Collegiate athletics have been the lifeblood of American culture since, well, as long as anyone cares to remember. Every Saturday tens of millions of Americans either turn out to their Alma Mater’s stadium to see the squad that represents the best four years of their life or they simply turn on their television to watch anywhere from 3 to 15 hours of football. (If you start off with the 12 o clock noon EST Atlantic Coastal Conference slate and stay up to watch the midnight Hawaii Rainbow Warriors game, you can reach the high end of this range.) And while football dominates American Sundays for about a third of the calendar year, America sets aside one full month, March, to celebrate Cinderella stories and blue blood powerhouses on college basketball’s biggest stage, the NCAA March Madness Basketball Tournament.

When a fan is cheering so passionately for the name on the front of the jersey, the name of the university, it is often easy to forget about the name on the back, the name of the player. In fact, many universities have elected not to have player names on their player’s jerseys at all, as a sign that no individual is more important than the school. This sentiment, that the players come second to the colleges is one that is pervasive throughout the amateur sporting world.

In what way you ask? Well, college athletes, regardless of the sport, do not get paid for their services. In fact, they are prohibited from getting paid under a set of rules regarding amateur athlete eligibility. The rules, which can be found here in full, forbid athletes from making money in any way, less they lose their eligibility which would disqualify them from playing the sport they so love. They are not allowed to be paid by the university for their athletic services outside of “necessary expenses” which is a clause that is more difficult to get around than one may think. They are not allowed to receive prize money from professional tournaments. A golfer who may be allowed to participate in the Masters (the premier golf tournament) is not allowed to collect the millions of dollars he otherwise would have had he not been a student athlete. And they are not allowed to profit off of their name or likeness, meaning that they cannot be used as endorsers for products and, most catastrophically, they cannot be included in video games.

There are people who are all over the spectrum on this issue of whether or not athletes should be able to be paid. Some people think that they should absolutely be paid by the University. I mean, it just makes sense right? The students put in dozens of hours a week training, practicing, and performing for their university, which not only increases the pedigree of the university and makes it more desirable for students to attend for both sporting and academic reasons, but it makes the university and the NCAA cold hard cash. In 2017 alone, the NCAA, a non-profit organization, had revenues of 1.1 Billion Dollars. Of that incredible sum of money, a little more than half returned to the universities that are its members. But there is nothing inherently wrong with an organization as prominent as this making so much money, and when the money is returned to the universities it does primarily get used to better the students and athletes there for the years to come. It is a well known fact that at nearly all of the Power 5 Universities the only profitable sports are men’s basketball and American football. That means that at Penn State, which has 31 division one sports, there are 29 unprofitable teams. (Penn State Hockey is occasionally profitable, Penn State Wrestling, which has one 7 of the last 8 championships. has not been profitable since 2003.)

And if the profits from the two sports are being used to fund the athletic hopes and dreams of 29 others, the utilitarians in the room may be perfectly happy. This may not be the most fair arrangement, in fact, it certainly isn’t, but college campuses would not be the same without all of their “minor” sports teams, as these student athletes perform far better than the regular university student, a fact that the NCAA never fails to point out.

So if it’s relatively okay that the university or the NCAA does not pay the athlete, why can the athlete not make money on their own? This is where the argument gets awfully fuzzy. Phrases like “for the integrity of the sport” and “to protect the amateur identity” and “that’s the way it has always been” are used with incredibly disappointing frequency, and seem to hold no weight when you hear tales of athletes from the poorest of homes not be able to feed themselves, not even counting the family at home counting on them as a meal ticket.

And one important tidbit before I wrap up here, athletes are already being paid. It seems like every year there is a scandal about a university giving improper benefits to its players, and the FBI has to swoop in and punish the university with fines and bowl bans and scholarship restrictions that in the end hurt the athletes the most. Just off the top of my head I can recall scandals at Auburn,UCLA, USC, SMU, FSU, UF, OSU, The U, Louisville, Arizona, and LSU and the only thing that separates these schools from the rest is that they got caught.

It’s probably about time to end the shady backroom dealings and “duffel bag drops” that have been present throughout the college sports world for decades, and one way to do that is to give up the ridiculous notion that college athletes who could be making millions on there own should just play for scholarships and meal plans.

R&R. Rest and Relaxation. Everybody wants it, everybody needs it. It’s that simple, but in the world of professional sports rest gets a little more complicated.

The way I see it, there are three types of rest in the sporting world: routine rest, pre-playoff rest, and pre-draft rest. Each has its purpose, each has a varying level of controversy, but one thing is for certain–none of them are fun for the fans.

Routine rest is not really something that fans complain about too frequently. Whether the season is 82 games or 162 games, the human body is not a machine and thus needs some time to recover from the physicality of the sport, often more time than is built into the schedule. While some fans may be upset that their city’s athletes are making tens of millions of dollars to play for their team, and they STILL want/need rest, resting a few games here and there does help out a player’s overall production throughout a season. One area where this is abundantly clear is in the National Basketball Association with the oft-discussed “back-to-backs.” This phenomena, where a team plays games on consecutive nights, can take quite the toll on the body, but a special type of back-to-back, the home/road back-to-back is worth discussing here. This scenario, where a team plays a game in the home arena one night, then travels either that night or the following morning to an arena in another city, often on the same coast but not necessarily anywhere near by, is so strenuous, so tiresome, so incredibly difficult, the second game has earned the title “scheduled loss.” Teams perform so horribly in these games, that it has become practice to rest some of your squads more important or older players to save their bodies from this hardship. This happens two or three teams each season for an NBA team, and has thus become routine.

The second type of rest is pre-playoff rest, a concept that is more popular in the NFL than its fellow American sports. If a team has clinched their spot in the NFL playoff seeding hierarchy and has no risk of moving down and no chance of moving up, they often rest the large majority of their starters. This type of resting is controversial both from a strategic standpoint, and from a business standpoint. On the field, there is plenty of concern that a team that rests its starters in the final week of the season will have rusty players come playoff time. There are countless examples of a team resting their players in Week 17, and then coming out flat in their first round playoff matchup. This exact scenario played out in 2010, when my Philadelphia Eagles rested superstar quarterback Michael Vick, standout running back LeSean McCoy and elite corner Asante Samuel in a “meaningless” game against the Cowboys. The players received their rest, and avoided any chance of injury, but their relaxed attitude of the week prior came back to bite them in the playoffs, where they came out flat and only posted 3 first half points in an eventual defeat at the hands of the Packers. On the flip side, resting players in Week 17 seems to work just about as often as it does not. In 2009, the Saints rested their starters in week 17, and went on to drop 45 points in the divisional round against the Cardinals. Go figure. So while the football side seems to be rather split, the business side of pre-playoff rest is decidedly one sided. It’s bad for business. If a team is resting their players in the final week of the season, they are most likely good enough to create buzz throughout the city, resulting in a sellout and high ticket prices on the secondary market. If the starters are sitting, nobody needs to see that game. In 2017, on New Years Eve, my Eagles were playing with the backups against the Cowboys. They lost 6-0. It was an incredibly boring game with players that only football freaks like myself were familiar with on the field. I cannot imagine tickets were selling for very much in such a contest. Maybe the boredom drove people to the concessions stands? Either way, having the stars on the field is what drives revenues.

The final type of rest, pre-draft resting, is causing quite the stir in the NBA this season. In a league where tanking is as widespread as can be, resting stars to acquire higher draft picks is something that general managers around the league would love to do, but this is an area where GM’s do not see eye to eye with the commissioner’s office. Adam Silver understands that fans pay to see a team’s star players more so in the NBA than in any other sport, so teams are fined $100,000 for every game they sit a star player without cause. As a result, the New Orleans Pelicans, who are out of playoff contention and would love to move up in the NBA draft lottery odds order are forced to play their star Anthony Davis, who has already requested a trade to another team. Davis does not want to play in New Orleans. The Pelicans do not want Davis to play. But the city of New Orleans will pay to watch the star, so the NBA does their absolute best to make him play. It is so rare that fans are aligned with the league over the team like this, making this particular dynamic exceptionally fascinating.

While rest is quite simple for you and I, it is anything but for our sports teams.

 

The National Basketball Association is perhaps the best run league in the world. The players make incredible amounts of money, all thirty teams have been profitable year over year for the better part of a decade, league-wide revenue sharing is fair and satisfactory to all franchises, and franchise values have increased five fold over the last fifteen years.

Just this morning Ramona Shelburne of ESPN reported that star commissioner Adam Silver, the face of the association, has been offered the same position at the league offices in New York of the National Football League, the only US sports league the NBA has yet to surpass in popularity.

With exceptional leadership, marketable stars and money pouring in from every possible area, the National Basketball Association could hardy be in a better position, but there is room for improvement in some areas, specifically, in the team building department.

At this moment, there are two successful methods for team building in the NBA: tanking and super-team creation.

Former 76ers General Manager Sam Hinkie, who has acquired a sort of cult following since his firing from the organization, popularized tanking after successfully building the 76ers’ roster through this method. Tanking is a process in which teams in any sport (although baseball and basketball implement the strategy the most frequently) create rosters that are designed not to win games, but to lose as many games as possible in pursuit of the high draft picks. Advanced analytics have proven that the highest draft picks in professional sports leagues are successful at a disproportionately high rate. As a result, any team that does not have the talent to win a championship in a given season has incentive to delay their success by tanking to receive these draft picks. In the NBA, the team with the worst record does not automatically receive the highest draft pick like in the NFL, but rather they receive the highest chance at receiving the number one pick. Up until this coming season, the team with the worst record would receive a 25% chance at the ever-coveted number one overall selection, but after a series of reforms passed by Commissioner Silver, the bottom three teams now each receive just a 14% chance to obtain the pick. Many experts believed that the drastically reduced odds would disincentivize teams from tanking, but this season, more than ever, teams are losing at an alarming rate. Arguments can be made about the motives behind the losing of some teams, but it is reasonable to say that 6 teams, or 20% of the league, are tanking. On the surface one may not find this to be a problem, but when teams are losing “on purpose” fans do not pay to see their games, and when arenas are not filled, neither are wallets. In addition to the business side of the league suffering, the product on the court is greatly diminished due to tanking. If every NBA team is playing on a given night and none of the tanking teams are squaring off against one another, 40% of all games would involve a team actively trying to lose. This leaves fans disinterested, a problem that the National Football League does not have, in large part due to the limited number of games, a luxury the NBA does not possess. While the league office may not want to mess with a good thing, it is clear that there is room for the league to grow if NBA lottery reform took the final drastic step to give equal odds for all non-playoff teams.

The second way teams are successfully built is through the assembly of super-teams. Super-teams are created when a team that was already of playoff caliber acquires a superstar free agent, or a group of superstar free agents assemble on one team with a tremendous amount of cap space. It could be argued that every championship team since 2007, with the sole exception of the 2014 San Antonio Spurs, has been a super-team. Having great teams is traditionally not a problem for sports leagues, but when the teams are so great that the league has no parity, to the point where the same championship matchup has persisted for four years running, there is a problem. Many NBA fans have grown sick of the reigning champion, the Golden State Warriors, and all of their dominance. And when superstar free agents sacrifice some financial security in exchange for more winning by joining already assembled great teams, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the league suffers. Solutions for this problem are not as easy as lottery reform. Players sacrificing money for winnings was not something the NBA ever thought would catch on, and the problem is only getting worse. The two most popular proposed solutions, a franchise tag to keep star players with their former teams, and a hard salary cap, which would help to limit the creation of luxury tax based super-teams, will never get approved by the always strong-willed NBA Players Association. It may take a a change in league-wide thinking to solve this one. Stars may have to change their mindset from winning at all costs to winning on their own teams, but as long as the greatest super-team of all time, the Golden State Warriors exist, nobody will be able to successfully pull that off.

America’s pastime is in trouble. While TV ratings are holding steady, ballpark attendance is declining at an alarming rate, and public perception of the sport as a whole is not what it once was. But that’s okay because the MLB can take steps to make their product as desirable as it once was. There are several different groups that have plans to make baseball better.

Approach 1: Conservatives

Baseball is fine. I understand that attendance is down right now, but that’s just because the league does not have a super marketable star player. Mike Trout is great. Aaron Judge is awesome. Bryce Harper is really cool, but none of those guys have the charisma of a Ruth or Mays or Bonds. When the MLB gets their next big star, like the NBA has with that LeBron James character, baseball can regain its position of America’s second favorite sport, and favorite sport from the months March through October.

Above is the opinion of the baseball purist. The fans who loves the game he or she grew up with and don’t want to see it change, they just want to see people like it again. Rule changes like the ones outlined by the fans below are either foreign or will ruin the sport that in their minds is already perfect.

Approach 2: Common Sense Baseball Reformists

Baseball is not doing as well as it could, but a couple of simple rule changes could make baseball great again! First off, the National League should probably add the designated hitter already. No other sport has different sets of rules for different conferences, so the MLB should finally make some sense and make the league cohesive throughout. This will also help the MLB shed its “lack of excitement” reputation that is so strongly held by the millennial generation and younger. Another thing we can do to help that particular issue is add and enforce a 20 second pitch clock. Contrary to popular opinion, pitching is not boring. Neither is hitting. The boring parts of baseball are where none of that is happening, so we should add this pitch clock to make those parts disappear. And you know what, let’s make relief pitcher pitch for a minimum of three batters too so we don’t have to see them warm up so much.

Above is the opinion of the modern day baseball fan. They acknowledge that the sport is not the incredible entity it once was, but see very real and reasonable paths to making it the fun family experience it was for them growing up. They like baseball, but not in a way that would prevent them from wanting to change it.

Approach 3: Radical Baseball Terrorists

Baseball is dying. I haven’t met a single person who has seen a single baseball game ever in their entire life. If we don’t change baseball completely, the sport will no longer exist in 10 years. Its death will be as swift and brutal as jai alai. In order for this sport to have any chance at survival, we have to make sweeping changes to flip the sport on its head. The first thing we should do is move the mound back six feet so it is 66 feet and 6 inches away from the plate, an apt number as this game will be burning in hell soon enough. This might allow hitters to hit the ball like half the time instead of a quarter of the time, which would be cool because hitting is fun. But if there is a whole bunch of hitting, the games are going to take way too long, so we should make it two outs instead of three. And while we’re at it, lets put a runner at third base at the beginning of every inning so there can be more scoring. I like basketball and football and those sports have scores that total between 40 and 250. If baseball did something like this, the scores could be like that, which would be really fun for everyone.

Above is the opinion of someone who is not really a fan of baseball. They want to change the sport entirely, and while they are entitled to their opinion, these people should not be the people who are in charge of the future of the sport. At a certain point, maintaining the integrity of the game is important, and it would be better for the sport to die off than have the hundreds of years of baseball that have come before it be disrespected.

Conclusion

Overall, it is safe to say that baseball could benefit from a variety of tweaks to the game, but a complete revamping of the sport is quite foolish. To what degree you would take your tweaks is really up to your own personal preference, but let’s just hope that the lovely men and men at the league office make the right choices to allow baseball to be the best version of itself.

Last week we discussed how the Saints-Rams game stirred up a slew of drama about officiating in the National Football League, but the Saints-Rams game was not the only game that happened last week, and the NFL officiating crisis was not the only drama. In the waning seconds of the AFC Championship Game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the New England Patriots, Chiefs superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes led his squad 48 yards down the field in 31 seconds to put his kicker, Harrison Butker in range for a 39 yard game tying kick.

After the traditional commercial break and discussion of the overtime rules between the referee and the team captains was the moment that was the talk of the town for the coming days, the coin toss. To start the season, the Kansas City Chiefs took the league by storm by winning each of their first nine coin tosses, but that mathematical anomaly could not help them on Sunday night, (January 20th) when a coin toss with the Lamar Hunt trophy on one side and the team logos on the other side would seal their eventual fate. The coin came up heads, the Chiefs lost the coin toss, and the Patriots won the game.

On each of the final five drives of regulation, points were scored. Four touchdowns and the Chiefs game tying field goal. The defenses were clearly exhausted. There was no way either of them was going to stop one of these offenses, who at this stage of the game were firing on all cylinders. The winner of the coin toss was going to win the game, and they did. The New England Patriots drove down the field with ease, converting several third downs on slants and seems to Julian Edelman, and eventually ended the game on a Sony Michel touchdown run. All the while, Patrick Mahomes, the hero of regulation, the best Chiefs quarterback of all time, the eventual most valuable player of the National Football League, sat on the sideline, not touching the ball one time.

If you want to see what happened as it happened, click here for a link to the Patriots final drive.

Deciding football games with the result of a coin toss, as opposed to the players who earn millions of dollar to play, is not in the best interest of the National Football League. And keeping star players off the field is an even more foolish endeavor. The media made these points over and over this week, which led to loads of speculation over whether or not the NFL should change their overtime rules, and if yes, what should the change them to?

Option 1: Keep the Rules as They Are

The current NFL overtime rules are this. If the first team that gets the ball scores a touchdown, they win the game. If they fail to do so, the other team gets an opportunity to take the lead or tie on a drive of their own. If the second team takes the lead, they win. If they fail to tie or take the lead, they lose. If they tie the game, the next score wins.

In this system, the team that receives the ball first has a significant advantage, as they can end the game without the other team touching the ball. They “control their own destiny” as they saying goes, but in reality, each team control’s their own destiny, it’s just that each offense does not. 55% of the time, the team that receives the ball first wins the game. This is unfair, and certainly worth correcting in my eyes, but many a football purist would rather keep the rules as they are. They believe that changing the rules of the game muddles the history of the sport. Many of them believe that the system is not unfair. They believe that if you don’t win the coin toss and you want to win the game, you should just “get a stop.”

While this opinion is not entirely invalid, there are certainly better options.

Option 2: Both Teams Get the Ball

This option is likely the most popular and most conceivable of the slew of fan created overtime rule changes. The idea behind this one is that even if the first team to receive the ball scores a touchdown, the second team will receive the opportunity to have a drive of their own. If they match the first team, the game will then go on to sudden death. This option is appealing because both teams get the ball, which eliminates the problem of star players remaining on the sideline for the entirety of overtime, and because it brings about additional excitement surrounding the coin toss. If you win the coin toss, you may select to receive the ball first, which will also give you the third drive of the overtime period, one where you can win the game with a score of any type. This option would theoretically be appealing for offense-centric teams that are not confident in their defenses ability to get a stop. However, the decision as to whether or not you want the ball right away is not clear cut. If you elect to take the ball second, an option that makes sense for defense-centric teams, then you know exactly what you have to do on your drive. If the other team does not score, then you only need a field goal. If they score a field goal, then you know you need at least a field goal to keep the game going. And if the other team scores a touchdown, then you know you need the touchdown to keep the game going, AND you have the opportunity to end the game right then and there by attempting a two-point conversion. The only real negatives with this option are that the coin toss is still a factor, although not nearly as big of one, and that football fans would have to learn a whole new set of rules and strategies, which they may find confusing and unsettling.

Option 3: College Football Overtime Rules

If you want to change the overtime rules to something fans perceive as more fair, but you don’t want them to have to learn anything new, then switching to college football overtime is a solid option. In college football, each team is guaranteed an equal number of drives starting at the opponent’s 25 yard line. Team 1 has their drive, team 2 then has their drive. If it remains tied, team 2 now must go first, which as I explained in Option 2, is a serious disadvantage as the other team knows exactly what they need to do on their possession. On the surface this idea is relatively fair, but the second team to receive the ball has a distinct advantage. They win the game 55% of the time, about the same mark that the current set of NFL overtime rules has. While public perception of fairness would be up, and the fans would get to see their stars on offense and defense play every time, this system, from a fairness perspective, is just as bad.

Here is a link to the Alabama vs Georgia Overtime in the 2018 College Football Playoff Championship game if you want to see what this option looks like first hand.

Option 4: College Football Overtime Variant

Many NFL fans, though it would be a stretch to say that too many do, believe that Option 3: College Football Overtime Rules is too focused on the offenses and scoring, and that for professional leagues, teams should start with the ball at their own 25, at the 50, or start off the traditional way, with a kick off. There may be some merit behind this thinking, but it does not change the overall level of unfairness that comes with a coin toss deciding which team gets the ball first.

Option 5: Kicking Contest in Place of the Coin Toss

The problem with the coin toss and the current overtime rules is not really that one team has an advantage, it’s that one team has an advantage because of an event that is entirely based on chance. That is why the best option, although it has received no actual consideration from the NFL, is the introduction of a kicking contest in place of the coin toss. Have each kicker take kicks of varying length until one kicker makes it and the other does not. Winner gets the right to choose whether or not their team gets the ball first, which represents a 5% advantage in Options 1,3, and 4, and an indeterminate advantage in option 2. (presumably, the team that has the right to pick between the two seemingly fair although entirely different options that come from the coin toss in option 2 would have some sort of advantage). Adding in a merit based event that has high entertainment value for the fans like this one would help solve all of the NFL’s overtime problems. Combine Option 5 with any other new rule change and stars get to see the field and no team receives an advantage they did not earn with football or football like activities.

If you want to see what a kicking contest may look like, or if you would like one in place of a coin toss, here is a link to the Pro Bowl Skills Competition Kick-Tac-Toe kicking contest between Graham Gano and Chris Boswell.

Conclusion

The NFL has a lot to analyze when it comes to changing the overtime rules. Do they really have a problem? Do fans really care about fairness when the current system is already relatively fair? Is the cost and effort associated with educating the fans about another new set of overtime rules really worth it?

The NFL Competition Committee will have to answer all of these questions this Spring during their meetings.

In the midst of all of this uncertainty, one thing is for certain. If fans want the overtime rules altered, they will have to make their voices heard. The giant bureaucracy that is the NFL is not going to modify its billion dollar model unless we, the consumers of their ever-controversial product, come together and demand change.

Every week of the NFL season comes with loads of new controversy, and in the playoffs this is true ten times over. That being said, this past week, the NFL Conference Championship Games, was one for the ages in terms of drumming up new slants for the media to discuss ad nauseam.

The first game of the weekend was the NFC Championship game between the Saints and the Rams. With a minute and forty-one seconds left on the clock, and the score knotted at twenty, a play that would go on to provoke hundreds of hours of press attention, pundit deliberation and this music video rocked the NFL world.

On third down Saints quarterback Drew Brees through an accurate pass to rotational wide receiver Tommy Lee Lewis. As the ball was traveling through the air, Rams cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman lowered his helmet into the upper body of Lewis, without ever looking for the football. Because Robey-Coleman made contact with the receiver before the ball arrived, this was an obvious pass interference penalty, that is, to everyone except the seven officials in charge of making such a ruling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw4GuiDL6rQ

Saints head coach was livid for the remainder of the game. After the penalty, the Saints were forced to kick a field goal, which they made. The Rams then drove down the field for a field goal of their own, which they also converted. In overtime, the Saints received the ball first. The football gods had realized the error in their ways, and granted the Saints this gift to restore balance in the sports world. The Saints threw an interception. The Rams picked up a couple first downs, kicked a field goal, and one the game and the trip to the Superbowl that comes with it.

Officiating errors happen all the time, but rarely does one occur in such a prominent moment as this one. The attention that this particular incident received has led to a movement from the fans to take measures to prevent this from ever happening again. There are a variety of options for how to prevent this problem, although each of them have their own set of flaws.

Option 1: The Canadian Football Rules

In the Canadian Football League, the NFL’s most successful “competitor,” the head coach is allowed to use his allotted challenge flags on pass interference penalties, in addition to scores, turnovers, catches, and spots which are challengable in both leagues. Allowing for challenges on pass interference penalties, and other big penalties like this phantom call from the Chiefs Patriots game from this weekend, will add a new level of strategy to the sport we have all come to love. It will also take pressure off of officiating crews, who currently receive a billion times more criticism than praise for their performance. The only pitfalls of this idea are the added length to each NFL game brought about by prolonged reviews, which people could and should be able to forgive, and the question of what happens within the final two minutes of each half, where challenges are currently prohibited.

In the Saints-Rams game, a coaches challenge on the lack of a pass interference penalty could have saved the Saints, but if the Saints had already used their allotment of challenges, it just would have created an additional what-if.

Options 2 and 3: Pay the Refs More and Add Put More Refs on the Field

Currently, the job “NFL Referee” is a part time gig. A billion dollar industry with hundreds of millions of viewers that pays its players tens of millions of dollars and its coaches nearly as much relies on part time employees to manage the game. This seems foolish. Making NFL Referee a full-time position with mandatory training programs and constant practicing should make the calls on the field far better than they currently are, but to expect his from part-time employees is simply unrealistic. In addition to paying refs more and forcing them to work more hours, putting more eyes on each play certainly would help identify penalties. As I’ve previously stated, there are currently seven refs on the field on any given play. Adding an additional ref or two would allow multiple sets of eyes to look at the same aspect of any given play, which would allow for a ref to make the occasional mistake, without it being such a big deal, as the other official would be able to step in and make the right call.

This plan is also not perfect. Making NFL Referee a full-time job would require the owners, and presumably the players, to forfeit a portion of their salaries, and while it may be easy for a fan or a writer to say they should be willing to do so, it certainly will not excite the wage-losing parties. Additionally, adding refs on the field would increase “clutter” and ref interference. NFL Referees interfering with plays is already a problem (if you don’t believe me, click here) and adding more refs will only exacerbate said problem.

Option 4: Add a Ref, And Place Him In Front of a TV Camera

A big problem with this whole blown call fiasco is that the fans get to see the play over and over again, and the announcers lament over the missed call for several minutes of the telecast, but the refs only get to see what happens once, and it does not happen in slow motion for these poor souls. One solution to this may be adding a referee who does not stand on or along the field, but who resides in the booth, and watches the play on a screen with a wide angle, professionally shot stream of the game. This referee would be able to see calls that the other referees may have missed, and then would communicate with one of the refs on the field to make the call.

On this surface, this idea seems great. Owners will only have to hire one more referee per game, and the number of bad calls or bad no-calls would dramatically increase. However, there are very valid concerns about how this change would affect the flow of the game. Unlike a replay system, which one or two times a game would stop play for a few minutes, a system where a ref watches the game on a TV would likely delay each play in which he sees a penalty by a few seconds. This may not seem so drastic, but when one of the slowest sports (in terms of time between action) becomes slower, fans will not be happy. It would also produce an inordinate number of late flags, a phenomena which has bothered fans of all sports for millennia.

Option 5: Do Nothing

There are many NFL fans who accept that officiating will never be perfect. These fans believe that the sport they love should be kept pure, and remain away from the dirty hands of “progressives” who want to tarnish the game they love with newfangled technology or innovative ideas.

There is something to be said for liking the chaos that ensues after an incident like this, but it is the opinion of this blogger that the bad far outweighs the good.

In Conclusion:

The NFL has a plethora of options they can peruse to better their sport. Each option has its own pros and cons, but change definitely is necessary and appears to be coming, just over the horizon.

Athletes and owners are entities on either pole of the sports universe, and while their interests are often at odds with one another, maintaining a stable relationship is paramount to a team’s success.

 

The Athlete’s Perspective

First off, I would like to say that the dynamic I am attempting to express in this post exists primarily in basketball and football as these two sports are the most visible in the media, and thus have the requisite amount of drama necessary to have this piece be substantial.

The professional athlete generally has two primary concerns: being able to provide for his family and winning as many games as possible.

To the athlete, the owner is a figure who has a tremendous amount of control over whether or not the athlete has his two primary concerns addressed, however, the athlete typically does not believe the owner SHOULD be the one who has control over such things.

A typical professional athlete (remember, football and basketball) is a mid to late twenty something year old African American male (70% in the NFL, 75% in the NBA) who spends countless hours each day for months at a time focusing on his craft by preparing his mind and body for the rigors of game-time.

To the athlete, the owner is some old white dude, (only one owner in each sport is non-white) who knows a lot about business (in most circumstances) but does not know what it is like to be an athlete. Owners obviously have a passion for sport, otherwise they would not have paid a billion dollars to purchase the team, but much of their experience with their respective game came from youth athletics, a time for many of these nonathletic individuals was a stress free time playing with their friends.

Athletes and owners having such different experiences with sports, and athletes and owners coming from such different demographics is part of the reason why the divide between them is so great.

In no instance was the divide between the wants of the owner and the wants of the player more prominent than in the 2018 ‘feud’ between Pittsburgh Steelers’ star running back Le’Veon Bell and owner Art Rooney II (son of longtime owner and fan-favorite Art Rooney, creator of the Rooney Rule). Le’Veon Bell was franchise tagged by the Steelers during the offseason, a rule which essentially forces a player to sign a one year contract for, in this case, the average value of the top five salaries of the players at his position. Having already taken one for the team and played under the franchise tag before, (players typically do not like the franchise tag as they are at risk of getting injured without having a long-term contract to ensure their future financial security) Le’Veon Bell was incensed. After evaluating the decision, Le’Veon made a ‘business decision’, something owners should theoretically understand, and decided to sit out the season, much to the begrudge of the Pittsburgh fan-base, many of his teammates, and the entire Rooney family.

The Owner’s Perspective

To the owner, the various athletes on the team are his employees. He pays each of them several million dollars to play a child’s game, and all he demands is that they practice religiously, perform excellently, and not do anything that could remotely be considered controversial, so as to not draw attention to the team.

Some owners, the ones that traditionally have their teams put up the best on-field results, stay far away from the day-to-day operations of the team that they own. They save the football decisions to the people whose job it is to analyze players, coach them up, and make the tough choice about which ones are worthy to be on the football field. Other owners, usually the ones whose teams do not perform well like to be as involved as possible.

Owners traditionally do have the FINAL say over what direction a team decides to go (although must just defer to the General Manager) but one thing that all owners have come to agree on, is that former Superbowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick will not play for their team.

In a world dominated by 24/7 media coverage, a scandal of any kind can turn into the story of the day, week, month, or even the year and this year that story was Colin Kaepernick. Colin Kaepernick elected to take a knee during the national anthem in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and regardless of what your opinion is, it is impossible to deny that there are many offended parties and an abundance of scandal.

Players may want to have the rather talented Kaepernick in the league to help their teams, but owners certainly do not want the media circus that would come with the signing.

In Conclusion,

Players and owners both want to win games, but that is just about where their mutual interests end. Players want to have their voice heard, and to have their wallets stuffed. Owners want to save funds where they can, and save face at all costs.

Feuds and disagreements between players and owners are inevitable, but compromise is the only path to the end of the Athlete v Owner feud. Players sometimes will have to put the team above themselves, and owners will sometimes have to put their hearts above their wallets.

 

The relationship between athletes and the media is incredibly complex.

The media’s primary goal is to have us, the members of the general public, consume as much of their content as is humanly possible. Each click on a link or like on a tweet equates to a certain number of advertising dollars for the media outlet, whether it be a mega-conglomerate of entities like ESPN or a mom and pop, shanty style outfit like CBS Sports. Money is the obvious motivator for the media outlets that cover sports, and they utilize a variety of tactics to get it including the use of eye catching click bait-y headlines like:

the creation of conflict out of nothing at all like:

and the spreading of mistruths like:

This past week CBS produced an article titled “Jimmy Butler ‘Agressively Challenged’ Brett Brown Over Role In 76ers Offense; Called Him Out In Team Meeting.”  In the article, they go on to say that Jimmy Butler really just made a logical and simple request to his boss, 76ers Head Coach Brett Brown, about how he believes the Sixers would be more successful if they ran the pick and roll more frequently, but this headline paints a very different picture. In order to get the highest number of clicks, they antagonize the 76ers star forward, who was merely trying to do what is best for his team. The continued painting of certain athletes as either argumentative, as in the case of Jimmy Butler, lazy, as in the case of Kawhi Leonard, or as a “cancer”, as in the case of Chad Johnson has created quite the divide between the media and the athletes.

Just in the past two weeks alone, athletes have begun to fight back in a big way. After Steelers star wide receiver Antonio Brown was reported to have had a feud with quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, many members of the media considered this an opportunity to pounce. They panned him for several days, saying that he was a burden in the locker room, and that his outburst, before the last game of the season, (in which they won) was the reason for the Steelers not making the postseason. One member of the media, who is on the voting committee for the AP All-Pro Team, did not put Antonio Brown on his ballot for said All-Pro Team, and went as far to say that he would not put him in his top twenty wide receivers even though he led the league in touchdowns. This led Antonio Brown to say this:

This sentiment that Antonio Brown is expressing is held by many players throughout the league. Kawhi Leonard and Markele Fultz, two of the shyest players in professional sports, have expressed their displeasure with the way the media has portrayed their recoveries from injury, and Derrick Rose, who was upset by how the media displayed his fall from grace has said:

While Rose’s language was certainly not politically correct (a point which the media brutalized him for plenty), it very accurately shows the passionate frustration that athletes are having with members of the media.

ON THE FLIP SIDE,

the media is an incredibly valuable asset for professional sports leagues. If the NFL was just football games on Sundays, it would not be the multi-billion dollar industry that it has grown to become. ESPN’s 24/7 coverage of the MLB, NFL, and NBA is essentially free advertising for the leagues and it creates an atmosphere in which if one desired, he or she could be consuming that league’s coverage every waking moment of his or her life. And the constant media coverage that has allowed the leagues to grow to the level of popularity that they have today has certainly helped the athletes, specifically, in the form of astronomical salaries. 40 years ago, a star NFL quarterback did not make enough in his playing career to retire from work all together. Today, any NFL player who makes it to their second contract has enough money to support his grandchildren for the entirety of their lives, and that is thanks to the massive rights deals purchased by media outlets. In 2016, the Philadelphia Phillies signed a 2.5 BILLION DOLLAR TV rights deal with Comcast Sports Network, and that money makes its way to the players very quickly. In just three years, the Phillies have reportedly offered the largest ever contract in baseball history to two different players! If players want to continue to enjoy receiving salaries like the 300 MILLION DOLLAR ones offered to Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, it is in their best interests to not antagonize the media, like the media is antagonizing them.

IN CONCLUSION,

the media needs content consumers to make money, and they get the most money by reporting hyperbolic stories that make the athletes unhappy. The media also indirectly pays the salary of the athletes, so the media-athlete relationship is always going to exist.

The only way the constant tension between the media and the athletes it reports on will end is if us, the content consuming public, demand a different type of reporting. Reporting that does not rely on over-exaggeration and lies to make sports narratives interesting, but reporting that keeps the interest of the athlete in mind, only representing him or her in the most credible of ways.