In a Thursday column on CBSSportsline.com one of the site’s writers made an argument that Major League Baseball is better than the National Football League because the league has “stayed true to itself” and doesn’t have 20 teams that exist in a “perpetual haze of mediocrity.”
My first thought was that the column was ridiculous. Stayed true to itself? “Pace-of-life rhythms”?
Baseball has “stayed true to itself” by instituting the gimmick of using the glorified exhibition called the All-Star Game to determine home-field for the World Series?
By instituting interleague play into a game whose greatest traditions for nearly a century included the leagues only meeting in the All-Star Game and the World Series?
By continuing to water down the playoffs by splitting into three divisions and adding a Wild Card game, a move clearly made for money and television?
By insisting that its economic issues are a thing of the past despite a $60-plus million gap between the highest and second-highest payrolls in the league?
By claiming parity in a league where three of the four playoff spots in the American League have been claimed by the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles/California/Anaheim Angels for five of the last years?
And worst of all, by actually allowing a World Series to be canceled for labor reasons?
If that is staying true to itself, I’ll take the league where “the in-stadium experience has been watered down to the extent that a couch/TV combo trumps seats on the 50-yard-line.
And while he can claim 20 teams are stumbling around in a haze of mediocrity, at least those teams have a chance to improve from year to year under an economic system that at least allows results on the field to be determined by the moves made by the football front office rather than the income brought in by television revenue.
While I still think the column’s premise is laughable, there is one valuable thing for the NFL to take from such writings. The NFL is – clearly – America’s Game. But the rhetoric that continues coming from league offices, teams’ headquarters, and the NFL Players Union is troubling.
DeMaurice Smith, new head of the NFLPA, has started a strike/lockout fund.
Commissioner Roger Goodell has at least acknowledged that it’s up to the league and the union to settle their upcoming labor issues peacefully.
But some of the league’s team owners are reportedly frustrated by revenue sharing and some of the other facts of life that have made this league great.
The union has said in the past that if 2010 is an uncapped year there will never be another cap.
Can the league stay strong without a salary cap? Perhaps. But the league and the union need to take a lesson from some of the mistakes made by Major League Baseball, some of which forced them to make some of the moves I disliked in order to start bringing back fans furious about the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.
Tossing out revenue sharing would present a “Yankees versus the rest of the league” situation in the NFL for teams with large markets, deep-pocketed owners and brilliant stadiums like the Giants, Jets and Cowboys. League founders like Wellington Mara sacrificed making every buck they could for the good of the competition and the long-term success of the league. I’d say it’s worked well so far.
And a work stoppage? Over the division of billions and billions of dollars? During an economic time in which people may be seeing some slow recovery, the last thing these guys should be thinking about doing is screwing the fans out of the most popular forms of entertainment available to the public.
If the higher-ups in each of these organizations ignore these facts, go on a long, bitter strike, and eliminate the salary cap and many of the sources of revenue sharing in favor of a free-for-all, deep-pockets-buys-success strategy, they deserve whatever happens to them.
Hopefully that result would be a fan revolt remindful of the slow return Major League Baseball saw in the years following its last strike.
Figure it out, guys. Don’t prove this CBSSportsline.com columnist right.
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I think the notion that a single uncapped year will result in it disappearing forever is a bit absurd. My guess is that would depend far more on the political strength of certain owners (Jerry Jones, et al) than the player’s union. We all know what spectacular successes the last two NFL strikes were for the union.
That’s a fair point but I think the owners were more united back then. I’m not convinced that Jerry Jones, Daniel Snyder and maybe a couple more of the really deep-pocketed owners aren’t going to try to get rid of the cap so they can go on the kind of buying sprees the Yankees did last offseason.
And with owners like the Bidwells in Arizona and the Brown family in Cincinnati the competitive balance that has existed in the NFL would, I think, quickly deteriorate.
It is the union’s claims about abolishing the cap that I find absurd. Sadly, they may be right about the cap going away but it will have nothing to do with the NFLPA. It will be whether or not the owners can come to an agreement among themselves.
If the owners decide they want a cap I have no doubts they could make it happen.