Jackson Free Press

"I always turn to the sports section first," Earl Warren, the 14th chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court once said. "The sports page records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures."

As Warren acknowledged, sports are often cast in the narrative of accomplishment. The mystique of the "unbroken record" ensconces most athletic competition. These records offer a quantifiable method to weigh achievement and frame moments in historical sequence. But then the records themselves gain a foggy mystery and an academic remoteness.

In terms of mystique, the last three years have been a revelatory period in speed sailing. In October 2008, a French kite surfer, Sebastien Cattelan, cracked an unprecedented 50 knots at the Lüderitz Speed Challenge. Within a month, the 50-knot threshold became the equivalent of a four-minute mile: once undreamt-of, now attainable.

The fall of a record can liberate a sport. Suddenly, we recognize that while the record stood, the mystique of sports figures had begun to dim beside the solemnly collected and assiduously studied data. Then, another Frenchman, Alain Thébault, a defiant, self-proclaimed "Icarus of the sea," pushed the record to 51.4 knots in September 2009.

By this summer, the NBA might see a different barometer of "unprecedence" forged. Last summer, the Boston Celtics brought in power forward Rasheed Wallace to bolster the team's already stout defensive prowess. Celtics fans hoped his diminished playing time would keep his intensity high, and his ejections and technical fouls low.

When introduced, Wallace said that he would accept any role that coach Doc Rivers would assign him, as long as it led to victories. Mostly, that's exactly what he's done for the aging Eastern Conference contender. This NBA season, Wallace has averaged almost 24 minutes, but with an astonishing 14 technical fouls. For every five quarters he spends on the court, Wallace gets a technical foul. Likely, he will fall short of his own regular-season record of 41 technicals in a season. But, if he remains on pace (and on the floor), Wallace will set a new, and dubious, record for most technical-fouls-per-minutes-on-the-floor.

In the first week of February, the University of Florida set a precedent for monopolizing ESPNU-150 recruits, bringing in 15 of them, including four in the top 10.

Aside from the garden-variety moral qualms I have about the insulated and upside-down world of college recruiting (it's creepy; it's overhyped; it's deranged; it's damaging for student-athletes), the mania around National Signing Day is especially misplaced. Florida's Urban Meyer's recruiting achievements illustrates the problems with record-breaking.

Collecting talent does not ordain winning seasons. Since Pete Carroll's arrival, the USC program has dominated recruiting, but has never matched the successful period from 2003 to 2005. Those days are more than a half-decade past. The real significance of accumulating stud high-school players or home runs or sailing records might pale beside the popular furor that "stat-tracking" raises.

More importantly, you have to consider the "Michael E. Mann Factor." In 2001, Mann, a celebrated climatologist and professor at Penn State University, crafted "the hockey stick graph" that gave powerful visual weight to environmentalists' polemical position of global warming, featuring prominently in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." Last year, though, private e-mails sent by Mann seemed to give credence to the fact that he (and perhaps other climatologists) had distorted evidence to verify the existence of climate change. This discovery does not shake the scientific foundation for climate-change research, but it does illustrate how even someone invested in objectivity might distort evidence to fit a widely held professional consensus.

In college recruiting, a program will establish a consensus around itself, or around a coach as an evaluator or developer. Since the evidence on a recruit's ability is weak, recruits rise and fall depending on how their stock is graded by those coaches and programs. Three-star athletes are transformed into five-star guys, and five-star players slip into mediocrity.

Recruiters form consensus around a recruit and even a region (Florida is talent-rich, Connecticut is not). Since Florida coach Meyer is a great recruiter, the ESPNU and Rivals.com recruitniks will always rate his classes highly, even when their previous estimations had those same athletes rated low. Because the recruitniks will always rate him highly, the legend of coach Meyer as a great recruiter grows.

(It also helps that he lauds his recruits like a gushing mother hen. Meyer has suggested this 2010 crop is, to a person, the finest individuals, the brightest academic stars, and the best football players available, before they ever play a meaningful down or attend a college class. The last time he brought in classes this talented, 2006 and 2007, those athletes accumulated a collective rap sheet of about 20 arrests and two national championships.)

Ironically, this is how great programs are brought low: hubris. Just ask Bobby Bowden.