FanHouse Malcolm Gladwell

The FanHouse Podcast: Because bloggers are much sexier on the phone.

In Episode 23, FanHouse's Michael David Smith joins Will Brinson and Ryan Wilson to talk about Tony Kornheiser's departure from Monday Night Football. Jon Gruden now has the gig, but is it a one-year deal? And is there a chance that should Gruden return to coaching in 2010, Matt Millen is next in line? Good times.

The conversation also touches on Malcolm Gladwell, who thinks the Lions had nothing to lose by featuring the no-huddle during their run to 0-16 last season, as well as the latest on Brett Favre. Naturally.

Disclaimer: I enjoy Malcolm Gladwell a great deal. I read his books, columns and blog. There's a substantial backlash against him, especially in the sports world, but I'm not a part of it. He has great gifts in distillation and (in my opinion) telling stories. I'm a fan. (I also generally like Bill Simmons, for the record.)

But Gladwell's argument that the reverse-quality structure of the NBA draft "does untold damage" to the league is awful. I touched on Gladwell's discussion of "moral hazard" in the NBA draft over the weekend as it relates to another plea by the author (that teams think outside the box more frequently). But here I'd like to really dig into Gladwell's specific theory (endorsed by Simmons) that all teams would benefit from a complete reformation of the current draft system.

One of the maddening things about the Detroit Lions over the eight-year Matt Millen era -- and especially during their winless season in 2008 -- was that no matter how awful the team was, the coaches and front office seemed to feel certain that they were doing things the right way, and that they didn't need to change.

Every time Millen addressed the media during his horrendous run as the team's president, reporters would pose him questions about ways that the Lions should change their approach, and Millen would, without fail, insist that he had the right plan for changing the team's fortunes, and that they were close to turning the corner. And after Millen was finally fired early in the 2008 season, head coach Rod Marinelli constantly insisted that his approach to coaching was the right one, even as he became the first coach ever to finish a season 0-16.

In his lengthy dispatch exchange with ESPN's Bill Simmons, New Yorker writer and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell endorses wholesale changes to the NBA draft. Specifically, he wants to erase the incentive for bad teams -- he wants all teams, elite and awful, to have a shot at the best players in the draft.

Gladwell has most recently been the talk of basketball blogs for another opinion, that NBA and college teams need to embrace the full-court press as a legitimate strategy. Frankly, these two opinions don't make sense coming from the same person.

Malcolm Gladwell's article in the current issue of The New Yorker focuses on Vivek Ranadivé, a man with limited basketball knowledge who took his 12-year-old daughter's basketball team to the national championships (yes, they have national champions for 12-year-old girls) by employing the full-court press.

As you'd expect from Gladwell, it's a sprawling narrative that covers everything from Lawrence of Arabia to the fascinating research of the Harvard political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft, and the bottom line, by Gladwell's way of thinking, is that in every walk of life, the little guy can beat the big guy, as long as the little guy tries harder. The full-court press in 12-year-old girls' basketball is just the way Gladwell gets that point across.