McCain Gets Younger

So, by now, I'm sure everyone has heard the news about John McCain selecting Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate in the general election. Ah, but what to make of it?



I'm sure Democrats will be upset that he made the announcement on the same day that Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in that functional, workmanlike speech in Denver. That, in and of itself, was interesting: gone were the uplifting, flowery words of hope ("Yes, We Can!"), replaced with actual step-by-step planks of what Obama hopes to do once he assumes the Presidency. I know the NY Times talking head didn't like it, but let's be honest. Obama has taken heat for his inexperience and lack of substance, and he really needed to show that he can be serious about running the country. I thought he did a great job, and for the first time, I heard some things from Obama that I really appreciated. I really liked it when he said we should be able to find middle ground on issues like gun control, gay rights, and abortion. Even if it is an agreement to disagree, I like the move to the middle. The far left and the far right have dominated their respective party politics for too long.

Of course, Obama's choice in his VP selection, Joe Biden*, showed that he was also serious about filling the holes in his own resume by picking a running mate with considerable foreign policy chops and a long legislative track record. I was surprised that Obama didn't pick Tim Kaine, Kathleen Sibelius, or some other Governor from a state that could really help him. By picking another Senator from a small population east coast state, I'm not entirely sure Obama helped himself as much as he could have. It will be interesting to see how the general election plays out.

* When I told my mom, who was vacationing in Colorado at the time and had no access to news, about the Joe Biden pick, she was devastated. A die-hard Democrat who has been on the Obama bandwagon for quite a while now, she had no excitement over the naming of Biden to the ticket.

But then McCain announced his VP choice in Sarah Palin. Which really means he is also serious about filling holes in his candidacy. McCain knows he can't really be challenged by Obama on foreign policy issues or on his experience in the Senate. (Yes, that's what Biden is for.) McCain has been taking heat on the age issue, though. If elected, McCain will be the oldest first-time President sworn in to office in the history of the U.S. He's been shown to be out of touch with the Internet and e-mail. His cultural references are older than the Baby Boomers. He really needed to connect with a younger generation, and Palin fits that bill.

By all accounts, Palin is considered a maverick on par with her new running mate. Appointed to a high position by the previous Republican Governor of Alaska, she exposed corruption within her own party. She brings a blue-collar mentality to the ticket, as her husband works on the oil pipelines in Alaska. She also is adamantly pro-life, which should help McCain with the right-wing evangelicals within the Republican party.

It's too early to say whether a McCain-Palin ticket will have the same effect as the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in 1984. Already, Geraldine and Hillary have praised the decision to name another woman to a major party Presidential ticket. It would be not a little disingenuous to say that McCain is not deliberately reaching out to the Hillary supporters, all 18 million of them, with his choice in running mate. Politics can be a dirty business, and you gotta do what you gotta do to win. Bill Clinton said words to that effect back in the '90s.

They say that genius usually comes with a tincture of madness. It will be interesting to see if McCain's move is a stroke of genius or the desperation of a madman.

Fun Times at the Drury Inn

I promise to keep this post shorter than the others. As we traveled down to Oklahoma on Wednesday and Thursday, we broke the trip into shorter sections by staying at the Drury Inn & Suites in far southwest St. Louis. We stay there so often, we ought to get a timeshare there! The staff is great, the hotel is fine, we often get a two-room suite to put the kids down for sleep before we turn in, and they have a hot breakfast and free internet access. It certainly is a nice place to stay when we're on the road.

Yesterday morning, we finished our breakfast and went back upstairs around 7:30 am or so. The kids were still in their PJs, and they started running around the open atrium on the second floor. Our two kids absolutely LOVE to play "got you," and it almost doesn't matter who is chasing them. They often chase each other, which is what they were doing yesterday.

Now, I can appreciate that many people just don't like to hear kids shrieking with delight. For lots of people, the sound might as well be fingernails on a chalkboard. Even for other parents, if it's not your own kids, it can be really annoying to hear other kids' giggles and laughter. So, for those people who called the front desk and complained, I apologize. I'm sorry my kids weren't being better controlled, and that they were having a good time. I know they were being a little loud every so often as they chased each other around the glass walls of the railing. If you were sleeping in on your road trip, I apologize for waking you up at 7:30 in the morning. If you were some of those college kids who were boozing it up the night before and were therefore hungover at that time of day, I'm sure the shrieks sounded like a-bombs going off outside your door, and I apologize for not giving you more time to sleep it off.

To me, there's simply no better sound in the world that hearing the giggles and laughter of little kids who don't know how to use their indoor voices yet. They were expressing pure, unadulterated joy. They haven't learned the lesson of always being in control of their emotions, or of only expressing themselves when society deems it appropriate. They're not quite three years old and 16 months old, so I hope they don't learn those lessons for some time.

Facebook Fantasy Football

When I learned a few weeks ago that Sports Illustrated had teamed with Citizen Sports to provide a free fantasy football application on Facebook, I thought "Eureka!" Finally, I thought, I can get my brother, who is incredibly busy running his own business yet still checks Facebook every day, into a league with me. He had always claimed to be too busy to keep up on fantasy football in years past. I also wanted to try my hand at being a league commissioner, setting the roster limits, tweaking the scoring rules, setting the playoff format, etc.

And yet, my league will not take off this fall. The problem seems to be inherent in a conflict between the social nature of Facebook and the social nature of fantasy football. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, either, so let me try to explain.

From the outside, fantasy football probably seems like a totally loser thing to do. Team "owners" draft real players into a faux team, manage a lineup every week, keep track of the stats throughout the year, and determine a league winner from a playoff that ends before the regular NFL season comes to a close. Only a certain subset of NFL fans and geeks could possibly get into playing a game like this (see figure below). And before the internet came along, it was a really small subset of uber geeks getting together in their basements and tracking stats on spreadsheets, a la rotisserie baseball. Especially if there is no money involved, what's the point, right? Fantasy football is basically legalized gambling outside of Vegas and Atlantic City. Each owner is betting that his players will perform better on a given week than the opponent's players. Money doesn't have to be involved; plenty of fantasy enthusiasts play only for bragging rights. However, bragging rights are only valuable for a group of friends (trying not to be sexist here; women have been known to play fantasy football, too) who know each other and can give each other grief on a regular basis.

But there is still a social aspect to the game. As Bender might say, "...demented and sad, but social." If you have a group of guys who have grown up together, you're much more likely to care about who beats whom on a given week. The live draft is more enjoyable, because you can talk smack on almost every pick. "LT at number one? Norv Turner is killing his value!" For me, I started playing with a free Yahoo! league back in 1998. I was active on the waiver wire, and picked up players like Randy Moss, Randall Cunningham, and Fred Taylor as they exploded during that season. I won my league with 13 straight victories, but because it was a free league against people I didn't know, the victory was hollow. Plus, in free leagues, you almost always have at least one or two "dead" teams, where the owner has lost interest and simply stops setting his lineup or trying to improve his team every week.

In 1999, I played in a free league, but this time it was a private one with guys I knew at Dyess AFB, TX. We had the requisite 10 guys who stayed active, made roster moves, and generally had a great time playing against each other for that year and the next. We even played head-to-head and salary cap leagues at the same time for a change of pace. It was fun, and even though I didn't win, it thoroughly increased the value of the competition to play against people I knew.

Before the 2001 NFL season, I had moved away from Dyess and lost touch with the guys running that fantasy league. At my new base, I couldn't find another group of guys to play against, so I quit playing for the next five years. It was funny, walking away from a near obsession like that. I didn't miss it much, and figured I'd never really play fantasy football competitively again. Without the camaraderie of playing against people I knew, it wasn't worth the time and effort to be an active owner. But then I moved for work during the 2005 season to an office with a well-established fantasy league. I was unable to join them in mid-season, but the next year, I was one of 10 team owners competing once again for both cash and bragging rights.

I tell you all of this because I am no longer eligible to play in that league. They wanted to keep the league all under the same roof, and I understand that. Every week, they had two traveling trophies: a Nerf football for high score of the week, and a doormat for low score of the week. Even though I'm still in the local area, it wouldn't make any sense to try to rotate those trophies around to my new office since I no longer work for the same company.

Which brings me back to setting up my own league on Facebook. There are over 24,000 fantasy football leagues currently set up on Facebook, so you would think this would be a natural fit, right? Again, fantasy football is social, and Facebook is social, so what could go wrong? At first, I set up my league to be a private league with 10 owners, and I sent out only 9 invites to people I thought would want to play. Silence. I sent out a few more invites, plus a reminder or two. More silence. I sent out a few more invites, and finally got one of my old high school friends to join my league, even though he said he didn't know anything about how to play (see graph above). I made it so that anyone in the league could invite their friends to play, since friends of friends would make for a better social dynamic than playing against strangers. Still only two owners in the league. I flipped my league over to a public league, eventually got one more person to join, and then I discovered something.

Searching through all the public leagues on Facebook this fall, I saw a damning statistic: in almost every single public league, there were 1 or 2 of X teams in the league. I would say in about 95% of the leagues, only one or two teams had joined, like my own league. People on Facebook must either want to play just with their friends, or they want to run their own league. It's different from the public leagues on Yahoo!, ESPN, or NFL.com. Even when those leagues are public and free, there are usually enough players to fill up an open league. Not so on Facebook.

So, I will be deleting the teams and closing down my league on Facebook. I do have one team over on NFL.com's free public leagues this fall, and I'm in a 12-team league with guys who are mostly from Chicago, I think. Our "live" draft was interesting, and that's what I'll describe in a later post. I'll turn it into a strategy guide for other players, and I'll explain why in that post, too. Needless to say, I'm not happy to be playing against a bunch of guys I don't know, but I will still do my best to own this league.

The bottom line is that fantasy football can be a lot of fun, if you can find a group of 9 or 11 other like-minded souls who are active team owners throughout the season. I sincerely hope the SI and Citizen Sports guys do well with their application. There is too much money to be made on fantasy sports to not give it a try. The social dynamic of Facebook just seems to be a little off when it comes to fantasy football.

The Hill's Speech

This blog will not be focused just on fantasy football; that would cover ground already well-covered by many other writers much more talented than I. Plus, I have many more passions and interests than pro and college football, and I fully intend to write about whatever strikes my fancy on a given day.

Which brings me to the DNC currently happening in Denver, CO. My first reaction when I learned that the Democrats were holding their convention this week was pure fatigue. My wife and I just finished watching days of Beijing Olympics coverage on NBC for whatever reason (normally, I couldn't be bothered by running, swimming, or gymnastics, but for some reason, this Summer Olympics found its way into our TV viewing schedule. And we were not alone; the ratings numbers even surprised NBC, I think!), and I really didn't want to jump into another week of every night extended TV coverage of a "big event." Couldn't they have given us a week off before starting the national conventions? Oh, and the Republicans REALLY should give us a week off before starting theirs in Minneapolis next week! Talk about viewer fatigue! I know the networks have dead time during the summer they need to fill with programming before starting their fall schedules, but this is rediculous.

Having said that, I was interested in watching the Michelle Obama video and speech. I read someone else say yesterday that they wanted to vote for Michelle's dad for President. Her back story certainly is interesting and compelling, and she delivered a very solid speech in support of her man. She would make a heck of a first lady, if they win the general election.

And then Hillary took the stage yesterday, and I couldn't help but think she's in full image recovery mode. Her speech enabled her to save face within the Democratic Party. I don't doubt that she was sincere in pushing for her supporters to back Obama, but it must have been tough to get so close to the nomination only to come away empty-handed (not even the VP!). She was also able to deliver the quippy one-liners that were sure to be clipped into sound bites by the MSM: "No way, no how... no McCain!" Plus the one about Bush and McCain being together in the Twin Cities. It almost looked like Bill had given her that one to use during her speech. He certainly seemed to be bursting with pride as she delivered; the Clintons will not go quietly into the night!

I do take exception to some of the comments she made, however. If nothing else, she is setting up Obama to fail if he does ascend to the Presidency. Many of the evils she mentioned (the Halliburtons and Exxons, the companies offshoring their jobs, etc.) are simply easy targets to scapegoat during the current economic downturn. These have been the Democratic drum beat for the past eight years. But NO President has control over rising energy prices, rising healthcare costs, the move to cheaper manufacturing locations, or even the move by many companies to incorporate offshore in Bermuda, where they can avoid paying U.S. taxes. None of these things would change under any new administration without significant new laws being passed, and oh by the way, that has to be done by Congress.

Let's review what the President does have control over: some elements of Fiscal Policy, although let's be honest, the annual President's budget generally is DOA when it arrives at Congress every fall. Some amount of Monetary Policy, only insofar as the Pres can appoint a new Chairman of the Fed Reserve, whose policies he then has to live with. Everything else revolves around running the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, which only very indirectly impacts the economy as a whole. Sure, FCC and FTC policies have an impact on specific elements of the telecommunications sector, but it's not like the President has a whole lot of levers he can pull to effect change. The next Pres won't even appoint a new Fed Reserve Chairman (confirmed by the Senate, natch) until 2010, when Ben Bernanke's term expires. So for the first half of the next President's term, either McCain or Obama will be stuck with the guy appointed by Bush.

So, for Hillary and Obama to make calls for ending the war in Iraq (seems like the Iraqi PM Maliki is giving them less fodder there, since he is calling for a definitive timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal--independent of actions proposed by the POTUS), universal healthcare (how do you propose to pay for that?!), more manufacturing jobs in the U.S. (I guess that could be a possibility, if Honda and Toyota build more plants for small, fuel efficient cars here; again, not something the Pres has any contol over), and whatever else makes up the Democratic Party platform this year seems to me to be nothing more than empty campaign promises. As always.

Not that the Republicans will do any better next week. Are you sure we can't get a week off in between the two conventions?! Talk about viewer fatigue. I just wonder who McCain will tap to be his running mate?

Everyone Else Can, Why Not Me?

I seem to remember the WSJ including a stat in one of their recent news items about the proliferation of individual blogs reaching 5 million per year. Or was that per day? Certainly, there are too many blogs to mention out there, so why add my own voice to that cacophonous chorus?

Good question, and BTW, the name on this blog isn't even original. My brother used it for his columns and editorial cartoons in college and in his early newspaper days. He has moved on to drawing educational comix (see the link at right), so I hope he doesn't sue me for copyright infringement.

More than anything else, if my 70-something father can have his own blog (again, link provided on the right), I figure the youngest of his three children can, too. I plan on reviewing my 2008 fantasy football season here, providing an online diary of what's going on in a league that no one cares about. If nothing else, it should be worth a chuckle to see what boneheaded player moves I make as the season progresses. Next up will be a review of my draft, which happened last Saturday. Cheers!