Do you know this man?Of course you do, this is Skip Sauer, the man most responsible for The Sports Economist – the very blog you are reading. And the picture comes with the story on The Sports Economist published in Sports Illustrated. As Bill Syken notes in “Number Crunchers”
“One of the beauties of sport is that it can be enjoyed by so many kinds of people, from little girls to grandfathers, from face-painted yahoos to deep thinkers like Skip Sauer and his cohorts. Sauer, 50, is chair of the economics department at Clemson and the brains behind The Sports Economist, a two-year-old blog. On the site Sauer and nine other professors put their decades in academe to use dissecting the sports news of the day. Think of www.thesportseconomist.com as a highbrow version of Around the Horn.”
All in all, this was a wonderful article and very nice recognition for this blog and the field of sports economics.
By the way, if the Sports Illustrated article was not enough, the field was also profiled in USA Today’s Money section on July 27. In a lengthy profile by Sue Kirchhoff entitled, “Batter up! Sports Economics Hits Field”, one can learn much about sports economics. One interesting factoid was that between 100 and 120 professors in the United States teach a sports econ course. It would be interesting to see how much that number has changed in the past ten years and project the popularity of this class into the future. Perhaps Rod Fort, author of one of the two major textbooks in the field and a contributor to The Sports Economist, could comment on that issue. At what point do we expect most colleges and universities to offer sports economics as an elective to its students?
