Because I want to contemplate abundance and scarcity in the sports world today, let me begin with a digression. If you have not read Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, How We Build A Better Future, let me recommend that you do so. It is easily read over a rainy weekend; it is both inspiring and frustrating at the same time. It deals directly with the concepts of abundance and scarcity in present-day America.
Over in the sports world it seems that we have moved through environments of:
- “Scarcity” – – It was unusual to turn on the TV randomly and find a sporting event on the air on the channel you randomly tuned into …
- “Abundance” – – Sporting events were plentiful on the airwaves and then onto …
- “Glut” – – Who knew that was even a “sport”?
When I was a kid, the only baseball games on my TV – – short of the World Series – – were when the home team was on the road or if there was a Sunday afternoon game which there almost always was. Maybe there would be an NFL game on a random weekend after the World Series was over; there was almost no college basketball on TV and there was an NBA Game of the Week on Saturdays. The only sports event that was “certain” was Friday Night Fights – – the Gilette Cavalcade of Sports – – on NBC.
As a young adult, sports programming spread nicely. MLB had a Game of the Week on Saturdays and college basketball for the “local schools” was used as time slot filler for the newly emerging UHF channels which challenged the hegemony of Channels 2 through 12 that had existed for about 25 years. As a kid, I thought it was great to be able to see sports on TV instead of things like “Lawrence Welk” or “Arthur Godfrey” or “Omnibus”.
It seemed to me that “Morning in America” arrived when ABC began to put Wide World of Sports on the air in the early 1960s not when Ronald Regan proclaimed its existence in his 1984 Presidential Campaign. Long before Archie and Edith Bunker sang Those Were The Days, my sense was that I was living in a time when I had access to the full abundance of the sports world. Not so …
As people tuned in to more and more sports programming, networks and local stations began to put more and more on the air. Selling TV rights to events became the major revenue stream for schools and college conferences and professional franchises. And in that economic sphere, more revenue is always preferable to less revenue meaning more sports on TV is always better than less sports on TV meaning …
Today, we have entire networks that do nothing but telecast sporting events and programming about sporting events. Moreover, those networks are not only available to us on our TV sets in our homes – – or at places called “sports bars” that never existed when I was a kid. No, those networks are omnipresent on our tablets and phones that we carry with us everywhere all the time. We have passed from scarcity through abundance to arrive at a State of Glut.
I know the solution for individuals is simply to turn off the TV or look at a different app on the phone to avoid the sports assault on the senses; my problem is that the Sports Glut has created an environment where the events themselves are diluted. Let me use the NBA as an example here:
- The NBA playoffs used to be semi-finals and finals.
- Today the NBA playoffs involve 20 of the 30 teams in the league.
- More “dramatic games” and more television inventory.
Here is something to consider:
- If two-thirds of a league will be in the playoffs at the end of the regular season, must that regular season be 82 games in length and involve 1230 individual games?
The same can be said for MLB and for the NHL. What the “State of Glut” does to leagues is to devalue the majority of the regular season games. They are no longer “events”; they have become “occurrences”. That status is demonstrated by the secondary market for most regular season games in MLB or the NBA.
Lots of season-ticket holders recognize that they will not want or be able to attend every game for their favorite team over the course of the season and many of them try to sell their excess ticket inventory at places like Stub Hub. Often, those secondary market tix can be had for as little as 10 cents on the dollar as compared to what the season ticket holder paid for them up front. That secondary ticket market is driven almost exclusively by supply and demand and the low ticket prices indicate a very small demand.
It is possible that the “State of Glut” can lead to an economic slide that will do damage to the sports and the leagues that have fed the monster that has become the “State of Glut”. If fans are not willing to buy up all the “spare tix” on the secondary market even at 10 cents on the dollar, who is to say that those same fans might find other things to watch on their TVs and phones instead of sports events? Here are data:
Ratings for regular season games in MLB and the NBA have been trending down.
- Ratings drive the value of advertising slots.
- Lower value for advertisers means less revenue for networks meaning less revenue for leagues.
- And so it goes …
Please note that almost none of the above applies to the NFL. I believe the reason for that is that the NFL presents “weekly events” and not “daily occurrences”. There is an abundance of games; the playoffs are short because they are “one-and-done”; there are only 272 regular season games and most of them matter. I think it would behoove other leagues and other sports to consider the meaningfulness of their games as part of their strategic planning and to focus less on revenue streams for the next quarter or two.
Finally, I’ll close with these:
“From abundance springs satiety.” Livy
And …
“Gluttony is not a secret vice.” Orson Welles
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………
There’s a big oversight in your recounting of the history of sports on TV. You forgot to mention pro wrestling. That was a fixture on Saturdays during the mid-day. Between 10:00 and 2:00 you could always find it on some station, usually UHF. Rock ‘em, sock’em action!!!!!
Gil:
I watched pro wrestling until about the mid-70s and then gave it up to the point that I never think of it in terms of sports or sports related stuff on TV. And you are completely correct to say that there was a time when pro wrestling dominated Saturday TV.
I watched Pro Wresting as a kid, and this was when the WWE (WWF at the time) was in its 80’s ascendency to absorb all the local/regional leagues into its giant black hole of Hulkamania. It was a Saturday morning staple in my house once the Saturday morning cartoons were done airing. (Remember those too?…)
Anyway, I raise this point because I think that wresting actually suffered from a microcosm of this “glut phenomenon” in the 90’s. It used to be that wresting was a once a week thing. Tuning in each week was how you kept up with the soap opera that was evolving between the likes of the Hulk and Rowdy Roddy Piper (RIP). But then came all the weeknight shows, and with their market dominance, it was impossible to keep track of all the characters, all the storylines, and tuning in to all of the broadcasts. Simply put, it became too much work to keep track of what the heck was going on. (that, and the “Attitude Era” was tasteless garbage….)
I think the way to sum it up I think is to reference an old Seinfeld stand up bit where he said that people with cell phones have reached an over-abundance of connectivity. The punch line was, “You have to give people a chance to *miss* you!” (This was even before smart phones…)
And that’s just it. You have to give people a chance to *miss* seeing sports. They’ll love it all the more when it’s around as a result.
What? Don’t you remember Roller Derby and the San Francisco Bay Bombers????
Ed:
Yet one more sporting blast from the past… Thanks.
When the NBA recently went through their collective brainstorming to find a way to make the regular season games matter, and what they came up with was the mid-season tournament (*slow clap*), the one thought had was always, “cut the number of playoff teams to 12 total”. Bottom 4 teams on each side play in, and then the top two get a “bye” of the first round. It’s the simplest incentivization to make people play for real in the regular season – to both get in, and to hopefully get one of those coveted “top two” spots.
I knew of course this would never work, because the NBA’s solution to everything is “more games”. And that is how the glut happens.