The SportsThink Review #119
March 14, 2025: Risk, Burgers, NFTs
The SportsThink Review highlights my favorite sport-related content. Most things I share are recently published, but some are not; the only rule is that I’ve read or encountered them recently. Some are relevant to my day job as a professor teaching courses on the business, history, and philosophy of sports. Others are just plain interesting, relevant to my lifelong obsession with the games we play. I also occasionally share articles and assorted musings on Twitter.
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Howdy folks, happy Friday. Here’s what got me thinking this week…
Risk Redux
I got a few notes about a study I shared last week: Male coaches increase the risk-taking of female teams—Evidence from the NCAA. Given the interest, I figure a little more discussion is in order.
I did not mean to suggest—nor do I think the study suggests—that male coaches are better than their female counterparts. The relationship between risk and winning is notable, as is their finding that female coaches (on average) follow less risky strategies.
Worth debating is that the definition of risk here is rather simple: 3 point shot attempts. Whether it’s usefully simple or actually too simplistic…I’m not sure. Surely there are other ways to take risks in basketball.
While there is ample discussion of the relationship between gender and risk in other domains, the study isn’t really trying to understand why this goes on in this sporting context. Now that is an interesting paper (hello, grad student readers). Before we rush to the conclusion of “female coaches need to encourage more three point shooting,” we probably need to unpack why the status quo is as it is. Are female coaches incentivized to be risk-averse? Is there job stability in playing it safe? These sorts of things are quite interesting.
For what it’s worth: the last 7 NCAA women’s basketball national champions have been coached by women. I’m hoping that streak ends this year…but only because the Horns are coached by Vic Schaefer!
And more: of the 43 WBB national championship teams, 30 have been coached by women; 13 by men. Geno Auriemma accounts for 11 of those 13.
The Main Event: One Good Read
The Tale Of The Early-Round KO Of Muhammad Ali’s Champburger (Dan McQuade, Defector)
Wonderful piece of history: on Muhammad Ali’s not-so-successful fast food chain. Ali’s story is pretty well told at this point, but I learned a lot here. The Greatest and his “Champburger” chain are central, but McQuade elegantly covers a lot of ground: the post-war rise of fast food, the concurrent emergence of athlete/celebrity endorsements, and African-American entrepreneurship. Very well researched and well told, absolutely worth your time.
The Highlight Reel: Things Worth A Look
“Men Lie About Their Height-Even Baseball Players” I swear, I’m 6 feet tall. Short and interesting, on MLB attempts to standardize strike zones in the era of player challenges to ball-strike calls. Tech, innovation, and the ethics of fair play.
Leo Sepkowitz on the rise and fall of NBA Topshot, the NFT (non-fungible token) marketplace. You may have already forgotten about the NFT boom, when “digital assets” were trading for millions of non-digital dollars. I’ll admit, I still have a hard time understanding what exactly an NFT is, let alone why it might have value. But this is worth a read to make sense of the NFT madness from a couple years back and to get sense of the potential future of sport memorabilia and marketing in the digital age.
An Oral History of the NBA COVID Shutdown. For many of us, the moment everything became real in 2020. Feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago. Well put together piece. Here’s the literal moment (“Rudy Gobert is out with an illness…”):
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See you next time,
Tolga