Tag Archives: sports

The Push to Unionize College Football Players Just Suffered a Huge Blow

by LinwoodJernigan Posted on August 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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The National Labor Relations Board on Monday dismissed a bid from Northwestern University football players to form the first-ever college athletes’ union, overturning an earlier regional board ruling and ending a year-and-a-half-long battle that included several union-busting efforts by the school and the team’s coaches to persuade athletes to vote against unionization.

From the Chicago Tribune:

In a unanimous decision, the five-member board declined to “assert” jurisdiction over the case because doing so would not promote uniformity and labor stability in college football and could potentially upset the competitive balance between college teams, according to an NLRB official.

The board, the official said, analyzed the nature, composition and structure of college football and concluded that Northwestern football players would be attempting to bargain with a single employer over policies that apply league-wide.

The decision marks a significant blow for Northwestern athletes, who won a regional board decision in March 2014 that determined they were university employees and could therefore seek union representation. However, it is unclear what effect the latest ruling will have on potential future unionization attempts at other schools; the board’s decision applies strictly to Northwestern’s case, and it declined to decide whether the athletes were employees under federal law, leaving open the possibility for athletes to unionize elsewhere.

The College Athletes Players Association, a collection of former athletes spearheading the bid, could appeal the ruling in federal court, but, according to the Tribune, that appears unlikely. Former Northwestern star quarterback Kain Colter, who had pushed the athletes’ union efforts, expressed disappointment over Monday’s ruling on Twitter, noting that the jury was still out as to whether college athletes are still employees.

CAPA president Ramogi Kuma called Monday’s ruling a “loss in time” in a statement, in that it delayed “the leverage the players need to protect themselves.” But, he said, it didn’t stop other athletes from pursuing unionization. “The fight for college athletes’ rights,” he told the Tribune, “will continue.”

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The Push to Unionize College Football Players Just Suffered a Huge Blow

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It Takes How Much Electricity to Power an NFL Game?

by ChandaBlakeley Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the last few years, pro sports teams across the United States, often at the urging of environmentalist Allen Hershkowitz, have tried to go green.

Solar panels installed at Seattle’s CenturyLink Field in 2011 generate enough power for 95 homes. The Miami Heat have invested in efforts to reduce energy consumption at American Airlines Arena while cutting costs and combating the blistering heat. This year’s US Open Championship took place at Chambers Bay, a gravel mine turned public park that includes a world-class golf course planted with drought-resistant grass and irrigated with reused wastewater.

But what kind of impact can these efforts actually have? Here’s a look at pro sports’ environmental footprint and some recent attempts to shrink it:

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It Takes How Much Electricity to Power an NFL Game?

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America Didn’t Get to See John Oliver’s Latest Work of Comic Genius. Here It Is.

by RobertoNichols Posted on June 10, 2015

Mother Jones

Since last year’s World Cup in Brazil, comedian John Oliver has used his Last Week Tonight perch to sound off about the ongoing allegations of corruption and human rights abuses involving FIFA, soccer’s governing body. On Tuesday night, he brought that criticism to a new venue: Trinidadian television.

His target? Former FIFA vice president Jack Warner, who is among those accused of facilitating bribes—and who bought airtime in his native Trinidad and Tobago just last week to claim he would expose his co-conspirators in a paid advertisement called “The Gloves Are Off.” (Warner, you might remember, is the same guy who recently took an Onion article a bit too seriously.)

In a four-minute segment called “John Oliver: The Mittens of Disapproval Are On,” Oliver called on Warner to follow through on his warning and release all his proof of FIFA’s wrongdoing:

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America Didn’t Get to See John Oliver’s Latest Work of Comic Genius. Here It Is.

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Don’t Forget: Sepp Blatter’s Odds-On Replacement Is Also Pretty Terrible

by Nathanmlm Posted on June 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michel Platini, the legendary former French midfielder who now runs Europe’s soccer governing body, is already the oddsmaker’s favorite to become the next head of FIFA.

He also kind of sucks.

Blatter unexpectedly resigned on Tuesday, just days after winning a fifth term as FIFA president. His resignation was prompted by the arrest of FIFA officials last week as part of a Justice Department investigation into corruption and bribery at the organization. Though Blatter professed shock and said he had no intention of leaving FIFA, the widening scope of the investigations—along with huge global media coverage and schadenfreude—finally drove Blatter out of office.

“FIFA needs a profound overhaul,” he said at the announcement.

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Don’t Forget: Sepp Blatter’s Odds-On Replacement Is Also Pretty Terrible

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FIFA President Sepp Blatter Resigns Amid Corruption Scandal

by AgnesMathy Posted on June 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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FIFA President Sepp Blatter announced Tuesday that he will step down after 17 years at the head of soccer’s international governing body, in the wake of a corruption probe that has rattled the sport. In a press conference, Blatter called for a special election to find his replacement, just days after he was elected to a fifth term.

Here’s an excerpt of Blatter’s resignation letter:

I have been reflecting deeply about my presidency and about the forty years in which my life has been inextricably bound to FIFA and the great sport of football. I cherish FIFA more than anything and I want to do only what is best for FIFA and for football. I felt compelled to stand for re-election, as I believed that this was the best thing for the organization. That election is over but FIFA’s challenges are not. FIFA needs a profound overhaul. While I have a mandate from the membership of FIFA, I do not feel that I have a mandate from the entire world of football – the fans, the players, the clubs, the people who live, breathe and love football as much as we all do at FIFA. Therefore, I have decided to lay down my mandate at an extraordinary elective Congress. I will continue to exercise my functions as FIFA President until that election.

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FIFA President Sepp Blatter Resigns Amid Corruption Scandal

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The Kentucky Derby Is Fueled by Tamales, and Other Gems From a Great New Podcast

by YaniraDowie Posted on May 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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When you think about the Kentucky Derby, what flavors come to mind? A refreshing mint julep? Pillowy biscuits propping up salty glazed ham? The sweet tang of pickled shrimp? Or how about…tamales? As radio journalist Tina Antolini discovered, that’s the dish that best embodies “the backside” of the Derby, where horse walkers, grooms, stable cleaners, and trainers live and work. The majority hail from Central America, and due to the migratory nature of the job and a lack of kitchen access, they rely on hot plates and crockpots to re-create their traditional cuisine.

Tina Antolini Photo by Pableaux Johnson

Antolini dug into this Derby subculture for an episode of Gravy, a new biweekly podcast from the Southern Foodways Alliance that explores a changing American South through the lens of food. The podcast’s host and producer isn’t exactly a good ol’ girl; Antolini grew up in a coastal Maine town full of “lobstermen and artists.” Her mom, a cookbook editor, would spend “three hours making a complicated deal for dinner,” so she developed an early interest in all things culinary. Jobs at pier-side seafood joints and upscale restaurants fortified her passion—food would become a theme in her reporting for New England Public Radio and later for the podcast State of the (Re)Union, for which she is still a senior producer.

Having a Yankee host doesn’t seem to have detracted from Gravy‘s allure. The podcast, along with its quarterly print version, won Publication of the Year at the 2015 James Beard Foundation Awards—a.k.a. the “Oscars of the food world.” Dorothy Kalins, chair of the awards committee, commended Gravy for its “humor and style” and for “giving voice to the unsung characters who grow, cook, and serve our food.”

But don’t come looking for recipes—Antolini rarely gets into ingredient lists. Rather, she uses food as a launchpad for stories about race, culture, health, and business. “The food has to take us somewhere,” she told me. Episodes have covered water wars from the perspective of feuding oyster farms, the buried history of black culinarians, and military vets who turn to farming. And Gravy transcends geography. As illustrated by the Kentucky Derby episode, “the themes we are dealing with in these Southern-based stories,” Antolini says, “are really at the heart of understanding the United States.”

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The Kentucky Derby Is Fueled by Tamales, and Other Gems From a Great New Podcast

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The NFL Is About to Pay Taxes for the First Time in More Than 70 Years

by Charity1825 Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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The National Football League paid its commissioner, Roger Goodell, a staggering $44.1 million in 2012. The year before, he took home $29 million. The year before that, $11 million. That’s corner-office-at-Goldman-Sachs-level money—to run what for decades has been a tax-exempt organization.

Soon, however, the public won’t have a clue what Goodell or anyone else in the NFL league office earns. On Tuesday, Goodell announced that the NFL will give up its tax-exempt status, claiming that it has turned into a “distraction” that “has been mischaracterized repeatedly.” Here’s what that means: For the first time in more than 70 years, pro football’s league headquarters will pony up its share of federal taxes. But it also means the NFL won’t have to file the tax forms that require it to be transparent about salaries, revenue, spending, and more.

Congress granted the NFL tax-exempt status way back in 1942, long before it was the global juggernaut that it is today, with estimated revenues of $9.5 billion a year. (Goodell wants to grow that to $25 billion by 2027.) For years, budget hawks in Congress and good-government groups have called for stripping the league of its nonprofit status and forcing it to join Major League Baseball’s front office in operating like a normal taxable business. Former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who never saw a piece of pork he didn’t want to trim, waged a lonely war to revoke the NFL’s 501(c)(6) status with a piece of legislation called the Properly Reducing Overexemptions for Sports Act (PRO Sports Act). (The bill specifically targeted the NFL, even though the National Hockey League and Professional Golf Association are also nonprofits.) And in December 2013, I wrote about an anti-corruption group’s campaign to gin up public support for eliminating the NFL’s tax break.

Goodell’s announcement will no doubt be cheered as a victory by the league’s critics. So what I’m about to say will make me few friends, but here goes: The commish has a point. And the NFL giving up its tax-exempt status is bad news.

Goodell frames this decision not as a financial one but as a way to move past what he sees as the misguided controversy and anger over the league’s tax status. As he’s quick to point out, the league’s 32 teams pay taxes on all that revenue. The Pats, the Colts, my beloved Detroit Lions: None is tax-exempt. It’s the NFL front office—which reported $326,882,787 in 2013 revenue—that doesn’t pay taxes. Sure, $327 million is a lot of money, but it’s a pittance compared to $9.5 billion. How much do we lose in tax revenue from this? The Joint Committee on Taxation crunched the numbers and found that the 10-year cost for giving the NFL and NHL tax-exempt status is roughly $109 million—a relatively paltry sum.

Nonetheless, critics like Coburn and government watchdog groups argue that eliminating the NFL’s subsidy is the right thing to do. Any waste, they say, is bad waste. Okay, sure. But at what cost?

There’s a wealth of information in each of the NFL’s annual tax forms—detailed breakdowns of where the league’s money comes from, front-office compensation packages, which law firms the league retains, the amounts and recipients of league grants. Goodell doesn’t mention this in his announcement, but it’s hard to imagine the league not relishing the opportunity to pull some of that information out of the spotlight.

Perhaps the silver lining is this: By taking the tax-exempt issue off the table, activists can instead focus their work on more-meaningful reforms. Take, for example, the grand scam of taxpayer financing for stadiums. A 2012 Bloomberg analysis calculated that federal taxpayers lost $4 billion in the last 25 years’ worth of stadium construction deals. It’s one of the great boondoggles in sports today, an issue where the fleecing is very real.

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The NFL Is About to Pay Taxes for the First Time in More Than 70 Years

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Watch John Oliver Explain Why the NCAA Should Stop Exploiting Student Athletes and Pay Up

by TNPGenevasjzsx Posted on March 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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The National Collegiate Athletic Association reaps in nearly $1 billion a year in revenue, thanks to an annual onslaught of glitzy advertising campaigns and television deals. Coaches and top executives are paid in the millions, but student athletes return to their dorm rooms with nothing but an education for compensation, “the only currency more difficult to spent than Bitcoin,” John Oliver noted last night.

With the start of March Madness on Tuesday, “Last Week Tonight” takes on this very issue, slamming the “illegal sweatshop” nature of the NCAA’s non-pay scale. “There is nothing inherently wrong with a sporting tournament making huge amounts of money,” Oliver said. “But there is something slightly troubling about a billion-dollar sports enterprise where the athletes are not paid a penny, because they aren’t.”

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Watch John Oliver Explain Why the NCAA Should Stop Exploiting Student Athletes and Pay Up

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Saying Goodbye to Dean Smith, College Basketball’s Liberal Conscience

by JenniSmerd Posted on February 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Famed college basketball coach Dean Smith died Saturday night at the age of 83, after years of decline. His on-court prowess as the frontman at North Carolina from 1961 to 1997 is unforgettable: 879 wins, two national championships, 11 Final Four appearances, and a lasting legacy as a hoops innovator. But for many, it’s his off-court example—which manifested itself in something people in Chapel Hill still call the Carolina Way—that made him a legend.

Smith was an outspoken liberal Democrat who was anti-nukes, anti-death-penalty, and pro-gay-rights in a state that sent Jesse Helms to the Senate for five terms. (In fact, North Carolina Dems even tried to convince Smith to run against Helms.) His father, Alfred, integrated his high school basketball team in 1930s Kansas; years later, Smith would do the same at UNC, recruiting Charlie Scott in the mid-1960s to become the first African American player on scholarship there and one of the first in the entire South.

This story, from a 2014 piece by the Washington Post‘s John Feinstein, has been making the rounds today. It’s worth re-reading:

…In 1981, Smith very grudgingly agreed to cooperate with me on a profile for this newspaper. He kept insisting I should write about his players, but I said I had written about them. I wanted to write about him. He finally agreed.

One of the people I interviewed for the story was Rev. Robert Seymour, who had been Smith’s pastor at the Binkley Baptist Church since 1958, when he first arrived in Chapel Hill. Seymour told me a story about how upset Smith was to learn that Chapel Hill’s restaurants were still segregated. He and Seymour came up with an idea: Smith would walk into a restaurant with a black member of the church.

“You have to remember,” Reverend Seymour said. “Back then, he wasn’t Dean Smith. He was an assistant coach. Nothing more.”

Smith agreed and went to a restaurant where management knew him. He and his companion sat down and were served. That was the beginning of desegregation in Chapel Hill.

When I circled back to Smith and asked him to tell me more about that night, he shot me an angry look. “Who told you about that?” he asked.

“Reverend Seymour,” I said.

“I wish he hadn’t done that.”

“Why? You should be proud of doing something like that.”

He leaned forward in his chair and in a very quiet voice said something I’ve never forgotten: “You should never be proud of doing what’s right. You should just do what’s right.”

RIP, Dean.

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Saying Goodbye to Dean Smith, College Basketball’s Liberal Conscience

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Bill Nye: Screw Deflategate. You Should “Give a Fuck” About Climate Change Instead.

by AaronLampungmei Posted on January 29, 2015

Mother Jones

This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Bill Nye is weighing in on Deflategate again, but this time he has a few props and a message to share about something far more important.

New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick claimed atmospheric conditions and temperature changes could have caused footballs to lose air pressure during the team’s AFC Championship win over the Indianapolis Colts.

On Sunday, Nye said taking that much air out of a ball would require an inflation needle. But in a new video posted on Funny or Die, The Science Guy declared that “one test is worth 1,000 expert opinions,” and put some footballs into a fridge set to 51 degrees, or the temperature at the Jan. 18 game.

That’s where the video takes a very different turn.

“While we’re all obsessed with Deflategate, let’s keep in mind that there’s something about which you should give a fuck,” Nye said. “Yes, like Tom Brady, the world is getting hotter and hotter, and you know why? Because we humans are pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

Nye then began listing things that contribute to climate change—including long-winded Deflategate press conferences—and followed that up with a rallying cry.

“You should vote for congressmen and senators that appreciate the threat of climate change and the rate at which the world is getting warmer, so that we can preserve the earth for humankind for generations to come,” Nye said.

Oh, and about those balls…

Nye took one out of the fridge, gave it a squeeze, pronounced it “pretty much the same,” and said “the Patriots probably bent the rules a little bit.”

Nye, who lived in Seattle for a number of years, ended the video with a message that’s bound to rankle the New England faithful: “Go Seahawks!”

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Bill Nye: Screw Deflategate. You Should “Give a Fuck” About Climate Change Instead.

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