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I am a huge sports fan, like many in my generation, primarily baseball, football and basketball. This is high season, with leading professional and college football games, basketball season warming up and pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training in less than seven weeks.
Yet somehow it seems less exciting today. Maybe it’s because my favorite teams are lousy. But it’s deeper. The only professional league that commands respect is the NBA and big time college athletics is driven by money.
With the explosion of sports gambling, I fear major scandals are around the corner. There already are charges on both the professional and college level. Expect more.
The National Football League’s popularity is dominant, I used to be a fanatical fan. My high school classmate, the late Steve Sabol, was the creative genius of NFL Films. Watching those films was as good as watching most games.
Yet the NFL’s insufficient response in only partially addressing the alarming incidents of brain injuries and dementia is putting profits over safety.
There are virtues to the League’s parity and recently there have been some thrilling games. But this year’s playoffs without Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes is a letdown. In college and professional sports, free agency or portal transfers are essential for players. I don’t want limits but the constant switching of uniforms is unsettling for fans.
The NBA is the best-led league. Yet they have a flawed draft system (all these sports practice a form of socialism giving the worst teams preference to new entries) and inexplicably the Western conference always is better than its Eastern counterpart. Still, every time star players start to age/fade, an exciting new crop emerges.
Baseball is the worst-led league and faces the real prospects of a work stoppage in a year. Yet it’s hard to get really down on baseball when there was a World Series like the Dodgers and Blue Jays this year.
Big time college athletics starts with a lie that it’s about student athletes; it’s about money. Recently top college conference commissioners descended on Washington to watch the passage of a sweetheart legislation that would enrich them while limiting players whose performance is what brings in the money. I got a perverse delight when it failed.
One of the stunning pieces of data was put out by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. The severance compensation over the past two years to major conferences’ fired football coaches will total an estimated $350 million.
Figures that knock your socks off like $54 million for LSU’s Brian Kelly and $32 million for Kentucky’s Bob Stoops, who had a losing record. These and other coaches in this circle were fired for supposedly underperforming while walking away with these riches.
Ok, some of my discontent is that most of my favorite teams are lousy.
In Washington the professional football team finally was sold by Dan Snyder, a personal and professional embarrassment. The franchise was bought by a private equity executive, Josh Harris, who owns a couple Philadelphia sports teams. Anything would be better and last year the Commanders seemed on the way back. But this year they are close to rock bottom again.
Ted Leonsis who owns the professional basketball team, the Wizards, is an admirable guy (he also owns the pro hockey team the Capitals.) But the record is terrible; over the past five years the Wizards have won only 34% of their games and this year they have the secoond worst record in the NBA.
The great hope for long suffering Washington fans was the Nationals baseball team winning the World Series in 2019. I have been a season ticket holder since they relocated in 2005.
Sadly, in the six seasons since the World Series, the Nationals have the second worst record in MLB, trailing only the hapless Colorado Rockies. The leader in this division, the Philadelphia Phillies, have flourished as their best players are Nationals alums.
The only hope is that the team is sold to better owners.
In college sports, my alma mater Wake Forest, a small school with high academic standards, hits above its weight in football and is a leading baseball team.
But its signature program is basketball. From the early 1990s to 2010, Wake Forest had the third best record in the Atlantic Coast Conference, trailing only perennial powerhouses Duke and North Carolina. They won two conference titles, played in the NCAA tournament in 15 of those 20 years They produced some of the best players in the country -- Tim Duncan, Chris Paul and Rodney Rogers.
In the 15 years since, with three bad head coaching choices, they possess one of the poorer records in the ACC, have been to only one NCAA tournament where they lost in the first round. This year looks rocky. (I have two other basketball favorites, Villanova, my boyhood favorite and Georgetown which my dear friend Mark Shields and I adopted more than four decades ago. Both were great and now aren’t.)
I guess I’m a bandwagon fan. It’s more fun when you’re winning.
With what’s going on in political Washington, we need escapes. Few are better than sports.
Still, complaints and disappointments aside, I’ll spend considerable time this holiday week glued to a television set watching football and basketball games.