FanNation - The Republic of Sport

The maverick wanted a game changer. Al Davis had watched his Raiders get repeatedly poked in their one good pirate's eye by cooler opponents and knew Oakland's menacing fan base was losing its sneer. He craved a fresh image to update his reputation as a visionary, to avoid being seen as an owner sealed in a time capsule with warmup suits, mood rings and Skylab debris. His vitality was in question. His relevance was in doubt. So 21 months ago Davis searched for a new face to front his beleaguered franchise, someone charismatic and young and without a lick of pro coaching experience. Someone who didn't blink when Davis asked him to join in reenergizing fans who had lost their desire to wear spiked collars on Sundays. Someone who could wink.

And this is how Lane Kiffin became Davis's Sarah Palin. Davis wanted arm candy, a personable coach who could stand on the sideline and say you betcha as he carried out the owner's antiquated vertical-passing schemes. All was well until the 31-year-old Kiffin started to depart from the script, with his smiling displays of ambition and crazy thoughts of expanding his power. Kiffin said he wanted the defensive coordinator fired and opposed signing the free agents Davis held dear. Then for the past year Kiffin vented his frustration as the Raiders failed to deliver victories.

In addition to losing 15 of 20 games, Kiffin spewed "propaganda" and "lies," as Davis put it last week during a surreal 45-minute press conference that screamed TMI. It was awkward, like hearing divorce tales from the airplane passenger in the middle seat. At 79, with his strands of hair slicked back and his frail frame swallowed in a Raiders jacket, Davis let the dirt fly in explaining why he had just fired his fifth coach in seven years. "I didn't hire the person I thought I was hiring," said Davis, angry at how he was suckered into believing the dynamic Kiffin was like-minded only to find out that he was basically Reese Witherspoon in Election. "I think he conned me like he conned all you people," Davis added.

This wasn't so much a con perpetrated by Kiffin as self-delusion perpetuated by Davis. In an attempt to prove he wasn't dead yet -- his mother lived to 103, he reminded everyone -- Davis spoke with the stamina of a telethon host but could not mask his tiresome ideology rooted in outdated precepts. Back in the era of George Halas, with friends like Red Auerbach, sharing the sports scene with George Steinbrenner, Davis was the whiz of "Just win, baby" fame, able to assemble champions from junkyard parts, before free agency made loyalty passé and the salary cap homogenized team identities. Here's what Davis failed to notice: The cult of personality has largely shifted from the owner to the coach. It's Bill Belichick in the ubiquitous hoodie, Tony Dungy as a bestselling author, Eric Mangini in a scene as Mangenius in The Sopranos.

The coach is the all-powerful Oz in a league where it takes a brain trust of IT junkies to raise a champion. It's been this way for a while, certainly when Kiffin was teething on leather laces at USC as a twentysomething assistant coach. No wonder he felt free to disagree with Davis on draft picks, coaching hires and issues of reverence. "I couldn't get him to feel toward ex-Raiders the way I wanted him to feel," Davis said. Odd he would say that when a lineup of former Oakland players from Rich Gannon to Warren Sapp emerged last week to assert what was already apparent: Davis still sees the world through a lava lamp.

It's a disturbing paradox. Davis can be a refreshing progressive -- he installed the first Hispanic coach in the NFL (Tom Flores), the first black coach of the modern era (Art Shell) and the first female CEO (Amy Trask) -- yet his mind remains largely closed to new football ideas. Roger Goodell was among the rubberneckers watching on the NFL Network as Davis eviscerated Kiffin during a daytime hour when most melodramatic death scenes are reserved for soap operas. What's a commissioner to do when one of his owners starts dropping his clown pants in public? He should channel David Stern when New York Knicks owner James Dolan -- a serial feud-maker with coaches, too -- let his control issues sabotage a celebrated franchise. Behind the scenes, Stern helped nudge Dolan to the background while he supported the hiring of adults to reshape the roster.

This is a different context -- Davis knows football; Dolan knows a basketball is round -- but with Goodell's push, a similar move toward organizational peace may occur in Oakland. This doesn't mean Davis has to surrender his outcast persona, but he can update his style by being more inclusive of a strong-willed coach, by deciding not to take fliers on sexy hires to prove he's still got it.

-- Selena Roberts

I spy a tailback in an English lab at 8:02 a.m. I spy the runny eggs he eats at the training table 92 minutes later, and the flirty Facebook note he posts about a classmate at 11:36 a.m. I spy the cap he wears into art history at 3:59 p.m., and the peace sign he flashes in a party picture stamped 11:58.

I spy him all day and into the night; he's living the Orwellian existence of a college athlete in the digital age. Across the nation Big Brother is wearing team colors. "I've never felt like a normal student," says Josh Briscoe, a senior receiver at Tennessee, adding, "No matter what you do, everyone is always watching you." This isn't a complaint or paranoia, but an acceptance of reality on campuses where the new fight song is Me and My Shadow.

Inside a 33,000-square-foot academic center devoted to athletes at UT -- from the men's basketball team to women's crew -- Vols swipe I.D. cards when they move from math tutor to study hall to computer stations, as electronically tracked as FedEx packages. (The linebacker is number 55 in your program and number C3Y285 on his I.D. bar code.) At Texas A&M, as The Chronicle of Higher Education detailed last week, officials budgeted $48,224 last year for class-checking nannies, who deterred athletes from participating in a college ritual: skipping.

The current climate of dread among coaches and administrators -- will an athlete's slightest slipup go viral online? -- makes bed checks seem so Bear Bryant. With athletic departments underwritten by TV money and hedge-fund boosters, teams can spring for the high-tech tools to discover not only Where's Waldo? but also What's Waldo Thinking? They can pose as secret agents of the mind with a software program introduced at the NCAA convention last winter: YouDiligence. It provides a shortcut for coaches to scan the Facebook and MySpace pages of athletes, rapidly detecting buzzwords, such as funnel or bong, in their cyber chatter. More than two dozen college programs, including some BCS powerhouses, have signed up as clients since last January, according to Kevin Long, president of MVP Sports Media Training, which markets the service to universities. "Where an athlete crosses the line is up to the athletic departments," Long says. Imagine coaches as the thought police: So I see you dig Marilyn Manson; well, Junior Satan, drop and give me 50!

It's not a stretch. Some coaches require athletes to list them -- yes, The Coach -- as a friend on their Facebook pages, which is a lot like putting BEWARE OF DOG on their dorm door. With a click, The Coach has an all-access pass to a player's social world. "Athletes are upset by it," says Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology and anthropology professor at Maryland Baltimore County, who has surveyed more than a thousand college students, including athletes, in her research on the impact of technology. "I ask them, 'Are you a star player?' And they laugh because they're not.... I've had athletes say they've been told, 'Do not have a Facebook page,' but given how they communicate, that's not an option. It's like being told, 'Don't have a phone if you don't want to be wiretapped.' "

The Coach sees all, knows all. As Tufekci explains, athletes fear being photographed with a red plastic cup in their hand at a bash because coaches view it as a symbol of alcohol consumption, even if they're only drinking Yoo-hoo. "It's guilt by association," she says. The constant surveillance is creepy yet reluctantly accepted by athletes who realize they are acquisitions, stocks to be followed on a crawl. "Some things I personally don't agree with," says Oklahoma's Nic Harris, one of the nation's top defensive backs. "You take some of the individualism away from people. At the end of the day we're seen as an investment. And the university wants to protect its investment. They have to protect what's going on in your life for their best interest."

The NCAA's academic reform three years ago -- demanding that programs meet graduation standards or risk losing scholarships even as institutions lower admission levels -- is the latest reason for hypervigilance over athletes' activity. It's also allowed coaches on the BCS scale to monetize their players' grades. Most say they are educators first, yet, oddly enough, their base pay doesn't cover teaching. Take Nebraska's football coach, Bo Pelini. He will pocket an extra $125,000 if the Cornhuskers' graduation rate equals that of the overall student population's.

College athletes are bonus babies for a coach, parented by a staff of dozens on campus. Coddled, to be sure. But aren't they entitled to the college experience? As always, students are ahead of technology. Some are confiscating cellphone cameras, the picture-posting devices of every social network, at the doors of parties attended by athletes. As every player of the spy game knows: You can't catch what you can't see.

-- Selena Roberts

 Bad news, America. You have no more excuses for not running that marathon, finishing that screenplay or quitting that desk job to open a surf shop the way you're always threatening to do. In case you haven't noticed, Everyman is on a roll. Ordinary Joes and Janes are turning their one-of-these-days dreams into right-now reality, which means no one is buying your alibis anymore.

So it's time to go for it -- nothing's too crazy. If a warehouse manager can beat LeBron James in H-O-R-S-E, if a 36-year-old infielder can finally hit his first big league home run, if a quarterback who's been cut eight times can start for an NFL team, if a sportscaster turned hockey mom can become a vice presidential nominee, shouldn't you get your backside off the BarcaLounger and reach for whatever pie is in your sky?

Granted, it may take a little luck to make the magic happen, the kind David Kalb of La Habra, Calif., had when James chose him from hundreds of potential challengers for a trick-shot competition sponsored by a landscaping equipment company. Kalb's online video entry -- which included footage of him bouncing a shot off a warehouse floor and into a hoop 32 feet high (it was on a forklift) -- intrigued James enough to invite him to the courts in Venice Beach, Calif., last week.

King James arrived on the scene with pomp befitting royalty, emerging from a glistening black Excursion resplendent in all white, including a headband, a skin-tight muscle shirt and satiny shorts that made him look like a bad-**** angel. Kalb? He's 26, prematurely bald, unimposing in T-shirt and gym shorts, and seven inches shorter than the 6' 8" James. Think Woody Harrelson in White Men Can't Jump.

But Kalb proceeded to flummox one of the best basketball players in the world. He threw a bounce pass off the backboard, caught the ball and from five feet put it in. He shot a ball from behind the backboard and put it in. He shot a ball from behind the backboard, put it in, raced around to the front and caught it coming through the net -- then put it back in. The plan had been to play only one game, but James, amused, impressed and newly motivated, quickly called for two out of three. Kalb said fine. Then he beat James again.

Shouldn't you be shooting for a similar big moment? Making the varsity? Making the Senior tour? Guys like Scott McClain would insist you can do it if you ignore that whisper in your head that tells you to give up and pursue less lofty goals. McClain has spent 19 years playing first base and third for teams with names like Sky Sox, Baysox, River Cats and Grizzlies in places like Geneva, Ill.; Frederick, Md.; Rochester, N.Y.; and Tokorozawa, Japan. "The last three or four years I've said this is my last season going into it," he says. "But for some reason I always end up coming back."

McClain has belted 287 homers in the minors (think Kevin Costner in Bull Durham), but he also strikes out a lot, which is why he hasn't stuck in the big leagues. During brief stints with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Chicago Cubs and the San Francisco Giants he never could go deep. Then on Sept. 3, two days after being called up by the Giants, McClain crushed a no-doubt shot over the leftfield wall at Coors Field in Colorado. When he went back to the dugout, his teammates gave him the silent treatment for a few seconds before mobbing him, which didn't faze him in the least. The man obviously knows how to wait for his reward.

J.T. O'Sullivan can relate to McClain's patience. You probably missed O'Sullivan's college career as the UC Davis quarterback from 1999 to 2001, after which he was little more than training-camp fodder for eight NFL teams. He was such a forgotten man that kneeling down to run out the clock for the Packers four years ago ranks as one of his highlights. But these are heady days for previously obscure guys like O'Sullivan, so it shouldn't be surprising that when the San Francisco 49ers chose their starter near the end of camp, he rather than Alex Smith, the No. 1 draft choice of 2005, was their man.

Had she stuck to the sportscasting career she briefly tried back in the 1980s, Sarah Palin might have reported some of these stories, but at least the practice she got in reading teleprompters has come in handy. Whether or not you're rooting for her to achieve her current goal, you have to admit she's not afraid to chase big dreams. You shouldn't be, either. Now is the time to make your move, when fortune seems to favor the little-known. Mayor of your town, No. 1 tennis player at the club, back-page columnist for a national sports magazine -- it's all within your reach.

On second thought, scratch the last one. Let's not get that crazy.

-- Phil Taylor