Sports Chaos

About the Author

John’s research background is in philosophy specializing in ethics and epistemology. In graduate school, John studied the nature of normativity specifically reasons for belief and reasons for action. Zack’s research interests are centered around sports analytics, market analysis, contractual negotiations, and employment law. They combined their interests to investigate and analyze sports decision-making.

John is an avid fan of the New York Knicks and New York Giants. Zack is a passionate fan of the Dallas Cowboys, Dallas Stars, not the Dallas Mavericks, and loves March Madness.

Qn 1: Can you tell us more about your book What is it about?

Sports Chaos is about the fundamental relationships between sports, business, law, and morality. Many experts such as team executives, athletes, and scholars specialize in only one or two of these areas. We wanted to provide a more realistic comprehensive understanding of the real life battles between all of these areas. We see these battles as part of a wider chaos that goes beyond sports. When people argue in the art versus the artist debate, what they are really doing is arguing about the moral/immoral character of the artist vs the aesthetic reasons to appreciate the art. Similarly, when a team owner/president has to decide whether to keep or trade a player, the executive decides between sports reasons like whether the player increases the team’s chances of winning versus business reasons such as how expensive is the player’s contract. This kind of reasoning calculation is an intrinsic part of sports and social life.

The first part of the book delves deep into these foundational issues and proposes a new theory, Decision Dynamics Process, Chapters 1-4, the second part, Chapters 5-13, explores recent examples of sports decisions made by fans, student-athletes, ownership, athlete, and commissioners, and the third part, Chapters 14-16, discusses how this book is used to launch our company, The Moral Questions of Sports.

Qn 2: Who do you think would be interested in this book, is it directed at any particular market?

This book’s audience is sports fans everywhere. Chapter 5, “Love, The First Sports Decision” talks about the importance and impact our sports love creates. All sports fans will appreciate this chapter and remember their own personal decision to love a particular sport or sports team. This book will be most appreciated by the sports fans who have questioned or expressed frustration over decisions made by their favorite teams or players. We hope that this book can alleviate their worries by explaining the chaotic nature of sports. For example, many Dallas Mavericks fans including co-author, Zack Hamilton, were angry when the team traded their best player, Luka Doncic. For weeks and months after the trade, Mavericks fans could not comprehend why the trade was made and unleashed their frustration in many ways including putting up billboards or selling their season tickets. Chapter 11, “Luka to the Lakers, The Biggest Trade Ever” captures the ups and downs of the Luka trade and the battle between winning, supermax, and conditioning reasons.

Qn 3: Out of all the books in the world, and all the authors, which are your favourite and why?

Zack’s favorite books are

1. Michael Lombardi’s Gridiron Genius
2. Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball
3. Bob Sturn’s This Year is Different: How the Mavs Won it All — The Official Story
4. Mark Cuban’s How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It
5. OG Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in The World.

John’s favorite philosophy books are

1. Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton’s Moral Discourse & Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches especially, “Toward Fin de siècle Ethics: Some Trends,”
2. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice
3. Steven Cahn’s Philosophy for the 21st Century
4. Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa’s The Epistemology of Testimony
5. Tim Scanlon’s Being Realistic About Reasons
6. Daniel Star’s Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity

John’s favorite legal books are

1. H.L.A. Hart’s Concept of Law
2. Frederick Shauer’s Thinking Like a Lawyer
3. Amalia Amaya’s The Faces of Virtue in Law
4. Jeremy Waldron’s Law and Disagreement
5. John Oberdiek’s Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts
6. John Chapman’s NOMOS XXXIII Compensatory Justice
7. Hart Publishers Collection

• New Essays on the Normativity of Law
• The Normative Claim of Law
• Law, Virtue, and Justice
• New Essays on the Nature of Legal Reasoning

Qn 4: What guidance would you offer to someone new, or trying to enhance their writing?

Love this question! Finding one’s writer’s voice can take many years. Unfortunately, some people never truly find their own voice but merely copy the style from their favorite authors. We would encourage young writers to write selfishly. Don’t just write for a teacher, professor, or book reviewer, write for yourself first. You need to be the first and main judge of whatever you write. You have to believe in it. You have to believe it sounds good, which goes to the next piece of advice. Listen to your paper. Close your eyes and listen to your words. Do your words sound choppy or do they flow from page to page? Typos, bad syntax, and errors will become obvious. Writing is like any other artistic work. It takes hard work and practice, but there comes a point where every writer brings something new and distinctive. ChatGPT cannot save you. Lastly, young writers tend to take criticism of their writing too personally. Develop a tough shell early on and learn from your mistakes.

If you start writing with yourself as the main judge, listen to your paper, and can appreciate criticism of your writing, then you can quickly become a great writer.

Qn 5: Where can our readers find out more about you, do you have a website, or a way to be contacted?

We have a company! It’s called The Moral Questions of Sports at www.themoralquestionsofsports.com. On our website, you can leave your email to be notified for future events. In preparation for the book, John interviewed sports journalists, academics, and moral philosophers on the podcast, “The Moral Questions of Sports Intersection of Business, Law, and Philosophy.” The episodes are on our website, www.themoralquestionsofsports.com/podcast. John has written previous traditional sports journalism and sports law articles which are also listed on our website. https://www.themoralquestionsofsports.com/articles. If readers have any questions or media inquiries, please contact at info@decideonsports.com.

Qn 6: Why do you think it is important for sports participants and those who support sports participants to be careful and consider health and wellbeing whilst playing?

First, of course, sports participants like athletes have to value their health and wellbeing, because their physical health and mental wellbeing are necessary for their sporting and financial success. Second, fans, selfishly care about their favorite athletes’ health, because their good health improves their team’s chances of winning. A more controversial issue to discuss is why our book, Sports Chaos, targets and criticizes Journalist Greg Cote, and two Sociologists’ 2024 book, “The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game” by Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva. We appreciate Greg Cote’s work in journalism. In conducting our research, we found that Cote passionately articulates the views of traditional journalism. Thus, Cote became the perfect actor to criticise the limitations of traditional journalism in handling sports chaos. On the other hand, we do not have the same appreciation for Kalman-Lamb and Silva. Traditional expert specialists, like these two sociologists, tend to favor their own sociological reasons over other reasons. This narrow kind of reasoning fails to account for the comprehensive scope of the decision-making process. Kalman-Lamb and Silva’s work is not practically helpful for decision-makers, nor does it realistically depict the decision-making process in the board members of universities. The Decision Dynamics Process provides a superior alternative.

Qn 7: What story or event can you tell readers about the scenarios that have happened that need action?

The book explains many areas that need immediate action today! Transgender athletes, Donald Trump’s outright ban created new litigation and moral outrage. Instead of a divisive ban, the U.S. government use the same metric that we use today for separating boys and girls in other sports, puberty. If a child had transgender surgery before puberty, then the child can compete in the same group as their surgery. If not, then the person cannot compete because they received the unfair biological advantage of puberty. Sportswashing, veteran athletes can make financial decisions about choosing where to sign based on the majority and minority owners’ moral conduct. Concussions, the NFL should mandate Diffusion Tensor Imaging in MRIs to test concussions, which gives a more accurate depiction of an athlete’s traumatic brain injuries. All of the medical reasons support this decision, but DTI’s are more expensive than traditional MRIs. These are just a few ways that the book provides immediate, actionable solutions to today’s sports problems.

Qn 8: What has been the most challenging aspect of writing your book?

RESEARCH!! The research process never stops, so finding a stopping point was difficult. In January 2025, we thought that the book was done and then the Luka Doncic trade happened in February. We knew that we had to include it. The Doncic trade exemplified everything about the book, including the public battle of sports vs financial vs conditioning reasons, so that chapter had to be added. We did not complete the Luka chapter until weeks before publication. The book is over 200 pages with over 200 citations, so we made sure that our research process was thorough.

Qn 9: What has been the most rewarding aspect of writing your book?

The most rewarding aspect of the book is how it carves out a new path in sports discourse. There was no previous format or model to use. We introduced a whole new language, including Sports Chaos, The Colliding Reasons Problem, Battles of Expert Reasons, Balance of Reasons, Decision Dynamics Process, and more. This is a unique kind of sports book. This is not a traditional sports journalist’s biography of a team or player. Sports Chaos focuses on today’s controversial decision-making, not historical ones. Furthermore, contemporary sports academics such as sports law professors or sports philosophers either publish in academic journals that many decision-makers do not read nor have access or write “popular books” which tend to explain or “dumb-down” academic jargon for a general audience. But, where is the book that takes seriously contemporary sports problems spoken by LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, or Andre Iguodala? Or analyzes the decision-making process by the International Olympic Committee, commissioners, and owners? Sports analysts may write articles on these topics, but it is never captured in a system until right now! Sports Chaos accounts for the comprehensive scope of controversies. Problems are not merely sports or business problems, but they can also be legal, moral, familial, and psychological ones. Decisions are not made in a vacuum of choices, but among a plethora of options. Sports Chaos successfully carves out a substantive middle ground between journalists and academics. We are the first to develop this idea of expert reasons battling each other in these chaotic sports wars and also developed a solution in terms of the Decision Dynamics Process.

Qn10: What will you be working on next?

We originally attempted qualitative research at a Big Ten University in the form of a questionnaire on sports decisions. Athletes had to choose between sports, business, legal, and moral reasons, including which experts they trusted most to handle their problems. We would love to return to that project. We also have projects on the differences between Sports Etiquette versus Sports Morality, a further study into the Intangibles of Sports, and Season 2 of our podcast, The Moral Questions of Sport: Intersection of Business, Law, and Philosophy. And, of course, watch out for future editions of Sports Chaos dealing with additional controversies.

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