The Elephant In The Room

It seems unwise and irresponsible to discuss the next frontier of sports in the summer of 2020
without examining the effect of the coronavirus. So let's not be (unwise and irresponsible,
that is). The first question to ask is, Is 2020 just a blip, like an extended rain delay at a
baseball game where we have faith that everything will return to normal as soon as the skies
clear? Or has this viral force majeure forever altered the sports landscape in meaningful
ways, regardless of what the global public health future holds?

The short answer: Who knows? Links to an external site. There's an excellent chance that the
summer of 2021 sports-wise will resemble the summer of 2019 (only even better because the
Tokyo Olympics will be taking place) as opposed to this summer. Then again, maybe the
economic hardships created by the coronavirus will have lingering effects. If the past five
months have taught us anything, it's that almost all of us are lousy at seeing what's just
around the bend. The best you can do is stay curious and hopefully wonder if people are even
asking the right questions.

Case in point: If you pay attention to sports radio or TV or just any of the pundits discussing
sports and the virus, you will note that they'll eventually come around to asking whether
football will return. And then some genius will note that football is a contact sport—players
actually touch one another— and that this heightens the risk to players of contracting the
virus.

However, if you've ever played organized football, then you know that the gridiron (i.e.,
football field) itself is not the petri dish for contamination. The locker room is. Every human
fluid one can conjure is omnipresent, in an enclosed area, with dozens of barely clad or naked
men walking to and fro. Community showers, bathroom stalls, sinks. Bringing football back
is not about a pileup on 3rd-and-1. It's about 53 to 80 men sharing a locker room before and
after every practice and game.

As Rust Cohle (Matthew McGonaughey) chided the officers interrogating him in True
Detective...

Apologies about the profanity. Listen, if you're watching sports news or talk shows (or
listening to them) in the spring and summer of 2020, you should be annoyed. At the very
least. Because—and perhaps this rant belonged in the Media module—the people who are
paid very well to inform you are doing a lazy job at best. They are behaving not like reporters
but like cheerleaders ("We want sports! We want sports!") and that is irresponsible. So let's
spell it out:
Pretty much every network except PBS has hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) invested
in sports television rights. Whether or not the pressure from above (the corner offices) is
explicit or implicit, the sense a viewer/listener gets from these talking heads is "How soon
can we open sports back up?" as opposed to "Should we right now?"

Dissenting voices are unwelcome (When covering Notre Dame football for NBC Sports, a
reporter wrote a withering commentary on then Fighting Irish head coach Charlie Weis. Notre
Dame home games aired (and still do) on NBC. When NBC Sports' 2nd-in-command next
saw me in person, his first words were, "Are you gonna be on our side or not?").

Where will sports be after this pandemic? Will a large swath of Americans say, "I'm over it"
kind of the way some people who quit drinking coffee do? The first two weeks were difficult
but after that they'd overcome the addiction? Or will fans return in droves and celebrate the
return of their prodigal Suns (and Lakers and Clippers, etc.) that they used to figuratively
live-and-die with before the pandemic struck?

Who knows? More likely the latter, is my guess. But until then, pay attention to how the
ESPNs and FS1 are covering this interregnum. And remember: money has a way of
obfuscating the truth.

The Sports Bubble (Related: Is There A Sports Bubble?)

If you remember the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings from the Teams module, you probably
recall that the owners disbanded the club after two seasons because they feared the players'
economic demands would bring financial ruin. That's when the team payroll was still below
$10,000.

You can fast forward more than a century to the July 17, 1978 cover of Sports Illustrated and
the headline, "Money! Money! Money! Is It Ruining Sports?" Again, that's America's
paragon of sports journalism wondering aloud if the system is about to buckle—42 summers
ago.
All of which is to say that while the money in professional sports has never been this insane,
this is hardly the first moment in history that people have thought so. Thus the question: Will
the sports bubble ever burst or is it always just hysteria?

In 1978, the year SI ran that cover, the average median U.S. household income was
$10,556Links to an external site. while the average Major League Baseball salary was
$99,876Links to an external site.. The Major League ball player earned nearly 10 times what
the typical American family did. In 2018, the average U.S. income was $52,145 while the
average MLB salary had skyrocketed to $4,095,000.

That means...

• In 40 years the average American wage (not adjusting for inflation) had risen five times. In
those same four decades the average MLB wage had risen by a factor of 41.

• Where the average Major Leaguer once earned more than 10 times your parents' income, he
now earns 78 times more.

Will the bubble ever burst?

If you saw the 2015 film The Big Short (or read Michael Lewis' book, upon which it is
based), then you know how the stock market crash of 2008 occurred. The prices of homes
kept soaring while people's incomes did not. However, it was bad business for banks to not
keep rubber-stamping mortgage applications. And people wanted to own homes, never mind
that their salary did not align with the price of the home. So lenders figured out a a way to
craft mortgages so that buyers would not feel the pain until three to five years after moving
in.

And new homes (i.e., flooding the market with product) continued to be built. Eventually the
prices of homes peaked and went down. Homeowners could not afford their mortgages and
they could not flip their homes for more than they bought them. The economy crashed.

Will the bubble ever burst?

In 2020 the price of sports keeps soaring while people's incomes do not. In 2006 the average
NFL ticket price was roughly $62Links to an external site.; today it is $102. That's
approximately a 2/3 (66%) markup. Baseball? $22, now $33. A 50% markup. The NBA?
From $47 to $130 oLinks to an external site.r so. That's about a 175% increase, give or take a
few percentage points.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate as of early June was at 13.3%, the highest since the Great
Depression. Also...

The price of homes/sports keeps rising while potential homeowners/fans are dealing with
more financial hardship.

Ticket prices only tell part of the story, however. Last year the Utah Jazz (NBA) nearly
doubled their ticket pricesLinks to an external site.. Jazz tickets were among the cheapest in
the NBA, every game was a sellout and team executives noticed how much more those
tickets were selling for on the secondary market (scalpers). Supply and demand. Who can
blame them?

But as fans of lower- and middle-class incomes (generally speaking, the most passionate fans
in most teams' fan bases) get priced out of seeing games in person, almost all games are still
available on free TV. And as long as fans watch on TV, where the real money is, teams and
leagues will not be overly concerned about how sports arenas are becoming de facto gated
communities.

So how to increase revenue via TV? Higher rights fees. And how do networks recoup that
investment? Two ways: 1) With higher ratings, which allow them to charge higher ad rates
and 2) With more commercials.

You may have noticed that football games, which once finished under three hours, now run
about 3:30. NBA games, formerly tidy 2-hour affairs, now run 2:30. That's not all the fault of
replay review.

As fans, how much will we agree to? How much more money will we agree to spend to see a
game in person? How much more time will we agree to devote to a game that feels
increasingly like more bun, less burger?

Let's wrap this up: the athletes are better than they ever have been, in every sport. The games
are still thrilling. But in terms of the experience, in terms of money and time spent, sports
have never been this expensive. And the proprietors of sports (commissioners, owners) are
not seeking ways to reduce those expenditures. Is the bubble close to bursting yet?
The Sun Never Sets On The Sports Empire

(Yankees, Red Sox, England: What would the Puritans think?)

The people who own sports franchises did not get to be billionaires, for the most part, by not
understanding how capitalism works. Hence, market expansion is paramount to sports teams
and leagues.

You probably know that the NFL has scheduled regular-season games in London for years
and recently, in Mexico City. Major League Baseball sent the Yankees and Red Sox to
London for a pair of games last summer. And the NBA has staged regular season games in
Japan, Mexico City and London since 1990.

Globalization. Finding new markets. The NBA even had plans to tip off a pro basketball
league in Africa until the coronavirus put those plans in a holding pattern. The Basketball
Africa League's inaugural season was put on hold when the NBA postponed its own season
on March 11 after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert's positive test for Covid-19. BAL's season
was supposed to begin two days laterLinks to an external site.: on Friday, the 13th of March.

Even the big three leagues understand that the domestic revenue level from television rights
deals and ticket pricing is near the ceiling. Or perhaps it has crashed through the ceiling and
is living in the attic. New markets needed to be plumbed and all three sports are engaged in
their own space race of sorts (with the NBA being in the best position to finish on top).

Only time will tell how the effects of the pandemic will affect sports globalization. And, in
the near term, with the United States at its worst unemployment levelsLinks to an external
site. since, well, before the first televised sporting event (1939, but you knew that), the sports
bubble may be facing, in the near-term, an implosion.

Welcome To Dystopia

(James Caan as Jonathan E in "Rollerball")

Hollywood has long painted a grim picture of the future and how sports are used to exploit
the masses. Is Hollywood cynical about the future of society or is it simply populated with
too many executives who were cut from the freshman basketball team? You be the judge.

Still, it's worth exploring two films that were released more than 35 years apart. The first is
Rollerball, from 1975, and the latter, with which you are likely more familiar, is The Hunger
Games, from 2012. The "sports" in the two films are only similar in the sense that the stakes
are even higher than they are in the most brutal sports we currently watch: death is not only a
side-effect, it is somewhat expected.

In each film the overlords of the respective sports have an ulterior motive for staging the
games: as a palliative measure. The men who control both rollerball and the hunger games
wish to promote authoritarian rule and to stamp out the will of the individual. It is no
coincidence that a strong-willed individualist who happens to excel at the game while
simultaneously rejecting authoritarianism emerges (Katniss Everdeen is an updated Jonathan
E).

Then again, it's only Hollywood. It's not as if real sports owners or leagues would ever
attempt to silence (or blackballLinks to an external site.) an individual, an iconoclast, who
refuses to toe the company line.

The Future Of Sports Television

In June Robert Johnson, the co-founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the
former majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats (now the New Orleans Pelicans), appeared
on CNBC. Johnson, 74, is America's first black billionaire.

Asked about the future of televised sports, Johnson said that the current model of cable
subscription packages is untenable. In other words, before streaming services existed, cable
television could get away with charging subscribers to pay for a bundle of channels when
most consumers only wanted a fraction of them. Even if you only wanted the prime rib, you
had to pay for the entire buffet.
As streaming services have created competition (there's that term again) for cable, Johnson
believe that cable providers will have to become more consumer-friendly. He foresees a
future in which consumers will not have to pay exorbitant monthly fees but instead will pay
to watch certain sporting events. In short, Johnson foresees an a la carte sports television
universe.

Is Johnson correct? We shall see. Many events, such as live boxing and ultimate fighting,
already operates on a pay-per-view basis. The most expensive cable channel by far is
ESPNLinks to an external site.— $9 of your cable bill goes directly to ESPN whether you
watch it or not.

The pro side of Johnson's argument is that the consumer may prefer only paying for the
games he or she wants to watch while sports, in the near-term, may make a tidy bundle.
Consider: In 2017 boxer Floyd Mayweather and mixed martial arts phenom Conor McGregor
got into the ring for arguably the most hyped fight of the decade. The pay-per-view cost
ranged between $90 and $100. For one night's work, Mayweather earned $285 millionLinks
to an external site. (if you need to ask who won the fight, just re-read the previous seven
words before this parenthetical).

Of course, that was a one-off event. How much would the NBA charge fans to watch a
Bucks-Lakers NBA Finals contest? Moreover, and this is an important consideration: pro
sports understand that by not having a pay wall, they invite a larger audience to consume the
game. And that translates into social media posts and a sense of community that translates
into merchandise sales, into their players landing larger endorsements, into always being a
major part of the conversation.

The inclusiveness of pro sports for anyone who can afford a cable TV bill pays off in
countless ways that may not be directly measurable on a spread sheet. Would the NFL, NBA
and MLB risk its incredibly profitable relationship with its fans over pay-per-view? We'll see.

What Next?

Every summer SI.com releases a list of the Top 100 college football players (because nothing
draws more clicks than lists or mock drafts, which are themselves lists). You are welcome to
peruse the list from 2018Links to an external site. but allow me to save you the trouble:
nowhere on the list does the name Kyler Murray appear. A few months after this list was
published Murray, the quarterback at Oklahoma, won the Heisman Trophy as college
football's most outstanding football player.

Let's not just pick on SI. ESPN's NFL draft guru, Todd Mcshay, did not have Joe Burrow in
his initial 2020 NFL mock draftLinks to an external site. that he released in April of 2019.
Burrow, who won the Heisman Trophy in 2019 after leading LSU to the national
championship, was the first overall pick in the 2020 draft.

Prognosticating is difficult (one reporter devoted an entire weekend this past March to
watching the XFL and reporting on the rookie league's prospects for long-tLinks to an
external site.erm success. Nowhere in the story did he consider the prospect that this was the
XFL's final weekend of play before folding, which it did thanks in large part to the
pandemic). Our predictions are usually biased by our own pasts. You will notice that no time
has been spent in this class discussing the rise in popularity among young people of anti-
competitive sports such as skateboarding. And almost no time has been spent discussing E-
sports, which many industry experts claim is the future.

Who knows? That is an honest assessment. From the assigned readings, "Super Hippie"
came along 50 years ago proselytizing about a post-competitive sports world in which we
compete only against ourselves. Very zen, but also it has not yet come to pass half a century
later.

Mankind (how's that for an oxymoron?) remains competitive. Fandom still exists. People still
read about sports, even if they rarely pick up a newspaper or magazine to do so. The formats
have changed in many ways, but the fundamentals remain.

As far as the future of sports go, I would leave you with this piece of advice: think about your
own future relationship with sports. If you fell in love with sports, you most likely did so by
playing sports. Watching sports was an ancillary benefit. As we grow into adulthood and
middle age too many of us reverse that order: we watch more than we play.

The best thing that you can do for yourself, at any age, is to play more than you watch. Be
active, not passive. A week or so ago a man was swimming laps in his community pool,
something I try to do every day. Another man swimming in the next lane was keeping a
swifter pace. When they both finished Al (that was his name) offered the first man a few
pointers on his stroke. He took them and then asked Al his age.
"I turn 85 in September," Al said.

Yes, the first man was that slow of a swimmer, but Al's a fish (or perhaps a whale?) in the
pool.

Al has it figured out. It's better to be in the game than watching it.