Sports analogies, part n, and the process of faculty hiring

I remember, back in my law school days, how few sports analogies I really understood. Back then, I vowed that I'd find other analogies to use when I taught--and, for a while, I used shopping analogies, clothing analogies, etc., to make my points in class. For a while, I worried that sports analogies were themselves somehow sexist; but then I found myself with lots of other women friends who follow sports seriously. Moreover, I found myself learning some sports--and feeling pretty darn awkward as a beginner. That experience gave me some perspective in teaching entry-level courses (contracts, basic bankruptcy) to law students. I became more patient. I gave them more opportunities to practice what I was teaching. So I still don't really "get" most sports analogies, but I've started to like them more....

That being said, I believe that the baseball analogies that we use here at MoneyLaw really are the most apt at describing what hiring committees should be doing. The whole smash of metaphors--contests, performance, arenas, playing under pressure, position players, etc.--resonates for me. Friends of mine who are on the market this year talk about the endurance aspects of the whole thing. Faculty hiring, perhaps, is its own sport.

I'm not enough of a mainstream athlete to put all of this into a pure sports analogy, and everything that I know about baseball I can put into a two-word sentence ("Seems cool."), but here's my distillation of the MoneyLaw principles when it comes to faculty hiring:

• Pedigree doesn't matter. Performance does.
• "Potential" for performance isn't nearly as good as is proven performance.
• What looks good on paper can look very different in real life.