The Locksley Factor, Plus Tasty Bratwurst

I went to a Lobo football game once.

It was a blustery November Saturday back in 2006, and my friend Miguel Navrot had convened what he euphemistically described as a “tailgate party,” complete with barbecue. I say “euphemistically” because we had neither pickups nor station wagons, and therefore no tailgates. But Miguel’s talent with tongs is unquestioned, and the bratwurst was great.

At some point near the end of the first half, most of us found our way into the University of New Mexico’s football stadium, where our Lobos were in the process of losing 27-21 to the Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University. The Lobos played a great second half, but unfortunately, football rules require cumulatively outscoring opponents through two consecutive halves for a victory, so the home team lost.

I’m pretty sure it was the first football game I had attended in person since the mid-’80s, and I haven’t been to one since. I say this by way of explaining that I claim little expertise on, or interest in, the sport itself. But like many in this community, despite knowing so little, I feel competent to express an opinion on the tenure of former Lobo football coach Mike Locksley, whose time as the team’s head coach flamed out spectacularly last September.

Because while I neither know nor care about football, I know and care deeply about the University of New Mexico. My daughter is a graduate, I’ve taken classes there myself (a shoutout to my posse in econ!) and I believe the university’s role as an educational and research institution makes it, for better and sometimes worse, an anchor of our community.

It is that sentiment that underpins my conclusion that Mike Locksley’s contribution was vastly underrated. Hiring him to head the football squad was genius. I was deeply sorry to see him go, and the university could very well be a worse place for his departure.

I can already hear the football fans in the audience. “Doesn’t this doofus know Locksley’s Lobos went 2-26?”

Yes. Precisely.

My rationale is found in a somewhat dense 32-page study by a trio of University of Oregon economists that made the rounds last month. Jason Lindo, Isaac Swensen and Glen Waddell compared student behavior and performance to collegiate football team success.

“We find that males are more likely than females to increase alcohol consumption, decrease studying, and increase partying in response to the success of the team,” they wrote in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Given the importance of athletics in our big colleges, the question of the influence of sports on the academic mission has seen oddly little research, but Lindo and colleagues point to a fascinating study by Duke University economist Charles Clotfelter. Clotfelter found a clever way of looking at whether students shirked on their homework around the time of the Big Game by tracking universities’ use of resources from the JSTOR online academic library.

If your team is in the NCAA basketball tournament, you’re less likely to be hitting the books around tourney time, Clotfelter found. He found an especially big drop-off if the team wins an upset victory.

Duh.

Lindo and colleagues took the analysis further, finding a statistically significant drop in male fall student grade point averages when football teams are winning more games. (Baseball in the spring, apparently, not so much. Do people tailgate at Lobo baseball games? You see my point.)

Here’s the problem. If I or anyone else were to suggest ending our beloved cultural ritual of fall football, we’d be laughed off the front page of the newspaper. (I know, there’s a good chance a lot of you will have that reaction to this column.) As Clotfelter has written, “Tailgating rituals, painted faces, and screaming fans are part of American higher education as surely as physics labs and seminars on Milton.”

Therein lies the genius of Mike Locksley’s tenure. We need to have football, so I have someplace to eat Miguel’s brats. We just need to help our students’ academic performance by mostly losing.

I’m sure Bob Davie, Locksley’s successor, is a fine man. In stories about his selection, my colleague Rick Wright quoted a number of actual football experts who sounded cautiously optimistic that Davie’s recruiting skill and sideline acumen (that is what you call it, the place where the coach stands, the “sideline,” right?) could lead the Lobos back in the direction of a winning record.

I hope, for the good of my beloved University of New Mexico, that Bob Davie has the courage to follow in Mike Locksley’s footsteps.

UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. Comment directly to John Fleck at 823-3916 or jfleck@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal