It can get wild when a bunch of economists get together to talk sports on a smart and funny blog

	Sauer is part of a movement in sports analysis that changed the way Belichick thinks about fourth down. Greg Foster/SI

By Bill Syken

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.  ... To get immediate access to this complete story you must be a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED magazine subscriber. If you are not currently a subscriber, see below for a special offer.

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