Tank Carter, brother of Steelers safety Tyrone Carter, skipped a court date for driving with a suspended license, to see his brother in the Super Bowl.
The judge responded by extending his 6 month jail sentence to 5 years.
Slate truth sleuth Jack Shafer calls hoo-bob on the latest attempt to heap blame for our economic woes on that old reliable scapegoat for all of society's ills: the lowly sports fan.
The culprit this time is one John Challenger, a worker productivity guru who last week released this study which posits that the economy will suffer $3.8 billion in lost productivity due to workers following March Madness. The media ran with it -- Shafer has a list of culprits -- nevermind that Challenger's numbers are bogus on their face.
As Shafer points out, Challenger gets to his number by asserting that some 58 million Americans will spend an average of 13.5 minutes online following the tourney for each of its 16 days. Nevermind that for the last 2 years, viewership for the championship game was just 23.1 and 16.6 million respectively. And further, two-thirds of the games are at night or on weekends, when there's little productivity to be lost.
Now it's obvious that sports fans can do some dumb things but alas, watching $3.8 billion worth of college basketball isn't one of them. I suggest Mr. Challenger get his calculator out and try to tally the amount of lost productivity caused from reading, forwarding and writing angry blog posts about bogus worker productivity studies. Add my six minutes to the pile.
