Personally, I think they’re all overpaid, rookies and veterans. If you ask most football players if they would still play football for $80,000 per year instead of $800,000 or $8 million, they’d say yes. It’s almost certainly a better proposition than whatever else they’d be able to do in the labor market. If Sam Bradford had the choice between playing in the NFL for $80k/yr or looking for an entry level job in Oklahoma City, what do you think he’d do? Every dollar above $80k is icing on the cake. Technically, it could be considered economic rent.

In economic terms, rent is a misnomer. It does not refer to money you pay a landlord for your apartment. It refers to the money above the minimum amount required to induce the employment of a resource. There is always rent claimed by both sides of all voluntary transactions, otherwise people wouldn’t agree to the transaction in the first place. . . .

It seems to me almost all of the economic rent in professional sports goes to the players. It’s hard to imagine any other multi-billion dollar company paying more than 60% of its revenue to a few hundred employees. It’s not that the salaries are high in absolute terms, it’s that the athletes should gladly play for far less.

I tend to agree… or do I? I am conflicted. It is a plausible account, but there is a lot of uncertainty there as well. One, the NFL and other sports leagues are already incredibly distorted markets, aided as they are by exceptions to anti-trade law and a general public (to say nothing of lawmakers and judges) who are fine giving the NFL monopoly power over professional football (which may be a perfectly rational and fine choice). Second, and more importantly, the lifespan of an NFL player is blisteringly short. I’ve heard a variety of estimates, but most often the estimate is put at around 2-3 years; never have I heard even five seasons.

This skews the incentives. Were Sam Bradford to have taken the $80,000 a year job, he would be giving up a lot now, but it’s much more likely that his other career would last far longer, and as a result his income would be much smoother. And of course the number one pick is not really the appropriate metric; it’s not evident that, from a financial perspective at least, making around $400,000 a year for three or even four years and then having no career prospects at all is better than starting in a $70,000/year job with growth potential and stability. (I know in this economy nothing is certain.)

Two points flow from this. The first is that it cannot be accurate to compare an NFL player’s salary with the salary of Joe Schmo, office manager. Their income stream is more like that of an artist, or even an entrepreneur — variable with their success, with great opportunity to be set for life, with also a high likelihood of bust. As I’ve pointed out, 78% of NFL players file for bankruptcy. As this NY Times article points out, it’s not easy to manage your money if it comes in irregular, large chunks, followed by long dry-spells.

And second, if you make your money at once you end up paying more in taxes than someone who earned the same total amount, in smoother fashion, over the same period. To use an example of an entrepreneur, imagine the there are only two tax rates: 40% if you make over $200,000 and 20% if you make over $45,000. If two neighbors both make $500,000 over five years, with neighbor 1 making $100,000 every year while neighbor 2 making $250,000 twice and zero in the other years, neighbor 1 will have paid $100,000 in taxes while neighbor 2 will have paid $200,000.

Is any of this determinative of whether or not football players make too much? No, but I think it all adds a significant layer of uncertainty to their ability to make a living that, particularly when coupled with the well documented health issues that come from playing football, including brain injuries, make high incomes somewhat more understandable, even if they could be characterized as raw economic rents.

And if you’re curious what they look like in print, here is a link to an article I did last season for the Florida guide — I think it came out somewhat better than Tebow’s actual season did. In any event, here are the choices. Without further delay, and in no particular order, are the articles:

- We Are Penn State, edited by Mike Hubbell of BlackShoeDiaries. My article is titled “Inside the Spread HD,” but as I explain, that term is really a misnomer or at least merely serves cosmetic purposes, as at best Penn State’s offense is formed from coach Galen Hall’s two-tight, power approach (similar to the Indianapolis Colts’s core offense), with Jay Paterno’s “be multiple” impulses laid on top. At worst, however, this balancing act can lead the Nittany Lions away from having any particular identity. I discuss this balancing act, along with some of the key concepts, along with how PSU may feature Evan Royster this year.

- Cornhusker Kickoff 2010, edited by Jon Johnston of cornnation.com. My two articles, “Shawn Watson and K.I.S.S.” and “Offensive Tendencies,” discuss the man entrusted with steering the other half of Nebraska’s team, the offense, self-proclaimed west coast guru and Mike White disciple, Shawn Watson. Obviously, with how dominant the defense was Nebraska was a few more yards and a few more points away from an even better season, and the Cornhuskers showed flashes worthy of hope in their bowl game against Arizona. I discuss Watson’s evolutions and the team’s options for 2009 in each.

- Yea Alabama, edited by Todd Jones and Joel Gamble of rollbamaroll.com. My article, “The McElwain Way,” sheds some insight into the sarcastic and funny Jim McElwain, whose one-back power offense has in many ways been both the perfect complement to Saban’s defense and the difference between Alabama’s 7-6 record in Saban’s first year (without McElwain) and 26-2 record since. I focus particularly on ‘Bama’s run game.

- Here Comes the Irish, edited by Pat Misch of The Blue-Gray Sky. My article, “A Passing Primer,” is a nuts and bolts introduction to Brian Kelly’s offense and what he might do at Notre Dame. I’ve touched on similar topics previously, but I’d never had the opportunity to pull it all together as I did there. I look at Kelly’s run game, passing concepts (including how he handles pattern read coverages), favorite quirks, and his general approach to offense and especially quarterbacks.

- Hail to the Victors, edited by Brian Cook of mgoblog.com. The buzz coming out of spring camp at Michigan is that the Wolverines are moving to a 3-3-5 (or 3-5-3) look on defense, harkening back to Rich Rodriguez’s preferred defense at West Virginia. In “Back in Time,” I take a look at the origins of the 3-3-5, some of its progenitors (like Charlie Strong, formerly of Florida and now of Louisville, and the quixotic Joe Lee Dunn), how it is similar to and differs from traditional 4-3 and 3-4 defenses, and the ways it has evolved for modern football.

- Packers Annual 2010, edited by Brian Carriveau of the Journal-Sentinel Online and Cheeseheadtv.com. Yes, an NFL article! In “Unleashing Aaron Rodgers,” I discuss Packers head coach Mike McCarthy and offensive coordinator Joe Philbin’s “pro-spread” attack, how they handle the blitz by deploying more receivers and giving Rodgers more options, and how Rodgers cycles through his progressions on such staple concepts as “smash” and “levels.”

So, feel free to run out and buy a bunch for your friends (note that I don’t get paid based on how many you buy, and I do really think these are quality products). I would say that they’d make great stocking stuffers, but even I must admit that they will be a bit out of date by then.

- Defending the bunch. If a defense plays a lot of man coverage, you can bet that the offense (if they have any sense, anyway) will quickly start using “bunch” or “compressed” formations. Anyone who has ever played backyard football can give the answer: it’s much easier to get open if your defender can get “screened” by congestion of some sort — either your teammate running a “legal screen” (versus, ahem, an illegal pick which no one ever does, right?) or even some cluster of receivers and defenders. Defenses, not to outdone by such offensive wizardry, have responses, summed up well in posts by RUNCODHIT and Blitzology.

Unsurprisingly, discipline is a key factor. Blitzology covers some mechanics, while RUNCODHIT adds some background:

[Y]ou can’t run press-man on both WRs[;] alignment won’t allow you to. Also, to run straight man against reduced splits is suicide. The offense will pick you off and open-up a WR to the inside or outside. Because of this threat, defenses have to stay in pure-zone or combo-man coverage.

And,

versus the run 3-way [coverage] places the [strong safety] in a position to force the ball inside. The corner is assigned play-pass responsibility, and the [free-safety] is a flat-foot read player . . . . Against the pass the . . . [strong safety] has the first man to the flat. If no one attacks it, he sinks under the first WR outside. The corner[back] has the first deep route outside — he is going to [back]pedal on the pass and read the WRs. The FS has the first man deep inside. His technique is essentially the same as the corners’. If a deep receiver does not show in or out, then they play a “zone it” technique and help their partner.

Bonus: Check out RUNCODHIT on “Pattern Reading vs. Zone Dropping” and Blitzology’s series on attacking BOB or Big on Big pass protection. (I’ve described the principles of this protection here.) Series parts one, two, three, and BOB vs. the 3-4 defense.

- Think you have what it takes to be an NFL guy? Check out this Slate article on the work ethic of NFL coaches. The answer — it’s about managing people, as much as it is about strategizing and ideas:

What exactly does a head coach do for 23 hours every day? . . . Imagine telling George Halas that he should have worked 20-hour days. He would have laughed you out of his office, then gone back to inventing the T-formation. No matter how many variations on the spread offense you come up with, it’s still the spread offense, not Fermat’s Last Theorem. . . . The guy with the biggest whistle has a fleet of coordinators and position coaches that handle all the grunt work, from conditioning to game-planning to skill-training. . . . Instead, the coach functions as a sort of CEO, coordinating large-scale strategic planning while ensuring all members of his organization perform competently. Viewed through that lens, this endemic insomnia shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, CEOs fetishize waking up early just as much as football coaches. . . .

- Screenery strategery. If you’re going to spread the ball out or throw the ball at all, day one is usually spent working on the basics of passing: timing, quarterback drops, rhythm, catching, and the basic routes. Day two, however, goes to screens, those little gadget plays that, particularly at the lower levels, make being a pass first team really worth it. These impressive little suckers manage a quite impressive trifecta: (1) they are easy to complete (and maybe should be thought of as runs rather than passes), which can build your quarterback’s confidence and allow you to get the ball to your playmakers in space; (2) they are often your best weapon against aggressive, blitzing defenses, which can otherwise overwhelm young players just learning how to throw the ball efficiently; and (3) unlike a lot of passing-related concepts, these make heavy use of misdirection, that great equalizer between teams of greater and lesser talent.

In that vein, two great primers out there are Mike Emendorfer’s UW-Platteville screen presentation and this recent post from Brophy’s blog.

- Football and math, oh my. Good post on the basics of “football math” — i.e. who and where do you attack. Here’s a test: Where would you attack in these two situations?

Bonus: See clinic notes here and here from DACOACHMO.

- No surprise there: Bill Walsh gets it. Brian from Advanced NFL Stats quotes one of Bill Walsh’s best nuggets on playcalling:

We know that if they don’t blitz one down, they’re going to blitz the next down. Automatically. When you get down in there, every other play. They’ll seldom blitz twice in a row, but they’ll blitz every other down. If we go a series where there haven’t been blitzes on the first two downs, here comes the safety blitz on third down.

Brian has more on the theory behind Walsh’s practical wisdom, and I discussed the subject of randomizing playcalls a few years back:

In Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Purloined Letter, a character recounts a story of a young man who excels at game called “odds and evens,” known somewhat more popularly now as “matching pennies.” The game is a two-strategy version of rock-paper-scissors: Each player secretly turns their coin to heads or tails and then both reveal their choices simultaneously. If the pennies match (both heads or both tails) then one player gets a dollar; if they do not then the other gets the dollar. As told in the story, the young man quickly sizes up his opponents, gains a psychological advantage, and amasses a fortune by outguessing his opponents.

I suppose all playcallers think themselves like the young man, but most are probably more similar to the suckers. But here’s the rub: The suckers could nullify the young man’s psychological advantage. How?

By choosing randomly. If the suckers put no thought into whether they chose heads or tails, they would do better than if they tried their best to out-think him. They would break even — a fantastic result against the world’s greatest matching pennies player, an unnatural genius who, according to the story, would go through lengthy Sherlock Holmsian deductions to determine if his opponent would choose heads or tails, and of course almost always guessed correctly.

This is a breath-taking result: you can nullify anyone’s advantage by picking randomly. But it is also scary — would I be better off picking my plays entirely randomly?

Yet the more interesting and less focused upon question is to think about what you would have done if you were one of these little guys to be left behind? Arguably nobody handled the realignment issue better — at least once factoring in the relative strength of their bargaining position — than Baylor, whose strong lobbying efforts (coupled with a lucrative TV deal for Texas) helped save the Big 12.

Thus, when I caught an item on the WSJ’s Deal Journal blog I was intrigued. The piece was “Football M&A: How One Small School Navigated Conference Realignment, about how Rice dealt with the demise of the old SWC and found itself in the WAC. It’s worth quoting most of it in full:

How do [small schools] play their M&A strategy when terms are being dictated by the bigger, richer, more winning schools?

Deal Journal tracked down Bobby May, the now-retired athletic director at Rice University who shepherded the Owls through the death of the Southwest Conference in the early to mid-90s to the Western Athletic Conference and, finally, to their current home in the Conference USA.

Then, as now, the culprit behind conference realignment was money, though in the SWC’s case it was how difficult and costly it was getting for its private schools (Baylor, Rice, SMU and TCU) to compete with schools subsidized by the state (Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Oklahoma), among other factors.

May is a Rice man through and through. He was a student from 1961-65, came back in 1967 as an assistant track coach, ascended through the athletic department and serving as AD from 1989 to 2006. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation:

Deal Journal: When you were caught up in this, was Rice, as one of the smaller schools in the SWC, trying to be proactive, or did you have to wait to see how the chips fall and then make your move?

May: We were as proactive as we could be. Initially, we were like Baylor University was recently, trying to make the case that it would be better to keep the conference together, in our case the Southwest Conference. But the larger schools have a tendency to have a little more clout, so you pretty much have to react and do the best with what you have. In our case, we found a home in the WAC that was very good for us. Looking back, it wasn’t something you want to see happen. We didn’t want to see the SWC go away, sad to see it go, with all that history, but you have to move forward.

DJ: As a small school among much larger conference forces, were you looking at possible new homes as the SWC was discussing the breakup, or did that only happen afterward?

May: No, that was all post break-up, after the announcement. There was no discussion with the WAC or anyone else prior to that. First, that break-up vote all happened over a weekend, with an announcement on Monday morning that we wouldn’t be going with the Big Four to what was to be called the Big 12, though it was, I think, two years before the SWC finally wound down.

DJ: So, what were your options then?

May: Our choices were pretty limited. We could be an independent, or we could join the WAC. Being an independent wasn’t really a serious option. Joining the WAC turned out to be good for us in many ways. It afforded our student-athletes a chance to play for championships, see different places in the U.S. Then later we found that going to Conference USA would be better for us, especially in terms of expenses of running an athletic program.

DJ: Rice is now a member of the Conference USA. That is three conferences in a fairly short period. Was there a sense that Rice was whipsawed by larger forces?

May: All the moves were positive for us. We were able to be more competitive in the WAC than in the SWC, where we had had a string of losing football seasons–that was not a great time for our program. Moving to the WAC wasn’t something we would have chosen initially, yet it enabled us to be more in the fray for conference championships. It is important to have that chance as athletes.

[A]s the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons show in their new book “The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves. If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else. Music doesn’t make you better at math, conjugating Latin doesn’t make you more logical, brain-training games don’t make you smarter. Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science.

That’s from Steven Pinker, who doesn’t agree that the internet is making us dumber. How does this apply to football, and specifically football coaching?

Madden NFL 11 will log every play you call online, building a book on your tendencies that will available, in-game, to any multiplayer opponent. While the reports can be earned or unlocked, they can also be bought for cash. . . .

EA Sports’ Madden team revealed the new scouting reports feature today in an extensive discussion with ESPN’s Jon Robinson. Tendencies like your opponent’s run-to-pass playcalling ratio, the side of the field it’s run to, the side of the field his defense targets, will be redeemable through a coin system – one coin per scouting report – and coins may be earned for free by playing online games – and completing them. Coins can also be purchased for cash (or Microsoft Points) for those short on funds but needing intel fast. Finally, every retail copy of Madden 11 comes with access to 50 free scouting reports.

Sounds like a lot, but there are 45 separate tendency reports you can get access to, although you can buy the entire batch for 25 coins pre-game. But yes, that means you have to pay to see the book on yourself – such as the fact you always go to a slot receiver over the middle on third-down (raises hand) and everyone knows it.

There was no mention of how many coins it would take to buy a single report, nor of how much reports would cost in real-world cash or Microsoft points.

Money issues aside, that is pretty interesting. From a behavior/decision standpoint, I’m not sure how useful it will be. I would like a general view of whether a guy is a run guy or a pass guy (and maybe an inside run versus outside, and short passes versus longer), but anyone intelligent will build up tendencies (run right) and then destroy opponents who overcompensate by breaking the tendencies. As always, it’s a game theory thing: I’m less interested in the scouting report than the reactions to the scouting reports.

- The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, by Dan Ariely. I just ordered this and it is, of course, self-recommending. The Kindle edition is a bit pricey for an e-version, but I guess we have Steve Jobs and the iPad to thank for that. In any event, Ariely’s new book looks like a worthwhile successor to his earlier great work, Predictably Irrational.

- The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis. Worth the read, as everything by Lewis is. My only complaint was, as someone who had read most of his magazine pieces in Portfolio, Vanity Fair, and so on, that I found a lot of overlap with those earlier pieces. But the overlap stopped around 80 pages in, and at that point the narrative took off — funny, insightful, and easy to read. It’s also quite timely: the trades described in the SEC’s complaint against Goldman Sachs take a very similar form to the trades described in Lewis’s book (though obviously Lewis doesn’t claim to know what Goldman was telling the people they did their trades with). Plus the Kindle edition is finally out.

- Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed. A wonderful narrative following the world’s most prominent central bankers from the end of World War I up until World War II — from the United States, Germany, France, and Great Britain. Ahamed gracefully mixes history with personality while he describes the blunders these men made, first while operating under the system of post-WWI reparations and second by hewing the gold standard despite all the evidence. (With John Maynard Keynes frequently appearing as gadly, before of course he had actually invented Keynesian economics.) It took me a bit to finish this as I put it down a few times and got busy but I highly recommend it.

- 12 Modern Philosophers, edited by Christopher Belshaw and Gary Kemp. This is book is not exactly self-recommending: it’s a collection of introductory but nonetheless academic essays about, well, twelve modern philosophers. From the introduction: “There are 12 philosophers represented here, all writing in English, and all of them active in the last third of the twentieth century…. They are all highly important figures in philosophy now: widely read, initiators of debate. Are they the top 12 philosophers of our time? Of course we make no such claim. But were someone to give a list of, say, the 20 key players, then, probably, the 12 here would be among them.” So far so good for me; the essays on Quine, Rawls, and Rorty were good, but I am admittedly deficient in the ways of analytic philosophers, and the non-linear nature of a book of essays by different people is both a good thing (can jump around), and a bad thing (some essays drag, and little incentive to move on to the next one after finishing the last).

- Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy. Brutal and haunting, McCarthy’s writing is something like if you made Nabokov use Ernest Hemingway’s sentence structures. I’m not sure I want to borrow McCarthy’s dark worldview (or his lack of commas), but it’s a great read. And, if it means anything, Harold Bloom considers it one of the best books of the 20th century and a work of “genius.”

Actually that was Terry Tate, but the message was basically the same: NFL, you’ve overreached — you can’t transform 32 disparate, separately owned teams into a single-entity simply by setting up a joint venture, National Football League Properties or NFLP. For background, I’ve written about the case several times (where I confidently predicted that the NFL would lose), and the NY Times explains the posture well:

The case was brought by American Needle, an apparel maker from Illinois that lost its contract with the league when the N.F.L. entered into an exclusive 10-year, $250 million deal with Reebok in late 2000 to produce hats, jerseys and other league-branded merchandise.

American Needle argued that the league’s deal with Reebok violated antitrust law because the N.F.L. was a collection of individually owned teams that compete with one another, not a single entity able to negotiate contracts on behalf of its teams. By striking a deal with Reebok, the league effectively conspired to stifle competition, the company argued.

American Needle appealed to the Supreme Court….

In rejecting the position of the NFL (and that of the various other leagues who filed briefs in support of the NFL), the Court explained (I’ve removed the citations):

“Every contract, combination in the form of a trust or otherwise, or, conspiracy, in restraint of trade” is made illegal by §1 of the Sherman Act. The question whether an arrangement is a contract, combination, or conspiracy is different from and antecedent to the question whether it unreasonably restrains trade. This case raises that antecedent question about the business of the 32 teams in the National Football League (NFL) and a corporate entity that they formed to manage their intellectual property…

[...]

“[S]ubstance, not form, should determine whether a[n] . . . entity is capable of conspiring under §1.” This inquiry is sometimes described as asking whether the alleged conspirators are a single entity. That is perhaps a misdescription, however, because the question is not whether the defendant is a legally single entity or has a single name; nor is the question whether the parties involved “seem” like one firm or multiple firms in any metaphysical sense… The relevant inquiry, therefore, is whether there is a “contract, combination . . . or conspiracy” amongst “separate economic actors pursuing separate economic interests,” such that the agreement “deprives the marketplace of independent centers of decision-making” and therefore of “diversity of entrepreneurial interests.”

In applying this framework, the Court rejected the NFL and lower courts’ rationale that the NFL is a “single-entity” because the NFL is seems like a single-entity in what it termed a “metaphysical sense,” simply because you need multiple teams and hence cooperation to play a football game:

Each of the teams is a substantial, independently owned, and independently managed business. “[T]heir general corporate actions are guided or determined” by “separate corporate consciousnesses,” and “[t]heir objectives are” not “common.”… Directly relevant to this case, the teams compete in the market for intellectual property. To a firm making hats, the Saints and the Colts are two potentially competing suppliers of valuable trademarks. When each NFL team licenses its intellectual property, it is not pursuing the “common interests of the whole” league but is instead pursuing interests of each “corporation itself”… Decisions by NFL teams to license their separately owned trademarks collectively and to only one vendor are decisions that “depriv[e] the marketplace of independent centers of decision-making,” and therefore of actual or potential competition.

[The NFL and its teams] argue that they constitute a single entity because without their cooperation, there would be no NFL football….But that does not mean that necessity of cooperation transforms concerted action into independent action; a nut and a bolt can only operate together but an agreement between nut and bolt manufacturers is still subject to §1 analysis. Nor does it mean that once a group of firms agree to produce a joint product, cooperation amongst those firms must be treated as independent conduct. The mere fact that the teams operate jointly in some sense does not mean that they are immune.

And in a footnote, the Court summed up its rejection of the “Zen riddle: Who wins when a football team plays itself?” argument the NFL advanced:

Although two teams are needed to play a football game, not all aspects of elaborate inter-league cooperation are necessary to produce a game. Moreover, even if league-wide agreements are necessary to produce football, it does not follow that concerted activity in marketing intellectual property is necessary to produce football.

The Court of Appeals carved out a zone of antitrust immunity for conduct arguably related to league operations by reasoning that coordinated team trademark sales are necessary to produce “NFL football,” a single NFL brand that competes against other forms of entertainment. But defining the product as “NFL football” puts the cart before the horse: Of course the NFL produces NFL football; but that does not mean that cooperation amongst NFL teams is immune from §1 scrutiny. Members of any cartel could insist that their cooperation is necessary to produce the “cartel product” and compete with other products.

(Emphasis mine.) This is correct: the NFL’s position was really too bizarre to stand (hence the unanimity in rejecting it). But it’s also true that this case is not that significant: it merely overturned the ruling of one outlier lower court, and otherwise it was a narrow opinion. It did not rule out that the NFL could ultimately win the case — indeed, it sent fairly clear signals that the NFL ought to win under the “rule of reason” analysis (which again speaks to why it was so weird that the NFL wanted pure immunity in the first place). All the Court determined was that the NFL could be liable.

So it was a narrow case, likely to soon be forgotten other than as a real but relatively minor humiliation of the NFL’s upper management and legal counsel for asking the Supreme Court to take the case in the first place (a rare thing for a party that wins in a lower court). Lyle Denniston of Scotusblog explains the ho-hum nature of the case:

As the Supreme Court moved in to referee a major dispute over pro sports leagues and their plea for antitrust immunity, the labor unions that represent the players in those leagues warned the Justices not to allow team owners to send a “Trojan horse” into that arena. Whether or not that was a valid fear, the Court with Monday’s decision clearly did not give team owners a free pass to carry on a wide range of joint activity to promote their sport with American consumers. But neither did the Court add much of anything new to antitrust law in general.

[...]How much further beyond trademark licensing this exemption might have gone, no one could be quite sure. The players’ unions, in their expressed fear of a “Trojan horse,” speculated that the leagues would next argue that “promoting” the game also meant a joint, anti-competitive deal on players’ salaries and selection. And the coaches, in turn, worried about an anti-competitive approach to hiring and paying the on-the-field managers. And so on.

The Supreme Court, ruling unanimously in American Needle v. NFL (08-661), put at least a temporary end to the speculation — at least to this extent: a claim that joint action is the only way to promote the “brand” of “NFL football” was simply but firmly rejected…

If promoting pro football with the consuming public is the economic goal, “there would be nothing to prevent each of the teams from making its own market decisions relating to purchases of apparel and headwear, to the sale of such items, and to the granting of licenses to use its trademarks,” Stevens said. “Competitors,” he added, quoting colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor when she was a judge on the Second Circuit Court, ” ‘cannot simply get around’ antitrust liability by acting ‘through a third-party intermediary or ‘joint venture.’ ”

The concluding part of the opinion represented an attempt to narrow the scope of the ruling, suggesting that the NFL and other pro leagues may well be entitled to quite broad antitrust immunity for such joint efforts as producing and scheduling games, taking steps to maintain “a competitive balance” between teams, and acting to ensure that the sport makes money. The actual legality of any joint practice, the Court made clear, was not being decided in this case — including the specific tactic of joint marketing of the right to use team trademarks. Each “collective decision” a league chooses to make, the opinion concluded, is to be judged by an antitrust “rule of reason” — a flexible standard that is keyed to particular facts and circumstances.

The trademark licensing case now returns to the Seventh Circuit, and very likely back to District Court, for a trial on whether that scheme is, in fact, an “unreasonable restraint of trade” in the way that it actually operates. The outcome was not foreordained by Monday’s ruling.

While the American Needle case always had the potential to produce a significant new statement from the Court on the Sherman Act’s application to commercial “joint ventures” in general, in the end it did not do so. Much of Justice Stevens’ opinion is simply a reiteration of past rulings on such collective activity, and, indeed, did not mark any deviation from the main precedent on the subject, the Court’s 1984 decision in Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp. Stevens was an entirely faithful follower of that decision — even though he had dissented when it was issued.

What makes the discussion interesting really gets to the nature of quarterback, as opposed to almost all other positions in sports. Namely, that usually when you see these debates you’ll see them regarding whether to take a guy with great character and questionable talent, or great talent and questionable character. The thing about Tebow is that he not only has great character he actually has a great deal of talent, at least in terms of his big frame, good feet, and overall arm strength. Instead what he needs to work on is technique. Now, all rookies must work on technique, but there’s no question that quarterback is different, and at the end of the day it is throwing technique and the skill to put the ball where it must be that separates quarterbacks from citizens.

In other words, this isn’t the flipside of whether you’re drafting Lawrence Phillips or Randy Moss, two great talents who came in with character issues, or whether Tebow is another Graham Harrell or Danny Wuerffel, two guys with great character and drive but questionable ability. Instead Tebow has some design flaws in what he’s doing — which, it must be noted, have never actually done much to deter him from winning games or setting passing records — and the question is whether, given a year or two on the bench as all but the most highly drafted rookies have, he can improve his technique and marry it with his other great qualities.

So I throw it out to the readers: Don’t just tell me whether you think this was a good pick, tell me whether it’s possible to draft a guy with both talent and great character who needs to be molded into a better quarterback. And also tell me whether, if it is possible, if Denver can be that place for Tebow.

- Do football writers know football? To be fair, reporters need to be experts on different things, and being a beat reporter and Xs and Os guru is not really realistic. That said, one reason I write is to try to provide a window into strategy and analysis, and that is important to the average fan is because so much sports commentary is about assigning credit and blame, if you don’t understand what the coaches were trying to do or you don’t understand what the players were being asked to do, it is hard to know who to praise and who to chide. (Also see this post for Orson Swindle.)

- Can Charlie Strong succeed at Louisville? I say yes, but (a) it will take a few or two to undo the Kragthorping, and (b) Strong will find that he and offensive coordinator Mike Sanford (former Utah OC with Meyer) won’t be able to just run the Florida O at Louisville; it’ll have to evolve.

- The secret of the Airraid: “distilled offense.” (H/t Brophy.) Lede: “Talk to a few players and you’ll get the impression that Louisiana Tech’s old playbook was the college football equivalent of War and Peace. The new playbook? It’s more like a pamphlet. That’s if you could even call it a playbook. The players don’t necessarily refer to what they’re running as plays, but ‘concepts.’ Change a few details and a single concept grows into an offensive attack that looks overwhelming to opposing defenses, but could be executed by the Bulldogs with their eyes closed.”

- The “greatest play in football”?

- Why yes, the NCAA is quite interested in Reggie Bush’s testimony.

- Tips on running the option.

- The West Virginia Mountaineers will honor the 29 coal miners killed in the Upper Big Branch explosion by wearing helmet decals with a white circle with 29 in the middle. (H/t WizOfOdds.)

- Defending the counter-trey. (You can find a quick primer on the counter trey here.)

- Why blitz?

- Did Ohio State steal Oregon’s signals in the Rose Bowl?

- Doc Sat on Brian Kelly.

- Sorkin vs. Krugman

- And as an addendum, I have a lengthy piece on the NFL for the NY Times online on Monday; I will link to it when it is up. I also have some other topics I’d like to finish this weekend and schedule this week. Once I do I will post a schedule of what to expect on the blog this week.