Wishful Thinking

Sporting events are perhaps the most polarizing forms of entertainment.  Unlike a movie with a set protagonist and antagonist where you are clearly meant to root for one side sporting events offer two sides which can both be protagonists.  Unless the Yankees or the Jets are playing, in which case they are always antagonists.  It is for this reason that sports catch on so well.  In a movie you can express your hate towards a villain no more than you can rest in a cloud.  With sports though, you can shout at, fight with, or defenestrate fans of the opposite team with ease.  So, it’s really quite interactive really.

Unfortunately this has also led to problems: parents getting into drunken brawls at ping pong tournaments, Red Sox fans selling their homes (and wives) to get World Series tickets, and apparel with the Yankees logo on it.  Amazingly enough though, this is not the biggest problem with sports.  The biggest problem with sports is our limited attention span.

Imagine if you will a world where baseball had not evolved from its humble roots of the late 18th century.  Players wouldn’t be steroidal monsters, home runs would be quite rare and you would actually be able to afford to take your family to a game for the afternoon.  In fact, it would be quite like cricket.  There would still be a strong following but there would be little to no interest in the sport outside of the die hards that grew up playing it.  No $100 million contracts, supercars or mansions.  Amazing as that sounds, at some point someone figured out that if you change the rules a bit every now and then, make equipment better, make players stronger, that people that otherwise wouldn’t care will stay interested longer, especially when these small changes result in records being broken.  And there you have it, the formula for turning a somewhat popular sport into a phenomenon.

This process has been going on for years.  The NFL, MLB and NASCAR are probably the most notorious practitioners of this method in the United States.  The NHL is a little more traditional, and no one cares about basketball anyways.  The equation works, and in moderation it’s great.  The problem occurs when the leagues get greedy.  For MLB it was the steroid era.  Yes, it revitalized the sport after the strike, but the lasting effects are killing it again.  NASCAR is facing the problem of failed modifications that are arguably making the sport more boring.  The NFL is currently in the midst of this process, big time, and though they haven’t felt the consequences yet, they will.

The NFL has set into this mode where they want scores in the hundred thousands.  That may be slightly hyperbolic, but I doubt by much.  The key to high scores is passing.  Great passing quarterbacks have electrified games for quite some time.  From Johnny Unitas to Payton Manning passers have been gods.  The problem is they are few and far between.  Any quarterback in the NFL can throw, but few of them are elite passers.  This is a problem in a league that wants higher scoring, well, it was a problem.

To combat this problem the NFL tightened the pass interference rules making it much tougher for a defender to stop a receiver from catching the ball.  Rules created with the guise of protecting the quarterback from injury have made it harder for a defense to really let him have it, giving the quarterback more time to throw an accurate pass.  The effect: more passes being completed and higher scoring.  Everything the NFL wants, or is it?

The obvious consequence is defenses are being limited.  If defense is limited it means that cornerbacks and safeties are going to have to become more elite.  Which means teams without elite secondaries are going to get stomped on and they have to hope that the opposing defense is equally as bad.  Football players know this is a bad combination, old school football fans know this is a bad combination, but the NFL only sees money going into their pockets, short term.  If the system continues to runaway like this eventually the league will have to ease up on the rules to give defenses a chance and it will have an effect similar to steroids in baseball.  Don’t believe me?

Here’s how this will play out unchanged, especially if the league goes without a salary cap from now on like it seems.  The elite quarterbacks that are left are going to run over everything.  All the other teams will score because the rules will be made to allow almost anyone to score as long as the ball gets up in the air, but they won’t ever go the distance because cornerbacks and safties will be the new quarterback and receiver.  Teams like the Bills, the Lions and the Browns will remain perpetual losers.

This brings me back to the polarizing factor that I spoke of at the beginning of this column.  If you know the team is going to lose, you aren’t going to go to the game, buy a jersey, or even watch the game anymore unless you are a deep rooted fan.  Some teams are already to that point.  When the team eventually gets sold or moved to a new city the old fans will feel betrayed, and if they have half a wit to them, they’ll understand what happened and just find something else.  People will start telling stories of how when they were younger 30 points in a game was a miracle, none the less 50.  The game is rubbish, it’s a league of overpaid sissies.  Wait, that’s already happening.

Sure, the NFL is doing fine now.  But when you alienate your core fan base, the folks that really love the sport, to keep bringing in and retaining people that spend 90% of the game talking about their date last night it leads to problems.  The core fans will abandon you and with ticket prices as high as they are (and rising) when you hit a losing season prepare for empty seats.  People will still watch, but they won’t buy jerseys or comforters.  The effects might not be as bad as we are seeing with steroids in baseball but it shakes things up much more than will make any owner comfortable.

In the end people enjoy sports because it gives them something to root for.  Whether you win or lose it provides emotion and excitement.  That’s why for many it’s more than a game.  For a 23 year old recent grad that’s struggling seeing his college hockey team come back from the brink of disaster to win the national championship wasn’t just a game, it was a bright light in an otherwise dismal part of his life.  That’s why the leagues can’t alienate us or discard us as merely sources of income.  Some cities live (Boston) or die (Philly) by their sports teams. Teams, whether they like it or not, are much more important to America than they can possibly know, so set a good example.

In conclusion I’d like to say to the sports leagues of America this: if you want to keep the stands packed how about not raping us with ticket prices?  How about you take a hard line with greedy athletes and set caps so you don’t have to raise ticket prices to unspeakable heights to pay for the players?  And please, don’t fiddle with the game too much, we like it how it is.

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Title thanks to Brian Regan.