ALL POSTS BY: TonyO33

It’s that time of the year. Fantasy baseball drafts are starting up, and I need to get my draft board in order. Yup, I put a draft board together for my fantasy baseball drafts (yes, I do more than one league) every year. For the last 5 years, I’ve won at least one league I’ve been in, and think that putting a board together gives me an advantage. Does it really? Who knows, but I’m certainly not changing my system now.

Let me backtrack for a second. I started playing fantasy baseball in the 5th grade. I remember it being the 5th grade because my best friend’s dad was in a league and a group (6) of us decided we wanted to be cool like his dad and put a league together. This was before the advent of all the fantasy sports websites on the internet, so we had to do stats once a week from Baseball Weekly on a spreadsheet in the computer lab. Our math teacher thought this was a great way to learn about math, so he would let us out of class to work on it. Ever since then, I’ve been hooked.

I watched 3 hours of Clemens Congressional Testimony, and I have to say, I wonder why Washington is so bored. I think the hearing was an absolute waste of time and money, and that going into the situation, everyone had to know that nothing was going to get resolved. I think Bill Simmons summed up best what I feel about the hearing:

Given that we’re dealing with Iraq, global warming, the subprime shakeout, the decline of the American dollar, the decline of the public-school system and every other troublesome reality in this country right now, it’s hard to believe some of our most notable Congressmen didn’t have a better way to spend this week than interrogating a disgraced Hall of Fame pitcher and the sad-sack Andy Dick lookalike who once trained him. I do not approve this usage of my tax dollars.

I received an email from a friend this morning that made me laugh. I wonder if Chairman Waxman thought this was what was going to come from the meeting:

Clemens: You want answers?

Congressman: I think I’m entitled to them.

Clemens: You want answers?

Congressman: I want the truth!

Yes. I was in class at 8:45 this morning. Yes, it was voluntary. No, I was not getting any credit. Yes, I was questioning my own sanity.

By my count there were 6 other Owen students and 8 law school students, 13 large Starbucks coffees, 2 dozen Krispy Kreme donuts, and three Adjunct Professors who had forgotten more about the M&A process than most of us will ever know. Compared to last weekend when I had my Eli Manning jersey on at 9 am and was pacing around my house because I was so nervous about the Super Bowl, discussing the nuances of a material adverse change clause was quite a change.

The course, Mergers and Acquisitions Deal Dynamics, is a 4 day short course taught by David Katz, a partner with Wachtell Lipton, Rosen & Katz in NYC, Leo E. Strine, Jr., the Vice Chancellor, Court of Chancery, Delaware (and a fellow University of Delaware alum), and Jim Cheek, a partner with Bass Berry & Sims in Nashville who was involved in the HCA and Genesco deals. These three professors created an assignment that tracks an imaginary case of a proposed MBO that leads to an auction of the company. We started from the very beginning of the process, and were challenged at every step of the process to critically think about what each actor would/could/should do at each step of the process and why. Nothing is assumed and everything is questioned.

I’ve always been fascinated by the business side to sports. While some of my classmates would love to become CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies or MDs at an IB or a consulting firm, I wish I was Jerry Reese or Brian Cashman. Unfortunately for me (and probably fortunately for the Giants and Yankees) I highly doubt I’ll ever be running either organization. I was never a star athlete, and have no experience in the industry. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t read as much as I can on how teams run the personnel side of their organizations. Though this, I recently came across a couple of articles about the Houston Rockets.

Economists are now trying to use models to predict where high school players will attend college:

CNNSI Article

Also, there is a study from Univeristy of Colorado – Denver about whether college football games cause an increase in crime. Freakomonics has a blog article about it:

Freakonomics Blog

And here’s a link to the paper:

College Football Games and Crime by Rees and Schnepel