Don't think I'm going out on a limb here in saying this wasn't the headline Mid-American Conference officials were hoping for when the MAC got profiled by The Wall Street Journal: “The Little Conference That Can't”The piece focuses on how no team from the MAC has won an NCAA championship since 1965, when Western Michigan won a title in men's cross country. (Bowling Green won a hockey championship, but hockey is not a MAC sport, so that doesn't count to The Journal.)
“The MAC's dozen full-time members … are in the middle of a dry spell that nobody can explain,” The Journal says. “While the conference's members have had some glorious moments in the past, and seemed on the verge of becoming a real player among the bigger, richer conferences, the bottom has fallen out. Now, even winning the occasional football bowl game or first-round NCAA men's basketball tournament matchup is becoming a mighty chore.”
The MAC's new commissioner, Jon Steinbrecher, hasn't figured out the problem.
"I don't have a great answer for you," he tells The Journal. "I haven't been here long enough to know. But it's something we talk about. It's something that I'm spending a lot of time talking about with our athletic directors, trying to identify what we can do better."
The Journal says the MAC's “declining profile” is starting to hurt even its best teams.
"I'll use this year as an example," says Kent State men's basketball coach Geno Ford. "You don't even see our team listed on the bubble anywhere, yet our RPI is 42, which is way higher than almost any team people list on the bubble."
Steady as she goes
Republican Rob Portman continues to hold a lead in his bid to win the U.S. Senate seat now held by George Voinovich.
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters in the state finds Mr. Portman leading Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher 44%-39%, almost identical to his lead last month. Mr. Portman holds a 43%-37% lead over the other possible Democratic candidate, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.
Nearly 60% of Ohio voters “say it would be better for the country if most congressional incumbents were defeated in November,” according to Rasmussen, while just 21% say it would be better if most incumbents were re-elected.
On the hot-button health care reform plan slogging its way through Congress, 44% of Ohioans are in favor but 54% are opposed.
The politics of purity
Rep. Dennis Kucinich is starting to take more heat from the left for his opposition to health care reform. He's willing to vote with Republicans because the legislation isn't sufficiently liberal for his liking.
The Washington Monthly offers its critique here, concluding, "Fortunately for all of us, lawmakers from those eras saw a value in establishing a strong foundation and then building on it in future years. In other words, fortunately for all of us, Social Security and Medicare weren't dependent on lawmakers like Dennis Kucinich."
And Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas warned on Keith Olberman's MSNBC show last night that if Rep. Kucinich plays a role in killing health care reform, a Democratic primary challenger would almost certainly await him in the next election.
Signs of the times
Research conducted in Cleveland is used in this defense of digital billboards against the charge that they distract drivers and cause accidents.
Nancy Fletcher, president and CEO of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, responds in a letter to The New York Times to the newspaper's story that lumps digital billboards with texting and use of smartphones as dangers on the road.
“The question of whether to regulate and allow digital billboards has been asked and answered in dozens of states. The answer has been yes in virtually every case,” Ms. Fletcher writes. She says The Times “did not address the extensive crash data studies conducted where digital billboards have been installed. Analyses of traffic accidents in Cleveland, Rochester, Minn., and Albuquerque have shown there to be no relationship between traffic accidents and digital billboards. Similar studies by state police and transportation departments have found similar results.”
Eyes on the prize
Another Plain Dealer columnist is in line to win a Pulitzer Prize, according to this column on media watchdog site Media Matters for America.
Joe Strupp, former senior editor of Editor & Publisher, handicaps the coming Pulitzers and writes, “In commentary, do not be surprised if Regina Brett of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, a finalist the last two years, is a winner.”
PD columnist Connie Schultz won a Pulitzer for commentary in 2005.
Masters of all they survey
Scott Shane, the A. Malachi Mixon III Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University, has a strong piece in Small Business Trends that explains what we can and can't learn from monthly optimism surveys from organizations such as the National Federation of Independent Businesses.
“If the optimism and pessimism of all of these business owners moved in lock step over time, the tendency to focus on the average of all of them wouldn't be a big deal,” he writes. “Whether optimism was high or low would pretty much be the same for everyone. But when the levels of optimism of different groups don't all move in the same way over time (they aren't that highly correlated), then knowing the average but not what's happening with the different groups hides important information.”
Mr. Shane's nuanced essay concludes there's nothing wrong with the surveys and that they “provide us with useful information about what's going with small business owners' thinking on an up-to-date basis.”
But he adds, “We just need to be cautious about how we use them. We can't assume that the patterns over time are going to be the same for both surveys, between questions on each survey, or between different groups of respondents to the surveys.”
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