Why Political Leaders Lean On Journalists and Sports Coaches Do Not

"Scribes" get way more respect in politics

Sports insider, hater of media

From a subscriber comment on the Hanania pod, in regards to RH’s view that much of culture is downstream from legal edict:

Sasha: Yarvin's critique stills seems to be unaddressed here. Culture may be downstream of Law, but as you point out in this interview, Law is downstream of an offhand comment by a judge, the judge being quite obviously a member of Yarvin's ruling oligarchy/Cathedral. Where does the judge get an idea like that?

Hanania (and Rufo and existing or wannabe bourgeois managers of both parties) claims that if we had different (better?) judges, different oligarchs, different managers, we'd have different results, which, while perhaps illusorily true on a small level, would of course only re-entrench the existing oligarchic structure and the incentives implicit within that structure, which got us to this point, and, I would say, is not leading to good outcomes for Americans.

This comment pertains to a far more complicated conversation than I intend to get into here, but the argument about where power gets its ideas from got me thinking about a related topic: How political leaders look to writers for ideas, but professional sports coaches do not.

As I’ve gotten older and met some people of influence, it’s struck me how proximal certain writers and intellectuals are to real power. The most obvious recent example is theorist Aleksandr Dugin deeply informing Vladimir Putin’s worldview, possibly to the point of inspiring the war in Ukraine. There are other examples within our non autocracy. There was a closeness between Barack Obama and Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic. Later on in the presidency, Obama forged a relationship with Ta-Nehisi Coates, also of the Atlantic. I’d say second term Obama’s messaging was highly influenced by the latter at least. Donald Trump isn’t a noted reader, but his 2016 campaign appeared to borrow heavily from Ann Coulter’s Adios America. I don’t know who exactly is running the Biden administration, but I’m pretty confident they’re reading Matt Yglesias’ Substack. Few in respectable media dare speak his name, but it’s an open secret that nearly every GOP staffer under age 40 reads Steve Sailer’s blog. And so on. And so forth.

My basic thought on this is that politicians are fairly empty vessels, optimized for seeking power for its own sake. The ideas portion of their project gets delegated to someone else, often some weird nerd on the Internet. This is common, perhaps more so than you think. I was once told of dinner set up in the honor of a cutting edge American blogger, intended as a meeting of minds between that writer and a youngish foreign nation’s president. The latter was making policy based on what he’d read from the former. Political leaders might hate “The Media,” but they rarely adopt and implement without some media pundit’s heavy input.

Now contrast this dynamic with the sports world. Coaches have their own ideas and regard the media as intellectually useless. Here’s a sample from The Dynasty: New England Patriots on Apple +. In it, Ernie Adams, brilliant advisor to Bill Belichick, gives a take on the knowledge gap between sports journalists and coaches:

The media, just a group I call ‘The Scribes’, just a lot of people who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, frankly. But there are some experts in New England on football. And they all work for the coaching staff of the Patriots. If you’re not in the building, you don’t really know. 

When Adams says, “scribes,” his voice is dripping with contempt. The scene is specifically about the time when much of the football media was aghast at the Patriots benching star quarterback Drew Bledsoe for then fairly unknown Tom Brady. Inside the building, they knew that past hits had inspired Bledsoe to seize up and take costly sacks. Outside, perhaps because sacks weren’t folded enough into popular quarterback statistics, the media just saw a former number one pick with superficially good production. How could you replace such an established performer with some sixth round kid?

But we’re getting derailed here. The point is that nobody inside the building was looking to the Boston Globe for football advice. How could they? To quote Nicholas Dawidoff, a journalist who embedded himself with the New York Jets for a book: “Is there an activity that Americans give more of their attention to and know less about than professional football?”

The sports media shares more in common with “Americans” than with the people in the building. This is especially true in football, an incredibly complicated sport where 53 men fill out a roster, but it is generally so across sports. I can say that NBA coaches and general managers read ESPN’s Zach Lowe, a sign of considerable respect, but that’s principally done to keep tabs on the league, in general. When you ask them about their strategic choices, they’re going to reference other people in the building.

Speaking of, I have a brag that I haven’t really leaned on. When the Warriors trailed the Cavs 2-1 in the 2015 NBA Finals, I suggested they use Draymond Green at center while featuring Andre Iguodala. In Game 4, the Warriors started the game exactly like that, turned the series around, and changed basketball forever.

Warriors coach Steve Kerr credited his then special assistant Nick U'Ren for the suggestion. I suspected Nick had thought about my piece because he was a reader, but he might have come up with the idea himself and in the end, it doesn’t matter. It’s one thing to throw a suggestion into the wind and another to actually make that big balls call on the starting Finals lineup when you’ve the ability to make it happen. Perhaps more to the point, no self respecting basketball staffer would want to be seen looking to a civilian for direction. The people in the building are the ones who count. Their understanding of context dwarfs ours, and any idea we give them is more muse than methodology. That’s how they see it.

Why? Because they’re dead certain they know more than we do. A practice is closed to the world and strategy jargon is inscrutable to all but those who’ve been in buildings. The people in the buildings have a sense of what works because success is tangible and statistically based. They don’t need media help because ideas are always being tested against hard results.

In politics, results are fuzzier. You can make poor choices that the voters like, for instance. The political leader has complicated insights into the job, and uses a bit of jargon, but they’re usually just winging it. Almost nobody actually knows how to make an entire nation function in a healthy manner. No one but a maniac can be wholly confident at the helm, given all the inputs from all the directions.

In politics, the leaders need intellectuals to lead them. In sports, the leaders are the intellectuals. To bring this full circle, many influential people love reading the work of the late Bill Walsh, legendary NFL coach. This is especially so in Silicon Valley, backyard to Walsh’s 49ers and setting for Stanford University, where he also coached. Walsh’s ideas on leadership are thought to be applicable in great halls of power. He hails from a world where nobody would listen to a writer, yet his words live on as a writer the powerful listen to. Perhaps the greatest potential gravitas is afforded not to the writer, and not to the coach, but to anyone who can credibly combine these roles.