Emotional Labor; Elections; 30 Under 30; Finland

National strikes, baby! Workers in the U.S. nowadays are afraid they'll get fired for even mentioning a union. Another reason to vote for Bernard.

Hey, I don't know how closely Matt follows college football, but I have a take I'd be interested in hearing his (or Liz's) thoughts on. Now there's been a couple of times in recent years where the University of Alabama qualified for the national postseason despite failing to qualify for its conference championship game. This happened in 2011 and in 2017; and both times Alabama went on to win the national championship. The case of 2017 is especially funny because in the last week of the regular season Alabama lost to Auburn University; and consequently Auburn 1) qualified for the Southeastern Conference championship game whereas Alabama would not play the following week, and 2) jumped to #2 in the national College Football Playoff standings while Alabama dropped to #5. Since the top 4 teams and the top 4 teams alone qualify for the College Football Playoff and compete for the national championship, Auburn was sitting pretty and Alabama was in serious jeopardy of not getting a chance to play for the national title. Then Auburn hit the University of Georgia in the SEC championship and lost, while other highly ranked teams lost their own conference championship games, the result of which was that Auburn ended up #7 in the CFP standings and Alabama was promoted to #4, meaning Alabama qualified for the national playoffs and Auburn did not. So my take is this: Auburn was punished for playing a conference championship game against a tough opponent and losing, and Alabama was not penalized and indeed was rewarded for not being good enough to play in the same conference championship game. Clearly, the optimal move was not to play an extra game against a strong opponent. So it seems to me that, if a team are already placed in the College Football Playoff standings such that if the season ended immediately they would qualify, they should just refuse to play a conference championship game. It's possible the College Football Playoff committee would positively punish a team that was invited to a championship game but refused to play, but I think even that body would recognize the palpable unfairness of requiring certain very good teams to risk their seasons in an extra game their rivals don't have to play. And usually the teams that play in the conference championship games are big programs that pull in a lot of revenue which you'd like to see in the College Football Playoff; so I think in the end there'd be some angry press releases from the conference offices and some handwringing on ESPN, but nonetheless the likes of Ohio State or Clemson could get away with just skipping their conference championship games if they had nothing to gain from playing. I'm sure that if Bill Belichick were the coach of a prestige program he would do this and be praised as a genius.

Anonymous