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John A. Camacho and Zack Hamilton, "Sports Chaos: Exploring the Reasons Behind Expert Business, Legal, and Moral Decisions" (2025)
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- [00:00]
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Marshall Po
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- [01:37]
Paul Knepper
Hello and welcome back to New Books and Sports, a podcast channel, the New Books Network. I'm your host, Paul Knepper, and today I'm excited to talk to John Camacho and Zach Hamilton about their new book, Sports Chaos, exploring the reasons behind expert business, legal and moral decisions. John and Zach are the co founders of the Moral Questions of Sports. Both have law degrees. John has written for Conduct Detrimental, the Sports Law Intersection and the Peach Basket, and Zach is an executive search consultant. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.
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John Camacho
Thank you.
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Zach Hamilton
Yes, thanks for having us. It's great to be here.
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Paul Knepper
So I guess let's start off with kind of the impetus behind this book. What was the idea behind it? What made you feel compelled to write about this?
- [02:27]
John Camacho
Well, so we started with an idea of wanting this first we wanted this, you know, we set up this company and then we wanted to do research. We really wanted to do surveys at one of the big ten schools. And we were working with them for about a few months. And then as we were working, I think we worked with the philosopher at the time, and it just didn't turn out well, did it, Zach? We were trying to explain our process. We're trying to bring in a little bit more empirical work, but also bringing a little bit of philosophy together with it. And the project just fell flat. And so we really sort of looked at each other and it's one of those failures that reveal things to you. So to, you know, we looked at each other and we're like, okay, we need a clear statement of what we're talking about. We need a clear vision of what we're we talk about. We're talking about. We need a statement. We need something a little bit more definitive than just, you know, a few conversations. And so we wanted to talk about the ways that sports, law, business and morality all intersected and the decisions that athletes, student athletes, the professionals, how they make those kinds of decisions, how they weigh different things. That was really what we were interested in learning about. And so hopefully this book will be really our research statement or our mission statement as well.
- [04:04]
Zach Hamilton
Yeah, it was really kind of a roadmap because like John was saying, we connected with this Big ten university because the initial plan was, you know, we want to go out into the market and kind of assess the student athletes and then ultimately professional athletes and kind of see what their rationale is, their thought process, their decision making process, the wars of reason that they go through when they're making a decision. Because in the sports world, maybe more so than any other world, people at a young age are thrust into areas of exposure and responsibility and monetary gain that they aren't in other areas. And because of that, they need to be able to navigate those wars of reason by having a thorough decision making process and you don't know what you don't know type of thing. So I was kind of like, hey, let's try to help these kids, so to speak, as they're going through this and kind of assess what it is that they're doing to help them make better form decisions. And that just was not resonating with this guy we were working with because he just kind of get the whole mindset of being a student athlete or being an athlete in general, because he didn't come from that background. So we were like, you know what we need to make a roadmap to be like, hey, this is what we're talking about. Here it is. If you get it and you like it, that's great. Let's talk about it. If you don't, move on. But here it is in black and white just for you. So that's kind of how it fostered.
- [05:36]
John Camacho
Yeah. And especially for college athletes who are going through nil, who are making decisions, you know, they have family decisions that they're making, sports decisions, monetary financial decisions, marketing decisions, legal decisions. Unfortunately, you know, in terms of signing contracts and getting advice, they're getting advice from so many different kinds of people. And it's hard to. It's hard to vet.
- [06:01]
Zach Hamilton
Right.
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John Camacho
It's hard to know. Just like Zach said, it's hard to know when you don't know.
- [06:05]
Paul Knepper
Yeah. And you've kind of alluded to it, but I wonder if you could talk just a little more detail about what you refer to as the colliding reasons problem. What exactly is that as it relates to sports?
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John Camacho
Great. So this is an interdisciplinary research project. Right. So this is a problem that is not unique to any particular discipline. Because the problem is asking when all the experts weigh in after the financial expert weighs in, the legal expert weighs in, the sports expert weighs in, a moral expert or moral consultant weighs in after everyone weighs in, how do you make a decision? How do you weigh those things? What takes priority? Is it just business? Is it just legal? Do you favor morally sometimes? Do you rejected or only take care of your family? You know, in certain situations, but when it comes to other situations, you don't. Our question is when, when that problem happens, that's such an interdisciplinary problem that no expert on themselves can. Can answer it. Not the illegal expert, not the business expert, not the sports expert. And you know, again, student athletes are professionals, have these issues every day. These are most prominent in this area where you have to make these kind of decisions. And the cloudy reasons problem is what is a way to capture all the ways that these different kinds of reasons are all hitting each other and their relationships. There are relationships between business, law and morality, family or technology. All these other sort of things are. Obviously, we sort of focus on sports, business, law, morality in the first parts of the book, but throughout the rest of the book, as you can see, it expands out. It expands to family issues, expands to technology. It just spreads out with medicine in terms of concussions and health treatments. So there's many different kinds of ways that all these sort of things are intersecting. And not one person or not one expert can just solve the problem. If we only listen to the medical experts, that's not going to solve the concussion problem in the NFL. It's just not. Because right now there are still so many tests that are not being done that could be done. There's athletes who are high, you know, who are finding ways to avoid getting tested or cheating the test. So even if you have one expert trying to think that oh well, we just need one person to solve this problem, that's not gonna happen. And so the colliding reasons problem is saying, hey, look, this is not just an expert, one expert problem can solve this. This is a problem of many experts.
- [09:02]
Zach Hamilton
No, certainly. And to piggyback on that, the colliding reasons problem is something that really everybody addresses. Like you have various reasons for why you do whatever at the end of the day, but it might only be maybe yourself and your wife or your boss that are influencing you. A student athlete who is 18 years old at an SEC school has got a coach and friends and family members and other student body and media members and potential like there are so many different colliding reasons trying to influence and drive their decision making process more so in that area than probably anywhere else.
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Paul Knepper
Yeah. And I love some of the other examples. I love the Kindergarten Cop reference, by the way, in the book. Fantastic. Everybody have to read the book to get that one. But thank you, thank you. There's a part of the book where you talk about, you know, you talk about how business often ends up being a default solution. And you know, you refer to a Kirk, her quote in that sense. How often is the business decision, the, the default position? And, and how problematic is that?
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John Camacho
It's, it's usually the, I mean when I've listened to, let's say Andrew Brandt for example, who's been, you know, who's worked for the NFL, who's, I mean, he's worked for NFLPA agents, media, law firm professor. You listen to those kind of experts who have sports experts who have a little bit of variation in everything. A lot of them will just say, hey, look, players are going to take the most money. The default reasons is usually business. Or you're going to have to look at it as a business first. But the funny thing is that we've seen the problems with that, we've seen historically the issues with that where you only focus on business reason that it leads to other, it leads to other law, frankly, it leads to lawsuits, it leads to maltreatment. Either it leads to maltreatment in some respect where it creates a lawsuit. So instead of you focusing on the business in the front end, you have to worry about the business on the back end. So the profits that you're making, you think you're making, aren't really profits anymore because they become legal expenses. So, I mean, David Jansen, also, whose business, you know, Sports Business Guy, he also talks about how business reasons, the only. These are the only things that sort of matter. But then when you think about negotiations, particularly within player contracts, you want that person to be happy, like giving them that extra little money. Even if you want to be the best negotiator. Andrew, Brad even, you know, admits to this, like, I should have been a better negotiator in terms of, hey, this isn't really worth the fight because you, again, it's transactional work. You still want to work with that other person in the future. You still want to have a working relationship. And when you only focus on the business reasons, you damage that business. You damage that professional relationship. You damage them wanting to be there and being happy to be there. And we see that. We see that all the time. Where player contracts are fought, fought, fought, fought throughout the summer. And then either the owner will cave like Jerry Jones has. Sorry, Zach. He might cave, or he traded Michael Parsons, which is even worse. Right. Making that trade was, you know, has not. Has not. Has not let him focus on business reasons. Has not. Has not helped the sport, has not helped the Cowboys win more games this season.
- [12:38]
Zach Hamilton
Yeah. I would say by and large, business reasons more often win out just because dollars drive everything. But then also I would say more often, business decisions are the ones who have the most backlash. And like John was saying there just for instance, to circle to another one of my fabled Dallas teams. That Luca trade, we believe they did that for business reasons because they didn't want to pay the man. But they have lost so much more money and value for that franchise than they could have even imagined by making what they thought was going to be a smart business decision.
- [13:19]
John Camacho
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's a great example of just how the backlash was so big that you. I mean, the value of the franchise has diminished and has jeopardized their ability and owner's ability to now build this huge real estate stadium that he wants to build, change the gambling laws. He has no leverage.
- [13:40]
Zach Hamilton
Yeah, it's not going to happen.
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John Camacho
He has no business leverage. So you think you're making a financial decision to not pay Luca $200 million. Okay, fine. Now you're suffering for it in another business area. So Again, the relationships, there's almost like yin and yang. These things are connected. And so we see someone make such a big that make one financial decision that's so bad and then all of a sudden it affects the sport, it affects your fandom, it affects the community. And then that respect. You lost business community, you've lost sponsors. And now that's gonna hurt you. Now you don't have as much money. Now we wish you could have spent that $200 million.
- [14:25]
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- [15:55]
Paul Knepper
You know you do a nice job in the book of talking about how these different, these different reasons collide. The legal, the moral, the business, the sports. We just talk about business a little. What, what's, what are one or some ways that where the legal world kind of comes, you know, crashing into the sports world.
- [16:13]
Zach Hamilton
So I would say that sometimes the legal. So like for the flip side of that, you know, let's go back and this often has to do with sports punishments and the fact that sports punishments a long standing have not been universal because if you know and by always I say this with the disclaimer that this is not accurate. I've never seen any depiction of this happening before. But if Patrick Mahomes were to commit domestic battery, they would try to cover that up a lot more and his penalty be a lot less strenuous than if some backup defensive tackle did it on, you know, the Browns or whatever. Like it, it comes down to sometimes they try to diminish the legal reason because of the business reason. This is going to hurt the value of the franchise or the league or whatever it may be because of this specific individual's notoriety. Well, maybe let's not throw the book at that. Maybe let's not follow the actual technical legal path or what is morally right to do, because the business decision actually outweighs that at the end of the day. And I guess I feel like sports punishment is the place that that comes in most often. Don't you agree, John?
- [17:25]
John Camacho
Yeah. Yeah. The one thing I keep, I keep thinking about was more recently Brian Kelly, right? Brian Kelly, former LSU coach, you know, fired recently for basically winning reasons, but also cultural reasons. And then he has a huge payout. The governor has to get involved. And now he has. Now he's filing a lawsuit for wrongful termination, right? Pat Fitzgerald, when he was fired from Northwestern, he recently won his wrongful termination lawsuit. So he got fired. You know, he got fired and then won a lawsuit. Like, you know, it's. The law is there, but it's really a tool. It's really a tool that these universities or decision makers are using. And again, sort of like Zach said, when it's being used, not just that it's there out there, but now Brian Keller, for example, now he's going to enforce his right that I was fired, I was terminated, now I can get all of his money again, a lawsuit like that, that's going to take years, that could take years to settle, right? LSU doesn't want that. LSU doesn't want a lawsuit hanging over its head. They don't want to try to attract a new coach, right? So again, like, it's not necessarily the lawsuit. That's, that's, that's such the legal thing, but it's the effect that the lawsuit has on against the other and the perception that that goes around that, hey, look, this is something that, hey, man, they're being sued. Do I really want to go into that mess? You know, now coach might still, you know, another coach might still, you know, you know, may trump at the chance, but Lane Kiffin's not gonna go there. That seems pretty clear. And he's one of the top candidates out there. And I'm sure that lawsuit doesn't help. And so another example that I love is the shark effect, right? So in the film, what's the name? Civil trial. I think it's civil trial. Anyways, there's a great line from. There's a great line in there about it's not that they settle. It's about how much they were going to settle by and what the effect of that settlement number has into the rest of the community. A great example of that now is Brett Kavanaugh wrote an opinion destroying the ncaa, went out of his way to sort of set this, you know, to write this opinion, and now everyone is, is attacking the ncaa. Now there's a whole laundry list of, of lawsuits that he's just, you know, there's a, there's literally a buffet of anyone who wants to the NCAA right now, please, go ahead. You have a green light. That's the effect of the, of the lawsuit. Not necessarily that they're going to win. Not necessarily that every lawsuit has merit. Even it's show that now you have to deal with. Now you previously deal with maybe one or two lawsuits. You. Now you're dealing with 20, 25 lawsuits. That's the more egregious effect where law comes in. Again, not necessarily. Okay, well, the intricacies of the law, but the effect that that lawsuit has on the community and on other attorneys and everyone else. And that's really interesting because that is how you can commute. That's how other lawyers talk to each other. You know, that's how, you know, hey, look, if we have a green light, let's go. If anyone has a claim, let's. Let's go attack them to play today. Right?
- [21:01]
Paul Knepper
So we talked about, we talked about law of business a little bit. I wonder if you get into morality a little bit and how morality, reasons of morality collide with the sports world.
- [21:11]
Zach Hamilton
I would actually say that a big moral hot button hot button issue right now is all of the gambling stuff. And that also kind of ties into the legal as well. So really something that's really all in the vein of moral legal business reasonings is the Rozier Tronte Billups scandal. Because I've seen several reports that the day that that game happened with the Pelicans, that Roger, like, was touching his foot and all that weird stuff, the offline books were flooded with bets on his unders, and the offline books told the league about that. And the league was like, don't worry about that. Well, that was morally wrong. That was legally wrong. But the league made a business decision to not tarnish its brand or get any bad PR by being like, oh, let's just, let's not talk about that right now. And then ultimately, and it's now blown up and it is, but, you know, kind of a stigma on the league and on really all of sports in general as far as props and, you know, the, the sports gambling world is concerned, it creates them some more doubt with all that there. And that is something that is easily manipulated by somebody who doesn't have good morals and as a poor moral decision that they made that they probably know will ultimately be outweighed or overshadowed by some business decision. So they're not concerned about it.
- [22:40]
John Camacho
Yeah, you know, one, one thing that I really sort of discovered, definitely discovered through doing the research on this. I remember the LeBron, LeBron James mind the Game podcast with Jason Reddick at the time they were talking about, you know, I think LeBron James was like a cat analogy about how much crap the cat has. How much goodwill are you sort of bringing in in terms of how much of a problem are you on the court? And it really sort of help us make a distinction between morality, like more sort of serious violations, and just professional etiquette and professionalism. And I think we've really. In sports, we don't really distinguish between the two. And I think we really, you know, really need to. So, for example, Chauncey Billups, it's a professional. He is a professional. He is, you know, when he comes. He's worked at espn, he's worked at. Everyone calls him a good teammate. Everyone has said great things about him. No one says anything bad about who he is and that he comes on time. He doesn't badmouth the coach. He's a good guy to be around. Okay, fine. That's great at your professional job. That's one evaluation. It's a very different evaluation when you talk about morality. And now he's stealing. You know, we're setting up gamblers and stealing their money. That's a law violation. That's very different. And so I think a lot of times we equate to, oh, he's a good guy. We like him. He, he, he, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't talk back. Right.
- [24:15]
Zach Hamilton
Yeah, it's a good locker room guy.
- [24:16]
John Camacho
He comes to, he comes to, you know, he's not late to practice. Right. That's professionalism. That has nothing to do that. That's very distinguished between morality. Morales, more serious. Right. Rallies. Not just professional etiquette, basically. And a lot of times we talk about Etiquette. And that can bring you a lot of goodwill. Like Johnson Bills has a lot of goodwill. A lot of people, when they found out about Johnson Bills, they did not trash him that were fitting to Terry Rozier or Damon Jones. They were very residents to say, hey, look, I gotta wait for the evidence. Right? They didn't say that about Jerry Rozier. They said, oh, I can see Jerry Rodger doing that. I can see, I can see Damon Jones doing that.
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Paul Knepper
Yeah.
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John Camacho
When it comes to Chauncey Bills, he's built up a lot of that goodwill from his etiquette, from his professionalism, not his morality. Like, not from his moral behavior. And so, you know, that's one, that's one ways where morality comes in. You can have etiquette reasons, professional reasons. He's a good teammate, he's a good coworker. He's, you know, he comes to work on time, he contributes. He doesn't, you know, he's late, not late to practice. He leaves, you know, he stays extra, he does extra work. Fine, that's great. You get a goal, you get a, you get a little star for that. Morality is a different level. It's a different hierarchy. And when we talk about those moral reasons, those, you know, again conflict with etiquette reasons. And so, you know, if you're a veteran on a team, for example, and you're, and you're, and you're paying the, and you're paying the butt to be around, you may be a really good person, but if your professionalism is bad, you're late to practice, you're bounding off, you're, you know, maybe, you know, being a bad influence on the younger, on the younger players. You're going to get kicked out, you're going to get kicked out the league. And that has nothing to do with your moral character. And so moral character is definitely something a little more, you know, serious, more prestigious. Professionalism, etiquette, that's just your job. That's more of your professionalism, I think. You know, and listening to all, listen to all the research we've done, I think that's one thing that we can, we can definitely say that it exists in sports. Professionalism is very different than moral violations as well.
- [26:25]
Paul Knepper
So we touched on, you know, there's sports, there's, you know, trying to win on the field, on the court, and then the competing interests of business, legal and morality. And, you know, you guys talk about, in the book about this, you know, how do we, how do you decide between these colliding forces, right? And you talk about the decisions, dynamic decisions, dynamics, process in the book. So I wonder if you could, if you could address that a little bit, how that works.
- [26:52]
John Camacho
Yeah, so it's. So again, we're trying to think of a more comprehensive approach, right? You want something that involves not just, hey, I'm. So one of the examples that we give against our view is more of just empirical view on, hey. From two sociologists we mentioned. But one of the things that we try to mention is ours is try to include not just one expert, not just one expertise, but everyone. So the process, the CIS break process starts with, it's a five step process. What is the decision? What are the relevant reasons? Who's winning, who's currently winning in terms of those relationships, what's more dominant right now? Next question is who should be winning? Are these really the right ways that they should be winning? And again like right now you could say a lot of business reasons are winning, but then the question becomes, should they be? And in that respect, that's when you bring in more information, right? You bring in more information on, on, you know, from experts, from everyone, you know, from academics to sports media people, from athletes. You get everyone's input at that process. And then the last sort of, last sort of part is, you know, has there been a balance, is there a balance between all of these reasons? And I think so. Dominic Voxpert has talked about a balance of computing issues. So we sort of, you know, inspired by him basically, but we're stolen from him. But we want to see if there can be a balance of all these reasons. So even if, like, let's say, for example, the decision is mainly a business decision, you're saying, okay, well, you know, I got to take this lizard golf money, right? I got to take this money. Even if it's not, you know, it's maybe a little blunt money, but I got to take this money. Okay, that may be the first decision, but collectively later down the line, why can you also use that money or make another decision later on that balances that out, right? So maybe you, maybe you know, you take you, you, you work with Liv golf or you know, you work with the, you know, you work with them and then all of a sudden you can you use that money to also build up like a women's rights, you know, trade school or something, you use that money to build up, you know, to not just donate it, but you, you try to really use it to actually, you know, set up, you know, a balance between what, you know, not just focusing on your Business reason, but also something morally later down the line. And I think a lot of times we think, well, you know, I don't have any principles because I'm taking this bloodline, so I might as well just buy a Ferrari. No, no, that's not how it works. Right. Just because you initially are making that business decision, it doesn't mean that every other decision afterwards, you can't also try to find a balance between that. And so we want to have something where we think that that can be achieved. I think that's our main thesis, is that we can achieve a balance of these reasons, of these competing considerations. How do we do that? Let's be creative in trying to figure those things out, not just say, oh, well, you know, let's, you know, I can't. I can't be moral anymore. Sorry, I took the blood money. No, it's, It's. Let me try to do something else with it. Let me, you know, let me also influence people with it. Let's, you know, you can use that money in different ways. Not just put in your pocket.
- [30:30]
Zach Hamilton
Yeah, no, it's you. The decisions you make in the rubble sector, decisions you make. But not just that. It harkens back to the roadmap. For instance, if you were to, you know, you're going through a process and you're going like, I got to make this big decision. Instead of just like making that decision based off of your thoughts or maybe you and one other person, you should run through a full decision dynamics process, which is essentially like whiteboard this thing. All right, what are the business reasons for this? Okay, well, it'll save us from paying the supermax. We'll have more flexibility in the cap. We can bring in more free agents. Okay, well, what are the sports reason for making this? Well, I think the defense wins championships and blah, blah. Okay, well, you know, what are the moral reason. When moral. Moral comes into your identity, your. Your philosophy or culture, your, Your like, makeup. And as I'm clearly talking about here, the Mavs, the makeup, the maths, was that it a homegrown type of environment. That was the culture that they had. You know, we understand that, hey, if we might win one championship in 20 years, but it was with our guy and he got us there. And that was what it was. That was the kind of like, moral decision that they needed to think about and weigh in that. And they clearly didn't think about that at all. Or if they did, they put it, you know, diminished. And that's really what the decision dynamics process comes down to is you're making a decision. This is a big decision. This isn't just a business decision. This isn't just a sports decision. This isn't just a moral decision. This isn't just a legal decision. It's all of them. And you need to factor all of that in if you are going to make an informed decision.
- [32:11]
John Camacho
Yeah, yeah. And listen, this is a practice, right, where like, this is not going to be easy. I don't think. You know, right now there's a lot of specialists out there. Get be an expert, pays you a lot of money if you just say business reasons. If you just say legal reasons, you'll make a lot of money just on. Just on those two things alone, just articulating those reasons. But I would encourage people when they listen to like, just go beyond your discipline. Go beyond just thinking about, okay, well my discipline says this, so I'm going to. I have to give this reason, go beyond and understand the relationships between these things. If you understand, okay, well, a lot of business users are winning right now. Maybe we need to like help out with some, some other reasons out here, maybe bring a better community, family reasons, some more reasons, some other sort of things to balance this thing out. Now if we're losing money to the extent of like our, our morality, then, okay, well, we gotta come back to this. We gotta come back and make some business decisions to make sure we're funding this thing. And that's the other thing. People always think that business and morality are somehow always fighting each other. Charities, Charities are one of the big, easiest ways where money helps build charities, period. You're doing good things for money. A lot of athletes spend a lot of money donating to charities, helping good causes. There's so many good causes out there. They're not just this dynamic. They're not always just these fights. They have intricate relationships. Maybe, you know, you. It can make. It can make you not really appreciate other reasons. There's an example in there we talk about with Jamel Hill on this politics podcast where sports and politics meet, where she interviews someone and he says, like, you know, thinking of it as a charity has actually hurt the business because the people think it's like the morality aspect has actually made. It has actually made people not just think about money and maybe not be as efficient as they normally are. And so don't think of it as just a morality play. Think of it as strictly a business and you'll still do the morality later. So again, like, these relationships are very complex and we need to understand them so that we can make better decisions. Extra value meals are back.
- [34:37]
Paul Knepper
That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and.
- [34:40]
John Camacho
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- [34:46]
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John Camacho
And for delivery.
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- [35:18]
John Camacho
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo.
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Zach Hamilton
There's no Milo here.
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Who picked up my son from school?
- [35:24]
John Camacho
Streaming only on Peacock.
- [35:28]
Zach Hamilton
I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection.
- [35:31]
John Camacho
You don't understand. It was just the five of us. So this was all planned. What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to.
- [35:38]
Zach Hamilton
Get my son back.
- [35:39]
John Camacho
I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other.
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- [35:48]
Paul Knepper
So how. Let's try this out. I mean, you know, this decision making process, let's say, I mean, one thing you talk about, kind of difficult issue in sports right now, which you bring up in the book, is transgender athletes. So walk me through. How would you apply this decision making process to the question of should transgender athletes be allowed to participate in sports?
- [36:13]
John Camacho
Yeah, that's a great question because it's one of the few questions I keep getting. I remember even just talking about. I remember keep getting it when I would tell people, hey, I mind the sports book and spout ethics a little bit, and people would just say, well, what do you think about this? And it was like Uber drivers, people I just randomly met, they were like, they were so focused on this issue. Initially, I was like, Initially I was like, I don't really know. I was like, this is new. That's the first thing I would say, that this is a new phenomenon and that we're practicing this as a society. We're practicing this. We're trying to get it right. And just because the law is a law today or policy to policy today, it does not mean that it's going to stand in 50, 20 years. Right now, there's not that many transgender athletes I could easily imagine in a hundred years, 200, you know, whatever. There's a lot more Transgender athletes. And they want their own, they want their own professional leagues, right? They want their own sort of TV contracts, right? They want their own, you know, everything. So in that respect, like right now, right now, if we were making a decision about it, the way we talk about it initially is we talk about through the International Olympic Committee. So they actually had, they actually did this. They actually went out and tried to do decision, almost basically tried to do decision dynamics process. They tried to bring in all these experts. And what happened? They basically said puberty, which is the same thing that puberty was sort of the standard of if you hit puberty, if you had the surgery before puberty, then you could be count as the gender and that you didn't receive the benefit of puberty. So for example, you think of like Victor Wembanyama, he's hit puberty, right? He's at puberty. You think of Paul, you're here. So I keep thinking about Moses Malone. You think of mid career Moses Malone all of a sudden wants to join WNBA or something. Yeah, like, you know, that's a benefit. He's received the benefit of being a man enough that you know what, we can't really have you join the wnba, right? And that's not being discriminatory, that's really being fair to the process. So you know, one of the, so one, if we were looking at this, we would say one, who are the decision makers, right? So if it's a school board, if it's the policymakers, if it's, let's say, let's say it's a school board, let's say it's a school board, let's say it's for high school or something, then the next step is what are the relevant reasons? Well, obviously competition, fair competition. You want to maintain fair competition. You also don't want lawsuits from disgruntled parents. So you might be aware that, hey, you may be aware of, let's, let's bring them involved also into the process. Let's bring all these people involved. Business reasons, obviously, you know, what sort of business, what sort of financial benefit is this really going to have? You know, high school sports, maybe not much. Third. Okay, who's the, who's winning the relationship? Well, you know, clearly, clearly more people. I mean it really switches every day, honestly, with basically who the president is and what policies are being initiated. So right now there's probably more discrimination towards or banning transgender athletes from playing. And again, who should be winning. And that's when everyone sort of comes in. And one thing that I think, particularly for transgender athletes, is because it's fundamentally about fair competition, and you try to hold that in. One of the people who should have a strong voice is the opponents. Right? Like your opponents. If you're. If you're. We all know this. When we played recess, we knew this. You have to go on that team to make it fair. Like, we would split the teams up. The two best players would be on two separate teams, tallest players be on different teams. Particularly for team sports, it seems pretty easy. It seems easier to sort of do that. I think that if, especially if the. Their opponents, if the competition between each. Between the people, between the students, let's say, for example, their students, middle school, high school students, if they're okay with it, then go ahead, go ahead and do it. That's one thing that seems pretty clear, is that they need a strong voice because it's about fair competition. The people who are competing is going to have a strong voice for that, not necessarily people who are. Who are outside of it. And how does that balance been achieved? Well, you might achieve a balance maybe today, tomorrow. But again, as this grows, as this gets bigger, we can just imagine that it's going to change and that there's a lot more decisions that are going to be made. So I guess the case I keep thinking about is, like, Victor Waymiyama, he's in puberty. He's received the biological benefit of it. It seems unfair for him to play the WNBA even if he has a sex change tomorrow or something. It seems like, hey, look, that's. This is not fair. This is not fair at all. And so, you know, and that's one case, but other extreme case, if it's someone who's, you know, mugsy Bogue size and is a great point guard, and all of a sudden, you know, a bunch of switch genders and the. And the players are okay with it, then I think right now that can also be the right decision for today. But again, this is not something that's going to be fixed with a one law. For example, even after every law that's been out there, there's been a lawsuit. Someone's going to challenge this constitutionality. Someone's going to. Legislators are going to criticize it. Law professors might challenge it is constitutionality. So, you know, understand that it's a growing process. Like, it's not just a let's fix transgender app. Let's fix this together. No, it's going to be more complicated and a lot more decisions are going to be made. But at least we have A process. We have a process that evaluates every time we have to do this. We have a set form that how we do a set procedure on how to do it. And I think that is a lot better than just exactly. Than. Yeah. Than what we have right now, which is everyone yelling, everyone screaming, and no real consensus. And then all these problems happen. More lawsuits, more financial costs, more legal expenses. And the players don't even play either. The players are playing, the players are not. So.
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Zach Hamilton
Yeah, no, certainly. It definitely is an ever evolving issue. And like John was saying there, I think that this specifically is a lot of, well, you know, this so and so expert from this era, this so and so expert from this era says something, but that's like some geriatric who isn't living in the day to day. It should be more about, like, what do the cohesive units feel about the morality of the situation? And if everybody's okay with it, they're okay with. And there you there they used to be. There still is a kind of societal understanding of puberty because, you know, we're younger, like, like I said, we're playing kickball. We're playing like intermix co ed kickball, you know, in fifth grade or whatever it may be. But when I got into high school and I was playing football, like it was just guys because we were all sophomores and juniors and seniors in high school because we had already gone through puberty. I mean, it kind of made that break. And that was just kind of a societal understanding of, oh, yeah, sure, you're playing co ed soccer or kickball or basketball or whatever it may be in elementary school, but once you get to the age of puberty, things start to separate between and you have to account for that if you want to, at the end of the day, have fair play, which is what you should be trying to achieve in the competition of sports.
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John Camacho
Yeah. And I think, I think the aim for that balance of reasons is fair play. Right. If we can achieve wherever that balance is, a fair play exactly. Regardless of where it is or whatever, you know, that's whatever decisions we have to make to achieve that fair play. I think that's what's. I think that's the best solution. If you want to say that there's a solution, that's the best way to navigate this process and not feel like there's discrimination against transgender men or women, you know, or feel like they're stealing, you know, along the other side. Feel like they're stealing, you know, you know, wars and stuff.
- [44:52]
Zach Hamilton
Yeah.
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John Camacho
Records from Other records or something like that. Yeah, like there's, there's a way to achieve that fair play. And we're, again, we're aside. We just got to get better at it. We just have to get better at figuring it out. And it's going to take time. It's going to take time. Like it's not, you know, just like the legal process takes time. It's going to take time to get, to get us figuring out exactly in what situation. And again, this could, the way it works in your community and your local view, it might be different. We might have to use different things. For the Olympic Committee, for example, right. Where you have, you know, medals at stake and those, and you know, political relations are at stake. Like, you know, maybe in those situations it's a little bit different. But you know, I, you know, I think generally pretty strongly like are the opponents, the opponents, your competitors have a really strong voice in this and they don't. I don't feel like they do at all.
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Paul Knepper
Yeah, you know, to me, I, I think an inherent problem in this, in the decision making process is that people, you know, we're talking about this, this is a cross disciplinary approach. Right. But nobody is, nobody is an expert. And you, you touch on this in the book. Nobody is an expert of business, law, sports and morality. Right. It's just nobody is, has maybe somebody. Yeah, maybe somewhere close.
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John Camacho
Yeah.
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Paul Knepper
But you know, and I, so let's take an NBA, like an NBA team, for example, and people making the decisions. You know, I mean, the coaches, obviously he's the coaches, people are going to defer or revert to their area of expertise. Right. When making decisions, I think the, the owners are going to tend to make the business decisions because they, that's, that's their background. That's how they've made their living. That's, that's how they have become so successful, is making business decisions. So they're going to tend to go that way. You know, certain, I think, you know, sub commissioners like David Stern comes to mind. David Stern's a lawyer. He's going to, you know, and a great businessman too. But I think often he's going to revert to the, the legal, he's going to look up the legal documentation. You know, when it comes to the coach making the decision, he's going to make the sports decision. Right. Like what is the best, what is best going to help my team on the court? So I mean, what, what kind of people should coach, should, should teams, universities, leagues, organizations be looking for to make these types of decisions.
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John Camacho
That's a great question. That's a great question. One I, you know, the first person I sort of think of is Andrew Brandt. Just because he was trained law but also the business, was a sports agent. So he understands financial side for players. He's, he didn't actually play. So you know, there's, there's sort of that maybe not the sports knowledge as much or the moral knowledge also, but you know, I think that there should be. It's not necessarily of looking for a resume necessarily. It's understanding of a process. Yeah, sorry for that.
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Paul Knepper
But more like a process oriented person perhaps.
- [48:05]
John Camacho
Yeah, exactly. Like it's not like, hey, he worked in three, those four places, boom, let's hire this guy to consult with us. It's can someone think beyond their. Yeah. Then their specialty. And you mentioned the Kirk Herstreet. We call it a call to arms because it's like he just encapsulates really well in terms of we need someone not just thinking about one issue in college sports. We need someone who's thinking about the whole, about everything. So if you have that global perspective, if you have that comprehensive perspective that even if you're trained in something else, that may not be the best reason at that time. And so in that respect, yeah, it's going to be hard to find someone.
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Zach Hamilton
Is that, yeah, I would say it's not even necessarily someone specifically. It's a type of individual who understands the totality of the circumstance and the situation. So just to archive where you're saying that, you know, when you're making decisions, you get an owner, he's more than likely to make a business decision. You get a coach, more likely going to make the sports decision. You know, you'll get the, the GM who might try to blend the two of those together. But is anybody thinking about the moral as that's why it is the moral questions of sports. People aren't asking these questions. They're asking what is the sports decision for this? What is the business decision for this? Am I going to get sued? Okay, well then I don't have to worry about it. Yes, but inherently there are other things that factor at play here that you need to factor in. And that's, it's not necessarily this is the specific person that they need to call in. I'm telling you, I'm going to tell you it's this expert or that expert. It's that you need someone in your team, in your process, whatever it is, who is accurately applying decision dynamics, who is accurately assessing all of the different factors at play. Because if you don't do that, then you're going to have the one guy telling you the sports thing, the one guy telling the business thing, the one guy telling the legal thing. And more often than not, again, the business thing is going to win out. And often too. That's because that's the highest run in the hierarchy. The owner is telling you, hey, we're doing this as a business decision. I mean, what else are you going to say against that? Unless you are actually having a cohesive conversation about making that decision in, pulling in all of the various different areas. Right?
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John Camacho
Yeah. And again, you have to look at what kind of decision you're making and what the legals. Definitely what's at stake overall. I keep thinking about a case where it was. I think it was at the NHL where I think there was like sexual assault allegations towards a player and it was right during playoffs. So the coach comes in, he's like, I want to focus on sports. We need to just keep pushing forward. You know, owner's like, well, I want to keep this business rolling. You know, federal counsel is like, well, you know, there's liability risk here. If we don't do this, you know, everyone was thinking for themselves and then it just blows up, right? Then later, they try to cover it up. They try to cover it up, try to try to, you know, hush the person, hush the victim tried to maybe, you know, make them not, you know, hey, hey, don't talk, don't talk. We'll talk about it later. We'll talk about it later. We're not going to fire him now. We'll fire the guy later. You're accusing him. We'll do an investigation later. But we got to talk about the playoffs now, later. Town turns out they don't make the, you know, they don't. They all win a championship, of course they. And then it blows up in the summer and the whole thing comes out and it's just like, come on, guys. Like, come on, let's do better. Let's do better than just, you know, focusing on only their one thing. Like only focus on one thing. It's like, no, man, we can weigh different things. We can, we have. We can do that all the time. It's not that hard. We can make decisions that don't just apply to our own self interest or own business, financial interest. And we can think beyond not just the right now, but I think a lot of it isn't necessarily the business decision for right now. It's also the business decision for later, because the business later could also attack you. I mean, Northwestern hazing scandal is a great example of this. They fire the coach, then have to pay him a year later. What the. I mean, what's going on here? What's going on? Like, how did that have to happen? You could have easily had put him on indefinite suspension until an investigation was more thorough after the student newspaper had gone out. And you could have said, hey, look, okay, we need to properly investigate this. We need to talk to more people before we fire the guy. Turns out that he wasn't directly involved. And the same school who fired him is now appraising him when he's leaving. It's like, we gotta do better than this. We gotta do better. Those sort of things were just more frustrating because that's a decision that started that, you know, that you had to deal with for a whole year or so later, and you still came back exactly where you were. What are you doing? And are you a top university? You know, you know, you're not some, you know, little states fool or something from middle of nowhere. You're Northwestern. Like, you know, you would think that they would be smart enough to like to handle this better, and they just couldn't. They got afraid of the fire, afraid of the media fire, afraid of the reaction, fired someone wrongfully and then, and then had to literally say, we think he's a great coach at the end, at the end of it. But come on, those are the decisions that, to me, we can definitely do better at now. Are there going to be other decisions where we can try to. Where there's going to be more of a issue or more problems? Yes, of course, but some of those are just so blatantly bad that a decision on any process could have easily, to me, could have easily fixed that. Oh, yeah, and that caused legal fees aside, that, that cost. Legal fees, financial costs, the school's reputation, the football team isn't great anymore. You know, the only reason why they were the main news this year was because they, they, they beat Penn State. That was the only reason. Other than that they've been, you know, one year later, they were good program. Next year, they're, they're trash. Like, ha. Like, how is that smart?
- [54:57]
Paul Knepper
Yeah. Guys, before we wrap it up, can you just share with an audience a little about. About the moral, the moral questions of sports, about your company and what you guys are trying to do?
- [55:10]
Zach Hamilton
Yeah, I mean, this is the main thing is we were thinking about all this and kind of seeing, you know, the moral question is more often the One that is not, you know, paid attention to or considered in any facet. So we started bringing that about and brought up the decision dynamics process as a how a way to incorporate that. Ultimately, like I said earlier, we would love to get into and have plans to get into assessments and surveys for student athletes on how they go through their decision dynamics process and maybe a way to help foster a better decision dynamics process for them moving forward in the spring sports chaos world that they step into being collegiate athletes in 2025 and beyond. In addition to that, something that recently came out that we had talked about was the whole the report cards that was a big thing recently. You know, Woody Johnson was all mad that they called him out for how terribly the jets has run and you know, I'm notoriously the Bengals the same way, the Cardinals the same way. The Athletics were always that way. I think that that's something that should, there should be rate my professor types of things for every professional organization. And I'm not just talking NFL, mba, mlb, mls, wnba, like the Professional Lacrosse League. Like if you are a free agent and you are making a decision about a place to go to, move your family to, in often cases, if you are at that second contract stage, you need to be making an informed decision. And are you always taking into consideration all the various assets in a decision dynamics process? I'd say more often than not people aren't. And our hope is that in the future more people will.
- [56:59]
John Camacho
Yeah, we would love to take over those report cards. I would love to take those over if the NFLPA doesn't win their arbitration and just because the death. Exactly the type of stuff that we're kind of research that we're trying to do and are working towards is understanding what's important to the players and student athletes, what do they find valuable but also what's their day to day life, how do they make these decisions in understanding how to get. So we can get better at them and then you can, you know, we could, you know, you know the survey that industry that we had was something like, you know, if you're, if you're, you know, you just got on the team and you got a little nil money and you know someone of your teammates is struggling with some money and needs some food. Do you, do you help him out? You know, do you, you know, is that, you know, those are even just little things like that, like how much do you spend? You know, do you give him a hundred bucks or do you, do you go or do you take them grocery shopping? You know, those sorts of things are important for us to sort of understand like how people are thinking about this now that, you know, people are getting a little bit more, a lot more money than they used to and it's open and people know, you know, people knew that Shore Shannon's was making a lot of money, was making millions of dollars in nil. Archvadi was making millions of dollars. Now, you know, if you're a teammate of his and you're, and you don't have an nil contract, you know, ordeal, you know, what's your relationship with him? You know, when, you know, you're struggling and he's not, you know, how does that affect the team dynamics as well? So. Because money can affect the team. You know, we see that professional sports all the time. So it's not a surprise that's going to happen in college and other sports as well. So understanding more about those decisions and how they're made and making those public and available to everyone say, hey, look, this is how we're making a decision, guys. You guys feel okay with that? That would be some great research for us to do moving forward.
- [59:12]
Paul Knepper
All right, well, guys, let me just mention one last time. The name of Zakajad's book is Sports Chaos. Exploring the reasons behind expert business, legal and moral decisions. I mean, you raised some really interesting issues with this book and I agree we really need a better process going forward. So I wish you the best of luck with the moral questions of sports and thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [59:39]
Zach Hamilton
No, thank you for having us. It was great.
- [59:41]
John Camacho
Thank you. Thank you. Paul.
- [59:50]
Zach Hamilton
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John Camacho
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Zach Hamilton
Busy.
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John Camacho
Taxes and fees extra.
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Zach Hamilton
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