How not to shoot a gold medal goal
Plus: Olympics judging bias, morals clauses, and a fun tanking fix.
As we all dig ourselves out of another snowstorm, here are six sports business items worthy of your attention at the start of the week…
Media Fail of the Week 🦅: Both the U.S. men’s and women’s hockey teams beat Canada in overtime to secure their gold medals, and both times the camera and production crew from the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) fumbled the moment1. Here are those plays 👇. The footage after both goals pans to a wide shot of the crowd, instead of the players’ reactions. Why?? Jack Hughes threw his helmet and stick about 20 feet in the air. If you watched at home you’d never know.
Equally annoyingly, in the men’s game it took nearly three minutes—2:51 to be exact—after the goal was scored to see a replay. This happens all the time, and it drives me nuts. I get that we want to show the celebration, but give us a split screen at least! I asked Jacob, our resident media expert, why this has become standard in big sports moments. This was his response:
“I think this is particularly an issue with game-winning plays. There are a number of typical shots shown live at the end of a championship—celebrating team, losing team, likely one or both coaches, often each fan base. That’s well and good when the game ends on a routine play, as most do, but causes issues when there is a replay waiting in the queue for all of that live reaction to play out. This is even more heightened in the Olympics, where broadcasters amplify personal drama and emotional stakes over athletic breakdowns (this makes plenty of sense in luge or ski jumping—no offense—but less sense in hockey).”
Sportico Story of the Week ⛸️: Here are some insane stats about bias in figure skating judging, via Lev.
⚫ In the long program at the Olympics, 25 of the 29 judges who rated skaters from their own country scored them more favorably than ones from other countries
⚫ There were 15 teams in the Olympics free dance competition that had a judge from their country on the panel, and 14 of them received a higher score from that particular judge than their average from the remaining eight judges.
Look at this chart!
Read his full Sportico story about bias in Olympic judging here.
Fired Coach of the Week 🎽: Last week Kansas State fired its men’s basketball coach. In and of itself, that would be unremarkable—the Wildcats are 2-12 in Big 12 play, tied for last place—but it caught my attention because of how Jerome Tang was fired. Tang was let go a few days after he ranted that his players “don’t deserve” to play for the Wildcats. Here’s the full quote:
“These dudes do not deserve to wear this uniform. There will be very few of them in it next year. I’m embarrassed for the university. I’m embarrassed for our fans and our student section. It is just ridiculous… It means something to wear a K-State uniform. It means something to put on this purple, and everything this university is about and why I love this place. They don’t love this place, so they don’t deserve to be here.”
The university used that rant as a grounds to fire Tang for cause, claiming he violated the terms of his contract and therefore shouldn’t receive his $18.7 million buyout. The section that the school claims justifies that move is a very boilerplate morals clause that references anything that brings “public disrepute, embarrassment, [or] ridicule” to the university.
I’m assuming this ends in a private, multimillion dollar settlement, but I’m fascinated by the potential precedent. Schools have historically been very averse to firing coaches for cause. Now that buyouts are getting bigger and bigger, is this the new threshold?
Idiot Coach of the Week 🏀: By the newly-created Jerome Tang Threshold ©, UCLA coach Mick Cronin would have been fired years ago. I’m on record that UConn’s Dan Hurley is the most obnoxious coach in big-time college basketball, but Cronin may be coming for the crown. Just listen to this absurd back and forth with a reporter 👇
For what it’s worth, completely apropos of nothing, here is the morals clause language in Cronin’s contract. He can be fired for cause for:
Non-Sportico Tweets of the Week 🎟️: I’m fascinated by social media posts by former Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Now that he’s no longer calling the shots in Dallas, the often-outspoken billionaire has become even more so on NBA issues. This week, he went deep on the NBA’s affordability issue, and his concern about what happens when fans follow players instead of teams.
Free Advice of the Week 📉: Speaking of tanking, someone told me this week about how the PWHL, the new women’s hockey league, assigns its draft order. It’s called the “Gold Plan,” named after the PhD student who dreamt it up, and in short: teams start accruing points for wins (or overtime losses) once they’re mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.
I love this idea. It still favors the worst teams—the first team eliminated has the most chances to play its way into points—but actually seems to align incentives at the end of the season, when the bad teams ideally would be trying to win, not lose.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
OBS distributes feeds to broadcasters like NBC in the U.S. and CBC in Canada, both of which showed those camera angles. With 10M+ likely watching in America, NBC also probably deserves some responsibility for not ensuring the moment was handled better.
It’s the world feed. The usual way things are done in North America with NHL hockey broadcasts goes out the window on these things. You wait for replays, you can’t take the camera you want lots of times. You get one or two cameras for your show but even that’s screwy. This has been my experience anyway.