Every day that I come into work I have a little ritual that I go through. Unless I have an early meeting or something like that, I logon to my computer, and immediately sift through a couple of websites (Gmail, ESPN, Yahoo! Sports, etc.). I have to do this before I start any actual work. It’s such a reflex at this point that even though I probably only spend 10 minutes a day on ESPN in the morning at 8am, if my work started to just block ESPN from our computers, I probably would be psychologically paralyzed for the rest of the day, and would get no real work done at all.
Anyway, one of the big headline stories on each sports site this morning had to do with the upcoming labor agreement (or disagreement potentially) in the NFL. One of the sticking points of this upcoming collective bargaining agreement is switching from a 16 game regular season to an 18 game regular season. At first glance, who wouldn’t want that? The NFL is the most popular sports league in the country. Mo’ games would be mo’ better, right? But the timing of this couldn’t make the NFL look worse. The only thing that would be more hypocritical is if a pot literally called a kettle black. Every year, more and more rules come out that prohibit certain kinds of hits (helmet-to-helmet hits, leading with the helmet, horse-collar tackles, blows to the head, etc.), and this year more of these rules have been legislated than ever before. Whether these rule changes are actually good for the game or not is a debate for another day. Some say that tackle football is moving closer and closer to flag football all the time, but you can’t really argue that the rules have been put in place to help protect player safety. So, someone remind me again how lengthening the season will promote player safety.
Listen, this issue has already been debated by people much, much smarter than me, but the NFL, the king of all sports leagues in the United States, has a real public relations problem here. Not only does it make it look like the league and its owners don’t care about the players at all, but it makes them look like liars to boot. While the league continues to chug along without any real competitor in the world of sports, they have been called out on this kind of hypocrisy before. When the league’s legislators first started looking at putting rules in place against helmet-to-helmet hits some years back, some wondered how the NFL could do so with a straight face, as hits where players were getting “blown up” were still celebrated. The NFL was creating rules against these hits, and then still making money off them at the same time by putting out videos and DVDs for sale chronicling the NFL’s hardest hitters…which brings us to the real crux of the issue: money.
The fact of the matter is that the NFL is a business, and all businesses are in the business of making money. While the further they stretch themselves out (whether that means lengthening the season, adding more franchises, or whatever) will probably hurt the overall product, the NFL still hasn’t saturated the market yet. Football isn’t like other sports. In football, teams don’t play seasons that last close to or over a hundred games. Each NFL team hosts 8 home games a year, and most franchises sell-out all those games (or come close to it). Television ratings for professional football dwarf those for all other sports. The fact is that for those reasons alone the move to an 18 game season was always inevitable. But hey, NFL owners, do us a favor…don’t tell us about an 18 game season, and then mention player safety to us in the same breath. We’re not stupid. We know what the deal really is. And since this expanded season is coming like a runaway train, at least do us one other thing: cut the NFL preseason in half…please. We never needed 4 preseason games per team. No one likes watching games where the real teams play about a quarter (if that), and then we get to watch a bunch of practice squad players, most of which will never see the field in an NFL regular season, for the majority of the game. But then again, we know what that’s all about as well. I hope you know what you’re doing, NFL. Just like how I feel about the NCAA tournament expanding to 68 teams, you don’t mess with perfection, and March Madness and the NFL are as close to perfection as we get in sports. The old Wu-Tang lyric still rings true though: cash rules everything around me…
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