Score!
CAR assists sports writers
By Stan Dorsey NICAR staff
When most people think of sports, the first thing that comes to mind is numbers.
Whether it be the spiraling salaries of superstar athletes or the plummeting success rate of your favorite team, virtually all sports are mired in a swirling eddy of points, polls and percentages.
Why then, when most reporters think of sports, do they not think of CAR? It looks like a match made in heaven, but few sports writers take advantage of computer-assisted reporting.
Tom Witosky of the Des Moines Register knows this is true. Just a few years back, he was only an occasional practitioner of CAR, but now Witosky uses tools such as Quattro Pro and Paradox virtually every week to help him give readers insight past the ordinary numbers they are used to seeing in their daily sports pages.
One of the main obstacles, Witosky said, is technophobia. "I think it is lack of knowledge and fear," he said. "People just are a bit scared to jump into the water."
In addition, sports reporters over the years have grown increasingly dependent on the preselected and calculated statistics provided to them by sports information departments. While easing deadline pressure, it also may lead to complacency on the part of the reporter.
"Who is to say that all the information in the releases is accurate? Sports information departments will often just highlight numbers that they want you to see," said Witosky, who co-led a panel on sports and CAR at the NashCAR seminar in Nashville, Tenn. "Besides, if you were a government reporter, would you necessarily rely on a press release from the governor's office on earnings or on some financial matters? I have learned to not necessarily trust the numbers I get."
Witosky said he looks at the releases, but treats them with a grain of salt.
Instead, Witosky often compiles his own numbers and uses a database manager to unveil relationships that aren't evident in the vanilla reports handed out by SIDs.
He does this every week with the Iowa State and University of Iowa football teams.
Using the play-by-play sheets distributed by SIDs after games, Witosky enters each play into a spreadsheet program and creates fields for the quarter, down, yards to go, possession, field position, play result, and time of game.
Witosky said entering play-by-play is one of the easiest projects for beginning CAR reporters in that it involves simple data entry and requires no database requests. Plus, it can produce useful information every day.
He then plugs the numbers into a database manager such as Paradox and searches for trends he may not otherwise see: production by quarter or by down, tendencies of a certain player, or play calling habits of a coach.
"These are exactly the type of calculations coaches do every week," Witosky said. "Why shouldn't the reporters who cover them do the same?"
However, many off-the-field aspects of sports also lend themselves to CAR.
That is what Doug Bedell of the Dallas Morning News found when he decided to investigate accusations of fraud made by a Texas A&M University basketball player.
Using phone records obtained from the university on nine-track tape, Bedell was able to look at the calling patterns of certain coaches on the A&M staff and found that an unusually high number of calls were being made to a certain number in New York. The number, it turned out, was that of a talent scout who had been working illegally with coaches on the staff to recruit a player who was playing for Syracuse at the time.
When the player finally came forth and admitted his involvement with the agent, the Morning News had a story on the incriminating phone records in the next day's paper.
Obtaining the records wasn't easy, Bedell said, but when the school tried to give him the run-around, simply invoked the state's Open Records Law. The law, in existence in all states, classifies as public record anything toward which taxpayers' dollars are contributed. The calling card calls qualified, and the university relented.
It isn't always that easy, of course.
Just recently, Bedell tried to obtain records from the University of Nebraska and, though officials granted him access to the files, they told him he could only see them in paper form and that he would have to travel to Lincoln, Neb., and bring his own photocopier.
"That's fully within the law," Bedell said. "That's what they can do to you if they want to be nasty about it."
Still, Bedell said, it is usually worth the trouble, even if you aren't looking for anything specific in the records. Red flags such as simultaneously used calling card numbers or a high volume of calls to a particular out-of-state number can often indicate trouble.
During one such blind search, Bedell stumbled upon a coach's calling card that had far more calls than any other on the staff. The reason, he found, was that the card had been posted in the locker room of University of Texas basketball team for use by its players.
"I guess it was supposed to be like a perk," Bedell said.
But for all the corruption that goes on at the collegiate and professional levels, high schools are by no means immune from questionable activities.
Mark Skertic had never done a sports story before, but, as an education reporter at the Cincinnati Enquirer, he had plenty of CAR experience. That made him the perfect cross-over candidate when the paper decided to act on a tip and look into discrepancies in reported high-school enrollment figures.
In Ohio, as in most states, schools' athletic teams are placed in a division based on enrollment figures for ninth, 10th and 11th grades. In October of each year, school officials report one figure to the state to help determine funding; they also report a number to the Ohio High School Athletic Association for athletic division placement.
What Skertic found, after using Quattro Pro to look at five years worth of enrollment figures from both the state and the OHSAA, was that the figures often did not match.
"In some cases, there are accusations schools are juicing up the number they give to the state to boost their funding subsidy," Skertic said. "In others, the athletic numbers are lowballed to put a school in a smaller division where, presumably, they might be a powerhouse."
While Skertic said some of the inconsistencies turned out to be data entry mistakes at the school or state level, his story disturbed state officials enough that they decided to launch several internal audits and search for a better way to collect the information.
Stories like these help bring accountability to a sports world that often thrives on two things: One, reporters' fear of numbers and technology and their subsequent unwillingness to probe issues. And two, the complacency spawned by SIDs who consistently produce boring, meaningless numbers just to keep reporters happy, and keep themselves free from scrutiny.
Stan Dorsey can be reached at (573) 882-0684, or send e-mail to stan@nicar.org