NFL general managers looking for an edge in next week’s draft scour folders thick with information and base their decisions on the slimmest of margins — a tenth of a second in the 40-yard dash, an extra inch in height, the last 5 pounds on a barbell being bench-pressed two dozen times or more.
But a provocative new study suggests an almost surefire way for any GM to maximize the value of his pick: Choose a player who’s already had a run-in with the law.
“So if you’re on the fence about a player and worried about his criminal record,” said Stephen Wu, an economics professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., “the data says take a chance.”
That sounds strange, but makes sense when you consider the study found that players with so-called “character issues” get drafted, on average, 15 to 25 spots lower than players who performed similarly during their college career and at the NFL’s annual scouting combine but had zero entries on their rap sheets. Apparently, it’s already a consideration during draft-day planning in Arizona, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Chicago, where teams led the league in making shrewd picks out of problem children during the five drafts covered by the research.
“It sounds like an interesting breakdown, but I rely on our guys to do their own homework,” Chargers general manager A.J. Smith said. “Besides, plenty of ‘clean’ guys come in, get the money and go ‘Hollywood,’ and cause trouble until the day you off-load them. So we do it our way, hope we don’t make mistakes and clean up the ones we miss as fast as we can.”
Those sentiments were echoed by Buffalo GM Buddy Nix.
“I wish I could tell you it’s scientific, but it’s not,” Nix said. “It’s more of a gut feeling. There are some things kids do … they do it their first year, freshman and sophomore year, and then you say, ‘Well he’s changed.’ But most of that comes from learning about life and how to act, so we think that doesn’t really eliminate a guy.
“But if it’s a repeat offender and if it’s the wrong kind of trouble,” he added, “then we stay away from it.”
Take cornerback Janoris Jenkins, for example. He was kicked out of Florida a year ago after two arrests for marijuana possession in four months, which is why he played his final season at North Alabama. But even there he had problems, getting ejected from a game for throwing a punch at an opponent. He was also arrested in a 2009 bar fight. Lots of scouts see Jenkins as a first-round talent at a critical position, but most mock drafts already have him slipping into the second round because of that checkered past.
“I’d just as soon not get into that,” Nix said about Jenkins, then added, “But if you mean whether we’ll take him or not, I think ability-wise, obviously, you would. This is a political answer I’m fixing to give you, but probably otherwise, you wouldn’t. You get enough trouble without getting one that you know is a problem.”
On the other hand, despite an early blot on his record, Iowa offensive tackle Riley Reiff is exactly the kind of guy Nix and plenty of other GMs would grab with a Top 10 pick. As an incoming freshman visiting campus, Reiff, then 19, stripped in an alley and led eight police officers on a 20-minute drunken foot chase. He paid a hefty fine and never appeared on the police blotter in Iowa City again.
The study was done by Hamilton student Kendall Weir as his senior thesis for an economics degree and is being overseen by Wu. It included every player (around 1,200) taken in the 2005-2009 NFL drafts and their results at the scouting combine. Then it divided players into four groups based on comparable results and tracked their performance through the 2011-12 season. The four groups:
1.) Players with no suspensions or legal problems in college;
2.) Players suspended one game or more for violating team or university rules;
3.) Players arrested and charged with a crime;
4.) Players arrested, but not charged.
If you wanted the biggest bang for your buck and this were a multiple-choice quiz, the best answer would be No. 4.
Players in that group are usually drafted in the same spot as comparable players in the No. 1 group, yet wind up averaging two more starts per season. Suspended players dropped the farthest in the draft, 25 spots on average. They also fared the worst in performance terms when compared to the “clean” players, averaging two fewer starts per season, as well as having shorter careers. Players in the arrested-and-charged group tended to perform exactly the same as the clean group, but ended up being drafted 15 spots lower.
Of the teams mentioned above, Arizona used 27 percent of its picks during the five-year span on players in the last three groups. Cincinnati, which has become a sort of “Boys Town East” for troubled free agents as well as draftees, was second at 25 percent, with San Francisco and Chicago tied for third at 20 percent. At the other end of the spectrum, Seattle drafted no players with character issues, followed by Atlanta (2 percent), Baltimore (3) and Green Bay (6).
Asked about the conclusions of the study Thursday, NFL spokesman Greg Aiello quit laughing long enough to say, “Any comment should come from the individual clubs.”
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org and follow him at Twitter.com/JimLitke.
Nobody hires Bobby Valentine expecting peace and quiet.
That’s not the way he did business in the past, and as his latest run-in with struggling slugger Kevin Youkilis demonstrated, Bobby V. is not about to turn over a new leaf now.
Whether it meant needling opponents, umpires, his players or even his boss — Valentine rarely lets an opportunity pass without reminding everyone who is the smartest guy in the room. That explains why he was so welcome in TV studios and broadcast booths, but perhaps also why Valentine hadn’t managed in the big leagues for 10 years until the Red Sox gave him an office last winter. So if nothing else, a culture clash was inevitable.
Boston was coming off an historic collapse in the final month of last season, the last few days of which have been portrayed as a baseball production of “Animal House.” Terry Francona, who preceded Valentine in the job and won two World Series titles in his eight seasons there, conceded he’d left it to the players to police the clubhouse themselves and that by the end, a few devoted more time studying takeout menus than lineup cards. Even after leaving, Francona was reluctant to name names. That won’t happen with Valentine, who calls things as he sees ‘em the moment he sees ‘em.
So those who think he went hard after Youkilis just a few games into the season should remember when Valentine was managing the Mets and Todd Hundley, arguably his best bat, went into a slump in late August, 1997. Instead of extra batting practice for Hundley — or as in Youkilis’ case, a show of more emotion — Valentine prescribed an entire lifestyle makeover.
“Todd needs to change his ways,” Valentine said at the time. “He doesn’t sleep enough. He’s a nocturnal person and he needs to get more rest. He has a tough time getting to sleep after games.”
That dig — especially the part about Hundley being a “nocturnal person” — might be a little more personal than the usual motivational fare managers dole out. But what makes Valentine’s critiques even more unnerving is that unlike the diamond — where he was often several moves ahead of more-celebrated rivals like Tony LaRussa and Bobby Cox — even Valentine doesn’t always know where the endgame is off the field. He was fired abruptly after one very successful season with the Chiba Lotte Marines in Japan following a tiff with the general manager, then got fired during a second stint there in 2009 despite winning a pennant and a popularity contest against the club’s president.
Much of Valentine’s tenure with the Mets was no picnic, either, including a stunt in which then-GM Steve Phillips fired his coaching staff and practically dared Valentine to stay on. He did, but lost that job eventually, too.
So all those teammates who stood up for Youkilis, saying they’ve “got his back” and “that’s not the way we go about our stuff around here” would be wise to watch their own backs. Because that’s exactly the way Valentine goes about his “stuff.”
He might have singled out Youkilis to get his teammates rallying behind him, or planting the seeds for a trade. Either way, once his comment about Youkilis — “I don’t think he’s as physically or emotionally into the game as he has been in the past for some reason” — produced exactly the kind of manufactured controversy he specializes in, Valentine said he was simply answering a question. He then denied trying to motivate his third baseman, apologizing in one breath and then hinting he might not be done in the next.
“I’d be surprised if Kevin didn’t know I was totally behind him,” Valentine said. “We’re big boys. I think he’ll get it. If not, I’ll talk to him a lot more.”
No doubt. At this rate, unless Boston gets better in a hurry, Valentine will have talked to — or about — every one of Youkilis’ teammates by the All-Star break, apparently with the blessing of his higher-ups in the organization.
Not that it matters much. When he took the Red Sox deal, rather than focusing on why it took him so long to get back to the majors, Valentine said he was never “consumed with what I’m not doing. When I had a job, I wasn’t thinking about another job.”
What’s going to make this more interesting going forward is that the Red Sox, even coming off disappointing back-to-back seasons, are probably the most-talented team Valentine has ever been handed. They’ve made the playoffs six of the last nine seasons. If they fail to do so again, thinking about another job on a big-league bench is an option he won’t have to worry about.
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.or and follow him at Twitter.com/JimLitke.
AUGUSTA, Ga. (AP) — His dad was hoping for a baseball player. The baby boy who popped out was football-sized instead, so chubby and pink that Gerry Watson needed all of 10 seconds to nickname his newborn son “Bubba.” Instead of crashing into running backs, he grew up to overpower one of the most iconic golf courses in the game.
The newest Masters champion isn’t much for subtlety. Bubba Watson has never taken a lesson or watched his quirky southpaw swing on video, and he can barely putt. Watson arrived ranked 152nd out of 185 players on the PGA Tour and not surprising, he finished tied for 37th in that department here, needing 10 more strokes on Augusta National’s slick, contoured greens than Louis Oosthuizen, the guy he beat in a playoff.
But nobody anywhere hits it farther. Or so relishes the adventures that begin every time he hunts down one of those wayward drives in the trees — which is often.
Watson hadn’t even reached his tee shot deep in the woods on the right of the second playoff hole when he began charting a course toward the 10th green. He saw the crowd already outlining a tunnel back to the fairway, and a TV tower in the distance he figured would be directly between his ball and the flag. He was right.
“We had 135 front, which is the only number I was looking at. I think we had like 164 (yards to the) hole, give or take, in that area, maybe a little less,” Watson recalled in the interview room afterward. “And I hit 52 degree, my gap wedge, hooked it about 40 yards, hit about 15 feet off the ground until it got under the tree and then started rising.”
He looked out at the blank stares on the faces of the reporters in front of him.
“Pretty easy,” Watson said a moment later to laughter.
“Even though the tower was in my way, I didn’t want to ask if I get relief or anything, because it just set up for a perfect draw,” he added, “Well, a hook.”
Like the back nine that preceded the two-putt par that won it, just about everything else was a blur.
“I know I made bogey on 12 and then I birdied four holes in a row. Nervous on every shot, every putt. Went into a playoff. I got in these trees and hit a crazy shot that I saw in my head and somehow I’m here talking to you,” he said, “with a green jacket on.”
Watson began sobbing even as he pulled his ball out of the cup, then hugged his caddie, Ted Scott, before falling into mother Molly’s arms. The father Watson was named after died two years ago. His own newborn son, Caleb, adopted barely two weeks ago, and wife Angie were back home. He couldn’t wait to get there, save for one thing.
“I don’t want to change a diaper. Hopefully this will give me a week or two,” Watson said, then quickly added, “Maybe not, though.”
What he vowed to never change was his go-for-broke playing style, which his pals — among them former Milton (Fla.) High School teammates and current PGA pros Boo Weekley and Heath Slocum — have dubbed “Bubba golf.” That’s shorthand for hitting his azalea-pink driver as hard as he can, finding the ball, and then hitting it under, over or around all the obstacles that get in his way. He hits more greens in regulation than you’d think, mostly because the 6-foot-3 Watson needs a club or two less than his rivals to get where he’s going.
“Truthfully,” he explained, “it’s like Seve (Ballesteros) played. He hit shots that were unbelievable.
“And if you watch Phil Mickelson, he goes for broke. That’s why he wins so many times. That’s why he’s not afraid. So for me, that’s what I do. I just play golf. I attack. I always attack. I don’t like to go to the center of the greens. I want to hit the incredible shot. Who doesn’t?”
He had a front-row seat for one of the most amazing shots the Masters has ever seen, a 253-yard 4-iron by Oosthuizen, his playing partner throughout the day, that landed on the front of the par-5 second hole and rolled 80 feet before curling into the cup for a double-eagle. It was all Watson could do to keep himself from racing across the green to give the South African a high-five.
“Then I saw the leaderboard on the next hole,” he said, “and I thought, that double-eagle, he’s leading now.”
Being Bubba, it didn’t change a thing Watson did. He kept bombing away, firing at the pins from every crazy angle, just like he did in a losing playoff effort against Martin Kaymer in the 2010 PGA Championship.
“I mean, I can hit it straight. It’s just it’s easier to see curves, get the ball working towards the hole,” Watson said.
“I remember this good player, maybe great player, y’all, Jack Nicklaus. He said he wanted to aim at the center of the green and get the ball drifting towards the hole when he played Augusta. That’s what he did here. That’s the way I like to play all the golf courses, not just Augusta. …
“So I can do it. It’s just not something I really want to do. It’s easier in the trees,” Watson said, “like I did on the last playoff hole.”
It’s such an improbable recipe for success, that even though Watson finished up his college golf career at Georgia some 100 miles down the road, he couldn’t quite picture himself wearing the green jacket that fit snugly on his shoulders.
“I dreamed about it,” he said. “I just never made the putt.”
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org and follow him at Twitter.com/JimLitke.
AUGUSTA, Ga. (AP) — Tiger Woods apologized. Sort of.
He behaved better. Sort of.
None of it made much difference.
The peace of mind Woods used to know every time he stepped on a golf course is gone, if not for good, then certainly for the rest of this Masters. He will never get that back, at least not completely. It’s like Superman finding out kryptonite followed him to a new planet. Woods is never going to be worry free again.
Dozens of times, for more than two years running, Woods kept saying how close he is to putting it all together. He said it four more times in the span of four minutes after his round Saturday. A win at Bay Hill two weeks ago — his first in 30 months — suggested Woods finally might be. His play this week said the opposite. His spoiled-child routine a day earlier — a kicked club, a few mock swings in anger, a handful of curses — suggested he knew that, too.
“Am I conscious of it? No. Certainly I’m frustrated at times,” Woods said after shooting even-par 72, three strokes better than his round Friday — with only one slammed club.
“I apologize if I offend anybody by that, but I’ve hit some bad shots. It’s certainly frustrating at times not to hit the ball where you need to hit it. I certainly heard that people didn’t like me kicking the club.
“But I didn’t like it, either,” he added. “I hit it right in the bunker. Didn’t feel good on my toe, either.”
Ditto for his reputation.
Grace was never Woods’ strongest suit. Ambition was, and the gulf between what he wants and what he has to settle for has likely never been wider. When he returned to golf at the Masters in 2010, a few months after that fateful post-Thanksgiving slalom down the driveway of his Florida mansion, he vowed to respect the game. Back then, Woods had no idea it was going to be this hard.
“All this club dropping all the time, he seems disgusted,” said Hank Haney, his former coach, whose recent book “The Big Miss” has kicked up a stir.
“I’m not there watching his shots, and he did some of that when I had him. But it seems to me he’s doing it a lot more now. Still, the notion that he should just go out and play, or have fun, or somehow just play like he used to, is nonsense. I hear people say it all the time, in things I read, or on TV, and it’s just total nonsense.
“He’s always been mechanical. He was always thinking about his swing, about his short game, about one adjustment or another he was convinced would make a difference. With a lot of touring pros, it’s a defensive mechanism. They can’t let too many doubts creep in. But there’s a big difference between a textbook swing and one you can take to the golf course.
“And for some reason, he can’t make that transfer. … The strange thing is that before this tournament, he was on a run of pretty good results. He’s still going to win a lot of tournaments,” Haney said finally, “but probably not as many as he used to.”
Woods is at 3 over, 12 shots off the lead, farther behind than he’s ever been at the Masters. Late into the night Friday, using a spotlight provided by the club, Woods went to the practice range and pounded shot after shot into the darkness. His coach, Sean Foley, crouched alongside and tried to track the flight of the ball.
Despite the extra work, less than 24 hours later, Woods found himself another four strokes in arrears. Asked whether another practice session was on his schedule, Woods replied, “I’m a little tired. Last night took a little bit out of me and certainly (so did) trying to put everything I possibly had into this round to get it back. I’m going to go back and go lift, work out and get ready for tomorrow.”
Someone asked Woods what he would need Sunday to get back into the tournament, recalling that just a few weeks ago, when the arrow on his game was pointing up, he shot a 62 in the final round of the Honda Classic to finish in a tie for second.
“That would be nice,” Woods replied, almost wistfully. “I don’t know. I don’t know what the score is going to be because it’s going to be dependent, obviously, on what these guys do today. If somebody shoots 4 or 5 under par and they’re up there in the lead, it’s going to be tough to go get ‘em. But anything can happen. That’s the thing.
“You can be 4, 5, 6 back going into the back nine and still win the golf tournament. Anything,” he said, “can happen.”
With that, Woods turned and headed for the parking lot, where he climbed behind the wheel of a black Mercedes SUV and headed for the exit. If he really believed he could still conjure up some of the old Masters magic, the mournful look on his face said otherwise, calling to mind a line from an old blues standard that goes, “I might be better, but I’ll never be well.”
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org and follow him at Twitter.com/JimLitke.
AUGUSTA, Ga. (AP) — Don’t say he’s back.
Or that’s he’s not.
Tiger Woods could play Augusta National in his sleep, in a daze, in a blizzard or with a ball and chain cuffed at his ankle and still get around in a respectable number of strokes. See where he is at close of light Sunday. Then we’ll talk.
A day before the opening round, Woods tweeted, “Feeling ready,” except he didn’t play as if he was. Not completely, anyway. He sprayed practice shots all over the range, then pulled his first tee shot into a stand of trees on the left, a bad habit that plagued him most of the day. He scrambled from the pine straw off the first fairway, then holed from 8 feet for a one-putt par, another habit that kept the round from tipping over into disarray.
Say this much for Woods: He’s rarely boring. At No. 9, he pulled his drive so far to the left that it wound up in the walkway between the ninth and first holes. A kid got to the ball first, as it rolled to a stop, bent over and looked at the logo. Then he pulled his father in the opposite direction just before a crowd of fans surged toward the errant drive and staked out a spot to watch.
The little guy might have been the only person on the grounds who didn’t seem much interested. But Woods salvaged par from there and by the end, his seven one-putts offset the six fairways Woods missed with his driver, as well as the two drops he took because of unplayable lies. That left him effectively stuck in neutral, at even-par 72.
“I just felt my way around today, I really grinded, stayed very present. And you know,” Woods said, “I know how to play this golf course. I think it’s just understanding what I need to do.”
He won two weeks ago at Bay Hill — his first real tournament in 30 months — and arrived here saying, “Everything is headed in the right direction at the right time.” That suggested the remodeling of his swing under his latest coach, Sean Foley, was nearly complete. Not so fast. Turns out some of the changes Woods employed under his previous coach, Hank Haney, managed to creep back into his game and get in the way Thursday.
“Same old motor patterns,” Woods said, referring to his problems off the tee. “Now I’m struggling with it all the way around with all the clubs.
“The Hank backswing,” he added a moment later, “with the new downswing.”
But in the moment after that, Woods lauded himself for his “commitment to each and every shot, what I was doing, my alignment, my setup, everything was something that I’m excited about.”
You could listen to Woods talk all day and not know what to believe. In his recent book, “The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods,” Haney tells the story of how Woods often said one thing for public consumption after a round and then called the coach and laid out the things he felt a need to work on. They were rarely the same things.
Two things are not in dispute.
The first is that Woods knows how to play here, no matter which swing, or swings, he’s wrestling with. He’s won the Masters four times, never finished worse than 22nd as a professional and tied for fourth the last two years, the post-scandal phase of his career. The second is that golf is still a game played mostly between the ears and only Woods knows what’s going on in that space. He’s also the only one who knows which, if any, of the various personalities he’s tried on in public since that fateful spin down the driveway of his Florida mansion in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving, 2009, is the real Woods.
The rest of us are left to try to divine that from the way Woods has played golf. The results have been middling at best, and the inconsistency suggests that just like this latest swing, Woods’ psyche is still very much a work in progress. He was at his best when he was one of the most cold-blooded competitors on the planet, and we haven’t seen that person since he dusted off Rocco Mediate in a playoff with one good leg to win the 2008 U.S. Open.
No one knows, perhaps not even Woods, whether that guy still exists. Barring a missed cut, all of us could have the chance to find out on the back nine on Sunday, when the kids who’ve never seen him in that mode and the contemporaries who wonder where that Woods went start throwing off birdies and wait to see how he replies.
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org and follow him at Twitter.com/JimLitke.
AUGUSTA, Ga. (AP) — Don’t say he’s back.
Or that’s he’s not.
Tiger Woods could play Augusta National in his sleep, in a daze, in a blizzard or with a ball and chain cuffed at his ankle and still get around in a respectable number of strokes. See where he is at close of light Sunday. Then we’ll talk.
A day before the opening round, Woods tweeted, “I’m ready,” except he wasn’t. Not completely, anyway. He sprayed practice shots all over the range, then pulled his first tee shot into a stand of trees on the left, a bad habit that plagued him most of the day. He scrambled from the pine straw off the first fairway, then holed from 8 feet for a one-putt par, another habit that kept the round from tipping over into disarray.
Say this much for Woods: He’s rarely boring. At No. 9, he pulled his drive so far to the left that it wound up in the walkway between the ninth and first holes. A kid got to the ball first, as it rolled to a stop, bent over and looked at the logo. Then he pulled his father in the opposite direction just before a crowd of fans surged toward the errant drive and staked out a spot to watch.
The little guy might have been the only person on the grounds who didn’t seem much interested. But Woods salvaged par from there and by the end, his seven one-putts offset the six fairways Woods missed with his driver, as well as the two drops he took because of unplayable lies. That left him effectively stuck in neutral, at even-par 72.
“I just felt my way around today, I really grinded, stayed very present. And you know,” Woods said, “I know how to play this golf course. I think it’s just understanding what I need to do.”
He won two weeks ago at Bay Hill — his first real tournament in 30 months — and arrived here saying, “Everything is headed in the right direction at the right time.” That suggested the remodeling of his swing under his latest coach, Sean Foley, was nearly complete. Not so fast. Turns out some of the changes Woods employed under his previous coach, Hank Haney, managed to creep back into his game and get in the way Thursday.
“Same old motor patterns,” Woods said, referring to his problems off the tee. “Now I’m struggling with it all the way around with all the clubs.
“The Hank backswing,” he added a moment later, “with the new downswing.”
But in the moment after that, Woods lauded himself for his “commitment to each and every shot, what I was doing, my alignment, my setup, everything was something that I’m excited about.”
You could listen to Woods talk all day and not know what to believe. In his recent book, “The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods,” Haney tells the story of how Woods often said one thing for public consumption after a round and then called the coach and laid out the things he felt a need to work on. They were rarely the same things.
Two things are not in dispute.
The first is that Woods knows how to play here, no matter which swing, or swings, he’s wrestling with. He’s won the Masters four times, never finished worse than 22nd as a professional and tied for fourth the last two years, the post-scandal phase of his career. The second is that golf is still a game played mostly between the ears and only Woods knows what’s going on in that space. He’s also the only one who knows which, if any, of the various personalities he’s tried on in public since that fateful spin down the driveway of his Florida mansion in the early morning hours of Thanksgiving, 2009, is the real Woods.
The rest of us are left to try to divine that from the way Woods has played golf. The results have been middling at best, and the inconsistency suggests that just like this latest swing, Woods’ psyche is still very much a work in progress. He was at his best when he was one of the most cold-blooded competitors on the planet, and we haven’t seen that person since he dusted off Rocco Mediate in a playoff with one good leg to win the 2008 U.S. Open.
No one knows, perhaps not even Woods, whether that guy still exists. Barring a missed cut, all of us could have the chance to find out on the back nine on Sunday, when the kids who’ve never seen him in that mode and the contemporaries who wonder where that Woods went start throwing off birdies and wait to see how he replies.
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org and follow him at Twitter.com/JimLitke.
Charl Schwartzel, right, of South Africa, helps Bubba Watson put on the green jacket after winning the Masters golf tournament following a sudden death playoff on the 10th hole Sunday, April 8, 2012, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)(Credit: David J. Phillip) 
Tiger Woods waits to putt on the third green during the third round of the Masters golf tournament Saturday, April 7, 2012, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)(Credit: Charlie Riedel) 
Tiger Woods reacts as he misses a birdie on the second green during the first round the Masters golf tournament Thursday, April 5, 2012, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)(Credit: David J. Phillip) 