In Rituals and Traditions we had a group work day today. At the end of the semester the groups will be delivering big presentations and I’m trying to give them some built-in time to work on their projects. They are presenting ideas to the university’s athletic department. Rituals, traditions, game day atmosphere, and so on. Today I overheard of the few ideas that are percolating. Some of them are going to shape up nicely.
In Criticism, we talked about two basketball stories that the class selected. First, we had this one, which gave us a nice modern and historical parallel.
Odds are, there won’t be any ads about it over the next three weeks of the NCAA Tournament, but college basketball is celebrating an anniversary this year.
It was 75 years ago that the New York district attorney announced the arrests of 32 college basketball players as part of a sweeping sting operation into point-shaving that eventually included 86 games, 17 states and $72,000 in bribes – more than $900,000 in today’s money.
[…]
Time is, in fact, a flat circle.
Three-quarters of a century later, coaches remain aggrieved that their players are equal parts coddled and entitled, and the sport is in the throes of yet another point-shaving scandal. Twenty people are alleged to have hatched a game-fixing scheme that affected 17 teams, 29 games and at least 39 players.
When these stories come up I realize I need to learn more about gambling. “Gambling: bad” only gets you so far. Also, the thing that seems obvious to me is less an issue for others. But we talked about framing and the like, which led nicely into this next story they selected.
Just yesterday we had our first outdoor ride of the season. We made it off campus in good order today and that allowed us another nice treat, an after-work ride. The days are getting longer; it’s about time.
So we pedaled by the winery, where we will soon return to eat pizza. We cruised through the pastures, where I see my horsey friends, and then turned left to go down the asphalt shoot which is some of the best roadwork around here. We went up to the park, passing empty sheep pastures, and hooked a lovely left uphill into the backside of town. We took the biggest hill around, huffing and puffing in the still-warm sun, and turned onto the road that I rode so incredibly well one time that I turned it into three Strava segments — I have never ridden it well again. Then we breezed by haunted house, down the hill, up the other side, and home.
It was a lovely, windy, 12-mile stretch of the legs.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
Late Saturday afternoon the light came in a southern-facing and I just happened to catch it’s delicate double-pane dance. No idea why it does this. Whenever I do see it, which isn’t every day, I find myself staring at the glass to see if there’s something there. There’s nothing there. Just an abstract ghost in the machine, a surrealist glitch in the matrix.
It reminded me that I needed to wash my car. The winter weather is behind us, surely, and I can now get the salt and sand off the body and frame. So I drove to the nearby car wash, sprung for the you-do-this-twice-a-year package and drove on in.
Drive-through car washes fascinate me. It’s a ridiculous trip down memory lane, a demonstrate of the bites and bytes that your noggin is storing for no reason. I recall, as a kid, we used to go to one car wash that was for some reason quite popular. Long lines. Hand dried fenders. Maybe that’s why. I recall once when the driver of the car ahead of us panicked. The big fan at the end of the tunnel had a large wheel that descended and rolled along your windshield, over the roof of the car and so on, as the blower did it’s job of pushing the water back inside the collection and retention system. I guess the driver didn’t know that, or had a bad experience with airplane landing gear. He jammed the brakes and we tapped his bumper. Everyone was fine. No body damage, no physical damage. Two clean cars, one weird incident, one embarrassed driver. I recall having a car where the passenger door window didn’t seal well. It was fine in the rain. Never had a problem in the rain. If I was going through the car wash I had to take a towel. I recall someone I knew who did a destroy-her-wedding-dress photo shoot, when that was a thing. She had people throwing cans of paint on the dress. Silly online trend, colorful photos. The better ones, though, were when she went to one of those manual car wash places and they sprayed down her dress to get the paint out. I saw those photos and thought, “Ahh! Finally! A reason for these types of car washes!” No one ever wants to go to those if there’s a proper drive through car wash in town. I recall washing cars in the driveway. But I don’t recall the last time I saw someone doing that. Maybe no one wants to wash their cars at home if they can pay eight bucks, drive through the soap and get their ride almost clean.
You remember a lot of things in a car wash for no reason at all, other than that you’re there with the soap and the noise and not much else.
The experience also allowed me to take a bunch of windshield photos and create a new front page for the site. Go check it out. Stick with it for 60 seconds to see them all. Go on. I’ll wait for you here.
[…]
[…]
Wasn’t that fun? Different? Memorable? Will I remember that the next time I go to the car wash? Probably late this summer? Will it be worth remembering? How many times will I change the art on the front page between now and then? Don’t worry, I’ll always keep you updated about those changes. Keep reading this space and you’ll never miss a thing. A thing on this site, anyway.
The weather is finally cooperating on several fronts, and so we had our first outdoor bike ride of the year today. We just did an easy 10 miles around the neighbor to see if the bikes were working (they are) and see how it’d feel (weird) and to see who is going to be faster this year (she is).
I didn’t ride a lot in the basement this year. It’s just been mentally difficult to go down those stairs and I’m not sure why. We have a terrific basement space. One day we’re going to finish at least part of it. Right now it’s cinder blocks and shelves and great storage and a lot of floor space for activities you don’t want to do outside or can’t put in the living room. But, still, I haven’t gone down there that much this winter.
Probably will when it gets hot, though! It is always a little cooler in the basement.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
The rare Saturday post here coincides with the second and final day of the International Association of Communication and Sport’s summit in Dublin, Ireland. I spent almost the entire night finishing up the slides and notes for my presentation today.
I did get about two hours of sleep, and arrived at the conference just in time to see a morning session that included a presentation by one of our former professors, and also her daughter, who is a law student at Syracuse. I have photos of that young woman as a very little girl, and have now watched her give research for a few years. She’s been studying Name, Image, and Likeness in the NCAA and I’ve been trying to make the case that she could graduate from law school and carve herself a substantial niche in that brand new area. Whatever she does, she’ll be brilliant at it, just like her mother.
Later I gave my last presentation of the conference. This was actually inspired by someone else’s paper from last year. I sat in a conference room in Chicago and jotted notes last March and thinking I could do a similar, but different work. I had a topic that no one researches, one only barely discussed in the popular media.
And, then, last September, la Vuelta a España took place. There, and in the months to follow, we had an instance where sportswashing most decidedly did not work. So I talked to one of our friends and Sports CaM colleagues, Dr. Julia Richmond. I knew the story, but she knows propaganda. We batted it around, and she figured out precisely the way we should frame the work.
This version of the research was titled “Propaganda peloton: Sportswashing in professional cycling.”
If you need a citation: Smith, K.D. & Richmond, J. C. (2026, March 13-14). “Propaganda peloton: Sportswashing in professional cycling. [Conference presentation].” IACS 2026 Summit, Dublin, Ireland.
So today I gave our little example of how and when and why sportswashing didn’t actually work. (It usually does.) All it took was the specific circumstances of the sport of road cycling, like the lack of liminal space between fans and athletes, a history of protest, a route through the Basque country and one other thing …
I’m presenting this paper at #IACS26 in a few moments on behalf of @rowanuniversity.bsky.social and The Center for Sports Communication and Social Impact.
If you were here you could hear how the story turns out.
Usually, sportswashing can be successful in road cycling. There are a lot of multinational petrochemical sponsors now. There are nation-states sponsoring teams. (Indeed, I used one of those to make a point in this presentation about budget disparities.) And while it can work in those other cases it didn’t work here because of genocide. By November, the Israel Premier Tech team was being denied entry into other races, riders were breaking contracts or outright retiring, IPT stepped away as the sponsor of the team in question a year early. Their owner also parted ways with the team.
And wouldn’t you know it, in the audience for this presentation was someone who knows all about this, and another scholar who has a friend that, until last year, drove for Premier Tech. But it’s interesting, and it worked because of what Richmond did to make it happen. I hope someone in the room knows her and tells her how I was bragging on her. She couldn’t be there, because she had to attend a wedding in the Caribbean.
He said jealously, in Dublin.
That’s two years in a row I’ve presented cycling research at this conference. I’m going to develop a reputation for doing that if I keep this up.
The IACS conference ended today. I attended a bunch of great sessions, met some lovely new people and saw some friends for all too short a period of time. Some of them we’ll see at next year’s conference. Others we won’t see until the conference goes abroad once again.
My lovely bride, who is the executive director of IACS, helped put on a great conference. Their largest ever attendance, despite this dumb new war in the Middle East keeping about four percent of the participants from attending. It was also their first hybrid conference with the people from Sport and Discrimination. And everyone seemed to have a good conference. Some of the board members celebrated at Il Corvo, a little four-star Italian restaurant just across the street. Because I know people, I was invited for this little dinner. I had the carbonara, which is a good litmus test for an Italian restaurant. If it’s good, you can be comfortable ordering other things on the menu. The carbonara was good. I guess we’ll have to come back again.
Happy Monday, and happy March! We have survived the brutal months. Now, the month that makes the difference. All of the snow has mostly melted. Spring, overdue, has been promised. It has not yet been received here. It will be received with great interest when it shows up. And we’re getting close. We’ve had some mild temperatures. We’ve had sunny days, like this weekend. Now we just need to put it all together … and we will … and then keep it that way, until late November or so.
I better not be writing paragraphs like that very much longer.
It was a productive weekend, all spent right here at my desk. I did the monthly cleaning of the computer, updated the monthly spreadsheets, created new subdirectories and updated some boilerplate code. I put the February page of my master assignment calendar behind me. (I have several task-specific calendars running and when the stress of things hits my move is to make another calendar. Late last month I made the master panic calendar, filled it out through May, noticed almost every moment between then and March 28th was spoken for and then set about marking things off the list. Nowhere on that calendar is there a note to make another calendar. Five is sufficiently silly.)
I settled on two new documentaries for class. One of them will be a midterm, and I finished writing that today. The other we’ll watch in class. I’ve had it on my radar for some time, wanted to watch it, want to write something about it. About 14 minutes in I knew it was going into my Criticism class, too. I’ll pretend like this was all by design, because it should fit perfectly.
Also, I finished the draft of that work packet. Presently the thing clocks in at 29 pages, with all of the appendices to go. I wrote the service and research and professional development sections last week. I detailed the teaching section, filling up the maximum seven pages. I have two years of classes, peer observation, student reviews and subtle notes about the future to get into just seven pages. It took some doing to make it fit. Happily, all of the scores from my teaching evaluations are good. The lowest score I’ve registered in the last two years was about the difficulty of a class. Message received: that class will be more demanding and challenging if I get to offer it again.
I’m taking today off from that packet. It’s time for a break from thinking about myself. Besides, I have to think about tomorrow’s classes. Tomorrow evening I’ll do a dead tree edit of the packet, and then send it to a colleague who has generously offered to make sure I’m not omitting anything. After that, final corrections, final assembly, PDF the thing, and send it in. All of which takes place by mid-March. Not the longest thing I’ve ever written. Not the most tedious thing I’ve ever written. But it is a lot of me. Call it … maybe 60 or so pages? I can’t say yet. The checklist, though, tells me I have to have TWO tables of content. That’s always a signal.
On to more important things. We need to do the weekly check=in on the kitties. Phoebe would like you to know that she is not on the table. She is on the runner. And nowhere in the contract does it say she can’t be on the table runner.
Poseidon, himself no slouch when it comes to jailhouse cat lawyering, finds the argument a bit tiresome. Though you can be comfortably certain he’ll be doing much the same thing tomorrow.
So the cats are doing great. Lots of cuddles and big purrs over the weekend. Everyone is doing great.
I did manage a few quick rides. On Saturday, I was in Switzerland! This is just to the northeast of Zurich. I rode up and out from the small rural, forested village of Mosnang and over to the equally small and wonderfully charming Kollbrun. This route was part of one stage of the Tour De Suisse in 2024 and, while I did not see that particular race, I can see why.
I only wish that the person who recorded that route had done so on a brighter day. Switzerland is stunning most everywhere you look. Beautiful lakes, mountains a plenty, gorgeous values, and a huge array of glorious architecture. You can see ancient Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Art Nouveau. But there’s just a little too much Modern and Post Modern architecture, some of which is bordering on Brutalist. Much better to be among the trees and the hills and the rivers and streams. Even if it’s just my basement.
Anyway, here’s that route.
And this evening I rode in Corsica. (But still my basement.)
The last four rides have felt really nice on the trainer. This is notable because everything prior to that, since November, has felt bad or worse. I was getting demoralized. Now, though, I want to see what kind of trouble I can get into riding uphill on Rouvy. I did that tonight. I found myself a little Cat-2 climb that let me climb 1,110+ feet over 3.82 miles. Saying I rode in Switzerland on Saturday, and tonight in both Corsica or Mallorca, where I powered up that hill, is nice, but I’d also like to go outside. I’m ready to not be in the basement.
If for nothing else because I’m kicking myself by how little I’ve done down there this winter.
But spring is coming in now. That’s what the top of this post told me, anyway.
I had the weirdest dream this morning. But no one cares about your dreams. If you’re writing a blog, or someplace that’s not your own dream journal, or the Journal of Altered Conscious Mental, Emotional, and Sensory Experiences, no one will. This should be a lesson to you. Don’t write it out for others, because no one is reading about your dreams (and Freud isn’t coming along to analyze you in the comments.)
Simply do this instead. Point out you had a dream or dreams. This signals that you have not only slept recently, but done so to the extent that you could enter REM sleep. And then, share that you, too, are dismissive of the dreams, that you know that no one cares. And then, by definition, you are hip.
Not only are you hip, but you, my friend, are a dreamer.
And this is the sort of thing I normally charge $84.95 for down at the airport Ramada, where the lonely, bored, and vaguely motivated will fall all over themselves to see my latest slide decks.
No one cares about your slide decks. All the above? You can apply that to your presentations, too. Oh, sure, you put in a lot of work and they’re interesting, noteworthy, sometimes even compelling. But, and this is the key, they are those things in the moment, not in the re-telling.
Pick your spots.
No one cares about your spots.
Except for infectious disease specialists. Tell them everything. Do not charge them Ramada rates.
Here’s the view from the 6th floor almost-corner office. Not bad out there. Most of the streets on the way in were in great shape. Just one, screen by trees and hills and houses, looked a bit rough. At least for our commute. Quite a few people didn’t make it in today. Not everyone has the same snow experience. You can also see that, below, just by carefully observing which people have shoveled their sidewalks 48-plus hours after the snow stopped and who hasn’t.
In my Rituals and Traditions class today I tried to frame things so that we start thinking of these things more like a team, a league or a school, and not like a fan. I presented them with some research on rituals from a marketing perspective. (Rituals have staying power and create conditions where highly identified fans want to come back, take part, and come back again. Also, most of them spend more money on other stuff at the venue than the ticket price itself.) The lecture got us through about a decade of marketing of fandom research and a few more years on sports fan sociology. Also, I showed them the Aggie War Hymn at weddings, with which I made a point about things in, and out, of context.
And then I explained the song. It’s a song about hating your rivals. I explained the history of the song. J.V. “Pinky” Wilson wrote the song in a trench in France during World War I. He came home to College Station, finished his degree, and sang the song in a quarter. Some of the A&M yell leaders heard it, and convinced him to enter it into a campus song contest. It won, and since 1920 it has been an integral part of Texas A&M fandom. I mean, they sing it at weddings.
At which point I paused, and deadpanned, “White people weddings, man.”
Then I said, there are a lot of these videos on YouTube.
We also considered the shared affiliation of rituals, as in the example of the running of the Gumps. Look at that zeal! And the footspeed!
And then we considered what it means to be a part of 61,000 people singing to your favorite team.
I was also able to cite to them a study that told us some 98 percent of fans engage in sports rituals. Most of them have to do with wearing the team gear and colors, but that study broke out 15 other criteria, and quite a few make the cut for people.
On Thursday, my students’ surveys will be completed. We’re asking questions of our study body. Hopefully some of the information will be help to our class as we try to help find and or develop things our athletic department might work on.
In Criticism, we discussed baseball, beginning with this story about one of the Phillies recent relievers. As a young man he caused a terrible car accident that killed one man, badly injured a teenager and almost derailed his own life. But then one of the truly selfless and remarkable things about humanity happens. It’s a terrific story.
I asked the group what they would like to know at the end of the story. What’s not here that’d you like to see in a followup. Someone said they’d like to see what happened if the pitcher and the family met. Just you wait for Thursday.
We also talked about a museum piece — meaning copy from the Smithsonian — about Jackie Robinson. It didn’t really fit the bill, but we were able to discuss why, and also story curation and, again, what’s not in this piece. What wasn’t there was what Robinson did after he walked away from baseball, and that’s every bit, or more as important, as his time with the Dodgers.
In the evening, as the day is getting later everything felt sunny and cheery, even if it was cold, and it looks like Hoth.
We’re right at the point where 12 hours of the day is in daylight. Right at the point where it seems we might make it once again. Right at the moment that should have happened two weeks ago, but will take place three or four weeks from now: it’ll finally feel like winter is behind us.
Since it isn’t, I rode in the basement this evening. I’ve been suffering through the little riding I’ve done of late. Everything got out of whack around the holidays and my cardio slipped and nothing has helped and it just felt like a big chore — a big painful chore.
But this brief ride, for the first time in a long while, things finally felt good. I don’t know why it seemed to click back into place, physically or mentally, but it was about time. Also, Spain. And I went up a hill prominent enough that it got its own little graphic in the heads up display.
I’m sure that’s useful for climbers, so that they might time their exertion to perfection. But it does something else for the rest of us.
Anyway, 30-some minutes over a lumpy area of Tossa de Mar, with two little Cat 5 climbs according to the profile, way off in the northeast of Spain. I hope I get a few more rides in a row that feel as decent as this one.
