Jackson Library

What is at the 'root of evil' in sports and business? According to Andy Kern, doctoral student in Finance at the University of Missouri-Columbia, it is financial incentives. In the locker room athletes take tremendous risks in pursuit of big money. Are executives taking risks with stock options for the same reason? Mr Kern seems to think there is no other reason for the Enron debacle.

BusinessWeek October 8 issue targets The Power 100 -- their list of the most influential people in the business of sports. Leading the parade is NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, but other highlighted figures include agent Scott Boras, Big Ten conference executive James Delany, Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson, and Angels owner Arturo Moreno. The full list is a who's who of recognizable names including Tiger Woods, Dick Ebersol, George Steinbrenner, Lance Armstrong, Kobe Bryant and Yao Ming. Check out the list online, or read more in the issue in Jackson Library.

With the advent of global warming the ski season for avid skiers looks like it might start getting slushy and mushy. Sports Illustrated in their March 15 issue have an article entitled Muddy Slopes which provides future estimates of the number of days lost in a ski season at several major ski resorts. The numbers are staggering, by the year 2050 some will have lost up to 48 days to the warmer climate. They also estimate as a whole that since 1970 up to 4% of winter snow cover has decreased in North America.

I must blog today about the Super Bowl ads. In my opinion not a good crop this year. The game was actually better than the ads this year and Michigan State University advertising professor Bruce Vanden Bergh backs me up in this claim. Read the Wall Street Journal article (full-text available on Stanford network) which talks about the Super Bowl advertisiements. I did like the Anheuser-Busch commercial about the wanna be "Dalmatian" though.

One of our readers, Roger Dwarte, pointed out a way to link to this publicly available article.

What will the NFL come up with next? Who can beat an 80 lbs book with over 850 pages devoted solely to American Football. Super Bowl XL: The Opus is an ubersized book chronicling the last forty years of the NFL and will start selling November 21. The Kraken Media and Sports group is printing 20,000 copies of this limited edition which will sell for $4,000. The first 400 books printed and named the MVP edition will include the signatures of all living MVP players and go for around $25,000. The NFL is undoubtedly one of the most successful sports franchises around and what a way to make a splash into the holidays. You can buy it, or ogle it on Amazon.

Read more about Super Bowl XL: The Opus in this New York Times article.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Debi Gore-Mann (GSB, Class of 1987) has been hired as the first female athletic director at the University of San Francisco. Before going to USF, Gore-Mann served as senior associate athletic director and senior women's administrator at Stanford and the Cardinal won 14 Division-I national titles during her tenure. That's it from the Sports Desk!

Since the World Series has begun its October classic, I've run across books on baseball not surprisingly. One book "Growing the game: The globalization of Major League Baseball" by Alan Klein, concerns itself about the effort to promote baseball internationally.

In his book Klein cites polls that rank American football as the most popular US sport, then basketball followed by baseball. The US claims that baseball is the "national" sport. Will it ever be the #1 "international sport"?

You may find a copy of this book at Green Library.