I don’t know if overpromotion is a word or not, but lets just say it is.

I have followed sports the majority of my life and I have noticed that great teams are normally led by great coaches.

Great coaches come in many different shapes and forms. Often you will see a team make a former player their coach. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Logic might tell you that if a team takes a great player and makes him a coach, he will be a great coach. This coach, being a great player, knows what it takes to be great, so logically he should be able to coach his team to be great.

Logic would also tell you that if you take a marginal player and make him a coach, he will be a marginal coach. This coach, being a marginal player, doesn’t know what it is like to be great, so logically he shouldn’t be able to coach his team to be great.

Funny thing about logic in this case, it is wrong. Rarely does a great player become a great coach. However there are plenty of cases where a marginal player becomes a great coach.

Now slow down, I am not saying that all marginal players will make great coaches, or that great players will make horrible coaches, I am just saying that I recognize a trend.

I wonder if this trend exists outside of the sports world?

When I worked in retail jewelry, great salesmen were often rushed into management positions. I always wondered why this happened? If someone is great at sales, why take them away from the sales process and have them manage people who aren’t as gifted in the sales process? Unfortunately when the great salesman became manager, the store usually suffered. The sales went down and the manager was replaced.

When a marginal salesman was promoted to manager, the store normally benefited. Yes, a valuable member of  the sales team was removed, but the great salesmen were still selling. These marginal salesman usually became very good managers.

I wonder where else this trend might exist? The medical community? Industry? Politics? Churches?

For my sake, will you forget the politics of the phrase “redistribution of wealth” for a few minutes?

I am getting tired of hearing the phrase “redistribution of wealth“ repeated over and over and over and over…

Please understand me, I do not want my taxes to go up. When I was a kid growing up I always heard the news reporters talking about how taxes are “squeezing” the middle class. At 12 years old I didn’t know what that meant. At 37, I now painfully know what they meant.

The problem I have with the phrase “redistribution of wealth“ is that my tax dollars have always been used in “redistribution of wealth.” I pay my taxes and the dollars I give my local, state and federal government are redistributed to where my government sees fit. My tax dollars help pay government employees. Money I earn is taken away from me in the form of taxes and put into government  employees pay checks. Isn’t that “redistribution of wealth?” My tax dollars go to help build bridges in Wyoming. I have never been to Wyoming, but my hard earned money is going there to help pay for salaries, raw materials, engineers and things I don’t even know about to build bridges. Isn’t that “redistribution of wealth?”

So what gives? Why all of a sudden do we keep hearing about “redistribution of wealth?” I guess “higher taxes” just  doesn’t scare people enough anymore so some genius decided to pit “Rich America” against “Poor America” in some sort of marketing nightmare. Funny thing about this marketing campaign, if “Rich America” has its marketers backed by its dollars, where is the marketing dollars for “Poor America?”

The umpires in the MLB playoffs have been awful. I am not breaking a news story here, the officiating has been horrendous with virtually all of the poor calls shown over and over again on replay.

Last night in Game 2 of the World Series the umpires made two more obviously wrong calls.

If you listen to ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd (maybe the funniest and most honest sports radio personality) you have heard him consistently rip Major League Baseball for their refusal to upgrade their game with instant replay. Cowherd has repeatedly explained that he believes the reason MLB attendance and television ratings are going down is because the game of baseball is controlled by its traditionalists who refuse to allow the game to evolve.

I would be surprised if Colin Cowherd doesn’t point to MLB Commissioner Bud Selig’s comments about poor officiating  before last nights game. Selig is quoted by Jim Caple of ESPN.com:

The more baseball people I talk to, there is a lot of trepidation about it and I think their trepidation is fair. I’ve spent a lot of time [on this] over the past month and will spend a lot of time in the ensuing months as well. I don’t want to overreact. You can make light of that but when you start to think you’re going to have more intrusions — and even if their good intrusions — it’s something that you have to be very careful about. Affecting the game on the field is not something I really want to do.

and Selig continued:

Life is changing and I understand that. I do like the human element and I think the human element for the last 130 years has worked pretty well. There have been controversies but there are controversies in every sport.

What other sport, industry or business can say that “the last 130 years has worked pretty well” as a reason not to change when the business is trending down?

Baseball’s attendance is down, their television ratings are down, but hey, it has worked well for 130 years so we’re not going to change.

I’ll guess I’ll do what most of America is doing, turn on the NFL or college football and forget about baseball. That will probably work for the next 130 years.

Sam Bradford, last year’s Heisman Trophy winning quarterback for Oklahoma University, passed on the National Football League and decided to come back and play college football for the Sooners. Bradford knew when he made his decision that a very compelling argument could have been made that he would have been the #1 pick in the NFL Draft, but he still decided to forgo the NFL (for at least a year) and return to Oklahoma to help his beloved school attempt to win a National Championship .

Things didn’t work out as Bradford had hoped. He hurt his throwing shoulder in the first game of the year. He attempted to let his shoulder heal on its own as he didn’t play football for 5 weeks. Bradford played pretty well in his first game back, but in his second game back, he hurt his shoulder again. Bradford has now announced that he needs to have surgery to repair his shoulder.

Oh… did I forget to mention by turning down the NFL, Sam Bradford passed up over $35 million in guaranteed money?

When I was Sam Bradford’s age I loved Florida State. I would have done whatever I could to help my school win a National Championship. If I were in Bradford’s position, I may have even looked at the $35 million and decided Florida State was worth risking my future. I would have been wrong.

$35 million is generational money. If Sam Bradford would have decided to go to the NFL and received that kind of money, his grandchildren, even his great-grand children, probably even his great-great-grandchildren would have experienced the financial blessings of his athletic prowess.

I pray that Bradford will recover from his surgery and go onto have a wildly successful NFL career both in achievement and finance. He still very well may have all of that, however I have a few questions:

Who counseled Sam Bradford to return to Oklahoma and risk his entire future and his family’s future? Who advised Sam Bradford to play football for free all the while someone was willing to pay him $35 million to play? Was Sam Bradford’s best interests at the heart of the people giving him advice, or was the Oklahoma Sooner football program at the heart of the people advising Bradford to turn down the NFL?