There's an old adage one hears in business schools to describe managers with a limited range of management skills (and presumably limited career prospects): if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

And if the only two tools you have are a hammer

It's been a terrific World Cup so far. We all have to keep our fingers crossed for the semi-finals and the finals being as intriguing as the quarters, because our individual and collective memories of the overall quality of any given World Cup lean heavily on the quality of those

In the previous post I began with the intention of quickly introducing a link my colleague David Wong sent me to a fun article in Slate called "The Underdog Effect: why do we love a loser?" But before I could think about why some of us cheer for underdogs, I couldn't help/

An uncharitable, but not wholly inaccurate, line on This Sporting Life is that it's all about how to be a sports snob while still being a genuine sports fan. Of course, nobody wants to admit they're a snob. ("Connoisseur" is so much more urbane.) If you're into the themes of/

I'm obviously making this up as I go along; but if you've read Why is hockey analysis (almost) always so lame? Part 1 and Part 2, thanks for bearing with me. So far I have talked mostly about the ways in which hockey analysis (on TV, in the daily press) is so frust/

I don't remember a world without instant replay; although I was born into such a world. After clever but misbegotten attempts to use instant replay from the mid-1950s on, it is generally conceded that the first "modern" use -- and not yet slow-motion -- was in the broadcast of the

My friend Andrew Potter (author of the sizzling new book The Authenticity Hoax) tweeted a link on Friday [when I began writing this post] to a compelling contrast between the two biggest stars in the world of ice hockey, the Russian Alexander Ovechkin and the Canadian Sydney/

[Warning: What follows is an overly long post, even by the standards of this rambling blog. It is summarized over the last 3 paragraphs or so.]

At some point during the month-long March Madness gabfest on sports talk-radio Mike Greenberg (on ESPN’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning&rdqu

3.7 million people watched live coverage of the NFL draft this past weekend. And that figure surely doesn't include my father, since he was watching in Mexico. My dad never really stops following the NFL during the calendar year. The official end of the season with the Super Bowl just

In the last post I sketched out some of the reasons why Tiger fans (and some Tiger haters) like golf. And by "like" in sports I don't mean merely "enjoy" it or have a "revealed preference" for it. A true sports aficionado likes sports in the way an art-lover or

Tiger Woods could be the poster child for This Sporting Life. When I began this blog I identified four broad areas of interest for me at intersection of sports-philosophy-sociology. Thinking about sports can tell us a lot aboutpunditry, institutional design and ethics (or sportsm

Move over Gonzaga, Villanova, George Mason, and the Western Texas Miners. There's a new Cinderella in town. Take that, Goliath: there's a new David. Butler's unlikely run all the way to the National Championship last night was like cotton-candy-for-breakfast in the sports media this morning.

Many in

Real NFL fans should like the new overtime rule -- especially once it gets applied to the regular season -- for the same reason that most of the real NFL coaches hate it. It holds out the promise of more high drama of the kind the NFL does best: where the

On Tuesday the owners of the NFL franchises agreed to change to the rules for how to deal with playoff games that end in a tie after "regulation" time. (On average, about one of the 11 games each post-season is tied after 60 minutes.)

The old rule was simple: a

In the previous post I suggested that a 65-team tournament could be justified not because it was more likely than a more exclusive tournament to crown a worthy champion, but because it helped the NCAA meet a number of its reasonable objectives – which include providing a great experience f