There's a good example of how big the book Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt simply in the location where I picked it up: late one sleepless night in a Mumbai apartment I was staying at over Christmas, 2007. This was a couple of years after the book had first come out, true, but it was a juggernaut, launching an entire field of small-scale economics applied to various questions of life. So with the awkwardly named Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won, it's no surprise to see sports get the Freakonomics treatment. And that's part of the problem.

This book, which the publicity team was kind enough to send me, hews to the Freakonomics blueprint pretty closely. It's written by a fellow professor of Levitt's at the University of Chicago, Tobias Moskowitz, and Sports Illustrated reporter L. Jon Wertheim. The book was titled by the same consultant who came up with Freakonomics, gets a cover blurb from Levitt (calling it the closest thing to his own book written since) and is drawn mainly from research papers from Moskowitz or other economists in the same field. 

Unfortunately for the authors, if you've been around the sports blogging world for a decent length of time, you've probably heard of most of the shocking conclusions: NFL coaches should go for it on fourth down. Refs swallow their whistles in the closing moments of close games. There's no such thing as hot or cold streaks in shooting. Icing kickers doesn't really work, and everyone is governed by loss aversion, loss aversion, loss aversion. For the latter, it even pulls the same Duke basketball ticket experiment from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, another book of the genre that sits half-finished on my bookshelf. I have serious issues with the conclusions of that particular experiment, which I should really spell out in a separate post.

So the book suffers from repackaging a lot of things I already know. It also pads itself with more than a few four and five page chapters of little merit, the most egregious one arguing that the team who wins the coin toss almost always win an NFL overtime, possibly the least shocking bit of news ever put to print. The book basically has two sections going for it. The first is the long middle section on the home field advantage, which pretty thoroughly debunks most of the standard reasons – stress of travel, the home crowd, the vagaries of various baseball parks – to arrive at the conclusion that it's almost always the result of crowd pressure on the officials. (They do allow that scheduling of patsies on the college level contributes, but for the most part blame all those phantom charges Duke gets on cheating.)

The second, even more fascinating part of the book worth reading, discusses how Jerry Jones' purchase of the Dallas Cowboys completely revolutionized – and standardized – the draft-day trade. It's hilarious, and the authors get the money quote from one executive, "We're all using this document that a buddy of Jerry Jones put together using picks in the late eighties? Now that you put it like that, it's probably not so smart." That chapter alone is almost worth the price of admission; perhaps it's merely because I hadn't heard this part before, and it's incredibly commonly told. But even so, it comes across as much more exciting than the rest of the book. More like this and less of the same old thing would make this a much better book to me.

The bottom line is, if you really like Freakonomics, you'll probably like this book. If you're a sports fan, a fan of numbers, and not someone who has followed every blog link to every academic paper out there, you'll also probably really enjoy it. I am neither of these people, however, and so this book annoyed me more often than it interested. The writing could be repetitive, and some of the chapters as cliche as arguments they're refuting, but there's some good work here. If it's your thing, go ahead and pick it up.

The decline quality of the News and Observer over the last ten years is legendary in journalism circles. And this isn't a "The newspaper people were mean to my sports team rant!" – I haven't had a problem with their coverage of UNC's recent troubles. The journalists do the best with what they have, but budgets have been slashed, and corners cut, and it shows. Literally, in the case of the corners, in fact. Pull out a copy of the paper from the nineties if you have one celebrating a UNC championship or something and lay a modern copy on top of it and see how thinner the page is.

The N&O has been owned by the McClatchy Co. since the mid-nineties, one of a bunch of media companies that decided that massive expansion was a smart thing right as the Internet was destroying their business model. Bureaus are now being dropped left and right, with more and more content being provided by wire stories and content shared across papers. Which brings me to a little thing I've noticed lately.

I read a lot of stories on Butch Davis yesterday, so when it came time to link to a couple at the beginning of the last blog post, I just typed "Butch Davis" into Google News and waited for the big ones to come up. I assumed the N&O articles would be near the top, because hey, local paper, in-depth coverage, yadda yadda. Let's take a look a what you find:

See the N&O stories? They're actually there, if you read the paper well enough to recognize the names of the reporters. There's Robbi Pickeral's piece halfway down the page, who's been at the paper since I started blogging, a Caulton Tudor's near the bottom, right above Backing the Pack's piece. But Pickeral's listed as writing for the Sacramento Bee, and Tudor the Merced Sun-Star, both McClatchy papers in California. Now ask yourself, if you were quickly skimming Google for UNC news, would you turn to a couple of minor California papers, or would you just click on the Fox Sports or ESPN piece?

You see, McClatchy publishes it's articles across all of its papers to make up for how bare-bones its operations is, ignoring the fact that it's pushing articles about UNC on an uninterested Merced audience. But having the same content across a bunch of websites makes the content look less important. It's spamming Google, so Google downgrades it and sticks whatever paper wins the SEO game on the middle of the page. The paper comes across as irrelevant, and the articles – which again, are good! – don't get read.

McClatchy seems to think that everyone hits the front page of their local website and just stays there, reading everything like it's a Sunday morning. But the whole point of the web is that you don't have to do that. You can get alerts for whatever interests you and skip the boring crap. It's time to accept the fact that your readers realize you're a chain. They can tell when news is local or something that was just written in Miami and irrelevant to them. Admit it! If you think the folks in Merced want to read about Marvin Austin, have the paper link to the N&O site. You still get the ad revenue, the reader knows it was written by someone at the scene, and you actually come across as a far-reaching news organization, rather than a motley collection of stringers hanging on for dear life to a publishing model that used to work. And people will actually be able to find your work in Google and read it.

UNC's men's lacrosse team was named the fourth seed in the sixteen-team tournament yesterday, with an opening round matchup against Delaware on the 16th. Provided they win that, they'll meet either Duke or Johns Hopkins in the second round, both teams the Heels have already defeated his season. The top-seeded team is naturally the ACC champions Virginia, who have lately been in the news for more tragic reasons. Syracuse is the second seed and Maryland the third. All and all a favorable draw for Carolina.

A little background on this: the spring recreational running season on the East Coast pretty much ends in early May. After that, the weather gets to hot for putting together a great race, so everyone goes back into training mode to prepare for the fall races. And with the way training for road races works, you pretty much spend a couple of months putting in a lot of effort with the goal of peaking at just the right time, for a specific race.

For a lot of people, last weekend was that specific race. The Pittsburgh Marathon, the Broad Street Run in Philadelphia, the Frederick Marathon and a host of other big races in the Mid-Atlantic were all last weekend. And last weekend, it was suddenly 95 degrees – absolutely brutal weather. A lot of work from a lot of racers went right down the toilet because of the weather. And it's lead to some pretty great writing; I've ben addicted to reading it this week. And by far, this is my favorite, completely summing up the feeling of total disappointment:

Scores of cheerleaders from Plum lined the street in front of Kauffman's and I wanted to punch every one of them. Everyone who cheered for me was a total effing moron. They clearly didn't know good running if it kicked them in their moronic faces.

It sounds harsh, but I can totally understand the feeling. To go out and fail so miserably, and yet still have people treat it like an accomplishment – after all, how were they to know what you should have ran – is awful, completely inconsolable feeling, made all the worse by platitudes from the folks around you. Myself, I had no race last weekend and still had such a miserable training run I nearly threw in the towel all together, and I'm nowhere near this guy's league. (Those minute per miles he was dragging through at the end were faster than my 10K pace.) I kind of want to compare and contrast this with the attitudes of the UNC basketball team his season, but that's unfair to everybody and involves more than a bit of blogging mind-reading, which I avoid. Still though, great writing.

This Sunday, naturally, the high is going to be 65 degrees. Near-perfect running weather. 

(It wasn't horrible everywhere, of course. In Oregon, one of the best distance runners today had a race designed to break the American 10K record on a track. Perfect weather, pacers to make sure he got off the blocks at the right speed and overall ideal conditions; and break the record he did. Only he came in second place. Chris Solinsky now holds the record instead.)

You may have heard that the Tar Heels took second in the annual season-long, cross-sport, intercollegiate competition that is the Directors' Cup. It's their fourth time taking second, following 1995, 1997, and 1998. First, naturally, went to the fifteen-time winners, Stanford, as UNC remains the only non-Leland Junior school to take the thing home, back in 1994. Stanford totaled 1,455 points to Carolina's 1,184.25, a margin of 270.75 points that consisted almost entirely of three sports UNC does not field teams in. Those were men's gymnastics (Stanford was national champions, 100 pts.), women's water polo (Stanford made the semis, 72.5 pts.) and men's water polo (second place, 70 pts.)  Here, as in previous years, is the breakdown of the athletic season:

• Women's Field Hockey, First Round
• Football, Bowl Game Loss
• Women's Soccer, National Champions
• Men's Soccer, 2nd Place
• Women's Volleyball, Second Round
• Women's Basketball, Second Round
• Men's Basketball, National Champions
• Women's Fencing, 20th
• Women's Gymnastics, 25th
• Women's Swimming, 20th
• Men's Swimming, 26th
• Women's Indoor Track & Field, tied for 12th
• Men's Indoor Track & Field, 41st
• Wrestling, 46th
• Men's Baseball, College World Series
• Women's Golf, 7th
• Women's Lacrosse, 2nd Place
• Men's Lacrosse, Quaterfinals
• Women's Softball, Regional Finalist
• Women's Tennis, Second Round
• Men's Tennis, Second Round
• Women's Outdoor Track & Field, 47th
• Men's Outdoor Track & Field, 30th

Fetzer Field is very, very good to Carolina. Other tournament sites, not so much. Both the men's and women's lacrosse teams won the opening rounds of their respective tournaments, the guys 15-13 over UMBC on the strength of Billy Bitter's eight goals on his first eight shots, and the gals 15-4 over Towson. The women remain in Chapel Hill to face Notre Dame on Saturday at 1 pm, while the men move on to Annapolis to meet Duke on Sunday. The Blue Devils defeated UNC in their previous two contests, both of which were held at Kenan Stadium. In fact, UNC hasn't beaten Duke since 2004, and hasn't done so in the postseason since 1996.

(I know what you're thinking, but this won't effect the critical Carlyle Cup competition, which Carolina sewed up for the second straight year a few weeks ago.)

Both tennis teams were eliminated from their respective tournaments this weekend in the second round while the women's softball team was given a second seed and the honor of hosting a regional in Chapel Hill. The Heels will face Campbell, Thursday at 3:30, followed by Radford and Georgia. The regional is one of only two being played Thursday through Saturday, because Campbell does not play games on Sunday for religious reasons.

I don't have much of an interest in lacrosse personally, but it's worth noting that the NCAA brackets were announced yesterday, and UNC (11-5) is a sixth seed with a first round game against University of Maryland-Baltimore County. The first round game is on the seeded team's field, meaning Carolina will play at Fetzer, Saturday at 2:30. A win advances them to Annapolis, Maryland, to play either ACC champions Duke or Navy.

All four ACC teams (UNC, Duke, Virginia and Maryland) made the tournament, joining three Big East teams and three from the Ivy League. Inside Lacrosse has all the analysis on why teams landed where they did - location had a great deal to do with it.

On the women's side, the Tar Heels (13-4) are the three seed and will face Towson (no longer Towson State as of 1997) Sunday at 1:00 also at Fetzer Field. Women's lacrosse games are on the high seed's home field until the Final Four, which this year is played, oddly enough, in Towson, Maryland. Again, Four of the six ACC teams are in the field; the same four as on the men's side, to be exact. Again, Inside Lacrosse has some good analysis. 

Finally, UNC defender Amber Falcone is a finalist for the Tewaaraton Trophy, which is a pretty big deal. No one from UNC has ever won the award.

(If you're a lacrosse fan and in a competitive mood, the SB Nation Syracuse blog is running a bracket pool to satisfy all your prognostication needs.)