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Alan H. Rolnick grew up in Newburgh, New York, a sleepy river city on the west bank of the Hudson, where he played baseball, read science fiction, learned every Beatles song and dreamed of living someplace different. He graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1972 with a major in frisbee and promptly moved to New York to become a pop star. Taking up magazine writing to put himself through his music career, he eventually found work at the New York Times, where he contributed to the great paper’s early forays into so-called precision journalism. Those forays included a quixotic effort to rank college football teams using computers, a quest that has befuddled programmers, reporters, coaches, players and fans ever since. Alan takes minor credit for this (but swears he had nothing to do with the BCS). His final computer run for the 1983 season made Auburn number one. The human pollsters gave the title to Miami, and Alan decided to atone for his mistake by attending law school at U of M. He had to beg the admissions office to hold his file open until he could take a late LSAT, arguing that the school would be far better off if he were locked in a torts class instead of the Times’ computer room when the Hurricanes took the field to defend their title. The admissions office bought it.

During law school, Alan served as Managing Editor of the Law Review, received the Order of the Coif, and was inducted into the Society of Wig and Robe (which, fortunately, required wearing neither). He also brought luck to the football team, which won another championship in 1987, when he graduated magna cum laude. In the years since, he’s practiced class action and commercial litigation at top Miami law firms, and appeared in numerous high-profile cases. All the while, Miami’s heart-stopping beauty and self-absorbed chaos challenged him daily to figure out where on earth he was, leaving him well aware he’d gotten his wish of living someplace different. Alan still brings luck to the Hurricanes, who, at last count, have won five national titles, starting with the one his computer would have given to Auburn.