Here’s the logo for some artsy event in Sweden:

It must be sending subliminal messages because I feel like having a large cup of coffee. Delish!

Sometimes it’s fun to watch a game with really few preconceived notions or prior knowledge about it. The wife and I went to last night’s game between Boston University Terriers and University of New Hampshire Wildcats at Agganis Arena on Commonwealth Avenue. While I root for the Terriers in whatever sport they play in (and also in football, which they don’t play, unfortunately) I can’t say I follow them much, so I didn’t know what to expect.

I certainly didn’t expect the Terriers to be clearly outdone in three rather critical areas: Skating, puck handling, and positioning. It all added up to a 5-3 victory for UNH.

The first period was the worst and the Terriers would probably have fallen behind by more than one goal had not one of the Wildcats punched a Terrier in the face, earning himself a disqualification and his team five minutes of shorthanded play. The Terriers failed to score but the power play at least allowed them to stay even for a while (at least on the ice, they were already behind on the scoreboard).

BU had a hard time getting shots off. They threw the puck around instead of at the goal and they generally failed to create good shot opportunities. Their power-play box struck me as being spaced out too much, which allowed the Wildcats to regroup whenever the BU players passed the puck along the blue line. By contrast, the Wildcats power-play box was tighter which allowed them to shuffle the puck faster and get off more and better shots (the box score has it that BU outshot UNH 14-7 in the first period but that just goes to show how nebulous shot statistics are in ice hockey).

The Terriers also lacked in puck handling compared to the Wildcats. Too many opportunities were squandered - or afforded UNH - by Terriers whiffing on the puck. What I didn’t know going into the game is that UNH is ranked seventh in the nation while BU has a losing record.

The second period was quite entertaining. First the Terriers tied the game (Nick Bonino), then the Wildcats took the lead gain and later extended it to 3-1 on a power-play goal. But the Terriers struck, first by converting a power-play situation (Kev Shattenkirk) and then by tying the game 40 seconds later (Jason Lawrence).

Sadly, the Wildcats reasserted their superiority in the final period and eventually won 5-3. I thought the Terriers, while outplayed, at least played hard. My wife disagreed. BU head coach Jack Parker agreed with my wife, according to the The Boston Globe’s game report:

“We acted like we were disinterested in the third period,” said Parker, whose squad is a woeful 2-6-1 at home. “Before we went out for the third period, there was absolutely no emotion, you’d think we’d be all jacked up. It’s almost as if they were waiting to lose. Sad display by my team tonight. Great display by UNH. Without question, the best team won because of effort.”

The best team won, no doubt, but I’m not so sure that effort alone was the difference.

Depressing fact:

With the win, UNH completes its first ever regular-season sweep of the Terriers in Hockey East play.

On a positive note, both BU student sections produced a lot of noise throughout the game and even the general admissions sections were pretty good for being general admission. UNH had an impressive contingent of fans in tow. 6,024 spectators in all.

Below are some pictures from the game:

From left to right: BU Terriers Nick Bonino, Luke Popko, Colin Wilson, and John McCarthy during warm ups.

Brian McGuirk.

McCarthy in a third period face off.

Wilson wins a third period face-off for the Terriers.

Ryan Weston, McCarthy, and McGuirk chasing a play.

UNH stops a third-period attack.

UNH stops another third-period attack.

BU students dressed as a patriotic hot dog and, I think, Jesus in one of the student sections.

BU’s mascot Rhett fools around during a promotion in the second intermission.

Student section greets players entering the ice.

A group of BU student-athletes who were absolutely determined not to face our way. They were honored for having excelled in the field of athletic excellence.

Online auction giant eBay announced today that CEO and President Meg Whitman will resign on March 31, 2008. EBay Market North America President Bill Cobb will follow suit at the end of the year.

Whitman will be replaced by John Donahoe, currently the President of eBay Marketplaces. Donahoe will be replaced by Rajiv Dutta, the President of PayPal.

Side note of some interest: Donahoe is an alum of Bain & Company, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s old company, and also a former employer of Whitman, who’s a member of Romney’s campaign.

Whitman’s downfall was presumably brought about by several failed acquisitions, the one of Skype being the most spectacular one, and weak earnings. On the business side of things, eBay has struggled with seller attrition and stagnating listings volume, mostly because of steadily increasing fees. The company has also had a difficult time nailing down its value proposition to buyers. In 2006 the mantra was to make shopping on eBay as similar to regular store-shopping as possible, but last year the company decided to instead emphasize the auction aspect of the eBay shopper experience.

I actually chatted with Whitman for a few seconds in 2006 when she was inspecting eBay Live 2006 the day before it opened. Nothing particularly interesting was said, but it’s still fun little memory. I can’t say I particularly liked the way she ran eBay but I definitely wish her the best of luck if she joins Romney’s campaign full time.

Blogger reactions

Michael Fowlkes at BloggingStocks:

eBay users over the past few years have definitely had a love/hate relationship with Whitman, and it will be interesting to see just how well liked her successor finds himself. From a users perspective, eBay users are going to be looking for one main thing… lower fees.

William J. Holstein at The Corner Office:

… however many times Whitman has been on the cover of Fortune, and no matter how lionized she was as a pathbreaking woman CEO, it appears she didn’t live up to her own hype.

Jim Hedger at metamend SEO blog:

Whitman leaves eBay far stronger than she found it. She is one of the smartest and most consistent C-level players in the industry and, whether eBay likes it or not, Meg Whitman will be missed.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch:

During most of Whitman’s tenure, eBay seemed unstoppable. But the network effects that made it so powerful in the Web 1.0 era began to dissipate as destination sites began to lose some of their appeal. Now that people want to bring the Web to them—to their blog or MySpace or Facebook page—eBay needs to adapt to the new realities… During the last two years, eBay has lost about half its value. Not a great note to leave on.

David Yaskulka at GLG News:

eBay’s life blood is the 1.2 million entrepreneurs who make their primary or secondary income from selling on eBay. Entrepreneurs like the members of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance make up a tremendous portion of eBay’s Gross Merchandise Volume.

But these entrepreneurs are trying to distinguish themselves in an increasingly complex multichannel e-commerce world. They need to … find their way into the hearts and minds of the millions posting on social network sites such as MySpace, YouTube and FaceBook.

Yi-Wyn Yen at Fortune Magazine’s Techland:

The auction powerhouse is under pressure to move quickly to make a major overhaul with growing competition from Amazon (AMZN). eBay will report its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday, and Wall Street is expecting to hear how Donahoe’s new position and an anticipated drop in listings fees will jump start eBay’s auction business.

Susan Gunelius at Women On Business brings the sycophantic sisters-stand-united perspective:

Overall, Meg Whitman represents a great success story to inspire other women in business. Recently, she’s been spotted in the company of politicians and Presidential candidates creating speculation that she may leave the corporate world for a stint in the political world. That remains to be seen, but one thing seems certain - Meg Whitman will undoubtedly be successful in any endeavor she pursues in the future.

Skip McGrath:

Donahoe is an intriguing choice. He was a very successful turnaround specialist at Bain. It will be interesting to see if he continues on Meg’s path of focusing on buyers to the detriment of sellers, or if he will respond to seller’s needs to stem the tide of sellers leaving eBay and falling listings.

As a former turnaround specialist, he may also act to trim jobs at eBay where employment is now at 15,000. I doubt if eBay could reduce many jobs without hurting customer service which is already a weak point. That will be interesting to watch. It will also be interesting to see if the Yahoo/eBay merger rumors continue or go away. eBay is denying all merger/buyout rumors.

More Links:

Transcript of CNBC interview with Meg Whitman

Below is a screenshot from an online poll at the website of one of Sweden’s biggest daily newspapers. They question is “Who do you hope will become America’s next president?”

“Annan” is Other and “Vet ej” is Don’t know.

I have no idea what John Edwards did to so royally piss of the Swedes.

Boston Red Sox fans are an obnoxious bunch. Their team having the second highest payroll in Major League Baseball isn’t enough of an advantage for them, they want guaranteed championships.

Red Sox Nation? More like Red Sox Welfare State.

Those were New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick’s words during his press conference the week leading up to the game against San Diego in week two of the regular season, when all the reporters asked about was the ridiculous Spygate and the grotesquely excessive fine levied by the National Football League on Belichick. The enraged Patriots stomped the San Diego Chargers, who were looking for some measure of revenge for their embarrassing loss to New England in the playoffs in the previous season, 31-14.

And now the Patriots are about to play the Chargers gain, this time in the AFC Championship game, after San Diego shockingly beat the Indianapolis Colts on the road in the divisional round. In spite of that accomplishment the Chargers seem a bit fraudulent to me. They beat only two play off teams in the regular season - the Colts the week after they had lost a bruising game to the Patriots and the Tennessee Titans, whom they defeated gin in the Wild Card game - and lost to Jacksonville and Green Bay.

Top Line: New England Patriots advanced to the 2007 AFC Championship Game by beating Jacksonville Jaguars 31-20 in the AFC divisional playoff game. Jaguars tried to shorten the game not by holding on to the ball but by taking away New England’s downfield passing game, forcing the Patriots to march slowly and patiently down the field. On offense, Jacksonville tried to keep up with the Patriots scoring wise through deep passes off of the play action. It wasn’t a bad plan, Jaguars just didn’t have the personnel to execute it. The game was tied 14-14 at half time, but then the Patriots stepped it up in the second half, especially on defense, and the game slowly but surely - inevitably, I’d say - slipped away from the Jaguars.

Offensive Line: Patriots fielded their first-team offensive line, with left tackle Matt Light, left guard Logan Mankins, center Dan Koppen, right guard Stephen Neal and right tackle Nick Kaczur.

The Gist: Patriots used a lot of three wide formations and also frequently split tight end Ben Watson and even fullback Heath Evans wide, which was as expected given the size of Jaguars players and the strength of New England’s passing game. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady took full advantage of Jacksonville’s coverage schemes. He completed 26 of 28 passes, setting a new NFL record for completion rate in a playoff game (92.9%). The two incompletions were both catchable passes. Watson dropped a pass that hit his hands and Welker dropped the other incompletion by looking away from the ball the moment before it hit his hands (he had an almost identical third-down drop in the very first game of the season against the New York Jets). Brady’s 26 completions were good for 262 yards. Brady was sacked on the first play of the game when Logan was unable to hold off a power-rushing Henderson. Otherwise he was largely free to roam the pocket as he pleased, and when he wasn’t he was able to side step the problems in his customary cool fashion. Wide receiver Wes Welker caught nine passes for 54 yards, Donte Stallworth three for 68, Jabar Gaffney three for 26 and runningback Kevin Faulk five for 36. Runningback Laurence Maroney also benefited from the soft defensive front. He gained 122 yards on 22 carries, and another 40 yards on two receptions. He ran about as well as he did against the New York Giants in the last game of the regular season, but this time he got more yards to show for the effort. It helped that tight end Kyle Brady had his best game since the Patriots’ first game against Buffalo Bills.

Patriots had the ball eight times and scored five times (four touchdowns, one field goal). They also missed one field goal attempt, kneeled down once to end the second quarter and punted to end their final possession with 32 seconds to go in the fourth quarter.

The Jaguars also had the ball eight times, but managed only four scores (two touchdowns and two field goals), two turnovers (one fumble, one interception), one punt and one game ending run.

The Jaguars scored on the game’s opening drive, aided in large part by a 34 yard pass down the right sideline to tight end Marcedes Lewis on 4th and 1 from New England’s 43-yard line. But Patriots struck right back with a 10 play, 74-yard drive that ended with a three-yard touchdown pass to Watson. The first key play of the drive was a nice little screen-left dump to Maroney who took the ball 33 yards before getting pushed out of bounds. The second was a fourteen yard completion to Moss on fourth-and-five from Jacksonville’s 40-yard line.

Jaguars lost the initiative for good on the following drive when defensive end Ty Warren pushed past his blocker and powered into Garrard’s right arm, jarring the ball loose. Outside linebacker Mike Vrabel fell on the ball and just like that New England had the ball at Jacksonville’s 29 yard-line. It was the key play of the game because it allowed the Patriots to leap-frog the Jaguars on the score board. Seven plays later Maroney crashed into the end zone over right guard Neal on the first play of the second quarter, making the score 14-7.

While the Jaguars managed to march 95 yards to tie the game with surprising ease they remained one behind in the possession game, even after Patriots kicker Steven Gostkowski missed a field goal attempt late in the first half since the Patriots were to receive the second half kickoff.

With the Jaguars continuing to guard against the big play, Patriots dink-and-dunked their way down the field on the first drive of the second half. Brady tossed four passes to Welker for 25 yards, two to Faulk for 15 yards, and one to Gaffney for 13 yards. Watson dropped pass, Brady’s first incompletion of the game. Maroney ran three times for 29 yards, including an impressive 22-yard scamper round the left end where tight end Brady and a pulling Neal helped seal off the edge and punch a whole in the defensive front. Welker’s fourth catch was the drive’s coup de grace, a scoring six yard strike off of a sort of play action Statue of Liberty: Patriots faked a direct snap to Faulk that Brady helped sell by acting as if the snap had gone over his head, the standard fake to conceal a direct snap to the runningback. The Jaguars’ scrambled and befuddled secondary couldn’t recover in time to prevent Welker from getting open in the middle back of the end zone, where Brady hit him squarely in the numbers to put the Patriots up 21-14. I’m not a big fan of dink and dunk since it only takes one bad play to short circuit that kind of drive but Brady is so accurate and his receivers (including Faulk) so good that the Patriots can make it work.

Jacksonville answered with yet another good looking drive that eventually stalled at New England’s 21-yard line. The troubles began when right tackle Tony Pashos was flagged for a false start. A short run and an incomplete pass later Garrard went deep on third-and-eleven for wide receiver Dennis Northcutt who dropped the ball, possibly out of fear for the on coming cornerback Asante Samuel. Jacksonville had to settle for a field goal.

Up 21-17 New England moved in for the kill score. A short pass to Welker gained another 15 yards thanks to a roughing the passer penalty against Jaguars’ defensive tackle Derek Landri. The next play was another long run over the left end, where Kyle Brady and Neal once again gave Maroney something to work with. Maroney made a nice adjustment, bouncing out of the original point of attack and picking up 29 yards down the left sideline. That’s significant because throughout the regular season Maroney’s adjustments were consistently ill-conceived and unproductive. That run was followed by an 11-yard run to the right, once again behind Kyle Brady. Three plays later Tom Brady threw a nine-yard touchdown pass to Watson. Less than a minute remained of the third quarter and New England was up 28-17.

Jaguars and Patriots traded field goals on the next two drives, leaving Jacksonville with only six-and-a-half minutes to close the 31-20 gap. Jaguars worked their way to New England’s 41-yard line. On 4th and 6 Garrard tried to force the ball to Jones but the pass was intercepted by safety Rodney Harrison with just over four minutes remaining. That was the game.

Maroney was robbed of a shot at a big play late in the third quarter when he was ran down from inside on a run over the right side of the offensive line. Had Koppen maintained his block on Jacksonville linebacker Darell Smith Maroney would have had a one-on-one matchup in open field against a Jacksonville safety. A couple of plays earlier Neal had failed to pick up linebacker Ingram on a run blitz. The fourth-down play that Brady converted with a pass to Moss was preceeded by a weird run by Faulk that cost the Patriots three yards on third down. It wasn’t Faulk’s fault, it was the weird blocking scheme’s that called for Koppen to block a defensive tackle lined up between Koppen and the point of attack. Typical fruity zone-blocking garbage, in other words.

Stallworth made a great catch for 53 yards on third down on the Patriots final scoring drive. A busted screen play hd Brady look deep down the right side line where he found Stallworth after

Bottom Line: Most teams that have seriously challenged the Patriots this season (Dallas, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and New York Giants) have used pressure on Brady to try to disrupt the offense. Jaguars chose to borrow the much more cautious approach used by Cleveland Browns in week , which focused on taking Moss out of the game and otherwise cover the receivers best they could. The outcome was pretty similar, although the Patriots weren’t nearly as sharp that time. Brady completed 22 of 38 passes for 265 yards and three touchdowns against Cleveland. Sammy Morris ran for 102 yards on 21 carries and Watson caught two touchdown passes. The final score was 34-17 (cornerback Randall Gay forced a fumble and returned it for a touchdown).

Jacksonville’s plan was pretty sound and the execution good but the Jaguars don’t have the players necessary to beat the Patriots straight up and none of them rose to the occasion to make a play on defense. Without help from the defense the offense had little chance of keeping pace with New England’s scoring machine. I think a defense has to send some overload blitzes and loops at Brady in order to produce some errors and turnover opportunities. The few times the Jaguars did blitz they usually made something happen. Both of Brady’s incompletion came on blitzes and the drive that resulted in the missed field goal bogged down when a fake blitz combined with looping defensive lineman made Mankins draw a chop block penalty. But the reality is that there probably is no cute or clever scheme that can beat the Patriots this season.

[I write quite a bit of stuff that I don't publish for one reason or another. The following is a piece I wrote in spring 2007, after New England's brutal loss to Indianapolis Colts in the 2006 AFC Championship Game. With New England having completed the first ever 16-0 regular season and Colts sitting on the number two seed in the AFC playoffs I guess you could say it's still timely and topical.]

It has been a good decade for fans of the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. The two teams have combined to win four of the last six Super Bowls, and they have gone head to head against each other in the play offs in three of the last four seasons, twice in the AFC Championship game. When the Pittsburgh Steelers won the 2005 championship, they did so after beating the Colts in the AFC Championship game.

The Colts and the Patriots have been the class of the National Football League over the last four years and their rivalry rivals that of past great rivalries: The Steelers v the Dallas Cowboys in the 1970’s, and the horse race between the San Francisco 49′ers, Washington Redskins, and the New York Giants from 1981 to 1991, an era during which those three teams collectively won nine Super Bowls.

How much longer the rivalry between the Colts and the Patriots can be sustained is a question without obvious answers. The NFL is constructed to create parity between the teams, so that last year’s loser can be next year’s winner. While there is some turmoil in the standings every year, some teams have proven capable of remaining at or near the top of the league for years, while some teams are mired in mediocrity season after season. The Steelers have been contender almost every year since the mid 1990’s, the Philadelphia Eagles went to four straight NFC Championship games in the first half of this decade, and managed to make the play-offs again last season, in spite of losing its starting quarterback Donovan McNabb to injury.

It is too early to tell how this rivalry will be viewed in the decades to come. Perhaps it won’t be viewed as a rivalry at all, but as two distinct eras: The first one, 2001- 2004, dominated by the Patriots and the second one, starting in 2006, dominated by the Colts. Or maybe 2006 will be a blue blip in a decade of domination by the Patriots. Or perhaps both teams will rapidly decline.

Any of a very long list of things can go wrong and short-circuit a team’s quest to win the Super Bowl, but Colts and the Patriots each have four reasons to believe that they will have a good chance at making a run in the play-offs next season.

The owners

The Patriots have Robert Kraft who purchased the team in 1993 after spending almost his entire life as season-ticket holding fan. Had Kraft not bought the team, it probably moved have been moved to another locale. In his early years as an owner Kraft was a bit too much hands-on in the football part of the operation of the franchise, which contributed to head coach Bill Parcells’s leaving the team (given Parcells’s track record before and after his tenure with the Patriots he probably would have left anyway). After a few years of declining performance under the dual leadership of head coach Pete Carroll and personnel-chief Bobby Grier, Kraft brought in Bill Belichick to turn things around.

That alone was a masterstroke, but Kraft has also been a wildly successful owner outside of the football operations. He secured a stadium deal with the state of Massachusetts that allowed the Patriots to remain in Foxboro outside of Boston and make a bundle of money while doing so. He has become influential in shaping the NFL’s highly lucrative television contracts and he has poured substantial resources into expanding the team’s fan base and revenue streams.

The owner of the Colts, Jim Irsay, had a much easier path to becoming owner of a football team: He inherited it from his deceased father in 1997. Irsay, however, inherited not only a team but also a legacy of on-field underperformance and off-field shame: The team’s mid-night move from Baltimore to Indianapolis in 1984 is one of the low-lights in the history of the NFL. Jim Irsay also has to keep his team competitive while operating in one of the smallest markets in the league.

Irsay has made two decisions that have proved to be very wise: He hired Bill Polian as president in 1998 and Tony Dungy as head coach in 2002

The executives

Scott Pioli is the Patriots Vice President of Personnel, the man responsible for making sure the team’s roster is stuffed with players Belichick can win the next game with. Pioli is one of those football geeks that the head coach surrounds himself with, people who pretty much eat, breathe, and sleep football. They first met when Belichick was the defensive coordinator for the New York Giants, when Pioli was still in college.

Pioli was later hired by Belichick when he became the head coach of the Cleveland Browns in 1991 and he was the coach’s first hire after he became the head coach of the New England Patriots in 2000. Belichick and Pioli get along very well and are both deeply committed to the Patriots. Both also appear to enjoy working for the Kraft’s, and when Pioli was given permission to interview with the Giants this year for the General Manager position he politely turned down the opportunity.

Pioli helped salvage a roster that was laden with athletic-looking people who just weren’t very good football players after years of poor draft decisions by his predecessor Bobby Grier. Under Pioli’s stewardship the Patriots have drafted several very good to great players, including defensive ends Richard Seymour and Ty Warren, nose tackle Vince Wilfork, center Dan Koppen, right guard Logan Mankins, wide receiver Deion Branch, tight Daniel Graham, and, of course, quarterback Tom Brady.

Bill Polian is the President of the Indianapolis Colts and one of the most successful executives in the NFL. The Buffalo Bills made four straight, though losing, trips to the Super Bowl with Polian as General Managers. In the mid-1990’s he took the expansion Carolina Panthers to an NFC Championship game. As president of the Colts he has so far managed to maintain and improve a team that has been contending for league championship for a half-dozen years or so.

Polian has quite a temper. He has reportedly made a nuisance of himself in press boxes in stadiums around the league where decorum requests guests to not engage in partisan behavior. Last year Polian reportedly attacked an employee of the New York Jets. While the Colts denied the incident had taken place, the Patriots, who use just about anything they can to needle opponents, asked the NFL to provide security for the Patriots’ staff when the Bills played New England in Foxboro. Polian has also vigorously lobbied the league’s rules committee to ensure a stricter enforcement of pass interference and illegal use of hands rules. Polian felt the Patriots had used lax enforcement of the rules to disrupt the Colts’ passing game in the 2003 and 2004 playoffs.

The coaches

Bill Belichick was just about born to be a football coach. His father was an assistant coach in the NFL before accepting a job with the Naval Academy and young Bill grew up watching game film and scouting Navy’s opponents.

Belichick’s first job in the NFL was actually with the Colts, then in Baltimore, for whom he worked as pretty much the lowliest of assistants, making $25 a week. Belichick won two Super Bowls as the defensive coordinator for the Giants. He had some success as head coach for the Cleveland Browns, but alienated many fans with his decision to bench longtime quarterback Bernie Kosar in 1993. The whole team fell apart when it became known that the club would move to Baltimore. Belichick reunited with Parcells in New England as defensive coordinator, and then followed him to the Jets. After Parcells retired in 1999, Belichick was made head coach but then retired by jotting the famous note that read “I resign as HC of the NYJ.” Instead he was hired as HC of the NEP.

Belichick cleared house and restocked the team roster with Pioli’s help. After going 5-11 in 2000, the Patriots went 11-5 the following year and somehow managed to win Super Bowl in spite of having one of the weakest teams ever to win the Lombardi Trophy. One of Belichick’s many strengths is his ability to take away what the opposing team does best. Another is to find and exploit its weaknesses. While he’ll tweak his defense anyway necessary to win a game, his starting point is the basic 3-4 defense, and his goal is to stop the running game and pressure the quarterback. Probably no coach in the league can match his ability to successfully plug rejects, cast-offs and has-beens into the lineup.

Belichick is often criticized for not being quotable the way colorful coaches like Jim Mora (”Play offs?”) and Dennis Green (”Go ahead and crown their asses”) are. Belichick’s list of stock answers include exciting material such as “It is what it is,” “I’m just trying to win a football game,” and “We need to do everything better.” He will, however, talk at length about pretty much any aspect of football, especially at Wednesday and Friday press conferences during the season, when he is in between games so to speak.

Tony Dungy made his into the coaching ranks by way of playing in the NFL. He won the Super Bowl as a member of the Steelers in 1978. He got his first head coaching gig with the almost chronically inept Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1995 after a stint as Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator. He turned the Bucs into a fearsome defensive force that made the Cover 2 a widely popular defense in the league. While Dungy’s Buccaneers racked one impressive season after another they never made it to the Super Bowl and he was fired after the 2001 season.

Irsay immediately offered Dungy the job as Colts head coach. It seemed like a perfect match: The Colts already had one of the most explosive offenses in the league, but its defense was one of the worst. In spite of Dungy’s background and defensive expertise, the Indianapolis remained hobbled for several years under his leadership by a weak defense. It was until the second half of the 2006 season that the defense gelled enough to not sink the offense.

Dungy is quite a contrast to Belichick, and no doubt a more widely like person. He is soft spoken, virtually never curses, rarely if ever raises his voice and is sure to show opponents reasonable professional courtesy. Belichick, on the other hand, can be quite petty in his dealings with people, doesn’t mind rubbing it in on vanquished foes and is said to have a very foul mouth in team meetings. Dungy is properly dressed while Belichick dresses with all the panache of a penniless and homeless man.

I don’t mean any of that as a criticism of Belichick. His style clearly works for him and I personally, as a Patriots fan, don’t really care about what people think about him. Heck, I barely care about what I think about him. As he might say, all he’s trying to do is coach a football team. That’s all he’s trying to do. If that means tossing F-bombs in the locker room, looking like a bum, and running up the score on the Jets, then so be it.

I would no doubt feel differently if I had been a Jets fan, or really a fan of any team other than the Patriots.

The quarterbacks

Tom Brady v. Peyton Manning is almost literally the story of the Pauper and the Prince. Manning is just about NFL royalty, born to be a quarterback the way Belichick was born to be a coach.

Manning was the first player to be drafted in 1998 and he reached the upper echelons of quarterbacks after a rough rookie season. He has thrown for more than 4,000 yards in seven of his nine seasons, and, amazingly, he hasn’t missed a single start in the NFL. He’s been to seven Pro Bowls and won two league MVP titles (one shared, one outright).

Manning is extremely competitive, has a strong arm, tremendous accuracy, a great football mind and a tireless work ethic. He has also matured as a quarterback over the years, become more patient, more willing to take the easy yards instead of chasing the bigger, riskier plays.

Brady was picked in the sixth round in 2000, the 199th player selected overall that year. He was thrown into action in the second game of the 2001 season after the starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe was knocked out of the game. Brady went on to lead the Patriots to Super Bowl victories in 2001, 2003, and 2004.

Brady has killer accuracy and a tremendous understanding of the game. Like Manning he is insanely competitive and a hard worker. While Manning has had all-star players on offense, Brady has been supported by a strong defense that frequently enabled him to win close games.

At first there was nothing

The Colts and the Patriots played in the same division, the AFC East, from 1984 to 2002. Both teams were fairly mediocre most of those seasons. Patriots made it to the Super Bowl once, where they were blown our by the Bears, and the Colts lost a thrilling AFC Championship game to the San Diego Chargers. But usually both teams were pretty bad. In one particularly forgettable season the Patriots only victory came against the Colts and I think the Colts returned the favor a couple of years later. The Colts once ran the wishbone offense against the New York Jets in a Monday Night Football game. That is about as low as it gets in professional football.

The Patriots started their climb out of perennial mediocrity when Kraft bought the team, drafted Drew Bledsoe and hired Parcells. Things turned around for the Colts when Irsay took over in 1997.

Dungy’s quest to make the Super Bowl as head coach of the Bucs was cut short twice by the Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles themselves made it to the NFC Championship game in four consecutive seasons (2000 - 2004) but managed to advance to the Super Bowl only once and was then defeated by the Patriots. As noted above, the Bucs inability to overcome the Eagles was a major reason for why Dungy lost his job and ended up with the Colts. The Panthers made it back to the Super Bowl before Polian did, in 2003, where they lost to the Patriots. New England Patriots won its first Super Bowl title by defeating the Saint Louis Cardinals, whose defensive coordinator Lovie Smith was a former linebackers coach for Dungy at Tamp Bay, and who later became head coach of the Chicago Bears, with whom he lost to Dungy’s Colts in Super Bowl 41.

A couple of months ago MassInc released a report on the feeble job growth in Massachusetts. Massachusetts slowly has been adding jobs four almost four years but is still 100,000 jobs short of the peak in 2001. Sluggish job growth in Massachusetts is not just an effect of the latest business cycle. The report claims that the state’s share of payroll jobs in the United States declined from 2.98% in 1988 to 2.38% in 2006 (the report is available here, registration required).

If Massachusetts had been able to maintain its 1988 share of national payroll jobs, the state would have had an additional 815,000 jobs in 2006.

Let’s think about those numbers for a moment. What has happened between then and now is basically that America’s population grew rapidly while Massachusetts’s grew slowly. In 1988, America had 245 million people, compared to 300 million in 2006. Massachusetts population grew from 5.98 million to 6.44 million during those same years (or maybe 6.37 or 6.34 - it’s a Census thing).

As share of the nation’s population, Massachusetts’s declined from 2.45% in 1988 to 2.15% in 2006.

Had Massachusetts’s population grown as fast as America’s the state would have about 7.4 million people today, almost a million more than is currently the case. Had Massachusetts held on to its 1988 share of payroll employment it would likely have had an even larger population, maybe more than 8 million people.

Would that have been such a desirable thing? What would the impact have been on traffic congestion, population density inside and around Route 128, housing prices, land use outside of I-495 etc? I’m not asking you to embrace zero population growth but spend a few seconds to think about how an extra million or million and half people might affect the state and its quality of life.

Those who favor so-called smart growth initiatives are probably more than happy to tell you that their strategies easily would have handled substantial population growth. Personally, I doubt that a majority of those extra 1-2 million people would have liked smart growth living, and I also doubt that sufficient smart growth solutions would have been available for those who would have liked them.

In short, the problems we’re facing today because of slow job and population growth could well be less serious and more easily tackled than those we would have faced had our state not fallen behind.

That’s not to say our economic situation is rosy. In fact, even if one is not bothered by the lagging job growth, it is worse than it appears.

From 2001 to 2005, the level of real output per worker grew by 11.5% in Massachusetts, compared with a national increase of 10.6%.

That’s good, but considerably worse, relative to the nation as a whole, than the productivity increase Massachusetts experienced enjoyed during the 1990’s:

From 1989 to 1999, real output per worker increased by 24 percent in Massachusetts, outpacing the nation’s productivity growth by 10 percentage points.

And that’s not all:

Finally, fewer teens and young adults without four-year college degrees are working than in the past. This is troubling for the pipeline of the state’s future workforce, in addition to the immediate negative consequences for these individuals and their families. National and state research on this topic strongly indicates that work is “path dependent,” meaning the more a person works now, the more likely that person will work in the future. Conversely, if teens and young adults are not working today, they are less likely to work in the future.

There are two things to mull here. First, will the ” teens and young adults without four-year college degrees” who aren’t working become workers if the state were to come up with 20,000 mostly low-skilled jobs at state-licensed casinos? My guess is no. My guess is that most ofthose jobs would be filled by out-of-staters.

The other is that the state’s productivity growth has slowed even as its workforce has shed some of its weaker contributors.

Of course, the state has also lost many of its best contributors through out-migration to other states:

Over the July 2000 to July 2006 period, 286,000 more persons left Massachusetts to move to other states than came here from other states, an extraordinarily high level of net domestic out-migration. Findings of focus groups with recent out-migrants reveal that most do not plan to return to our state.

Here’s the problem with net out-migration:

Many of the out-migrants were young families with children. Their exodus from the state has reduced the number of active labor force participants, future labor force participants, and the number of adult taxpayers who would have favorably contributed to the fiscal position of both state and local governments. The loss of this potential pool of labor will constrain future job and economic growth in the state. We are losing our economic future.

As has been noted here and in many other places Massachusetts would have had a negative population growth had it not been for foreign immigration. So what might explain the out migration?

A number of alternative explanations of these high levels of out-migration from Massachusetts have been offered by demographers, economists, and media analysts, ranging from lack of job opportunities, a high cost of living, housing affordability problems and an unpleasant climate.

The problem with all those explanations is that they don’t address why Americans poured out of the state as foreigners poured into it. Wouldn’t “lack of job opportunities, a high cost of living, housing affordability problems and an unpleasant climate” be as detrimental to foreigners as they are to Americans? Yes, they probably do, so what it boils down to is basically that Massachusetts is too crappy for Americans but good enough for foreigners. That’s not a tremendously good grade for the second oldest chunk of what is now America.

But can’t the Americans who leave the state simply be replaced with immigrants? No, they cannot:

In addition, foreign immigrants will continue to be an important part of the state’s future labor force. Yet, as previous MassINC research documents, a relatively high number of new immigrants have limited education and English language skills, which creates a number of challenges for them to fully engage in the Massachusetts economy.

(Actually, MassInc has previously distorted the quality of the immigrant workforce, as in this research paper from 1999:

The educational backgrounds of foreign born labor force participants in Massachusetts who arrived in the U.S. since 1990 appear to differ in a number of key respects from those arriving in the 1980s. A considerably higher share of recent immigrants possess a Bachelor’s or more advanced degree and fewer lack a high school diploma or its equivalent. The recent supply of immigrants, thus, appears to more closely match the changing occupational structure of employment in the state.

The claim is unsourced.)

MassInc recommends the usual remedies for the state’s job-growth malaise: Better work-force training, better labor-market matching of jobs and workers, better subsidies for favored industries (export industries, the ones that sell most of their products to other states and countries are the ones MassInc would like to favor) and better urban-support programs (MassInc is pushing a concept they call Gateway Cities, which are roughly the eleven crappiest cities in the state but supposedly they’re full of potential that will be unleashed if only the right formula of cash and regulations is applied, if MassInc is to be believed).