The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 10

A lot can happen in a week and a few days, and there’s a lot to chime in on, but I want to get this second piece about the Lions out of the way so we can get to the more important stuff. Like this Tracy Chapman/Luke Combs performance.

So last issue I wrote about my long term relationship with the Detroit Lions. I remember Prince saying in an interview that he didn’t have “fans” because “fan” was short for “fanatic.” Inasmuch as this is really the first time in decades that supporting the Lions has paid off, I’d suggest ruefully that I’ve been a Lions fan all my life. I’d only write it here. I’m not sure I’d say it out loud. I don’t even know if I’d claim to have written it out loud if one of you saw me on the street and asked me.

But it is what it is.

So since I’ve been a fan of the Lions the Lions have had eight general managers, and fifteen head coaches. Of those fifteen head coaches none of them have ever gone on to become a head coach again. Their record over the period I’ve been a fan is a stunning 261-401. I don’t have the time to figure out how that record compares to other teams, but I can say pretty confidently it’s got to be the worst or close to it. The Lions are the first team to go winless—in 2008 they went 0-16. 

Now the NFL has all sorts of techniques designed to make the league competitive. For instance players can’t just choose where they want to play when they leave college to become professional, there’s a draft. Teams can’t just spend however much they want on players to build their team, there’s a salary cap. The salary cap also keeps teams from fully maintaining team quality over time—even if the teams get the draft right sooner or later the salary cap forces them to make tough choices. Teams don’t arrange their own schedules to play patsies every year, their schedule shifts with difficulty of scheduled pegged at least a bit to the quality of the team. And then on top of this, the structure of the league itself creates conditions where even though some teams profit more than others—according to Wikipedia the Dallas Cowboys brought in over $1.1 billion, making it the most profitable team in the league. The Detroit lions are pretty much at the bottom, but before we connect this to wins and losses, it’s important to note that the Kansas City Chiefs, which may go on to repeat this Sunday are in the middle of the pack. 

So the league is set up to make teams profits and to spread competition around. 

For a team to be consistently competitive, it has to work. For a team to consistently suck? It has to work. 

Now in talking about why they sucked (and then how they turned it around) I’m going to draw from a body of work I rarely draw from—positive political economy. I think more specifically the concept of “signaling” (used to explain aspects of market behavior) at least partially explains why some teams tend to perform better than other teams over time. And then why the Lions have been uniquely bad during this period.

In a given sports league, the league itself sends signals about teams need to do to win both in any given season and over time. It sends signals through the games themselves—as winners and losers will tend to have traits that distinguish them from each other. You can’t get more explicit a signal than winning over time. Now there’s a lot that goes into winning. In the NFL you’ve got to have a staff that identifies talent (college players, professional players), a staff of coaches (head coaches, defensive coaches, offensive coaches) and then management (general managers, assistant general managers), support staff (weight training staff, scouting staff). And then someone who knows how to properly assess that staff. 

This involves hiring. The owner obviously can’t do all of this, so the owner has to be able to identify folk who can. The better the owner is at doing this somehow, the better the team tends to be. 

Introducing William Clay Ford.

So for the bulk of my life, the Lions have been owned by William Clay Ford, grandson of Henry Ford. He bought the team in the mid sixties, right before the Detroit rebellion, and just a bit after the Lions had compiled one of the best winning records in the NFL. Clay Ford himself wasn’t known for much…his wikipedia page shows a list of accomplishments that underwhelms given the wealth he inherited. I think that Ford’s inherited wealth rendered him uniquely unable to interpret the signals needed to create the type of culture that would then generate a consistent winning football team. I’m going to assume that he wanted to win…no one wants to have a losing sports team. So he had to have known from his win-loss record that his team wasn’t performing the way it should. I think there were two sets of signals he couldn’t properly interpret. 

One set of signals is profit. The Lions were, as I note, at or near the bottom of the league, but they have consistently put bodies in seats. Profits and losses tell firms whether they’re on the right or wrong track…but if you aren’t in a situation to really lose money (because of a combination of NFL rules, and fandom) you don’t have a sense of how bad you really are, hence you don’t really get an incentive to change. 

A second set of signals is related to hiring. Because his team more or less sucked the entire time, and because he hadn’t attained success in any other endeavor of life (with the possible exception of college sports), he didn’t know how to properly assess talent and didn’t know how to properly assess the overall structure of the team. The best example of how much sense he didn’t have is Matt Millen, who he hired as GM based primarily on Matt’s record as a commentator and then as a Hall of Fame player. Millen was arguably the worst GM in sports history—not only were his drafts horrible, his selection of coaches was similarly bad. 

I think Ford’s inability in these areas come from the combination of inherited wealth and lack of success in life endeavors. It’s possible to inherit wealth and still have proper signal-interpreting capacity, but I think it’s pretty difficult for a range of reasons I am not going to go into.

Now he dies in 2014 and the team is then owned by his wife Martha. Now Martha as owner made one move that shows that she at least knew what she didn’t know—she brought in consultants to figure out who to hire. And those consultants themselves had solid football backgrounds.

The hire they made, GM Bob Quinn (who then chose Matt Patricia as head coach), had a strong pedigree—he and Patricia were both connected to the New England Patriots, at the time one of the most successful franchises in NFL history. So it would seem they had better sense.

But it’s worth noting that one of the problems Millen had was that he skirted the league’s Rooney Rule, created to create more opportunities for blacks to ascend to head coaching ranks. Millen was fined $200K for circumventing the rule. 

Quinn, who not only had a winning coach, but one of the few winning black coaches, himself skirted the rule, because he knew he wanted to hire Patricia.

Now I mentioned that one of the reasons I don’t generally use public choice theory and then within it, signaling, because I don’t believe signaling functions the way the literature suggests, particularly when it comes to politics and then to issues of race, gender, and power. Signals simply don’t work in politics for a range of reasons but to make a long story short most of those reasons are bound up in the fact that politics doesn’t function like markets. And then it doesn’t work in regards to race and relatedly gender because stereotypes associated with race and gender tend to mess with signal receipt. As a result, signaling MAY tell us why some who are poor tend to do better than others who are poor, but it tells us NOTHING about poverty itself. It can, however tell us about how organizations sustain and then overcome what could be called an organizational culture of poverty.

The NFL has always had a problem with regards to race. It took them decades to recognize that blacks could do more than run and block, and then decades to recognize that blacks (and players in general) had the potential to coach and manage. And even now the Rooney Rule exists because teams in general are bad at recognizing black talent. 

But there are teams that can’t recognize black talent, and then teams that can’t recognize talent period. It isn’t a coincidence that the Lions have been unable to recognize talent and the team that’s violated the Rooney Rule more than once.

However I write all of this after the Lions got within a half of getting to the Super Bowl. How’d they finally turn things around.

Ownership. The Fords still own the Lions, but it’s no longer William Clay Ford or his former wife, but their daughter. Who not only hasn’t had the signal problem her parents have, but seems to finally get what’s required for a winning culture. Sheila Hamp Ford gets signals. How does this translate into hiring?

AGAIN I’m running long, and I don’t want this to extend to a third issue because I want to get back to what I think is more important.

A couple of years ago a former player, Kelvin Sheppard, was considering getting into coaching. Only one problem. He had dreadlocks, and he didn’t know if he’d get bites.

Why? Because he had dreadlocks.

(What does dreadlocks have to do with coaching?? Exactly. Signals.)

He tells new (Hamp Ford Hire) head coach Dan Campbell he’s thinking about cutting them off.

I don’t know whether the Lions will win a Super Bowl in my lifetime. I do know that as problematic as the sport is, I can’t cut them. Many from Detroit can’t.  But at the very least I now know that spending my time on the Lions is no longer futile. It may not come this year. But it’s coming. Because Sheila Hamp Ford finally ended their culture of poverty