Category Archives: Commentary

Walk a mile in my LCD

Digital images frustrate me.

I suppose it might seem odd for me, a photographer with two digital cameras, to make a statement like that; these days, I add several hundred new images a week to the Burrill Strong Photography website. So I should clarify: I’m frustrated not at my images, but at the monitors displaying my images.

The display of digital images is one of the unique complications of digital photography. Printed images are simple and consistent: you can show that picture to any number of people, and the print quality, colors and sharpness will not vary. The hundredth person will see the same picture the first person saw; there will be no unexpected changes.

Unfortunately, an image on the internet does not have the same assurance of consistency; depending on the monitor used to display an image, certain aspects of that image can vary — often slightly, but occasionally significantly. When an image is uploaded for viewing on the internet, the image’s creator is forced to accept this variance as a cost of easy distribution.

For snapshots, the monitor problem is scarcely relevant; the details of color accuracy and proper exposure are not high considerations in the realm of point and shoot memories. If the content is recognizable, the image is ready for distribution.

For those in the business of photography, it is not quite that simple. Since I am in that business, I’m not just tossing images around the internet to share memories; I’m producing images for which I expect customers to give me actual money, so I have to produce images that customers will see as being worth actual money. And that means paying attention to those details of color accuracy and proper exposure (among other things) so that the printed images I sell will be worth buying.

To aid my pursuit of images worth actual money, I made a point to purchase a monitor known to be good for photo work; when I process images using that monitor, I can be confident that the images I see on the monitor will not surprise me by being different when I print them. I know I don’t have to compensate for my monitor’s shortcomings, and that confidence makes my task easier.

The problem begins when I put my images online for public viewing. I know I can trust my monitor, but I also know that I can’t trust most of the monitors that will be displaying my images; higher-end monitors — like the Apple Cinema line — cost more than the average Best Buy offering, and most people don’t have a reason to spend that extra money on a monitor.

On one hand, I can’t say I blame the consumers who buy the $200 19″ LCD monitors. It’s an LCD, it’s 19 inches, and it’s $200; that is an attractive set of features in one place. And really, it would be impossible for me to convince those consumers to spend three times as much on a monitor they’ll be using only for basic web surfing and word processing. Normal everyday web surfing is hardly detail-critical work, and $200 is much more appealing than $600.

On the other hand, for me as a photographer who makes an effort to produce quality images, it’s frustrating to have to trust those images to the average — or worse — monitors used by those who view my work online. Those images will look good enough, but the quality that would be apparent on a good monitor or in print won’t show as it should on a cheap monitor.

By itself, that wouldn’t even be so bad. If I could count on the users of subpar monitors to judge images within the context of their monitors, the preponderance of those monitors wouldn’t be such a significant concern; in a perfect world, I could expect a general understanding that these monitors aren’t doing the images any favors.

But I can’t expect that sort of understanding from everyone, so I’m left knowing that some potential customers, after viewing my images on a low-quality monitor, might decide the images are not worth the money. And if their monitors’ shortcomings had an effect on their decisions, it’s frustrating for me because that’s something over which I have absolutely no control. I can make images that look good on quality monitors and in print, but I can’t make cheap monitors better.

Fortunately, I suspect there aren’t hordes of people who let their cheap monitors affect their decisions to a significant degree, so I don’t need to spend my days fretting about the business these monitors might cost me. But it is still in the back of my mind, so, as a photographer, let me make this request: either buy a good monitor or remember that you didn’t buy a good monitor — and remember that the images you see will look better in print than they do on that monitor.

(More reading: an explanation of the different types of LCD panels.)

Happy fun propaganda

The last few years have seen a spate of animated animal movies. For me, the trend has grown a bit stale; after seeing a few pleasant but somewhat throwaway movies like Madagascar and avoiding a few others like Over the Hedge, I was ready for Hollywood to find something different. Now, after recently seeing Happy Feet, one of the last few trendy animal movies, I’m even more ready.

Happy Feet was advertised as an upbeat movie featuring dancing penguins and plenty of popular music; even the current movie description on the Netflix envelopes sells it as just a pleasant diversion. If you judged the movie based on its own advertising descriptions, you’d think it was just another movie making its living on cute animals and pop culture.

Sadly, that’s not the full story; instead of being a pleasant diversion, Happy Feet is an extraordinarily heavy-handed political movie. To a marginally lesser degree, it is Michael Moore and Al Gore wrapped in cute animation and humor.

The story starts out innocently enough, with a curious civilization in which penguins attract mates by singing catchy songs direct from the top-40 charts. (Oddly enough, sometimes the performances involve backup singers; this leads me to wonder about the marriageability of the backup singers. Do they find other backup singers, or are they lifelong singles? This is never addressed.) When two penguins can’t resist one another’s song, matchmaker matchmaker has made them a match.

But all is not happy in the singing society. In a tragic development, one of the penguins is born with a Fran Drescher singing voice and Michael Flatley feet: his singing could derail a freight train, but his dancing could charm that train right back onto the tracks. And if you don’t believe it, just wait: a song cue is sure to be right around the corner.

This tuxedoed Savion Glover is, of course, born into a society that values its members for their vocal cords, so he is mocked and shunned. Thanks to his consequent separation from that society, he has many adventures and meets new and highly comedic friends, because an animated character without comedic sidekicks might as well not exist at all. He does blah blah blah and learns blah blah blah and eventually manages to blah blah blah. (The blah blah blahs are representative of standard plot points and movie lessons. Also, feel free to insert a few ha ha ha’s for Robin Williams, who produces roughly 97% of the movie’s sparse humor. )

Anyway, this isn’t a movie synopsis site, so let’s get back to the point.

Politically, the first part of the movie is quite innocuous; there is little hint of the skull-cracking baseball bat of a message to be unleashed later. Unfortunately, it’s also fairly boring. It starts a bit slowly, and since most of the humor is produced by characters not introduced until after the waddling Fred Astaire’s societal exodus, it feels even slower. By the time the humor is introduced and the story has escaped the doldrums, the baseball bat has started to gain momentum.

In the grand tradition of Al Gore and The Day After Tomorrow, the movie’s baseball bat is the environment. But surprisingly, it doesn’t even mention global warming. No, this bat is much more specific: it is the food supply of the penguins. It seems the Penguin Idols are running out of fish to eat.

The penguin elders are old crotchety men who stubbornly cling to the belief that some great mystic being is reducing their supply of fish. During his adventures, our hero manages to find a much more reasonable, less mystical explanation for the crisis: aliens are stealing the fish. (Except when he says “aliens,” he means “humans”; he just doesn’t know it.) So, in a noble effort to save the penguins that don’t watch Dancing With The Stars, he sets out not just to prove his theory, but to convince the aliens to stop killing his fellow formal wear.

The last ten or fifteen minutes of the movie are the most heavy-handed scenes of the movie; unsurprisingly, they also are the most absurd. He ends up in a zoo, and his dancing prompts them to let him go so they can follow him to Tuxedo Junction. He convinces his now-sympathetic fellow penguins to dance for the aliens, and the footage of the Penguin of the Dance performance prompts massive worldwide debate, shown as a quick series of black-and-white cut scenes depicting political arguments and large-scale protests. Naturally, it results in a happy ending: the fishing is reduced, and the penguins revel in a wealth of seafood.

Ultimately, my biggest problem with Happy Feet was not that it contained an obvious message, but that it didn’t bother to be up front about its message. The Day After Tomorrow is a heavy-handed message movie, but that’s easy to see without even opening the DVD case; Happy Feet is a heavy-handed message movie wrapped in a thin candy-coated shell, but the marketing focuses on the shell and pays little or no attention to the message. Without a revelation from someone who took the time to discover that defining characteristic of the movie, there’s no warning of the anvil the movie is waiting to drop on its viewers’ heads. That angers me.

And I want my two hours back.

Generally speaking

“Democrats want to…”

“Republicans won’t…”

“Conservatives can’t…”

“Liberals believe…”

“Christians think…”

Go ahead: fill in the blanks. You won’t be alone. Countless times each day, someone fills in those blanks, and many more. One big statement — accusation or applause — is painted on one big label, and that statement is asserted to be true for every person who might don that label.

Why not? They’re easy assertions to make if you can believe that every big label covers a monolith, a slice of the population that thinks, believes and acts the same. And since so many people are willing to use those broad brushes, you’re more likely to be met with equally easy assertions than you are to be challenged to think on a smaller scale.

Democrats want to … destroy the foundations of America? Republicans won’t … pull their heads out of the sand?

I realize this generalization is necessary to some degree; to cover the variety contained in any one large group would require a prohibitive amount of time and effort. The range of specific beliefs within the “Christian” label, the range of specific ideals within the “Liberal” label and the range of specific opinions within the “Republican” label are far too large to be easily listed. So for the sake of convenience and continued dialogue, a world of pundits — both credentialed and self-appointed — speaks generally, perhaps with the assumption that everyone remembers the details within the broad strokes.

But do we?

I am not sure I can honestly say I am consistently careful to avoid the traps of the big labels; even if I am, it would be hypocritical for me to produce my own broad brush to assert that few consider the details. That is not my intention; There are plenty of people who use the larger labels as a tool of necessary convenience rather than a shortcut or a crutch.

Unfortunately, those people are not as entertaining as the easy label traders, so they don’t attract such vociferous fans, nor are they as easily parroted. Broad labels with underlying complexity become shallow labels with overarching simplicity, making it easy to forget that allies can have some differing opinions — and enemies can have some common opinions.

And if you disagree with this post … well, you’re whatever label you most dislike. So there.

Photo of the Variable Time Period, vol. 85

Today my parents and I visited the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo. It is a wonderful place full of history, both inanimate — the airplanes — and animate: many of the musem volunteers are military veterans.

We were blessed to have a conversation with a man named Larry Jenkins, a World War II veteran who was shot down over Austria and who spent time in a German prison camp. He was very friendly and very willing to speak of his experiences in the war, and it was very moving to hear the stories directly from Jenkins.

In addition, he had made the effort to maintain written accounts of his war experiences (even while he was in the prison camp!), and he had provided those accounts to the Air Zoo. His words, along with the others the Air Zoo has accumulated, are necessary remembrances in a modern world so eager to move forward without taking much time to look back. Few can truly understand Jenkins’ experiences, but all should take care to ensure that those experiences are not forgotten.

A vanishing generation (26 March 2007).

See the full gallery.

Spring Silliness in Shorts and Sneakers

For me, watching the NCAA basketball tournament is like watching the Lions: it’s occasionally frustrating, often inexplicable … and yet it draws me like Florida draws whiny football coaches. Okay, maybe not quite that much, but I am a sports fan. (Besides, I’m in a pool.)

Anyway, a few thoughts from the first few rounds of this year’s tournament:

  • Obviously, CBS doesn’t highlight attendance deficits, but they also can’t always hide the empty seats. Even into the third round, I have been a bit surprised at the number of empty lower bowl seats. Last night, I had no problem spotting blocks of empty seats at the Ohio State/Tennessee game; tonight I’m seeing them at the Florida/Butler game. When do the games start drawing capacity crowds?
  • At the beginning of the year, Ohio State freshman Greg Oden was hyped as one of the best player in the nation. I have a question for the more basketball-minded among us: is he really an elite player? The two times I’ve watched him play, he’s gotten in early foul trouble and played limited minutes, and his team won without him. For his sake, I hope those were isolated incidents.
  • More generally, I dislike the offensive bias in basketball. Actually, I’m not too fond of it in most sports, but I’m watching basketball right now, so it’s on my mind. Most basketball fouls are a mystery to me anyway, but it bothers me to no end that defensive players are whistled for seemingly pedestrian bumps while offensive players are given the liberty of backing into a defender and creating space for a shot near the basket. Maybe there’s something I’m missing (likely), but it irks me nonetheless.

Well, aren’t we just special!

It seems like it’s always playoff time in one sport or another, and it seems like playoffs excel at prompting suggestions for improvements. Consider this one more voice in the cacophony.

In most of the civilized world — and the United States, too! — playoffs consist of only a certain number of teams eliminating each other until one team is left. Some systems, like the NFL playoffs and the NCAA basketball tournament, are single-elimination; others, like the NBA or NHL playoffs, consist of multiple series (typically 5- or 7-game series). But all have some standard of entry.

Well, almost all.

The Michigan High School Athletic Association (MHSAA) basketball playoffs began last week. These playoffs are curious for several reasons, the most prominent of which is the standard of entry. Simply put, there is no standard.

In Michigan, every basketball team gains entry to the playoffs, regardless of record or conference standing. Teams whose only consistency was in losing march into the postseason alongside teams that feasted on those losing teams in the regular season. And to add to the curiosity, thanks to the random seeding at the district level, there’s no telling who will be given a first-round bye.

This makes for some odd playoff situations. Chelsea finished the regular season 19-1; the Bulldogs were considered not just the top team in the area, but among the top 10 in the state. But when the district pairings were released, Chelsea did not have a first-round bye. Who did receive a first-round bye? Erie Mason, a team that finished the regular season 2-18. And only two other teams in the district had winning records (Ida and Milan, both at 12-8); the remaining two, Brooklyn Columbia Central and Carleton Airport, were well below .500 at 5-15 and 1-19.

This also makes for humiliating playoff situations. After easily dispatching with Milan in the first round, 63-36, Chelsea moved on to face Erie Mason; as everyone expected, Chelsea won. But they didn’t just win; they won in a blowout, 85-26. Even more than the Milan game, the outcome was never in doubt; for Chelsea, it was simply a practice cleverly packaged as meaningful competition. That continued in the district finals, as Chelsea coasted to a 77-36 victory over Carleton Airport.

Chelsea’s wasn’t the only district featuring losing teams; every district included at least one lowly team. One class C district featured four losing teams: Greenhills (0-19), Inkster (5-14), Riverview Gabriel Richard (4-16) and Romulus Summit Academy (4-16); one class A district featured six losing teams: Adrian (7-13), Lincoln (7-13), Monroe (9-11), Saline (5-15), Tecumseh (6-14) and Temperance Bedford (8-12). There wasn’t room for a winning team.

Districts such as the sub-.500 group cause some to call for coherent organization — which means seeding — at the district level, but this is not a solution; seeding could have one of two effects, depending on its implementation: it could evenly distribute the winning and losing teams, or it could more evenly match teams in the first round.

The former would provide more expedient elimination of the losing teams. With few exceptions, the winning teams would tear through their considerably weaker opponents, much like Chelsea’s Trogdor-like destruction of its weak district; while this might provide a few more interesting second-round games, it would cancel out its potential benefits by guaranteeing too many cakewalks in the first round. This option may improve the second round to some degree, but in most cases, it would do little to improve the first round.

The latter may introduce some interest into the first round by providing more even matchups, but it is difficult to ignore the lowly records of the worst teams in the tournament. A 2-18 team may be evenly matched with a 1-19 team, but the quality of basketball likely will be middling at best. And no matter the winners of those games, they still would be walking from their even matchups into games against far superior opponents, at which point a vast majority of the losing teams would suffer the nearly-inevitable lopsided loss. This option would offer a more realistic — but only marginally meaningful — victory to more losing teams; it would also more quickly eliminate more winning teams. Fortunately, this option also is unlikely.

This playoff situation is not comparable to the NCAA basketball tournament. Unlike their counterparts in the MHSAA basketball playoffs, even the lowest seeds in the NCAA tournament have exhibited some ability to win games. The NCAA has postseason qualification standards; in basketball, the MHSAA does not. The lowest NCAA seeds gain entry through merit; the lowest MHSAA teams gain entry simply by existing.

Ultimately, the idea of guaranteeing even the most miserable team a playoff berth — typically a reward for some sort of regular-season success — is bad for everyone. For the good teams, it gives them not a game, but an unnecessary scrimmage; for the bad teams, it gives them hopeless losses; for the fans, it provides little reason to travel — in Chelsea’s case, a 40-minute trip for its three district games — to watch a blowout. For the most significant improvement, this system requires more than simple reorganization; it requires standards. Any standards.

Football, an equally popular high school sport, recently instituted its own playoff standards. Teams playing nine-game schedules must win six games to qualify; teams playing eight-game schedules must win five games. If there aren’t enough qualifying teams to fill the 256-team field, near-qualifying teams — like Chelsea’s 5-4 playoff team from 2005 — complete the field. As with any system, there are some complications, but in general, it’s easy enough to understand: if you win enough games, you’ll make the playoffs; if you don’t, you won’t.

The specifics of any potential basketball standards would be debated — how many wins is enough? How many teams in the field? How many rounds? — but that would be a welcome debate. It would be the first step in changing a playoff system that suffers because it simply can’t say no.

I want you not to want me; I need you not to need me.

I am in captivity.  Seriously.

My email program, my email server, my web browser and even my blog software are holding me captive.  They are making every effort to cruelly prevent me from experiencing the full and glorious breadth of the internet experience.

Fortunately, they can’t stop it all.  Despite their tireless attempts to block certain elements, they are not perfect.  A few representatives trickle into my world, and they bring with them tales of the grandeur beyond my computer.  I see only a small slice of that abundant life, but what I do see shows me what I’m missing.

It shows me that the internet is teeming with brand-name medicines for a fraction of the price, penny stocks on the verge of exploding and cheap OEM software for everyone.  Viagra, Valium, Zithromax, Ambien and Xanax are there for the taking; CTCX, FBVG, MISJ and PGCH are just waiting to skyrocket as soon as I buy; Windows XP Professional, Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Microsoft Office are available at deep discount.

And Thunderbird, Spam Assassin, Firefox and WordPress — the humorless, joy-squelching gatekeepers of my digital domain — labor to block from my view the news of such endless opportunities?  I must gather the strength to fight this oppression so that I might know everything the internet has to offer me.

Free my internet!

—

The above sarcasm was brought to you by my total inability to understand why, like the door-to-door salesmen and telemarketers before them who blazed an eternally intrusive trail, modern spammers ignore the teraultrasuperwickedlottabytes of evidence for the existence of a widespread distaste for unsolicited advertisements.

I know there’s money in it, but it can’t be only that.  It can’t be just money motivating these dark souls to devote their lives to overcoming the wishes of millions of people by forcing advertisements into every corner of the modern internet experience.  Even in our fallen world, money alone could not be enough to cause a person to descend into the world of emphatically unwanted advertising.

That unwanted advertisement goes beyond junk email.  That’s common enough, with spammers generating random subject lines and body text and making the advertising content graphical to as to dodge spam filters.  The email filters block the spam, the spammers find some new trick, the email filters adjust, and there is nothing new under the sun.  But there’s more than that.

One bothersome spam venue is comment fields on blogs.  Spambots troll the internet looking for blogs — an easy task, to be sure — and upon finding an open comment field, they add an advertisement.  Sometimes they add a generic message that attempts to don the appearance of a legitimate comment; sometimes they add brash lists of links; without fail, though they often are easily stopped, they are bothersome.  (The filter on my blog has caught over 280 spam comments in the last 15 days.)  But there’s even more than that.

When I started this blog, I began keeping an eye on my site statistics.  Among other statistics, I am able to see referral URLs — that is, the page that provided a link to my site.  If a visitor clicked on my link at the College Football Resource blog, CFR would be recorded as a referral.  It can be very informative.

After a few months of blogging, I began to see curious intrusions into my referral list.  Among the sites that made sense, there were sites not just that weren’t likely to link to me, but that I hoped would never, ever link to me.  For the good of every person ever, I won’t provide specific examples; let’s just say there were some red lights involved, and maybe three consecutive appearances of a certain letter between W and Y.  And that was how I learned about referral spam.

Yes, apparently in an effort to provoke ill will among as many internet users as possible, spammers make an effort to advertise in perfectly innocent (and typically not publicly accessible) referral lists.  The advertised sites don’t actually contain a link to the targeted site, but through deep dark magic, spammers shoehorn their unwanted input into the site’s statistics.  Not only is this bothersome, but it is more devious than email or comment spam.  On top of that, it makes little sense to me.

I suppose that’s the common theme in all this: I have trouble understanding the mindset of spammers.  Many people spend their lives wanting to be wanted; spammers spend their lives in an occupation they have to know is clearly unwanted.  If you met a man who said he spends his days helping deliver junk email to millions of inboxes across the planet, would you smile and thank him for his contribution to the world?  Not likely.  And yet there is no shortage of a workforce willing to devote itself to developing a wholly unwanted product.  It seems odd; it seems backwards.

Maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe I don’t want to understand it.

(Of course, with all these spam references, this post may either attract spam or be flagged as spam.  That would be rich humor, indeed.)

What if they gave a basketball game and nobody came?

Apparently there is a crisis at Crisler Arena: this year’s attendance for Michigan men’s basketball is on track to finish the season at a 25-year low. The per-game average through mid-February was 9,704; Crisler’s capacity is 13,751.

The drop in attendance isn’t surprising to many people; Michigan basketball is in the doldrums. There has been only a brief hope of an NCAA tournament berth under coach Tommy Amaker, and the team frittered away that glimmer of hope with a pile of losses at the end of the season. NIT berths and winning records are glimmering baubles to which Amaker and athletic director Bill Martin point in the hopes of distracting the fan base from the persistent mediocrity of the program, but obviously, it’s not working.

While the decline of fan interest is sad, it is not as disheartening as the apparent bewilderment in the athletic department. An Ann Arbor News article about the declining numbers included this quote:

“In some games, I’ve especially noticed it. You look around and say: ‘That’s not a big crowd for such a big game,'” senior forward Brent Petway said. “I don’t know what we can really do because we started off with a really good record. I don’t know what more we can say to get people to come out.”

Really, the surprise is not that the fans are losing interest, but that Petway doesn’t understand the reason fans weren’t attracted to Michigan’s 12-3 nonconference record. (Hint: the three losses were to the three quality opponents.) This isn’t about saying the right things to draw fans; it’s about doing the right things to draw fans.

Still, that outlook might be understandable coming from one of the players. But later in the article, an athletic marketing employee offered this:

What’s the biggest challenge in selling Michigan basketball?

“Getting people to the nonconference games,” said Clark Riley, who oversees the program’s marketing. “Even people who buy season tickets don’t go to the nonconference games.”

These quotes from Petway and Riley lead one to wonder if they have looked at Michigan’s nonconference schedule. Consider the basketball powerhouses Michigan lured to Crisler Arena this season: Central Connecticut State; Davidson; Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Youngstown State; Maryland-Baltimore County; Wofford; Delaware State.

And Petway and Riley wonder why the fan base doesn’t fill the seats for those games?

At the end of the article, Martin seems to come the closest to grasping a part of the problem:

“A lot of it is a function of who your opponent is,” Martin said. “Our season-ticket base of students and regular-season ticket holders has held up real well. But (attendance) is not where we want it.”

But sadly, that’s not the entire problem. In fact, it’s not even “a lot” of the problem. Without a doubt, fans want to see quality opponents — but they also want to see a quality home team. Where is the quality home team? It doesn’t exist.

Sure, Amaker’s teams have posted winning seasons, but the bulk of the victory feasts have occurred against the aforementioned tissue-soft nonconference schedule. When the team does meet an opponent of any real quality, more often than not, the result is a loss.

The previous and current solution to that problem, it seems, has been to schedule far more Kleenex opponents than quality opponents. That way, the team puts together an ostensibly impressive nonconference record. The problem that Amaker and Martin are discovering is that an impressive nonconference record in that context means almost nothing to the fans, or to anyone else.

To illustrate the problem, let’s go to the movies for a moment. No matter what ancillary attractions a theater throws at the public, a B-movie won’t gross $25 million on any weekend. Nothing changes the fact that the attraction — the movie — simply isn’t that good. Customers come to the theater for the movie; if the movie isn’t good, customers will stop coming. To lure customers, you first need a good movie.

At Crisler, Amaker essentially is providing Michigan fans a B-team: there are flashes of both good and bad play, but the bulk is simply mediocre, with no indications of improvement in the program. That’s a major problem. But in examining the problem of attendance, Martin seems to want to approach it through the issue of the B-, C- and D-team nonconference schedule. And while the schedule is Martin’s bailiwick, tweaking its strength is not the long-term solution to Crisler’s attendance woes.

As athletic director, Martin has to think about more than tweaking the schedule to draw a few fans for a few games. He has to think less about the teams he brings to town and more about the team that stays in town. Fan interest is only briefly stoked by marquee opponents; give the fans their own marquee team, and they’ll fill the seats.

Otherwise, it’s just a bad movie with good popcorn.

Committed like a polygamist to his first wife

A while back, Jerimy Finch, a highly regarded high school football players, committed to play football for Michigan.

commitment [kuh-mit-muhnt]
an agreement or pledge to do something in the future

No, wait. That’s not quite right. He gave his commitment prior to signing day, so he could give only a verbal commitment. And that sounds great … until you realize that while a commitment typically holds some weight among the general population, a football verbal commitment isn’t much of a commitment at all. It’s more of a whim, or a suggestion, or a fleeting thought, like a promise ring in high school. I’ll love you forever, but only until I meet some other hot football program.

verbal commitment [vur-buhl kuh-mit-muhnt]
(college football) a non-binding spoken intent to attend and play football for a specific college or university

That’s more like it. See, after he verbally committed to Michigan, he had second thoughts. His compass turned southwest, towards the Crossroads of America, and he soon fell under the spell of that remarkable football (in other words, basketball) powerhouse, Indiana University.

Fortunately for Finch, he gave not an actual commitment, but a verbal commitment. So he made a call to the best friend of second-thinking athletic high school seniors: the decommitment.

decommitment [di-kuh-mit-muhnt]
(college football) the retraction of a verbal commitment

Having been swayed by Indiana’s fabulous basketball warm-up pants, Finch decommitted from Michigan and told Indiana he’d be traveling their way. But after the decommitment, rumors abounded: he’s sticking with Indiana! No, he’s thinking of coming back to Michigan! No, he’s moving to Tibet to become a Buddhist monk!

After all that, what happened when national signing day rolled around? Why, he signed a letter of intent to play football for the Florida Gators, of course.

So much for commitment.

But I’m not irked at Finch; he only happened to be the ripest target, having been a Michigan commit who changed his mind twice.  Ultimately, my problem is not with him, or with any other recruit; instead, it is with the misleading “verbal commitment” that abounds in college football.  If a recruit decides not to attend one school or another, that’s fine; however, I would rather not see any sort of commitment enter the picture until that recruit is ready to be held to that commitment in some way.