelly said Tuesday. "But if it was easy, then it wouldn't be special. That's why Notre Dame is special."

Listen, I have heard Joe Theismann speak on national television. You don't have to be a genius to get yourself an ND diploma. It's Purdue with nicer helmets.

The scandal could even be evidence that college sports have passed a point of no return. If it could happen at Notre Dame, the thinking goes, it could happen anywhere.

You know the only group of people thinking this? People at Notre Dame. That is not the thinking of any other sane person who knows that Notre Dame is from the same cesspool that gave us Miami and USC and Oklahoma and all the rest. This is the mindset of the lousy suburban mother who wrings her hands and blames Little Junior's friends for his weed bust. NOT MY LITTLE ANGEL!

Many still take in earnest the alma mater's declaration that "glory's mantle cloaks thee." "It's man bites dog when it happens here," said John Gaski, a business professor and alumnus who serves on the faculty board on athletics.

Horseshit. Pure horseshit. It's an amazing little con, isn't it? Here's Notre Dame investigating commonplace academic fraud and somehow using it to distance itself from the rest of the college football-industrial complex. When the Domers don't openly cheat, they're saints. When they get caught, they're saints for owning up to it. They win either way. It's quite the party trick, like overtone singing.

Glory's mantle? George Gipp was a drunk and a pool-hall gambler who would've put glory's mantle up against your $5 if you spotted him the six and the break. The school has had booster problems like everyone else, and it has had 'roidheads like everyone else. If Notre Dame "stands apart," as the Times puts it, it's as a chronic bungler of sexual-assault accusations against football players.

But this school can have a scandal every year and keep its hands clean simply by saying: "Oh, this is not what Notre Dame is about. We're one of the good ones!" This is the Jim Nantz of schools. The Times quotes a Captain Renaultish professor who "doubted the university's academics had been tarnished substantially."

"I'd be shocked beyond belief," he said. "It's just not something I think could or would happen here."

Well then, you're an idiot. Who is this guy? Where'd he go to college?

Paul McGinn, a professor of chemical engineering who heads the faculty senate and roomed with football players at Notre Dame almost four decades ago ...

Of course.

The Cleveland Indians, Louis Socalexis, and The Name

This is a reprint of a Joe Posanski article I read on Hardball Talk:

When I was a kid growing up in Cleveland, I believed — completely, wholeheartedly, without reservation or pause — that the Cleveland Indians were named to honor a Native American ballplayer named Louis Sockalexis, who played for Cleveland in the late 19th Century.

When I became an adult and a sportswriter, I believed — completely, wholeheartedly, without reservation or pause — that the Sockalexis story was entirely untrue, a bit of state-funded propaganda to conceal the obvious fact the Cleveland team was named the Indians only to capitalize on the many racist cliches that could be used to promote the team. It had nothing at all to do with Sockalexis.

If there is one thing I have learned in my life, it is this:

Things are always more complicated than you think.

* * *

Louis Francis Sockalexis was born on the Penobscot Indian Reservation in Maine in 1871. He was, by all accounts, an extraordinary young athlete. Sockalexis lived such an outsized life that, from the start, it was very difficult to separate myth from reality, legend from achievement, flaws from tragic flaws. We can start off with what we know. From a very young age, Sockalexis showed extraordinary speed, great strength, and more than anything else, an arm unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Stories survive of a young Sockalexis throwing a ball across the Penobscot River — a throw of 600 or so feet — into his father’s waiting arms.

This could be one of the many exaggerated legends of Sockalexis — there are countless exaggerations in his story — but this one also could be true. There are many confirmed reports of Sockalexis’ great arm, my favorite being a throw he made against Harvard when he was playing centerfield for Holy Cross. He reportedly went back to the wall, leaped, caught the ball, and in one motion threw the ball home on a fly to throw out a tagging runner. This one was so jaw-dropping that, according to Ed Rice’s informative Baseball’s First Indian, it was called the “Lighting Throw” and two Harvard professors rushed on the field after the game to measure it. They came up with a measurement of 414 feet, which was some sort of world record.

There can be no doubt that Sockalexis had an arm for the ages.

The rest of his game was dazzling as well, at least when he was young. He was brilliantly fast and hit with power. He was a football star and a track star too. His second cousin, Andrew Sockalexis, was a marathoner of some renown. One of the more famous sportswriters of the age, Harry Grayson, became convinced that writer Gilbert Patten (under the pseudonym Burt L. Standish) invented a superhero sports character named Frank Merriwell with Sockalexis in mind. Frank Merriwell went to Yale, played every sport brilliantly and solved mysteries on the side. He was one of the most famous fictional characters of his day (the writer Calvin Trillin went to Yale, in part, because of his father’s admiration of the Merriwell character). Grayson found proof that Patten, who also lived in Maine, had managed a game against Sockalexis. Whether this is conclusive evidence of Sockalexis being the model for Merriwell or not, Grayson believed it and wrote it often.

Grayson is, in fact, the person most responsible for bringing Sockalexis back into the American consciousness some thirty years after he died. Grayson wrote at length about Sockalexis in newspapers across the country and even included him in the 1944 book “They played the game: The story of baseball greats.” In “They played the game,” Grayson wrote that Sockalexis was faster than Cobb, more powerful than Ruth and was a better outfielder than Tris Speaker. He quoted John McGraw saying that Sockalexis could have been better than Cobb, Wagner or Ruth. He quoted Hughie Jennings saying “He should have been the greatest player of all time.”

There are other quotes about Sockalexis not included in the book, like this famous one from Hall of Fame general manager Ed Barrow: “Sockalexis was the greatest outfielder in history, the best hitter, the best thrower, the best fielder, and also the best drinker.”

Alas, it is the last of these that defined Louis Sockalexis in his time.

* * *

With Sockalexis, myth and reality swirled together into an often indistinguishable fog. We have the record. In 1897, Sockalexis joined the Cleveland Spiders. There is some debate if he was actually the first Native American to play in the big leagues, but there is no doubt that he was the first acknowledged Native American. That is to say that there may have been a player before him who had Native American blood, but Sockalexis was the first to be known as an Indian, the first to endure being called a “noble savage” and “redskin” and “red man” and “educated Indian” in the papers.

“The man who said that there are no good Indians but dead Indians or words to that effect,” wrote an author inThe Sporting Life in an allegedly POSITIVE story, “surely never saw Louis Sockalexis.”

Or there is this — a recounting of an exchange between Washington third baseman Charles Reilly and Cleveland’s future Hall of Famer Jesse Burkett. Understand it was Burkett — while coaching at Holy Cross — who helped convince Sockalexis to join the Cleveland team. Reilly, in an effort to bust Burkett’s chops, asked if Sockalexis was ever ordered to sacrifice bunt.

“Don’t ask me about that bead peddler,” Burkett said. “He’s a Jonah. I haven’t hit over .100 since he joined the team … Wait till I strike my gait and I will make him go back to the woods and look for a few scalps.”

Yes, well, the coverage was like that. There was hardly a mention of Sockalexis that did not include some reference to collecting scalps or wampum or General Custer or, in later coverage, firewater. War whoops followed him everywhere. The favorable stories usually involved some sort of bizarre Indian tale. One story that kept getting repeated was that his father wanted him to give up baseball and fulfill his duty as Chief of the Penobscot tribe. The tribe no longer had “Chiefs” as such, but that was but a small detail in this involved story. Supposedly, Sockalexis’ father went on a long journey via canoe, to find the President of the United States and ask him to forbid his son from playing baseball. Yeah.

The story even has an ending, with President Grover Cleveland telling Sockalexis Sr.: “I am sorry Chief, but I am unable to help you. I do not have the authority to order your son not to play baseball. Even if I did, it would be wrong of me to issue such an order.”

That’s the sort of coverage Louis Sockalexis got in 1897.

“Sockalexis was no better and no worse than his people,” wrote one syndicated writer. “He made a spectacle of himself. The white man laughed at him and then kicked him aside. With the quickness gone from his brain and the fleetness from his limbs, Sockalexis was only one more drunk Indian.”

That’s the sort of coverage Louis Sockalexis got in 1898.

Here is what the record shows: Sockalexis hit .338 in 66 games with Cleveland in 1897 and was something of a phenomenon. He did commit 16 errors, however, many late in the season, and he reportedly showed up for games drunk. He hit just .224 in 22 games his second season. His third season, he had deteriorated so much and had so much trouble staying sober that Cleveland released him — a fate made worse by the fact that the 1899 Cleveland Spiders were the worst team in baseball history. He wasn’t even good enough or reliable enough by then to play for a team that went 20-134.

* * *

In 1973 and again in 1990, Sports Illustrated wrote stories about Sockalexis. In both stories, SI wrote that Sockalexis had his first drink in an after-game celebration while playing with Cleveland. He had hit a grand slam and he made a spectacular game-saving catch. And then came his downfall.

Sports Illustrated in 1973: “Exulting Cleveland fans flooding the field, sweeping Sock up and carrying him off on their shoulders. They took him to the local taproom to celebrate, coaxing until he gave in and accepted his first drink. And that was the beginning of the end.”

Sports Illustrated in 1995: “Then in storybook fashion, Sockalexis made a game-saving catch. Afterward, teammates carried him off the field and demanded that he lead them in a drinking fest to celebrate the victory. Sockalexis had never taste alcohol before, but as the months went by he fell under its spell.”

The idea that Louis Sockalexis had his first drink while playing for the Cleveland team on its face is dubious. As it turns out, it’s also verifiably wrong. It was another one of those folk stories that had somehow clanked down through the years like that chip in the “Price is Right” game of Plinko. Not only had Sockalexis tasted alcohol before that night in Cleveland, he was arrested and thrown out of Notre Dame after a drunken episode in a bar before he even signed with Cleveland. Here is a somewhat rough account from sportswriter Dave Lewis in the Long Beach Independent in 1954:

“A gay evening, though, was destined to wind up in violence when the Indian and his friend virtually wrecked a saloon before police arrived … The gendarmes tried to quiet Sockalexis but only succeeded in annoying him. In fact he finally became so provoked that he flattened two of them before being overpowered and dragged to the bastille. He was promptly expelled from school and a few days later reported to Cleveland.”

It seems likely that Sockalexis was drinking while at Holy Cross too before Notre Dame, and perhaps before then. The story that he had his first drink after being the hero is poetry … people have long tried to attach poetry to the story of Louis Sockalexis. But if we are to look at his role in the naming of the Cleveland Indians, we must look at him soberly. He was an extraordinarily talented and haunted player. He dealt with impossible expectations and terrifying racism. He was a hero, in his own way.

But he also was an alcoholic when he joined the Cleveland baseball team and despite what appears to be many honest efforts to kick the habit he could not. His alcoholism was utterly destructive. And so Sockalexis was not viewed as a hero in his time but, mostly, as a waste of talent and, sadly, in the words of one writer, “a man of his people.”

The Sandusky Star (May 18, 1899): “In the Cleveland police court Wednesday, Sockalexis, the half-breed ballplayer, was fined $1 and costs. He was arrested Tuesday night in an intoxicated condition while creating a disturbance at the Lyceum theater. Judge Fielder lectured “Sox,” telling him that he should stop the use of liquor, that it was affecting him physically. The Indian hung his head and below his breath murmured that he would not drink any more.”

The Dubuque Herald (May 21, 1899): “The once famous Indian Sockalexis, who made such a furor in baseball all over the country, has had his last chance. He was arrested for intoxication, Tuesday night, and the judge failed to recognize his pleadings for release. It needed no pleading with Manager Cross, however, and the Indian was released at once.”

And then there was this surprisingly long and irrepressibly sad item in St. Louis Republic under the headline “Poor Old Socks” and the subhead “Fire Water was the Indian’s Downfall:”

“That unfortunate son of the forest, that white Penobscot who played a brief but star engagement with our club in 1897, the Indian Sockalexis is a wreck in every way,” said one of the St. Louis players today. “Socks” was a tremendous drawing card in 1897. Thousands of people came to see not the game but the Indian. In New York and other places where we used to dress at the grounds, a fearful crowd would press about the rooms to see the aborigine come forth.

His picture was in every paper in America, his arms, his legs, his batting eye, every part of him was photographed and reproduced. Poor old Lo, he never got a bit swelled, but he has lots of of friends who wanted to buy for him and he was good enough to let them do it. Result soon came and “Socks” had to quit the game. He was a true Indian.

When he got the red man’s burden on he always was ashamed. He would come into the hotel slinking behind doors and pillars like his great ancestors slunk behind trees. From his ambush he would peep to see if (manager Patsy) Tebeau was around.

“Socks” is now in Cleveland for want of a better place. He hangs out with a gang of waiters who work at restaurants and saloons. The gang is divided into three crews, one for each meal. Each gang steals grub and fetches it to “Socks.” He has a place to sleep and for all this he pays by rushing the growler. He was around in the coldest days of last winter without shoes or clothes. He bore the frigid weather with true barbaric stoicism.

Yet if this poor savage had only been born without the Indian’s love for strong water, he would today be drawing a salary of $2,400 for five months work of three hours each day. But the Indian was strong in him and he is past redemption. Socks was sure death on a straight high ball and was quite a thrower, but he had some grave shortcomings in the field. Withal, he was good to draw as big a salary as any man in the league had he behaved himself.

After he was released by Cleveland, several papers suggested he could still be a “freak sideshow” for some independent league teams. He did do that for a while. He worked other jobs as well.

Sockalexis died on December 24, 1913 of a heart attack. He was 42 years old.

* * *

Now to the part about how the Cleveland Indians were named — we go back to Sports Illustrated in 1995: “When a new owner took over in 1915, a local newspaper ran a team-naming contest. The fan who had come up with the name said it would be a lasting tribute to Sockalexis.”

This was the story as it had been told for relentlessly for about 50 years. The story seems to originate with a man named Franklin Lewis, who wrote a history called “The Cleveland Indians” in 1948. In it there is a nonspecific one-paragraph reference to Sockalexis and how the team was named:

“There is a story, still heard frequently, that the Indians were named after a real Indian known as Sockalexis, a wild slugger who joined the National League Spiders in 1897. Sock was strong and fast, and there was fire in every movement. But there was fire in his throat too, and it needed extinguishing. Between remedies for this and the discovery by enemy pitchers that left-handers who threw curves could baffle the redskin, Sock enjoyed a rapid demise as a big leaguer.”

This story — and you will note that even Lewis refers to it as a “story” — was cleaned up and recast and pushed relentlessly by writers and, especially, the team (especially as Native Americans and others began to challenge the rightness of using names like Indians or, even more, mascots like the red-faced Chief Wahoo). In 1967, for instance, the Sockalexis story made it into Chase Morsey Jr.’s popular syndicated “Sports fans! I bet you didn’t know” column.

“Ever wonder how different sports teams got their nicknames? Well, today let’s take the case of the Cleveland Indians … Back in the early days, Cleveland’s nickname was the ‘Spiders’ … Nobody liked that name too well, and when Nap Lajoie took over the team shortly after that, they were called the ‘Naps.’ … Then Lajoie was replaced by Jim McGuire and the team was called the ‘Molly McGuires’ … When McGuire left a new name had to be found … Someone remembered that some years back Cleveland had a player named Louis (Chief) Sockalexis … Sockalexis was a full-blooded Indian, and was, in fact, the first Indian ever to play big league baseball. … And so the name ‘Indians’ was selected to honor Chief Sockalexis and it’s been ‘Indians’ every since.”

OK. Well, let’s get through the inaccuracies. Cleveland baseball had a long and mostly losing battle with team nicknames before 1915. They had been the Infants, the Spiders, the Bronchos, the Blues and unofficially they had been the Exiles, the Castoffs, the Misfits, the Molly McGuires (for a brief time in 1910) and countless other names. I had no idea until I went back and looked how much people HATED the nickname Spiders, which I always thought was kind of cool. The nickname confusion got so bad that in 1903, a Cleveland newspaper actually DID have a contest to name the team and the choices were so uninspiring and uninteresting (Cyclops? Excelsiors? Gladiators? Thistles?) that they finally voted on just naming the team after Cleveland’s best player, Napoleon Lajoie. That’s how they became the Cleveland Naps.

Well in 1914, the Naps were horrendous .. and Lajoie was sold. A new name was needed. But, contrary to the story told so often, there was no team-naming contest this time. Papers did solicit ideas from fans, but team owner Charles Somers put together a group of Cleveland sportswriters from the four papers and told them to come up with a name. They are the ones who chose the Cleveland Indians and there is no indication that they chose a name entered by a fan. No, they chose Indians for their own reasons.

And what were those reasons?

This was the cartoon that ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealer the next day:

Um, yeah. Here you can see pretty clearly why the Indians were named. One: A year earlier, the Boston Braves had a miraculous season — coming from last place on July 4 to win the pennant — and so Native American names were in. Two: It was a glorious opportunity for HI-larious Native American jokes and race-specific cliches and insults that fit well in headlines. For instance, there was this one-liner in the Muskogee paper:

“If we were an Apache, we’d sue the Cleveland club for libel for naming that team Indians.”

You will notice there is no mention in this cartoon of Louis Sockalexis, nor was there in any of the national stories about the name change. In fact, in my national search of more than 300 national newspapers, I could not find a single mention of Louis Sockalexis in the entire year of 1915.

The story I grew up hearing — that the Cleveland Indians were named to honor Louis Sockalexis — is certainly untrue.

So that dispatches one myth. Unfortunately, it creates another.

* * *

As a sportswriter I came to believe — and have written on more than one occasion — that the name Cleveland Indians had nothing whatsoever to do with Louis Sockalexis. Many, many others have written that as well. While for years it was accepted the the team was named for Sockalexis we now seem to have come to the conclusion that Sockalexis had nothing to do with it.

But we have to get back to the original thesis here; Everything is more complicated than you think.

In 1897, when Louis Sockalexis joined the Cleveland team, they were in desperate need of something exciting. The team had been alternately terrible and almost good enough, the worst cycle in sports. The Spiders had never won a pennant, and they could not draw anybody to ballgames. It seems semi-pro baseball in Cleveland was way more popular that the Spiders.

So, when Sockalexis joined the team in 1897, there WAS legitimate excitement. The stories of his baseball exploits were known everywhere. The curiosity of seeing a Native American athlete play ball was overwhelming. And people began calling the team in 1897, yes, the Indians. In his honor.

“There is no feature of the signing of Sockalexis,” wrote The Sporting Life, “more gratifying than the fact that his presence on the team will result in relegating to obscurity the title of ‘Spiders’ by which the team has been handicapped for several seasons, to give place to the more significant name, ‘Indians.’ And repeatedly that season — and periodically over the next few years — the Cleveland team was referred to as “Indians” in headlines and stories.

The fact that the 1897 Cleveland team was often called “Indians” was not directly the reason the team was officially named Indians in 1915. But it was part of the decision-making process. “(The name) recalls the old fighting days of the early American League period,” wrote the Boston Daily Globe, “when the Cleveland players of those days were often referred to as the ‘Indians.’”

And so the story I came to believe — that the whole Sockalexis naming thing was a fraud — is also untrue. The indians name does have something to do with him.

* * *

It is perfectly clear in the year 2014 how different people feel about the Washington Redskins nickname or the Chief Wahoo logo. Trenches have been dug, camps have been formed, it’s unlikely that there are any undecided voters left. I’m on record. As a lifelong Cleveland Indians fan I still think Wahoo is racist and offensive and should be dumped in the nearest bin. As a lifelong football fan who loves the history of the game, I still find it almost impossible to believe we still call a team “Redskins.”

But many others disagree — and I mean they VIRULENTLY disagree — and my point here is not to start the fight again.

As a child, I believed the Cleveland Indians were named for a great player named Sockalexis. As a grown man, I believed the Cleveland Indians were not named for a underachieving player named Sockalexis. Now I believe that the truth is somewhere in the silence between the notes. And, whatever the original reason for the name, I just spent days learning about and admiring a fairly obscure Native American baseball player who triumphed and suffered and lived and died more than 100 years ago. I don’t believe the Indians were named to honor Louis Sockalexis, not exactly. But I do believe the Indians name could honor him. That choice is ours.