CIS: Waterloo cancels 2010 football season over doping concerns

In a few short months, the Waterloo doping scandal has gone from an investigation of one player to a team-wide investigation to league-wide concerns over drug testing. Today saw the first tangible impact on a league-wide scale, though; as Sean Fitz-Gerald of The Canadian Press reports, Waterloo has suspended its football program for the coming year. The coaching staff has been placed on paid administrative leave.

I'll get into analysis on this later, and I believe Rob Pettapiece has a post coming at The CIS Blog as well, but for now, let's focus on the facts. As Mark Masters reports, Canadian Centre for Ethics In Sport (the organization that oversees CIS drug testing) president Paul Melia announced that nine anti-doping violations were found after tests of Waterloo's 62 football players.

As Masters writes, CIS CEO Marg McGregor called it "the biggest doping situation in CIS history. "The results announced today illustrate that the CIS core value of drug-free sport has been compromised and more needs to be done to protect the integrity of university sport and the rights of clean athletes to a level playing field," she said. That would suggest that we're going to see some drug policy changes from a league-wide perspective.

For now, though, the tangible impact comes from the Warriors' disappearance from OUA football for 2010. That's going to alter the schedule, and the OUA football institutions will be holding a conference call today to discuss how that will work. Dropping from a 10-team league to a nine-team league isn't normally easy, but it might not be that difficult in this case. Under the current system, each OUA team plays eight conference games and misses one opponent; with nine teams, each team should be able to play every other team. There are still complications around scheduling (for example, most schools use the same field for football and soccer, so dates have to be carefully planned to avoid conflicts), but they should be able to work it out.

I'll keep you updated as things progress.

[Cross-posted to The CIS Blog. Make sure to go there this evening for Rob's thoughts.]

Western - Guelph live blog

It should be a great day in CIS football, as the No. 2 Western Mustangs take on the No. 10 Guelph Gryphons live on The Score's University Rush. I'll be live-blogging it here and at The CIS Blog with Neate Sager and Rob Pettapiece, plus anyone else who can make it out. Kickoff is at 1 p.m. Eastern/10 a.m. Pacific. Come join us then!

Another look at sleep's effects

Thanks to the brilliance of commenters Ricardo Bortolon and Rob Pettapiece on my last post on the subject of travel and its effects on major-league teams, I was able to find some very interesting academic research on the subject. W. Christopher Winter and a group from the Martha Jefferson Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Virginia have conducted a couple of studies recently into how travel affects Major League Baseball teams. Their research was published in Sleep, and you might be able to access the original document if your library subscribes to the journal (Queen's apparently doesn't). Still, their abstract and the summary of their results can be found on page 85 of this PDF, and a Scientific American article on the research by Nikhil Swaminathan can be found here.

There are some very interesting points to consider in these studies. The pilot study in 2005 looked at the performance of MLB teams during the 2004 season alone, and found that teams did better when they were more acclimatized to the current time zone (so not having travelled recently). It's based on research suggesting that it takes a normal human one day to adjust to each time zone crossed. Thus, if you travel from Toronto to Vancouver today, you would not be fully acclimatized to the new time zone until Wednesday. I've made that trip plenty of times, and I can testify that there is a good bit of jet lag involved. They also found that teams were more likely to do well going east-to-west, rather than west-to-east. The follow-up study this year was funded by MLB crunched the numbers for the ten seasons from 1997-2006. It also found that teams with a circadian advantage performed better than expected otherwise and that this increase in performance was the most dramatic when there was a three-hour time difference involved. The east-to-west edge wasn't found here, though.

Here's the sample scenario from the Scientific American piece:

"So, let's say the New York Mets have to travel cross-country—and, so, through three time zones—for a four-game series against the Giants in San Francisco. According to the new research, the Mets would have a three-hour disadvantage, or 60 percent chance of losing the first game; their odds of winning would rise from 40 to 48 percent by the second day, and the Giant's advantage—at least the one based on circadian clocks—would dwindle to 51 percent by the third day. If there was a fourth game in the series, the teams would be equal in terms of their body clocks."

There are obviously other factors that enter into this. The quality of the two teams involved, the pitching and lineup matchups on each day and the team's travel arrangements all could affect it (for example, I'm guessing that arriving midday on the day before a game would be less wearying than arriving around 11:30 at night, but those cases would be considered equal by this methodology). This also is a study looking solely at baseball; it could be different for different sports. However, there's a pretty good sample size here and what seems to be pretty good evidence to suggest that crossing multiple time zones frequently can hurt your team. That would support Phil Jackson's thesis that centrally-located sports teams have an advantage over others. Let me know if you spot any more of these kinds of stories on any sport; I'm interested in tracking this issue for a while.

Scribblings of the Scribes of Sport: Diamond Dreams by Stephen Brunt

Stephen Brunt's Diamond Dreams is a classic for any fan of the Toronto Blue Jays. Published in 1996, it's an amazing retrospective into the history of the franchise. What's more impressive than the on-field action though is the clarity Brunt brings to the shady backroom maneuverings that are as much of a part of baseball in this day and age as "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" or the seventh-inning stretch. Along the way, we're treated to some interesting vignettes and character sketches of the key personalities involved: Pat Gillick, the withdrawn baseball genius, Don McDougall, the young, ambitious Labatt's president and eventual key ownership figure, and Howard Webster, the eccentric sport-loving millionaire.

Perhaps the most interesting portrait, though, is that of a man still deeply involved with the franchise: Paul Godfrey, who The Tao of Steib recently called "a kitten-drowning baby shaker " for his plans to sell Jays' tickets to Red Sox and Tigers fans before local fans could buy them. Godfrey's recent actions, particularly his deep involvement in the nefarious plot to bring the NFL north of the border , certainly make a lot more sense when you consider his history and his involvement in bringing the Jays to town. He was originally on North York council, a tiny role that was insufficient for his lofty dreams, and chose baseball as his ticket to the big time. He later was the Metro Toronto chairman from 1973-1984, and published the Toronto Sun from 1984-1991 before eventually joining the Jays' front office as president. As he told Brunt in an interview for the book, his involvement with the franchise was always with regards to what it could do for him.

"I figured there was no political downside for me," he said. "Only a political upside in any event. So I started this campaign to try to bring major league baseball to Toronto. I was going to be the guy who brough major league baseball."

In fact, as Brunt so eloquently points out, bringing a team was always going to be a massive effort involving many people, particularly as none of them knew how to do it.
"A politician [Godfrey], a brewery [Labatt's], a bank [CIBC] and an eccentric businessman [Webster] set out to buy a baseball team for Toronto," he writes. Sure enough, the punchline follows: "Not one of them really knew for sure how to do it."

Interestingly enough in the end, Brunt seems to conclude that Godfrey's role wasn't all that essential. As he writes, "...[T]he idea evolved that [Godfrey] was exactly what he had hoped to be—"the man who brought baseball to Toronto"... Some of those more directly involved with bringing the team to town―and especially with paying the bills—came to resent that image, though the friction never became public."

Brunt also quotes a couple of Jays' officials disgruntled with Godfrey for taking all the credit. "The guys at Labatt resent Godfrey being credited with bringing baseball to Toronto, because he didn't put up the money," one says. The overall consensus seems to be that Godfrey was helpful, particularly with Exhibition Stadium, but didn't do as much as he generally gets credit for: not surprising, given that it was always a political matter with him.

The on-field drama is also compelling, from the Jays' poor start to the back-to-back World Series wins in 1992 and 1993. Brunt's strong writing means the reader is never bored even in the midst of long stretches of mediocrity, and the in-depth profiles he provides of Jays' players, coaches, managers and front-office staff means the book always stays interesting even when the team isn't.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book: for a younger Jays fan like myself, it gave a lot of insight into the origins and roots of the team, which I think is vital to an understanding of where they are now. As previously mentioned, many of the same features in the original expansion to Toronto seem now to be repeating themselves with the NFL situation, so this book certainly is still relevant. Moreover, though, it stands as a strong example of sportswriting at its best: telling the behind-the-scenes story of a franchise to the fans who only get to see the on-field product.

A few quick links of the day:
- A post I put up over at my Journal blog predicting the various Queen's teams first-round playoff matchups: 1 for 1 so far, with women's volleyball's loss to the Varsity Blues tonight (my story on that should hit the Journal's website soon).
- Allan Maki has a great feature on Lakehead's basketball team over at the Globe and Mail's website
- Mike's take on the Senators' trade to get Cory Stillman and Mike Commodore
- Neate has a nice piece in the Ottawa Sun about a goalkeeper attending Toronto FC's summer camp
- The Globe's James Mirtle has some interesting stats on defensive forwards up on his blog: also, he wrote a hilarious post on the Globe on Hockey blog about former Canuck goalie Johan Hedberg facing rubber chickens in Atlanta
- The CIS Blog's newest contributor, Rob Pettapiece, has an interesting post up about the possible demise of campus sports radio over at the University of Waterloo