The Sports Curmudgeon

Throughout history, there have been intrigues. People love intrigues; they love guessing games. Currently we have the constant flirtation between the NFL and Los Angeles to provide the grist for rumor and innuendo and interpretation of signals.

For the record, if I were an NFL fan living in the Los Angeles area and was not in an economic condition to shell out about five-grand a year for tickets to the games, I’d prefer for the league to stay out of LA. With no home team to command the TV market, a fan in LA can see a much better variety of games around the league than he/she will once there is a home team. However, if I were an owner and saw a chance to get a nice stadium deal in that huge market with plenty of disposable income in the vicinity, that would be a totally different story. And therein reside the roots of the intrigue.

I could dismiss all of this talk of the NFL putting a team in LA by making the simple observation that the NFL will actually put a team in LA the day that Paul Tagliabue gets to shovel in some dirt on the coffin of Al Davis and then hangs around to see the grave completely filled in so he can be sure there isn’t a breathing tube connected to the coffin. That delay might obviate a lawsuit from Al Davis – based on whatever claim happens to come to mind on any given Tuesday – but it might not be the full satisfaction that Tags would want. Davis tried to claim exclusivity over the LA market/territory but a court said that claim had as much merit as Bob Dylan has vocal range. So moving a team there would be a way for Tags to say “Neener, neener, neener…” to his old nemesis. And since I believe that small-mindedness is part of the human condition, I will not rule out its role in such a decision.

The “problem” in LA is a stadium. The Coliseum is antiquated and sits in a neighborhood that resembles Baghdad as much as it resembles a thriving American metropolis. The Rose Bowl is even less like a modern NFL stadium than the Coliseum. The city fathers have not come across with the funding and the locale for a new stadium. In the past when Hollywood Park offered to build a stadium for an NFL team on its property, the NFL politely declined. The latest “story” is that the Rose Bowl would be willing to build in the requisite luxury boxes and simultaneously to reduce the number of seats from 93,000 to 65,000 in order to get a team to play there. I’d take that as an ominous sign. They are already conceding that they can’t fill up 93,000 seats for NFL football.

The NFL has hinted that it might – perhaps – pay to build a new stadium in LA assuming a place can be found and somehow the infrastructure gets upgraded. If the NFL owns the venue, you can be certain that they will be the sole determinant as to which franchise is located there. Will it be an expansion team? Or might the league look at recent LA experience with NFL ownership and see Georgia Frontiere and Al Davis and come to the conclusion that the only way to complete that trifecta is to add Bill Bidwell to the list? The latest NFL pronouncement is that it will NOT be an expansion team and that LA will have a team by 2008. Just a question here: Can the Montreal Expos play football? That would kill two birds with one stone!

Memo to NFL Execs: Don’t forget about that infrastructure upgrading. To remind yourselves of its importance, go to a Washington Redskins’ game once a month and experience the joy of getting in and out of there on the single road to the stadium…

Some people see the situation in Minnesota as a signal that the Vikes may move west. Owner Red McCombs wants a new stadium; the legislature is not going to give him one supposedly because they want “local ownership” for the Vikes; McCombs then says he’ll sell the team for $650M but the best offer he has at the moment is from a local guy who is willing to pay $450 – 500M. Now a guy from Phoenix named Reggie Fowler is purportedly putting together a consortium to make an offer to buy the team but depending on the day of the week, he either is in way over his head financially or is fat with cash because he has the Gateway Computer money behind him. And the intrigue continues because an alternative scenario has McCombs paying off his Metrodome lease with a $40-60M payment and moving the team to LA where he would sell it at an inflated price to a new owner. But the intrigue also holds that because Fowler is African-American and the league desperately wants an African-American owner, the NFL might actually buy the team for Fowler if he can’t put together the requisite financial muscle.

Oh, but it does not end there. Jerry Jones also wants a new stadium – presumably one without a hole in the roof. He is already floating the idea that he might strike a deal to build a stadium in Arlington Texas but he steadfastly denies that this story is merely a bargaining ploy to goose the people in Dallas to give him a sweeter deal. Then as training camp began this year, Jones pushed the rhetorical gas indicator to the red zone as he emoted about the beauty of Southern California and its economic prowess. He did not come out and say that he wanted to move the Cowboys to LA, but if things don’t move along in either Dallas or Arlington, expect to hear that at some point.

The Chargers play just down the road from LA and had a deal where the city of San Diego – or was it the county? – would buy up any and all unsold tickets for Chargers’ games for the foreseeable future. The Chargers want a new stadium –at least – or the potential to move out of San Diego. So they maneuvered for a couple of years to redo their lease in San Diego and to get rid of the sell-out guarantee. That’s right; they gave that away for the right to leave San Diego after the 2008 season. They can’t negotiate with another city until 2007 or they will owe the city of San Diego a $3M fine – as if that amount of money is going to be a deterrent here. The only real question here is whether the Chargers’ owners want a new stadium or a new city. I think it is pretty clear that they want a new city and that desire should only be reinforced as the team plays to 60% capacity over the next couple of seasons.

The Indianapolis Colts were offered a new stadium by the city/county/state and responded with the organizational equivalent of “Ho hum.” Sign interpreters have taken this to mean that Jim Irsay wants to move out of this market and into a better one - - like Los Angeles.

Memo to Indy City Fathers: Install 24/7 camera coverage on all moving van companies lest they all mobilize one evening around 11:00 PM.

The New Orleans Saints have complained about the age and the out-of-date nature of the Super Dome. Some folks say that the Saints will never be as important in that part of the world as LSU and a new stadium will only provide a temporary boost in attendance/revenue. So they think that the Saints will be heading west. If so, let me say that owner Tom Benson and his “Benson Boogie” will have to undergo a significant change. His little sideline dance with his umbrella may be quaint and interesting for the folks in New Orleans, but in LA, it should go over like the nomination of Paris Hilton to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Actually, one team that I think ought to be high on the list to move to LA is the Jacksonville Jaguars. Here is a franchise that is only about ten years old and the bloom is definitely off the rose already. The Jags are considering putting up black curtains in the upper reaches of Alltel Stadium to avoid showing the large number of empty seats. That kind of legerdemain is merely embarrassing when the NBA has to do it, but this is the NFL folks. Jacksonville is hoping to have half of their home games this year where they have to invoke the blackout rule because the seats are not sold out. Two years ago, one of the local supermarkets bought up the unsold seats and gave them away free at the stores with a qualifying purchase. They’re not doing that anymore because it was not deemed to be a huge promotional draw. I remember when Jacksonville got its franchise – to the surprise of many pundits – the NFL said that it was a football crazy town that would be the southeastern version of Green Bay. Through thick and thin, fans would be there to root on their beloved warriors. Now ten years later, they can’t get supermarkets to give away enough tickets to fill the stadium and are considering hiding the empty seats.

The intrigues are not over. The soothsayers can continue to say their sooth. And the fans in LA can sit and watch and start to familiarize themselves with whatever team becomes the “flavor of the week” for moving to LA. As for me, I just wonder when the NFL will move a team to Las Vegas. Now if Al Davis is such a genius, how come he hasn’t done that already?

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Thankfully, we are halfway through the NFL Exhibition Season. Watching the second half of an NFL exhibition game is like panning for gold; you are going to see a whole lot of dross before you come across a small speck that gives you some hope. The scrubs in the games at that point will not play much in the NFL this year – or any other probably – and so you are watching the teams play out the string merely so the owners can justify selling tickets to this nonsense at full price. The fourth quarter of many NFL exhibition games is less interesting than Celebrity Poker. Believe me, that is not a sentence Paul Tagliabue ever wanted to have written and under no circumstances would he and his cronies want it spread around.

The real NFL games are entertaining television and they are the engine that drives the sport. There is a cycle here. People gamble on football games; when they bet on the games, they like to watch them on TV; many people extrapolate this to the point where they want to bet on any game on TV and then watch it. This increases audiences and revenues. It is the underbelly of the game that Tags and company prefer not to speak about publicly, but they know all about it.

The current NFL TV deal with all the networks will expire at the end of the 2005 season. Normally, the league waits until the middle of the final season to entertain discussions about which networks will have the privilege of overpaying the league for the rights to the NFL games for the next several years. The current deal will have been in place for five years when it expires and it pitched $17.6B into the NFL coffers. The owners and the players and the league administrators and lots of other straphangers are making a lot of money here; the problem is that the networks that are paying out the billions of dollars are losing money on the deal.

Uncharacteristically, the NFL wants to begin exploratory discussions with current and potential broadcast partners – doesn’t that kind of management newspeak make you feel all tingly inside? – starting next month even though the current deal will have seventeen months to run at the beginning of such talks. My conclusion from that deviation from the norm is that the league has some ideas in mind that will alter the way that they put games on the air and they expect to have to sell these new ideas to the networks. If the discussions are going to be protracted, you need a lot of time to reach some kind of deal; but if all you are doing is deciding on the price of the new deal and not how or when the games will be telecast, it shouldn’t take very long at all. So, I suspect that the league is looking to change things up.

Interestingly, Disney has balked at opening the discussions at this time. And Disney (they own ABC and ESPN) is beginning its own PR spin campaign by pointing out that they have lost money on this current deal – and the one before it too by the way – and that they too might want to make some serious changes in the way they telecast football. Since Disney has a history of overpaying for every sports property that it buys for ABC and/or ESPN, that cannot be good news for the NFL mavens. My suspicion is the Disney is beginning its posturing for the Kabuki Dance that must happen prior to any serious negotiations on NFL rights fees; but their message is not one the league wants to hear.

ABC has hinted that it might want to move MNF to ESPN and they claim to have lost $100M on MNF despite the high ratings that the show commands. I take that with a grain of salt because I remember just how much money Enron was making just a few years ago and it all turned out to be accounting legerdemain. But FOX and CBS also claim to be losing money on their deals. I suspect they are correct, but once again, I am skeptical about anything anyone says about this topic as they posture prior to negotiations. But if ABC is losing money on MNF in anything near the amount that it claims, then this should be a warning siren for everyone in this business. Oh, and Disney has been silent on whether or not a move of MNF to ESPN would mean that the Sunday night games currently on ESPN would be “up for grabs” by someone else.

Just a short aside here, but I really wonder if any of these networks actually make money on any of the major sports deals that they sign. Baseball? I doubt it. NBA? Surely, you jest. NHL? Well, at least NBC won’t lose much in its new contract with the league. So why are sports properties so desirable to networks? In the programming world, they are like trophy wives; you have them because you can…

Here are some things I suspect the NFL might want to do with its TV presentation. I think they want to talk about moving the season start to late September and to push the Super Bowl back to the end of February. Networks should like that because February is a sweeps month and that should help the ones that get the games. But I suspect there might be an alternate agenda in the NFL wanting to push the season back. I think that the league would like to go to an 18 game schedule and cut down the exhibition games. They aren’t going to be able to do that easily until they can bargain for this with the NFLPA. So one way to do that is to push the season back and “cede” the field to baseball and college football in early to mid-September. Then if the players agree to an 18 game schedule – gaining things like an increased roster size in the bargaining – the NFL can reinstate the games in September after people have gotten used to games in February. It would be a way of doing this without all the carping from people who are spring loaded to be pissed off at nearly anything.

I look for lots more games on Saturdays after the college football season is over and maybe more Thursday night games too – even though coaches tend not to like Thursday games a whole lot. Expanding the playoffs to 16 teams was voted down last time it was proposed with the justification that the NFL did not want to be like the NHL or the NBA where “everybody gets into the playoffs”. However, if the price is right for four extra playoff games on TV, don’t be too surprised to hear this idea come back from the dead.

There is also talk that the NFL might want the games to start just a bit later on Sundays. Supposedly, CBS is not happy about that because they don’t like having to start 60 Minutes late on Sundays between September and January. And for some reason, they are adamant about not moving its time slot. So there are lots of issues involved here and all of them play into the bottom line, which is: how much will the TV deal bring into the league’s exchequer.

Why is that important, you ask? After all the NFL seems to have a license to print money; why do they need more? Well the league really doesn’t need more except for the ego gratification of getting more this time that last time. However, some of the individual teams need for the TV rights fees to rise significantly. Some teams have structured their salary commitments to jump significantly in 2006 given the way their contract bonuses are structured because they have banked on a spike in the salary cap, which is tied directly to league revenues. If that does not happen, players will have to take cuts in contracts or become “cap casualties” and the NFLPA does not want that to happen any more than the teams’ GMs want that to happen. But the driver for all of this is the TV revenue.

The current deal brings in an average of just about $3.5B. If every network is really losing money, how much higher will they be willing to go to use NFL football as a promotional platform for its other programming? [Aside: FOX has raised this aspect of NFL telecasting to an art form; ABC merely annoys the hell out of everyone by bringing the stars of their insipid shows into the booth to yak at us during games.] There will be lots of issues bouncing around during the negotiations no matter when they start but remember to do what “Deep Throat” supposedly told Woodward and Bernstein to do in the Watergate mess; follow the money. The rest of the stuff might be interesting and might add to or diminish ever so slightly your viewing experience. But the real deal here is the money. Believe it or not, the behemoth that is the NFL needs an increase in revenues.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports

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I read that the baseball owners were about to hold one of their meetings – the one where they will find yet another reason to postpone deciding where to put the Montreal Expos – about now. And one of the agenda items at that meeting is a motion to offer Bud Selig a three-year extension on his contract through to sometime in 2009. My first reaction was “Why?” But upon reflection, I began to think this was a smart move on the part of the baseball owners; and that, in and of itself, may be the biggest newsflash of the month. They don’t do very many smart things.

In the past, I have not always been kind to Mr. Selig; on more than a few occasions, I have referred to him as Butt Selig and wondered aloud what species of mammal provided the pelt that seems to rest on his head. I’m not going to try to argue that he is brilliant or anywhere near perfect in his actions, but when I think about it, he ain’t nearly as bad as the reputation he has. And maybe the reason for that is that his reputation comes from sportswriters and journalists who don’t like rich owners of sports franchises all that much.

How do you measure the competence and value of a sports commissioner? I don’t think you do it by some agglomeration of seat of the pants criteria that come to mind only when you read that he did something you really don’t like. Here’s what I think is a reasonable way to do it. You compare what Selig has done to what the commissioners of the other major sports have done in similar economic times and you compare what Selig has done to what his predecessors as MLB Commissioner did in their tenures of office. That’s why I say Bud Selig is a good commissioner – not the greatest of all time in any sport, but also not the bumbling incompetent boob he is usually made out to be.

First, let’s look at the commissioners in the other major sports. Paul Tagliabue presides over the gold standard of a pro league. There is huge fan interest; seemingly unending revenue streams, huge TV exposure and TV rights fees and labor peace. Everyone – and I mean everyone – is making money in that business. All Tags has to do is to find a way to keep Al Davis from suing every person and corporate entity on the planet and the NFL does just fine. Selig does not have baseball near that state of affairs but baseball popularity is on the upswing.

David Stern presides over the sport that we were told was the boom sport of the 1990s when really it was the sport that Michael Jordan carried through the 1990s. Fan interest is down; TV ratings are down; televised games are buried on cable networks; attendance was down in over half the cities last season; the last labor impasse had to be ended with a threat to cancel the entire season unless there was an agreement by a fixed time and date. Baseball is in better shape than the NBA these days; face it.

Gary Bettman took over the NHL when the league was floundering; and in his efforts to resuscitate interest and financial viability, he has put the NHL on life support. They lost their TV deal and now have the same one that the Arena League has with NBC. If you don’t think Bud Selig has done a better job than Gary Bettman has done, you are dumb enough to moon a werewolf.

So, what happens if you compare Selig to his predecessors as MLB Commissioner? I don’t think he comes out looking bad at all and he is certainly not a horse’s ass. Selig took over for Fay Vincent in 1992; in truth, he was part of the owners’ cabal to get rid of Vincent and he became the “interim Commissioner” who seems to have morphed into “Commissioner for Life”. In 1992, baseball was not in great shape; the labor situation was boiling and the players went out on strike in August 1994 ostensibly to prevent the owners from locking them out in the winter. The World Series was canceled in 1994 – something that two World Wars were not able to accomplish – and the next season began in haste after a late settlement. The players’ strike and the hastily concocted deal solved nothing. Fans were angry; attendance dropped; TV ratings were in the tank; people started writing things like, “The world has passed baseball by.”

Ten years later, the game is in good shape and another prolonged strike by the players was avoided. Is the game perfectly healthy? Of course not. The cloud of steroids hangs over the game; the Yankees still outspend some teams by a factor of five every year; contraction is still an idea whose time needs to come. But baseball is better in 2004 than it was in 1992. You can’t give all the credit to Bud Selig, but you have to allow that he had something to do with it all.

So what exactly did Fay Vincent and his pal Bart Giamatti accomplish in their tenure running the game for about 5 years? They banned Pete Rose from baseball. Can you think of anything else they did that redounded to the greater glory of the game? I can’t. Bart Giamatti’s baseball poetry was lyrically lame at its best; Fay Vincent was merely a feckless goof who always looked to me like he had just come from having an enema. To say this pair of human meat lockers were anything more than placeholders in the history of baseball would be to put them on a pedestal neither deserves.

Before they “ran the game”, we had Peter Uberroth as the man in charge. Here are the two words that describe his legacy to baseball:

Collusion … conspiracy

Not only did he and his owner pals collude to keep free agent salaries unnaturally low by refusing to have any competitive bidding, they were dumb enough to put the plans in writing and to let those plans fall into the “wrong hands”. It merely cost the owners a $300M judgment in court. That is right up there in the ranks of stupidity with Nixon not destroying all the tapes and Peter Uberroth was the main man at the time.

Another of Selig’s predecessors was Bowie Kuhn whose major accomplishment seems to have been refusing to allow Charlie Finley to sell off his star players when he know he would not be able to keep them in free agency. That had a lasting effect, didn’t it? Now, teams have to trade minor league “prospects” to get their “rent-a-players”; that enhances the integrity of the game, right?

Other people occupied the commissioner’s office who were non-entities, but the hallmark of the position is always held out to be Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Usually, sports people say his name in some kind of hushed tone of reverence. He was there to restore the faith in baseball after the Black Sox scandal in 1919. And he certainly did that which has to make him a critically important figure in the history of baseball. But let’s not forget that Landis might also have had some feet of clay. Please recall that Joe Jackson – who continues to be banned from baseball today – was exonerated in a court with regard to fixing games and taking bribes to influence their outcome. And there is more that just a hint of evidence that baseball might have been integrated about 10 years earlier than it was except for the fact that Landis was not the most racially tolerant person on the planet at the time. I’m not here to condemn Landis; I merely suggest that his great accomplishment was balanced with some negative activities also.

So look at what has happened in baseball during Bud Selig’s tenure:

Expansion, realignment, unbalanced schedules and three division formats and 8-team playoffs. The expansion part is not so great, but the rest of the stuff is positive. I’d prefer a balanced schedule, but that is not an issue I’ll fall on my sword over.

Interleague play. The purists don’t like it but the fans do and attendance figures prove it.

Increased revenue sharing leading to greater parity. The revenue sharing is imperfect and seems not to apply to a few teams, but there is greater parity in the last three years.

World Series cancellation. That was at least as much the fault of the Players Association as it was of the Commissioner’s Office. Remember, the players walked out; they were not thrown out.

Using the forbidden word - - “contraction”. Hey, it had to be said because it was a good idea then and is a good idea now.

Ending the All-Star Game in a tie. Please get over this. The All-Star Game is an exhibition game; it does not matter. Continuing to focus on that event is about as important as studying the history – so you can chart the future – of urban yodeling in the US.

Maybe it’s time to put Bud Selig’s time in office in a more global perspective and try to overcome the knee-jerk reaction that he is an ignorant bumpkin whenever he does something. I’m going to try to do that. But it will be a lot harder to get over the feeling I have that he dresses himself in a dark closet with no mirrors.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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