Why Professional Sports as we know it will go away:

Can you imagine Major League Baseball, as it is today, being around for another 20 years? I certainly can’t. We witnessed this week another example of the yearly owners meetings coming and going without any sort of significant changes to the salary structure which has turned the mid to small market teams into what are basically Class AAAA franchises for the larger market teams.

I don’t think you can operate a profitable, nationwide, professional sporting league of any kind, without some sort of salary cap in place. Right now, the only reason, that the vast majority of Major League Baseball teams make any money, is because of their 162 game schedules. You don’t have to sell out every game. With that kind of volume a team can get away, for several years, averaging 15 -20 thousand fans per game.

But it can’t keep being all about profitability or non-profitability. At some point, one has to look at WHY my team only has this many people showing up for games. When you have teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have the second largest market in the United States to form a fan base out of, going bankrupt, something is inherently wrong with your sport.

And I think that “something” is entertainment value. Baseball is the only sport, where on a yearly basis; I can’t tell you who plays for my home team. I have no idea who is in the 2012 starting rotation for the Cleveland Indians. I have heard of Asdrubel Cabrera, other than him, I can’t name you an everyday infielder for the Tribe. If you were to ask a Red Sox fan or a Yankee fan who is on their team, they could rattle those names off in a minute.

The difference is star power on their teams compared to ours. Most major league teams are not much more than a collection of that franchises best farm system players from the year before. Which is a nice story for those kids, but leaves a lot to be desired as a fan who is supposed to care about these people and pay money to watch them?

People don’t show up to boxing matches to watch the under card, just as people don’t show up to MLB games to watch minor leaguers masquerading as professional baseball players. Most people are not stupid enough as sports fans, to allow themselves to be fooled into thinking that Jason Donald is a professional second baseman.

So until every team has the ability to retain talent for long enough that their fan bases can identify with their players, professional baseball will be on the fast track to contraction of teams and an eventual failure.

I think the best thing that could possibly happen to professional baseball, as it is today, would be for Warren Buffet to buy the Kansas City Royals. I wonder how fast, the league would impose a hard salary cap, once someone with real wealth began poaching talent from the Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies and putting them in that television market. I have a feeling it would be a matter of days.

THE NBA

The NBA is just about done already. When you are in the middle of a 130 day lockout and 85% of American’s polled don’t care, you’ve got some serious issues with your sport. I live in a city where they have Kevin Garnet, Rajon Rondo, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen on their team, and I have not met a single person who gives a half a shit about the NBA not playing games right now.

I can’t imagine how little they care in places like Minnesota and Milwaukee. Essentially the owners of the teams want a system like the NFL that limits player movement, and the players want something like MLB which allows people to just do whatever they want. And as of this week, they are both suing each other.

So the NBA is now at a point where instead of playing games, which they are supposed to be doing tonight, they are all suing each other instead.

So there is not going to be an NBA this year and maybe not even next year. And when it does come back, it doesn’t seem like a whole lot of people are going to go watch it anyway.

So case in point when it comes to “The Association”.

THE NFL:
When it comes to sustainability, the NFL is the closest thing we have to a perfect system. I can see the NFL being around in 20 years however certain changes are in order.

First off, there are way too many play stoppages throughout the course of an NFL game. Do we still need the two minute warning? That was designed to let people know when there were two minutes left before they had clocks in the stadiums. You know how long ago that was? It was before they had clocks! We can all view a satellite feed of the tops of our own heads now, on our telephones. We do not need to still be following rules from before they had clocks in stadiums.

Reviews need to work faster. I see the value in reviewing plays. There is no way the refs can get everything right, at those speeds, on the first try. But the process needs to be refined. It needs to take far less time. I propose a time limit of 15 seconds to view the replay, if it is not absolutely clear at that point, just run the play again. The NFL has turned into a game of long winded, referee explanations to the crowd about some of the most obscure crap imaginable.

I am sick of hearing..

“Upon further review, the receiver did not maintain possession of the ball throughout the entire catching motion. The player must achieve full possession of the ball, and make an athletic football move, prior to the act being considered an actual reception. The ball will be placed at the original line of scrimmage, and the Oakland Raiders will be charged with their second time out of the half. It will be third down, six yards to go.”

The replay has righted a lot of wrongs, I will give it that. It has also taught everyone more about how exactly football works then I think many of us ever cared to know. But how many hours do we have to spend starring at some guys toes, trying to see if they landed on a white line or on the field of play, or gawking at some running backs elbow to see if it hit the ground prior to a fumble? Or my personal favorite, trying to pick out a brown ball, in the midst of a sweaty, rugby scrum of humanity to see if the tip of a ball, as it is being grasped by an enormous mans arm, broke the plane of the goal line. All the while listening to a couple of jackasses debating how the whole thing is going to turn out, whenever the referee decides to pull hit fat white ass, out of his peep show booth on the sidelines and let everyone move on with their lives.

Figure out a way to make that whole thing faster. It has already taken away a lot more from the game then it needs to.

I am also getting a little tired of the offensive based refereeing mentality. I have said it before and will say it again; the guys who play in the secondary in the NFL are the best athletes in the world. Thanks to rule change after rule change after rule change, these men’s positions basically require them to work miracles on every passing play. Think about it, as an NFL cornerback, you have to somehow manage to keep a 6’5, 230 pound man, who can run like an Olympic sprinter, from catching a ball, that you don’t know where is going, without so much as touching him. Every time an NFL cornerback or Safety breaks up a pass, without being penalized for something, we have all basically just witnessed a miracle.

It did not always used to be like this, you are barely allowed to tackle anyone anymore without being called for a penalty. The big concern is concussions. Too many people are leaving the games concussed. I don’t know how to say this without sounding “insensitive” but NFL players get paid millions of dollars to get concussions. And to expect defensive players to have the athletic wherewithal to be able to adjust where their heads are located, in a period of four hundredths of a second, so as to not hit a receiver in his helmet, is unrealistic. I would not expect Spiderman to be able to do that let alone nonfiction NFL players. I guess I would feel differently if these guys were making 10 bucks an hour out there. Nobody wants to see minimum wage employees getting knocked stupid, but millionaires, who have gone into a field that requires them to run as fast as they can amongst a bunch of the biggest, fastest, angriest freaks in the world, logically should result in a few concussions. And nobody is paying 150 a ticket to watch these guys play grab ass out there.

From the standpoint of a financial model, the NFL is second to none. How well do you think an MLB or NBA team would fare in Green Bay? They just need a little house cleaning, other than that, they are solid.