nfl

The Trouble with Colin Kaepernick

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Five seasons ago, Colin Kaepernick was a blown personal foul penalty away from leading the 49ers to a Super Bowl title. During his playoff run, he set an NFL record for rushing yards by a quarterback in any game. After the following season he signed an extension worth $54 million guaranteed. Despite struggling under two coaches who would only last a season each, he still threw for 16 touchdowns and only 4 interceptions on a team bad enough to secure the #2 pick in the draft.

And today he can’t find a job.

Of course, you already know that. And you probably know that Kaepernick is good enough to be one of between 64 ad 96 quarterbacks employed by an NFL team. And you definitely know that Kaepernick being out of a job has absolutely nothing to do with how well he plays on the football field.

But instead of launching into the stupidity of why Kaepernick can’t find a job or debating the appalling nature of how he’s being treated by the League and its member teams, I’m instead going to participate in a little experiment.

Last week, I listened to local sports talk personality Mike Valenti lament the stupidity of the Jacksonville Jaguars opening their quarterback competition between Blake Bortles and Chad Henne, instead of handing it over to either of the outright. Obviously, Valenti pointed out that it was asinine that the Jaguars would start the season with either of these 2 as their starting QB, and insisted that they were idiots for not calling Kaepernick. But, for reasons I’ll get to later, it’s not nearly that simple.

So I’m going to examine every team’s quarterback situation and determine whether or not they should bring in Kaepernick and examine just how deep his so-called blackballing goes.

AFC East
Buffalo Bills – Tyrod Taylor, TJ Yates, Nathan Peterman. None of these have ever done anything in the NFL and Taylor is so inept as a QB that the team benched him rather than risking injury and triggering his contract to become guaranteed. Kaepernick’s an upgrade over any of them.

Miami Dolphins – Matt Moore, Retired Jay Cutler, Brandon Doughty, David Fales. The Dolphins’ QB position opened up when Ryan Tannehill blew out his knee in the preseason, but one could argue that Kaepernick would be an upgrade over him as well. Logically he’d be a perfect fit here, but then we look at the political situation. Kap once did a press conference in a Fidel Castro t-shirt and compared his regime to those in the U.S. (I never argued that Kaepernick was the smartest knife in the block). And in the city with the nation’s largest concentration of Cuban exiles, that’s a non-starter. No go in Miami.

New England Patriots – Tom Brady, Jimmy Garopolo, Jacoy Brissett. Not even worth discussing, and easy no.

New York Jets – Josh McCown, Bryce Petty, Christian Hackenberg. Unless the Jets are playing for the #1 pick in 2018 (which is entirely possible), Kaepernick could sign 5 minutes before kickoff and be the starter for this embarrassing franchise.

AFC North
Baltimore Ravens – Joe Flacco, Ryan Mallett, Thaddeus Lewis, Josh Woodrum. It’s widely believed that when Flacco went down with an injury that would keep him out for a week during the preseason, Ravens owner Steve Biscotti nixed any chances of signing Kaepernick over ticket sales concerns. But while Mallett sucks, he’s definitely more in line with Flacco’s style of play and if Flacco goes down the Ravens are probably screwed anyway. No point in rocking the boat when Flacco will be back for the regular season.

Cincinnati Bengals – Andy Dalton, AJ McCarron, Jeff Driskel. Established starter, similarly styled backup, so no need here.

Cleveland Browns – Brock Osweiler, DeShone Kizer, Cody Kessler, Kevin Hogan. Kizer is likely the Browns’ designated QB of the Future for 2017, but Kaepernick plays with a similar style and could be a good mentor (as much as a guy everyone thinks is a cancer can be a mentor). He’d definitely make sense in Cleveland.

Pittsburgh Steelers – Ben Roethlisberger, Landry Jones, Joshua Dobbs, Bart Houston. They’ve got a future HOF’er as their starter and Kaepernick isn’t the same style QB. Pittsburgh’s set.

AFC South
Houston Texans – Tom Savage, Deshaun Watson, Brandon Weeden. In this putrid division Houston has gone to the playoffs with Savage, Brock Osweiler and TJ Yates. Kaepernick could come in and do the same and provide a stop-gap before Watson takes over for the next decade.

Indianapolis Colts – Andrew Luck, Scott Tolzien, Stephen Morris, Philip Walker. Assuming Luck is healthy (the new version of “Assuming Matthew Stafford is healthy”), they’re set for years, and they’re probably doomed if he’s not. No point here.

Jacksonville Jaguars – Blake Bortles, Chad Henne, Brandon Allen.  Considering a conversation about this team’s QB situation inspired this post, this seems like a no-brainer. However, I once read an anecdote that Jacksonville is so racist that when David Garrard was the QB the team was practically forced to sign two black quarterbacks to back him up for fear of fan backlash that the white guy wasn’t starting. In a world where Tim Tebow is a free agent and also the walking messiah in northern Florida, Kaepernick wouldn’t stand a chance here.

Tennessee Titans – Marcus Mariota, Matt Cassel, Alex Tanney, Tyler Ferguson. Mariota isn’t going anywhere, and there’s a solid argument to be made that Kaepernick is a better QB than Cassel. With a similar playing style and Mariota’s tendency to get hurt, Kaepernick could be a good backup option here.

AFC West
Denver Broncos – Trevor Simian, Paxton Lynch, Kyle Sloter, Chad Kelly. With the exception of Kelly, who’s only known because he’s Jim Kelly’s nephew and a total asshole off the field, all of these guys are anonymous nobodies (redundant?) who have done nothing. Kaepernick could fit here.

Kansas City Chiefs – Alex Smith, Patrick Mahomes, Tyler Bray, Joel Stave. Kaepernick has already beaten Smith in a QB situation and has a similar playing style to Mahomes, who the Chiefs took in the first round this year. If Mahomes isn’t going to play this year, I’d take Kaepernick over Smith, and if he is, Kaepernick would be a capable backup and mentor.

Los Angeles Chargers – Philip Rivers, Kellen Clemens, Cardale Jones, Mike Bercovici. I could see Jones as the eventual heir apparent to Rivers, and the playing styles aren’t particularly similar. No fit here.

Oakland Raiders – Derek Carr, EJ Manuel, Connor Cook. As a Michigan State grad, I’m supposed to stand up for Connor Cook, but the guy sucks and was a well-known asshole who could very easily wear out his welcome wherever he goes. Derek Carr might’ve been MVP last season if he hadn’t gotten hurt, so he’s not going anywhere. Kaepernick might be a good fit in a couple of years when the Raiders move to Vegas where he’s from, but no dice this year.

NFC East
Dallas Cowboys – Dak Prescott, Kellen Moore, Cooper Rush, Luke McCown. Prescott isn’t going anywhere, but Moore isn’t much of a runner and Kaepernick would allow an easy transition if Prescott were to get hurt. Plus, Jerrah loves him some controversy and would sign Hitler if he could run for 1500 yards. Not only is Kaepernick a decent fit for Dallas, I’m borderline floored that he hasn’t signed there yet.

New York Giants – Eli Manning, Josh Johnson, Geno Smith, Davis Webb. Just as a little aside, it’s amazing where Eli Manning ranks on the all-time passing lists (8th in passing yards, 7th in touchdowns, completions, and attempts, etc.). He’s been a joke for his entire career and he’s a definite first-ballot Hall of Famer. As for the Giants, I’m amazed that Johnson and Smith are still in the League, and they’re in the same mold as Kaepernick. Of course, their owner is the guy who signed a kicker whose wife had called the police on him over 20 times and complained that he’d gotten more calls about not signing Kaepernick than any player ever. He would make sense here as a player, but because their owner’s a douche, he won’t.

Philadelphia Eagles – Carson Wentz, Nick Foles, Matt McGloin, Dane Evans. Wentz was the #2 pick in the NFL draft and barring a Teddy Bridgewater type injury he’s not going anywhere for a while. All of his backups are in a similar mold as Wentz, so Kaepernick doesn’t make sense here.

Washington Redskins – Kirk Cousins, Colt McCoy, Nate Sudfeld. I’ll be damned, Colt McCoy is still in the League! I’m absolutely stunned. Anyhow, you’d have to think that someone who’s as dedicated to social justice as Kaepernick is wouldn’t sign with the team with the most racist name in sports, so this one’s a pretty simple no.

NFC North
Chicago Bears – Mike Glennon, Mark Sanchez, Mitch Trubisky, Connor Shaw. The Bears made arguably the biggest free agent signing of the offseason, then made the dumbest draft day trade in history to take another QB. And then, just for good measure, they signed the immortal Butt Fumble! So, no, I’d say Kaepernick doesn’t fit here.

Detroit Lions – Matthew Stafford, Jake Rudock, Bye Felicia Kaaya. Stafford’s not likely to go anywhere and half of Detroit wants Rudock to take over yesterday. Kaepernick would not go over well in this town.

Green Bay Packers – Aaron Rodgers, Brett Hundley, Joe Callahan, Taysom Hill. Who has ever heard of any of Rodgers’s backups? And I mean this year, Matt Flynn doesn’t count ever since the Lions turned him into an immortal. So no, I’d say Kaepernick doesn’t fit here.

Minnesota Vikings – Sam Bradford, Case Keenum, Taylor Henickie, Mitch Leidner. Obviously Teddy Bridgewater was the QB of the future until he had to have his leg reconnected. Kaepernick has done more than any of these QB’s in their career, so I’d bring him in. It would make the ridiculous draft bounty they gave up for Bradford look pretty stupid, though.

NFC South
Atlanta Falcons – Matt Ryan, Matt Schaub, Matt Simms, Alex Torgersen. Seriously? The Falcons have 3 QB’s named “Matt” on the roster. Was that intentional? Not that it really matters, but Ryan won the MVP last year and the backups are similarly styled, so no Kaepernick here.

Carolina Panthers – Cam Newton, Derek Anderson, Joe Webb, Garrett Gilbert. Kaepernick is essentially Cam Newton Lite, and Newton’s bound to have his brain scrambled by one of the 47 hits to the head that the refs don’t penalize this season. Carolina probably makes more sense than any other team for Kaepernick.

New Orleans Saints – Drew Brees, Chase Daniel, Garrett Grayson, Ryan Nassib. The Saints seem to like undersized QB’s who took their schools to unexpected bowl games. Kaepernick doesn’t seem to fit that particular mold, or the Saints’ system for that matter, so no.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers – Jameis Winston, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Ryan Griffin, Sefo Liufau. The Bucs clearly like rapists (sorry, “accused” rapists) as opposed to guys who stand up for injustice, so I’d say he doesn’t make a ton of sense here. Then again he and Winston have a similar style, so let’s go with yes.

NFC West
Arizona Cardinals – Carson Palmer, Drew Stanton, Blaine Gabbert, Trevor Knight. I’m actually floored any of these guys are still in the League, although obviously Palmer is in a different category than the other 3. Palmer probably has a year or two left, but Stanton has a playing style similar to Kaepernick and isn’t nearly as good. By those standards I might bring him in, but probably better to leave well enough alone.

Los Angeles Rams – Jared Goff, Sean Mannion, Dan Orlovsky. Goff may well suck, but he was the #1 pick in the draft last season so he’ll be around for a while. All 3 QB’s are similar styles, and Kaepernick isn’t the best fit, so no go here.

San Francisco 49ers – Brian Hoyer, Matt Barkley, CJ Beathard, Nick Mullens. As someone who’s watched Michigan State for over 20 years, I have no idea how Brian Hoyer ever took a snap in the NFL, let alone lasted 8 seasons. Kaepernick is better than any of these guys with his eyes closed. I have no clue why he opted out of his contract, but he shouldn’t have.

Seattle Seahawks – Russell Wilson, Trevone Boykin, Austin Davis. Seattle’s the only team that even brought in Kaepernick for a tryout. Then they signed Austin Davis, and if you said you know where he went to college, you’re a liar (Southern Miss, by the way). After the defense supposedly shit all over Russell Wilson I can actually understand why the Seahawks didn’t sign Kaepernick – the last thing Pete Carroll needs after a Wilson interception is Richard Sherman screaming in his ear to put in Kaepernick. So I’ll say it makes sense that Seattle passed.

So by my count, I see 12 teams where Kaepernick could fit, 15 where he doesn’t, and 5 (Miami, Jacksonville, Washington, NY Giants, and Seattle) where political issues interfere. Twelve teams, several of whom have signed domestic abusers and players who can’t pass a drug test, won’t make their team better because he chooses to protest the injustices in this country.

There’s much to be said about Colin Kaepernick’s protest. Personally, I’ve got no problem with it, although I think Kaepernick’s hurt his cause by wearing socks showing police dressed as pigs and a Fidel Castro t-shirt and proclaiming that he wouldn’t vote because it didn’t matter who won, which is absurd. And obviously the people who disagree with Kaepernick’s protest have as much right to their opinion as I do.

But you’ve got to admit that when you look at the ease with which guys like Ray Lewis, Michael Vick, Adrian Peterson, Greg Hardy, Josh Brown, Pacman Jones, and Leonard Little found jobs after far more appalling behavior, it’s hard to argue that the NFL has its priorities in order.

Fixing Major League Baseball

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We’re a week into the Major League Baseball season (at least we are when I started writing this, with my writing prowess it could be the All-Star break before this actually gets published), and it’s time to revisit one of my favorite pieces of this blog – fixing something that really isn’t broken.

Baseball’s a phenomenal sport, and reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.  It will never overtake the NFL – well, at least not until someone dies on the gridiron and the masses flee in droves – but it’s also never going to lose its ground to the NBA or NHL.  That said, there are still some relatively simple fixes that will make a great game even greater.  Without further ado:

Expansion/Contraction

A fair number of my suggestions will require an even number of teams in each League, so we should address the expansion/contraction of teams first.  My personal opinion is that there are 2 too many teams in baseball, and the stadium situations in Oakland and Tampa Bay prove that out.  If it were up to me, we’d contract the 2 teams that have never been to the World Series – the Seattle Mariners and the Washington Nationals – and move the Rays and A’s to those respective cities for the sake of franchise continuity (I’m a history geek like that).

But since we know that, barring a catastrophic financial situation – like, say, the bursting of the television rights fee bubble – no professional league is going to contract its teams, so let’s add teams in Montreal and Charlotte or Portland and call it good.

On Field Improvements

Universal Designated Hitter

Major League Baseball is the only sport on the planet (i.e., in the U.S., which is all that matters, amirite?) where half the league plays by one set of rules and the other half plays by another.  With year-round interleague play (we’ll get to that in a minute), that means a team built to play with the designated hitter may have to play a season-ending series with the playoffs on the line with their DH on the bench.  And anyone who’s ever seen Justin Verlander swing a bat knows that you’d much rather have Victor Martinez batting in a big situation.

So we’re changing the rules and either eliminating the DH or making it universal.  And while we can all marvel at Madison Bumgarner’s home run hitting ability, we tend to ignore the fact that he’s a career .186 hitter, and he’s the best hitting pitcher.  The simple fact is that watching a pitcher swing the bat is generally boring and painful (Bartolo Colon notwithstanding), and it leads to ridiculous managerial decisions where a guy throwing a shutout is pulled for a pinch hitter after 73 pitches because the offense can’t put up any runs.  No, it’s time for the NL’s antiquated rules to go by the wayside and MLB to adopt the DH permanently.  The fans will love it, the players will love it (more money for aging veterans to finish out their careers), and the owners…well, screw the owners.

Pitch Clock

I’ll get push back here – and I know this because I got plenty of push back from a buddy of mine when we were discussing it on Opening Day – but for a league that’s attempting to cut the length of their games so Millennials with attention spans measuring in nanoseconds can stay engaged, the pitch clock makes too much sense not to happen.

You can’t implement the pitch clock with men on base, because there are too many variables with that baserunner to force the pitcher to stick to a clock without disrupting his rhythm or making a stupid mistake.  But when there’s no one on base, there’s no reason a pitcher (or a batter) needs more than 20 seconds to make the next pitch.  Start the clock when the catcher receives the pitch, and if the umpire determines that the batter or pitcher is stalling, they’re punished with a ball or a strike against them.

Automated Balls/Strikes

In 2017, when anyone with a smartphone has access to PitchFX that shows exactly where every ball crosses the plate, there’s absolutely no reason for a human being to call balls and strikes.  Talk to me all you want about the human element, but I don’t want the game determined because some umpire didn’t see where the ball went across the plate.  The “human element” applies to the players; fair or not, the officiating of a game needs to be as close to perfect as possible.

With so few baseball calls being truly subjective – especially now that they’ve gotten rid of the neighborhood play on double plays – I’d argue that all officiating could be automated, but let’s start with baby steps.

Overhaul Instant Replay

Aside from Screech on Saved by the Bell, there’s not a person on Earth who has ever watched a game because of who’s officiating that game.  And yet we give the teams challenges to question when an umpire might have made an incorrect call, instead of insisting that the calls just be right.  So we’re going to remove the challenge system and put a fifth (or, in the case of postseason play, seventh) umpire in the broadcast booth, and if an umpire screws up, that extra umpire is going to correct him.  We’re not going to continue to allow the umpires’ egos to determine whether or not a game gets called correctly.

Drastically Reduce Ejections

Some ejections are deserved – I’m looking at you Bryce Harper.  But in a lot of cases a batter will question a call just a little bit more emphatically than the umpire likes (although not at all egregiously), and he’s gone.  The problem is that it drastically reduces the flexibility of the manager, and if someone like Miguel Cabrera gets ejected and has to be replaced by Andrew Romine, the strategy for the remainder of the game is changed immensely.  So unless someone is risking physical harm to another player or an umpire, or truly making an ass out of himself, we’re going to keep the Umpshow to a minimum.

Scheduling

154-Game Schedule

The owners will never go for it.  The players will love it.  Eliminate 8 games from the season to return to what was standard prior to expansion in 1961.  If you want to placate the owners, increase the cost of everything by 5%.  Well, everything except my beer.

Eliminate Interleague Play

Interleague play is over.  It’s played out.  It was never particularly interesting to start, and it ruined the truly novel approach that only MLB had – namely, that the two teams that met in the World Series had not met in the regular season.  MLB loved the “natural” rivalries in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Florida, and a few other places, but they didn’t account for truly dreadful games like Padres-Mariners.  And because the interleague games all took place on designated summer weekends when the weather was nice and the rivalry games were naturally more appealing to the local fans, MLB could proclaim that interleague games were more popular than your average American League or National League games.  It’s worth pointing out that since they’ve gone to year-round interleague play, we haven’t seen proclamations about the popularity of the games, likely because that April Marlins-Orioles game is dragging down the average.

Balanced Schedule

With 16 teams in each league, a 154-game schedule, and the elimination of interleague play, you can play 10 games against each team with 4 games left over.  The remaining 4 games can be rotated among the teams on an annual basis, or you could add a series based upon where the teams finished the previous season (for example, the best team plays the second best team, third place plays fourth place, etc.).  Either way, it’s better than 19 Royals-White Sox games a year.

Holiday Doubleheaders

There are 5 “major” holidays throughout the baseball season: Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day.  We’ll throw out Mother’s Day and Father’s Day since those are Sundays by rule and thus travel days.  But every team is required to play doubleheaders on 2 of the remaining 3 holidays – one at home, and one on the road.  If that holiday falls on a Sunday, the doubleheader will revert to the previous Saturday.  The players hate doubleheaders, but we’ve just cut 8 games out of the schedule, so they’ll get used to it.

Beginning/End of Season

Every season begins on the first Monday in April.  If you want to cater to ESPN and have them air a Sunday night game the night before, fine.  But this year there were 3 Sunday games to start the season, and that’s just insane.  One’s enough as a showcase for the game.

And since we’ve cut 8 games, plus 2 additional days of game play via the new doubleheader rule, there’s no excuse to be playing games in November.

Playoff Scheduling

Major League Baseball has deduced that playing 4 straight Division Series games on a Thursday will garner more television viewers than running 2 games simultaneously.  This seems dubious to me, but I’ve tended to default to the position of, “Someone smarter than me is making that determination.”  I mean, they have to be, right?

Still, it sucks for the fans with tickets.  Because the playoff schedule isn’t set until a day or two before the games start, you could wind up buying a ticket to a noon playoff game that you can’t use because you can’t get off work.  So either show the fans that there truly are more viewers for a Thursday noon game than there are for 2 games airing simultaneously, or cut out the weekday afternoon games.

Also, while I understand that games involving teams from New York and Chicago are going to garner more viewers than Oakland or Tampa Bay games will, it’s kind of crappy when all of the Oakland League Championship Series games get relegated to the 4pm games.  So alternate the LCS games so that both teams get prime time treatment.

Playoff Determinations

Realignment

In 2015, the three best teams in all of baseball all played in the National League Central.  The St. Louis Cardinals won the division with 100 wins, while the Cubs (97 wins) and Pirates (98) were subjected to a 1-game playoff to determine who moved on.  The Pirates and Cubs were punished because they were geographically close to the Cardinals.  And just to add insult to injury, because the team with the best regular season record automatically plays the winner of the Wild Card game in the Division Series, the Cardinals were punished by having to play the a 97-win team instead of the 92-win Dodgers or 90-win Mets.  This is asinine.  The best teams should be rewarded for having a superior regular season.  So we’re eliminating divisions.  Two Leagues, 16 teams each, with a balanced schedule.

Oh, and the Brewers and Astros are going back where they belong.

Playoff Seeding

Playoff seeding is simple: the top 5 teams in each League make the playoffs.  The top 3 teams get a bye to the Division Series while the 4th and 5th place teams play the Wild Card game to move on.  There’s no reason to reward a team for being located in a geographically advantageous location.

Conclusion

I’ll admit that a lot of these rule changes seek to fix some of the quirks that make baseball “great”.  Fans love to see pitchers hit dingers and the Wild Card situation I discussed isn’t particularly common.  But the Giants can still refuse the DH to let Bumgarner hit (which they’ve already done in interleague games), and no one’s going to weep because we close a loophole to give an advantage to a better team.

And I’m not going to stop watching because these rule changes aren’t made (because, let’s face it, most of them won’t be), but we could definitely make the game better.

 

Fixing the NFL (Part 2)

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It’s Super Bowl Sunday (or, if my writing/editing/posting history is any indication, sometime around Draft Day), which means football is on the brain.  As opposed to the other 365 days – it’s a leap year, remember – where football is on the brain.  Still, it strikes me as being as good a time as anyway to take another look at how we can fix the NFL.

My devoted readers – I’m talking to you, Dad – may remember that I already did a “Fix the NFL” post a few years back, and if you don’t, you can read it here.  Despite the fact that the NFL has stupidly listened to exactly none of my ideas (ok, they fixed the extra point, but they did it in a less than satisfactory way), we’re not going to rehash many of those issues here.  Instead we’re going to look closer at the business and societal issues with the game more than what happens on the field.

Without further ado:

Fire Roger Goodell.

Fire Roger Goodell out of a cannon.

Fire Roger Goodell out of a cannon into a brick wall.

Fire Roger Goodell out of a cannon into a brick wall on the surface of the sun.

Have I mentioned firing Roger Goodell?

Look, I think Goodell has his fans.  He has at least 32 of them, because if he didn’t the owners would’ve fired him already.  Unfortunately, a drunk monkey could’ve run the NFL during Goodell’s era and there would’ve been no difference.

People will tell you that Goodell’s grown the NFL’s business by leaps and bounds during his time as commissioner.  But that growth is due to, in my eyes, four things: gambling, fantasy football, the public financing of stadiums, and the DVR.  I’ll elaborate.

Fantasy football and gambling are no-brainers.  The NFL wouldn’t exist without it.  Or if it did it would be the NBA and Major League Baseball would still be America’s pastime.  Doubt me all you want, but I’m right.  The NFL could probably exist without fantasy football, and it did so with explosive growth up through the 1980’s, despite two seasons with work stoppages.  The reason is that football is so easy to gamble on that millions of people watch the games with absolutely no interest in who actually wins the games.  And football has been gambled on since the sport began, well before Roger Goodell was able to get his grimy claws on the game.

As for public financing, if you include the forthcoming Minnesota, Atlanta, and L.A. stadiums, 9 teams will have moved into new stadiums during Goodell’s reign.  Add the renovations in Buffalo and Kansas City and the fact that the Raiders and Chargers will eventually move, and you’re up to 13 teams that will have moved into new or renovated stadiums during Goodell’s reign.  All of these stadiums have been at least partially financed with public funds, with the billionaire owners claiming that the government – and the public that pays for government – needs to pony up because a new stadium offers so much benefit to the municipalities.  (I won’t go much into the scam, but if you want more information, go look at Field of Schemes.)

The thing is, since Jacksonville and Carolina entered the League in 1995, only the Bears, Packers, Chiefs, Chargers, Raiders, Rams, Bills, Dolphins, Falcons, and Saints remain in the same facilities; we’ve discussed the Chiefs, Chargers, Raiders, Rams, Bills, and Falcons, and only the Packers haven’t taken public funds for renovations (although the Packers breed a special breed of stupidity, as they financed their stadium by suckering their idiot fans into buying stock certificates that have no actual benefit of team ownership).

My point is that teams were suckering their fan bases into paying for their stadiums well before Goodell came into power.  Hell, they’ve been doing it in every other sport, with practically every team threatening to move if they didn’t get a new stadium financed with public funds.  This isn’t new, and it surely isn’t Goodell’s doing.

Finally, we come to the DVR.  Back in 2000 TiVo introduced the first DVR, and as their use has become more and more common in American households, the networks are looking for DVR-proof programming.  And nothing is more DVR-proof than sports.  Sure, there are a decent number of people who start the game an hour late, skip the commercials, and finish when everyone else does.  But for the most part people who are watching sports are doing it live, meaning they are consuming the commercials that are so important to the networks.  As a result, TV rights fees for sports have shot through the roof.  From 2006-13, TV rights fees were $3 billion/year.  From 2014-21, they were over $5 billion.  That’s not Roger Goodell’s doing, it’s because the networks are desperate.

And for all this business that Goodell had nothing to do with, what has he given us?  Embarrassment.  League disciplinary processes that leave us sympathetic to pieces of shit like Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, and Greg Hardy.  Suspensions so heavy-handed in the Bountygate investigation that his predecessor was brought in to overturn his findings.  Discipline that was probably light in the infamous SpyGate scandal, although we’ll never know because immediately after the penalties were handed down he destroyed all the evidence to protect his buddy Robert Kraft.  And a ridiculous make-up suspension – a suspension he’s still suing to uphold despite the fact that numerous arbitrators and courts have ruled that the suspension was ridiculous – of Tom Brady over some deflated footballs (to make up for the aforementioned light SpyGate penalties) that were so important to the outcome of the game that the Patriots outscored the Colts 28-0 after the offending footballs were removed from play.

And that doesn’t even mention the concussion catastrophe, which I’ll get to later.

Fire Roger Goodell.  Hire a drunk monkey.  It’s not that hard to be a commissioner in American sports.  Hell, Gary Bettman’s been doing it for over 20 years.

Fix the Concussion Crisis

Look, I get it.  Football is a dangerous game.  We watch as much for the bone-jarring collisions as we do for the amazing catches from Antonio Brown and the amazing runs from Todd Gurley.  But it’s recently become amazingly clear that playing football at all levels kills people.  It’s simply by the grace of God that no one has died on an NFL field as a result of a violent collision.  It is coming and it will likely destroy the League.  But the NFL can get in front of it and prevent that with a couple of easy fixes.

First, have independent concussion doctors on site at every game.  Let’s make it 3 doctors at each game who will have the power to stop the game if they see a guy struggling and will review him away from team personnel to determine if he is capable of returning to the game.  Players go into concussion protocol now, but players still believe that the doctors are more concerned with the team that employs them than they are with the players’ well being.  So we’re removing the concept of team concussion doctors and replacing them with League concussion doctors.  And just so we make sure that the League can’t step in and say that Cam Newton is cleared for the Super Bowl (when we know it would be an utter disaster for the League if Derek Anderson had to start), the doctors will be hired independent of the League.  Let it be the state’s medical boards that handle it.  If the NFL doesn’t like it, threaten to pull their favorable antitrust status.

Second, lifetime medical insurance for anyone who’s ever played for, been drafted by, or signed with an NFL team.  This will prevent the League from even trying to make the argument that the problem wasn’t caused by their football history.  Make it retroactive for any living player and have an independent board review the status of any of the decedents of deceased players.  It’ll save the League on lawyers fees and it’ll gain them immeasurable public relations points.  It’ll be expensive, but the NFL’s a cash cow.  And when a player inevitably dies on the field, the NFL will be able to say, “Hey, we know it’s dangerous, but we’re taking care of it.”

How are we going to pay for it?

Expand the Season

But wait, DSC, how can you complain about the inherent dangers of the NFL and then tell us we need to expand the season?  Simple.  We’re not adding games, we’re adding weeks.

I didn’t see Concussion, mainly because the Sony email hack scandal showed that the studio pulled some punches out of fear for being sued by the League, but also because I both watched the League of Denial documentary and read the book, so I didn’t feel like paying to watch a movie that thinks Luke Wilson is a convincing Roger Goodell.  But the trailer had one interesting line, and that’s that the League owns a day of the week.  And it’s true: from September until early February, every Sunday is NFL Sunday.  So what better way to add income then by giving them more of those Sundays?

As it stands now, we get 4 crappy preseason games and 16 regular season games over 21 weeks, with each team getting one regular season bye week.  The owners have started to realize that fans don’t want to pay full price for a preseason ticket, so they drop the price of the preseason games and spread the difference over the regular season games.  And we pay it, because we’re stupid sheep.

Now imagine 2 preseason games and 16 regular season games over the same 21 weeks, but with 19 weeks in the regular season.  What’s the difference?  I’m glad you asked.  And if you didn’t ask, you should have.

As it stands now, if you’re one of the 99% of America that has cable (that’s an estimate, but it’s not far off), you get to see 5 games a week – Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, and 2 on Sunday afternoon (and if you choose to skip around you can see 3 of the games on Sunday afternoon).  That’s 85 games a season, or 33% of the 256 games on the schedule, and that doesn’t include the nationally televised Thanksgiving games or the occasional late-season Saturday games.

Now, expand that 2 weeks without adding any games, and you’ll see 105 games, and you’re up to 41% of the season, all without dropping another penny.  And you do it in a way that helps player safety, and everyone loves that.

You may recall that in my prior diatribe about fixing the League I suggested that the final week of the regular season should be the final Sunday of December, with the playoffs starting the first week of January.  With this in mind, Week 1 would take place the week of August 23 and Week 19 would take place the week of December 27.  Is August 23 early?   Yes.  However, this would mean that the preseason games would start on August 9 (no sooner than normal), with the “real” games starting sooner.  And who would hate that?

(Well, Major League Baseball, but we’re not talking about them right now.)

So how will it work?  Each team plays a 16-game season with 3 bye weeks.  The players get added time to rest and recover and we likely see more players playing more games.  There will be no bye weeks from Weeks 1-4 and 17-19.  Two divisions each (one from each conference) have a bye week every fourth week from weeks 5-16, with the same divisions on the same bye weeks to eliminate any competitive advantage with teams getting longer gaps between bye weeks.

What’s the benefit?  You just gave the networks two additional weeks of DVR-free unstoppable NFL programming, which always finishes at the top of the ratings.  That’s roughly 12% more games for the people to see, and, more importantly, 12% more TV revenue.  At $5 billion a year as it currently stands, you’ve just added $600 million additional revenue without requiring the players to play another game.

If this isn’t the most brilliant and simplest fix to the game, I don’t know what is.

Lifetime Bans for Violent Criminals

Greg Hardy is a pile of shit who threw his girlfriend onto a futon full of assault weapons while she begged him to kill her, paid her off so that she wouldn’t press charges, and then promised to come out guns blazing when his suspension was up (and let’s not even discuss his comments about his opponents wives and girlfriends).

Adrian Peterson whipped the shit out of his 4-year-old son, scraping his legs and testicles, and while he was off on a league-mandated sabbatical (he was only retroactively suspended), he got caught smoking weed and threw himself an elaborate Egyptian-themed birthday party where he refused to allow anyone to discuss the charges against him.  He has shown zero remorse and seeks no redemption, despite the fact that publications such as Sports Illustrated really want to give it to him.

The NFL Players Association, because these pieces of shit are dues-paying members, are required to stick up for them, so when Goodell tries to do something good like banish these monsters in a manner that fits their crimes, he does it based on guidelines that aren’t in place and require the NFLPA to stick up for them.

So I say ban them for life.

Electrocuted a dog?  Gone.  Killed a guy while you were driving drunk?  See ya.  Knock your wife out and then dragged her out of an elevator?  Banned.  Threw your girlfriend onto a pile of assault weapons?  Outta here.  Beat the shit out of your kid?  Get out.

Playing football is a privilege.  In exchange for your considerable talents you are paid a ridiculous sum of money and expected to not be a total garbage human being.  If you fail to do so, that privilege is taken away.  And for anyone who says we’re taking away his right to earn a living, save it.  We’re not doing that.  He can go work as a janitor, or a clerk at a 7-11, or, perhaps, he could use his college education, say he made a mistake in job interviews and it’s cost him dearly, and hope he can make something of his life.

But if you’re guilty of committing a violent crime, you’re done.

And just so we don’t let the teams off the hook, they’ll be required to pay the remaining guaranteed amount of his contract to a charity of the victim’s choosing.  We won’t be total dicks though…we won’t make them take a salary cap hit.

“Fix” the Playoffs

Let’s face it, the NFL playoffs are about as good as it gets, second only to the NCAA tournament in terms of excitement and watchability.  But it can get moderately better with a few tweaks.

First, add a wild card team.  The NFL ditched one of their wild card teams when they expanded to four divisions in 2002; this corrects that issue.  It also makes securing the top seed a more important endeavor as it gives that team the only first-round bye.  And perhaps most importantly for the League, it gives them two additional playoff games, which means additional revenue.  An opening-weekend tripleheader on both Saturday and Sunday would be to everyone’s liking, I’m certain.

Second, seed the teams by record.  I’m fine with division champions being guaranteed a playoff berth (for the most part…I’ll get to that in a second), but that’s it.  In the 2015 playoffs, all four home teams lost in the Wild Card round.  If we seeded based on record, two of those teams would’ve played on the road.  The NBA is going this route, and while I hate to tell anyone to follow the NBA’s lead, in this case they’ve got it right.

Third, and definitely more controversially, a division title doesn’t guarantee you a playoff berth.  If you’re under .500 and there’s a team that has a better record than you and would otherwise be left out of the playoffs, you’re out and they’re in.  If you’re at or above .500 and a team has 2 more wins than you and would otherwise be left out, they’re in and you’re out.  Don’t like it?  Tough.  I hate rewarding teams for geography.

(If you read my first “Fix the NFL” post, you’ll notice I proposed a massive overhaul of the playoffs and the divisions.  I like that better, but this is more realistic.)

Kill the Coin Toss

There’s no such thing as home field advantage in football (same thing in basketball, but again, not my concern here).  In baseball you get the last at-bat at home, in hockey you get the second line change.  So the home team gets to determine whether to kick off or receive.  Same thing for overtime.  This eliminates any potential embarrassments such as the one we saw in the Green Bay-Arizona playoff game this year.

(And for you degenerate gamblers out there, because the Super Bowl is a neutral site, we can keep the coin toss for that game and that game only.)

Fix Overtime

I don’t have a simple fix for this one.  All I know is that the NFL’s overtime is stupid.  They changed it a few years back because the ball was taken out of Brett Favre’s hands after the Vikings lost the coin toss in the NFC Championship game (never mind the fact that Favre threw an asininely stupid interception that prevented the Vikings from kicking the game-winning field goal in regulation).  So now both teams are guaranteed a possession in overtime unless the team who wins the coin toss scores a touchdown on the first possession.  That’s just needlessly complicated.

The simplest answer is to just eliminate the sudden death nature of football’s overtime and play the full 15 minutes.  And because I’m lazy, let’s just do that.

Fix Replay

We’re instituting a couple of simple changes.  First, you have as many challenges as you have timeouts.  If that means you get 14 challenges and because the refs keep screwing up and you keep correctly pointing out that the refs keep screwing up, so be it.  Get the call right.

Second, everything is reviewable.  Some penalties are just obvious and aren’t really the judgment call that the referee’s union would like you to believe.  Illegally batting a ball out of bounds?  Reviewable.  Picking up the flag on an obvious pass interference?  Reviewable.  Thumb barely grazed the quarterback’s helmet, leading to a nonsensical facemask call?  Reviewable.

(Is it obvious I’m a Lions fan?)

Are you going to review a missed hold on 2nd-and-8 in the 2nd quarter?  No.  But you are going to review a play that would’ve given you the ball back late in the game or ended the game on the final play.

Third, institute a “Common Sense Committee”, or CSC.  The NFL refuses to fix the catch rule, which makes sense because it’s not like whether a catch is a catch should be the simplest question to answer in the NFL.  So because we’re not going to fix the rule, we’re going to institute a committee that asks for a common sense ruling when such a ruling is required.  So who’s on the CSC?  Simple.  Four drunk fans from every team (and yes, it’s football, they must be drunk).  When there’s a call that goes to replay (whether that’s by a coach’s challenge or on a turnover or touchdown), the CSC – excluding the representatives of the two teams involved – is called to review the play.  If the CSC disagrees with the outcome of the replay, the CSC’s decision wins out.  Utilizing the CSC, there’d be no such thing as the “Calvin Johnson Rule”.

Fix Officiating

The League will tell you that officiating is fine, that the percentage of incorrect calls was no different this year than it was in previous years.  This may be correct, but this year the mistakes were in particularly high-profile situations.  The NFL is a $12 billion enterprise that uses part-time officials.  I’m not the only one who finds this ridiculous.  The officials are crucial, and one needs only look back to the Fail Mary – a call so bad that it quite literally ended a strike by the officials’ union – to see how important they are.  So make them full-time paid employees and I guarantee it gets better.

(Although we may lose the greatness that is Ed Hochuli, because he’s a well-paid attorney in his “spare” time.)

We’re also allowing the League to correct the outcomes of games.  In two circumstances this season – a missed false start that would’ve led to a 10-second runoff and the end of the game prior to a game-winning field goal; and an incorrect face mask on the final play of the game that led to an untimed completed Hail Mary – bad calls resulted in outcomes different than what should have actually happened.  In these cases, the NFL is to be allowed to step in and change the outcome of the game.  It’s an extreme example and would not happen often, but it is a possibility.

Draft Pick Compensation for Incorrect Calls

This idea is so absurd that I’m completely separating it from the notion of fixing the officiating.  Will it ever happen?  No.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to talk about it.

Take the Week 4 game between the Seahawks and Lions.  With 1:45 left in the game, Calvin Johnson caught a pass, gained the first down at the Seattle 1, then fumbled the ball into the end zone, where Kam Chancellor illegally batted it out of bounds.  The referees incorrectly ruled it a touchback – the illegal bat should’ve given the ball back to the Lions at the spot of the fumble – and the Seahawks were able to run out the clock and win the game.  Because we don’t KNOW that this game would’ve turned out differently – and thus the NFL wouldn’t change the outcome of the game retroactively – we send the game to a committee for draft pick compensation.  After the season, teams would send egregious calls such as this to the committee for review to determine how much the bad call impacted the outcome of the game and how much that game impacted the remainder of the season.  If the committee determines that the game would have ended differently, they determine the round of draft pick compensation.  The actual winning team loses their draft pick in exchange for the next “natural” (i.e., not impacted by trades) draft pick of the actual losing team.

(In this situation, the Lions would’ve had the Packers Hail Mary game overturned on account of the incorrect face mask call, making the Lions 8-8 and the Packers 9-7.  The draft pick compensation committee would’ve then determined that with the ball on the Seahawks 1 with first down and under 2 minutes to play, the Lions likely would’ve won that game, which would’ve made them 9-7 and in a tie with – and more importantly holding the tiebreakers over – the Seahawks and Packers, which would’ve given them a playoff berth.  Loss of a playoff berth or a playoff game is an automatic first round draft pick, with the Seahawks receiving the Lions’ next draft pick, in this case their second rounder.)

(On a completely unrelated note, I’m now horribly depressed.)

Give the Lions and Browns 2 Additional Wins to Start the Season

Look, they need it.  Either they’ll screw it up themselves or the refs will do it for them.

These 2 wins will not be used for playoff seeding.

Depressing stat: Since the Browns returned to the NFL in the 1999 seasons, the Browns and Lions have made the playoffs a combined total of 4 times (out of 34 total team seasons).  If you spotted them each 2 wins to start the season, that number goes up to a total of 7 trips to the playoffs.

But seriously, fire Roger Goodell.

The Perfect Ending

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Sunday was the first without football since early September, and in an effort to be somewhat timely, I feel it’s important to discuss this past season before I wait 3 months to write something else in a timely fashion.

As seasons go, 2014 will go down in history as one of the worst in the history of the NFL, if not all of American professional sports.  Sure, in the League’s history, they’d probably say the strike years of 1982 and 1987 were worse.  And it’s hard to argue that this year ranks with the 1994 MLB season, which saw the cancellation of the World Series, and only Gary Bettman and the NHL would cancel an entire season.  But eliminate work stoppages, and this year’s football season was about as bad as it gets.

And the Super Bowl provided the perfect capper.

Let’s offer a quick recap.  The season really got off to its start in February, when Ray Rice knocked out his fiancee (now wife) and was caught on camera dragging her out of an Atlantic City elevator.  In July, Dictator…sorry, Commissioner Roger Goodell decided that seeing a guy dragging his unconscious fiancee out of an elevator after he’d knocked her out was only worth a 2-game suspension.  In September, TMZ released the video of Rice actually hitting his fiancee.  Shortly thereafter (as in, later that same day), the Ravens released Rice and the NFL suspended him indefinitely.  If you think it’s problematic that the NFL suspended a guy for an offense that they’d already suspended him for, congratulations, you’ve got more common sense than the NFL commissioner and really any of his advisors in the League office.

Four days after the Rice video surfaced, Adrian Peterson was arrested for beating the shit out of his 4-year-old son.  I won’t get into the ugly details of the case, but it’s safe to say that you’d think a guy who’s 6’2″, 217 pounds and is built to handle a football in the NFL 300-400 times a year probably could’ve found a way to discipline a 4-year-old kid without ordering the kid to bring Peterson a switch.  The Vikings “deactivated” him for a game, then ownership decided they wanted him reinstated, so they sent the GM out to make that announcement (despite the fact that the GM disagreed with that decision).  Of course, the GM did it in front of a backdrop that was covered in Radisson advertisements, so Radisson decided they were going to pull their sponsorship of the team.  Ownership then stepped up and decided to “deactivate” Peterson indefinitely (never question the power of the almighty dollar) and Peterson was put on the Commissioner’s exempt list, with pay.  After he pleaded his case out, a representative of the NFL told Peterson he would get a 2-game suspension, with time on the exempt list being credited against that suspension, only to have Goodell suspend him for the remainder of the season, with no consideration for time served.

Rice and Peterson aren’t what you would consider sympathetic figures, and Peterson’s behavior after he was deactivated probably had a lot to do with his punishment.  But look at the way the NFL treated the punishment process – to say they made it up as they went along insults the people who truly are making stuff up as they go along – and left the players union out of that decision-making process paints the League in a truly unflattering light.

So as these two cases hung over the League for quite literally the entire season, the playoffs went exactly how you would expect: with no one speaking about what happened on the field and instead talking about incompetent officiating, deflated footballs and the dumbest play call perhaps in the history of the League.

In the Wild Card round of the playoffs, the Lions led by 3 at Dallas with just over 8 minutes to go in the game.  On 3rd and 1, Matthew Stafford dropped back for a pass to Brandon Pettigrew, who was both held and interfered with on the play.  The refs threw a flag, Dez Bryant ran on the field to complain, and then the refs picked up the flag without calling a penalty.  Not for the hold, not for the pass interference, not for the hothead running onto the field to complain to the refs.  It’s not quite fair to say that this one play cost the Lions the game – they scored 3 points in the second half, Jim Caldwell decided to kick the ball away on 4th and 1 instead of trusting his defense, and Sam Martin unleashed a 10-yard punt at the worst possible moment – but being in field goal range with a fresh set of downs would’ve made the Cowboys’ job a lot harder.

cowboyspi-copy

The following week, as if to prove that karma exists, the Cowboys got screwed by a bad rule (although not a bad call).  Dez Bryant made what should’ve been regarded as one of the best and most clutch catches in NFL postseason history to give the Cowboys 1st and goal inside the 2-yard line.  Instead, an idiotic rule that burned the Lions in 2010 was called – correctly – the Cowboys gave up the ball on downs, and the Cowboys lost a game that they might otherwise have won.

In the conference title game, the Packers collapsed, blowing a 12-point lead with just over 2 minutes left in the game to send Seattle to the Super Bowl.  Meanwhile, the Patriots destroyed the Colts, winning 45-7, but the big news became the fact that the Patriots were using footballs that were deflated to less than the NFL’s minimum requirements.  The fact that the NFL used properly inflated balls for the second half of the game, a half in which the Patriots outscored the Colts 28-0, seems to be irrelevant.

(I saw an interesting theory prior to the Super Bowl that the Lions’ curse contributed to the Seahawks making the Super Bowl.  The theory went that the curse transferred from the Lions to the Cowboys on the pass interference that wasn’t, then from the Cowboys to the Packers on the Dez Bryant catch that wasn’t, then from the Packers to the Seahawks on their last-minute collapse.  Considering how the Super Bowl ended, it’s somewhat difficult to disagree with this theory.)

After the Wild Card round we talked about officiating.  After the Divisional round we talked about stupid rules.  After the Conference title games we talked about deflated balls.  So it’s fitting that the Super Bowl ended with a terrible play call and a brawl.

The general discussion surrounding the NFL for the past few years has related to things happening off the field.  Concussions, domestic violence, the general incompetence of the Commissioner.  Very few discussions have included the play of the players.  The only real discussion related to the play on the field this season became whether or not Tom Brady has cemented his place as the greatest quarterback of all time.  It’s not a ridiculous discussion, but it’s interesting that we probably don’t have that discussion if Pete Carroll calls for a handoff to Marshawn Lynch instead of having his QB throw it over the middle.

It hasn’t changed since the Super Bowl.  On top of the Pete Carroll play call, we’ve heard about a texting scandal that could bring about fines and suspensions to the Cleveland Browns, not to mention the year-long suspension of their star wide receiver and the story that their supposed QB of the future is in rehab.  Oh, and four more players have been arrested this week, on charges ranging from drug and gun possession to assault to animal cruelty.  The NFL is nothing if not consistent.

There’s nothing to suggest the NFL is going anywhere.  The viewership hasn’t changed, attendance isn’t down, and no advertisers have walked away.  So as bad as this season has been, not much will change.  But if we see many seasons where the discussion isn’t about what the players did on the field but rather what they did off the field, the number of kids playing the game might continue to drop.  There was a time when boxing and horse racing were on par with baseball; now they’re niche sports.  Is it realistic to think that the NFL is headed that way?  Probably not.  But stranger things have happened.

Let’s just hope that there aren’t many more seasons like this to help advance the NFL’s demise.

Why Sports?

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As a lot of you (translation: my dad) have noticed, I haven’t written in a while.  There are a lot of reasons for this.  Work doesn’t like it when I spend time writing for my personal blog, I like to drink, TV has some really cool stuff going on, I like to drink and I’m also pretty damn lazy.  Also, I like to drink.  But in reality, it might come down to one damning thing.

Sports just aren’t as fun anymore.

Let’s do a little history lesson.  First off, I didn’t get “big” into sports until my dad had moved away to Illinois.  This isn’t any criticism, but there really wasn’t any history of me sitting on the couch watching my dad get pumped up about the Bears, so a lot of my loyalties have varied and the start of my histories with certain sports tie in to when local teams were good.

Now that you know that…

I got off to a good start.  My first sports memory was the 1984 Tigers winning the World Series.  I didn’t have much of a memory of that team, but I do remember the end of that final game.  From there it was on to the ’85 Bears, whom I picked up with my dad and will still argue are the best team of all time.  In ’87 Michigan State’s football team went to the Rose Bowl for the first time in over 20 years.  In ’88 the Pistons should’ve beaten the Lakers in the NBA Finals, and in ’89 they did.  That same year Michigan fired their basketball coach then won the NCAA basketball title (at that age you could switch collegiate loyalties as often as you changed underwear, so at least once a week).  In 1989 the Lions drafted the greatest running back not named Jim Brown; in 1991 they were a win away from the Super Bowl.

And those were just the local teams.  For some reason I liked Jose Canseco, so I watched the A’s win the Earthquake World Series in ’89.  That same year – as with all summers from the time I was 10 until I was 16 – I spent the summer at my dad’s place in Illinois and watched the Cubs on WGN every afternoon.  They went to the playoffs that year and I’ve been a fair weather Cubs fan ever since.  I loved Joe Montana, and I watched the 49ers win Super Bowls 23 and 24 as Montana cemented his legacy as one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time.  My brother picked up hockey and the New York Rangers in 1994, so I learned the sport along with him (while wondering why Chris Osgood left the net).  And perhaps the biggest “betrayal” for any Michigan sports fan: in 1993 I discovered my dad was a Bulls fan and picked them up when the Pistons were down.  I stuck with them through the 72-win season in ’96, although the Dennis Rodman pickup helped me justify that one.

By 1997, the Red Wings had gotten off the schneid, beaten the shit out of the Colorado Avalanche, and would win 4 Cups in just over a decade.  The Pistons got over the teal era, and won one of the more unexpected titles in NBA history while going to 6 Eastern Conference Finals in a row.  The Tigers got over 13 consecutive losing seasons – including the worst year in American League history – by going to the World Series on a walkoff home run by Magglio Ordonez.  Michigan State’s basketball team capitalized on sanctions at Michigan and went to 4 straight Final Fours and won the national title in 2000 (my collegiate loyalties were locked in when I decided to go to East Lansing to study journalism for 6 weeks before I found out what journalists make).  The Spartan football team became a power and we’ve won 10+ games 4 times in 5 years, won a Rose Bowl, don’t measure our success on whether or not we beat Michigan, and talk about national titles without being called delusional.

I even gave up on the 49ers and shed my fair weather reputation when they fired Steve Mariucci and became a full-time Lions fan.  Then the Lions hired him and I completely understood what the 49ers were doing.  But while the Lions went through a stretch that would rival or even exceed the stretch the Tigers put us through, they weren’t contracted or moved, they didn’t have the Thanksgiving game taken away from them and they’ve even made the playoffs.

Things were good.

But dig deeper and it’s not hard to poke holes in the facade.  For a sporting society that lives on the idea of “Second place is the first loser”, a 4-team city (not counting the 2 Big 10 schools in the area) that hasn’t won a title since 2008 – with no teams that scream out that they’re favorites to win anytime soon – doesn’t leave a fan happy.  The average title drought for the teams in this city is over 26 years (the Lions surely don’t help that average), and within those droughts are some painful sporting legacies:

  • Tigers: David Ortiz’s grand slam in the 2013 ALCS, six total runs scored in 2012 World Series, pitchers forget how to field in 2006 World Series
  • Lions: only team to go 0-16
  • Pistons: team wide mutiny after starting 37-5 in 2006 Eastern Conference finals, destroyed by LeBron games in 2007 ECF, utter disaster of Charlie Villanueva and Ben Gordon deals
  • Red Wings: blew 3-2 lead to lose 2009 Stanley Cup Final

But that’s not it.

Should the Tigers have won a World Series by now?  Probably.  Should the Wings have repeated in ’09?  Possibly.  Could the Pistons have won more than 1 title in their 6-year run?  Definitely.  Should the Lions…hmm…um…

Every city’s got one of those teams.

And yes, these things start to wear on fans.  This isn’t the World Cup where a tiny country can be thrilled that not only did they qualify, but they also played a powerhouse to a scoreless draw.  Or the Olympics, where we watch a guy almost drown while simultaneously celebrate his ability to complete.  This is America.  We don’t just go to enjoy the games, we pull for our teams to win championships and we know exactly when the last time it happened for all of our states (1957, 1984, 2004, 2009).

But no, it’s not the woulda-coulda-shoulda that takes the fun sports.  In fact, to a large extent that’s exactly what makes it fun.

But it’s not that either.

Everyone in America watched the Great Home Run Chase of 1998.  We watched as this man who seemed destined for years to break the most hallowed record in American sports fought off a personable upstart, and then hit the magical mark of 70, a mark that seemed almost as unbreakable as the 60 that Babe Ruth hit in 1927.

Then 3 years later someone else hit 73.

I, like everyone else, was blinded to the fact that Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds were chemically enhanced when they broke the record.  And as the years went on I didn’t much care, because it turned out that everyone in the game was juiced.  I care that it was clear that those chemical enhancements cheapened that magical summer, that 73 isn’t anywhere near as romantic as 60 or 61*, that there are many who still believe that 755 is the home run record.

But no, that’s not quite it either.

It’s who I’m giving my money to.

As I’ve said before, I believe sports owners to be among the most despicable people on earth.  The history of professional sports is littered with stories of owners doing whatever they could to pay the players – the people the fans are coming to see – as little as possible, to treat them as chattel, to restrict their rights, to control what they wear.  It continues to this day, with the NFL fining players $10,000 for wearing Beats headphones to mandatory post-game press conferences.  “Guys, we know Beats is the big thing now, but we’ve got a contract with Motorola which, believe it or not, is still in business.”  And yet somehow the fans paint the players as greedy whenever there’s a work stoppage.

But no, we’re still not quite there.

No, it’s the fact that these people I give so much money to – and I’ve given a ridiculous sum of money to professional sports owners over the years – not only don’t give a fuck about anyone to whom they’re responsible (fans, players, employers, families, etc.), but they think we’re stupid enough to buy their shit.

That’s it.

I started thinking about this post as I boatgated before the first game of the Lions’ season.  It was that day that the infamous video of Ray Rice knocking out his now wife went public.  The Ravens acted quickly, cutting Rice.  The NFL was in a bit of spot, because they’d already determined that watching a guy dragging his unconscious fiance out of an Atlantic City elevator was only worth a 2-game suspension.  Nevertheless, the League suspended him again, a suspension that has been reversed because it turns out that you can’t suspend a guy for the same action when the only thing that changed was that the whole world saw what you’ve already clearly known.

Over the next few weeks I watched intently as Roger Goodell insisted they hadn’t seen the tape when they clearly had.  As Vikings ownership suspended Adrian Peterson for beating the shit out of his 4-year-old son, then activated him, then suspended him again when advertisers yanked their support.  As the NFL somehow made people who had beaten their wives and children into sympathetic figures.

Sports just didn’t really feel great anymore.

That was over 3 months ago.  I sat there watching that video thinking to myself, “Do I really want to support this company anymore?”  When does the NFL become Wal-Mart, or Apple, or GM?

Including that Monday Night game, I’ve been to 4 NFL games since then.  I am the problem.

The NFL handed out painkillers and steroids like they were tic-tacs until Lyle Alzado died of a brain tumor and went public believing that the two were related.  They fought the disability claims of players who were living in their cars with dementia caused by constant helmet-to-helmet collisions.  They ignored the somewhat obvious fact that concussions could have long lasting impact (you know, beyond the 3 plays that the NFL thought they had), despite the fact that concussion issues were a plot point in Varsity Blues, which came out in 19-freaking-99 (thanks Bill Simmons…asshole).  And now they’re trying to convince us they’re concerned about domestic violence while giving a 2-game suspension to a guy who knocked out his wife and then dragged her out of an elevator.

Hell, we can’t even escape politics on the field.  When players throughout the country have expressed their Constitutionally-protected right to express their opinions (whether the venue for those opinions were appropriate is for everyone to decide on their own) about high-profile police killings they’ve gotten shot down by fans and police spokespeople.  Never mind that it was members of those police departments that led to the demonstrations in the first place.  No, it’s the young black man – and it’s always a black man – expressing his opinion who’s the problem.

And yet through this entire mess, the NFL has lost not one single viewer.  Not even me.  The only Lions games I’ve missed this year were because there were more important Tigers games taking place at the same time.  And until they start losing viewers (and, more importantly, money), what the NFL does about these public relations disasters won’t matter.

Sports have just gotten less enjoyable.  I’ll get enraged by people at the bar who have differing opinions about trades the Tigers have made.  I’ve had the text message equation of a knock-down, drag-out brawl with a friend of mine who suggested I had gone off the deep end because of how I felt about Brad Ausmus’s bullpen usage.  I was genuinely afraid he was going to have a stroke, which leads me to believe he’s got a mindset about sports not far off from mine.

Which brings me back to the whole point of this post.  Why sports?

And then I think of this picture.

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That’s what sports is.  That’s a picture taken after the Lions had beaten the Falcons in London on a last-second field goal in October.  My friend and I hadn’t been getting along all that great, mostly because I’ve got thin skin and take things personally.  But after that game, we just celebrated and chatted with foreign (wait, I guess we were the foreigners) football fans in a magnificent stadium.

It’s an excuse to travel to see  faraway friends, like the friend who moved to Germany for business.  That’s why we were in London in the first place.  Without the Lions, I don’t know if we’d make that trip.  You’d like to think that friendships survive thousands of miles, but you don’t know.  Having your teams to talk about makes it easier.

It’s complaining with your dad over text about our football teams.  It’s a bit hard to be sympathetic to his plight.  As bad as the Bears have been, they still have 1985.  While I haven’t been a full-time Lions fan since birth, geography has required me to follow them since I’ve been watching football.  We don’t talk on the phone much anymore – why bother when texting and email is so much easier – but every Sunday we text about our teams.

Talking to strangers has always been an issue for me.  I can’t talk to women.  It’s a crippling issue that has kept me single far longer than I’d like.  But I can inject myself into a random conversation about the 2002 Fiesta Bowl or whether Roger Clemens belongs in the Hall of Fame like it’s nobody’s business.  I spent a long chunk of my life feeling weird about myself, and being involved in a sports conversation makes me feel normal.

So I guess that’s why sports.

Fixing the NFL

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It’s Thanksgiving weekend and that means food, family and football (and perhaps shopping for the truly psychotic). Of course, I didn’t start this blog to discuss food or family, and I damn sure didn’t start it to talk about shopping. So today we’re going to look the disaster that is the NFL and figure out how we can improve it.

(You will notice I’m posting this the weekend between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl.  I’d like to pretend that’s because I’m timing this perfectly when we need some football in our lives, but really I’m just that lazy.)

Now, before we begin, let’s discuss the 2 elephants in the room: the concussion disaster and the relatively recent hazing mess in Miami that’s become all the rage. Now, almost anyone who knows me I fall somewhere close to the bleeding heart point on the political spectrum, so they’d probably expect me to say the NFL should start playing flag football and anyone found to haze a player should be banned permanently. Not so.

See, I understand that the NFL is an entirely different beast from pretty much any other profession on earth. If these things were happening at a Wall Street brokerage…ok, bad example. If this were happening at a public accounting firm or a newspaper, the employees would be fired on site. But the NFL thrives on violence and manliness, and to pretend that you can just turn that off once you hit the locker room is lunacy. At the risk of sounding like a, “Durrr…foobaw” cretin jackass, football comes with a certain amount of collateral damage. Countless dead players, Michael Vick’s dogs, Jovan Belcher’s girlfriend, Aaron Hernandez’s victim(s)…sadly, this is the price we pay for being entertained on Sunday afternoons.

And sure, when a game starts to rack up a body count, people in today’s world tend to think that the game won’t be the same in 20 years. Here’s the problem: no one has stopped watching. Super Bowl ratings break records every year. Every week the NFL’s games are the highest rated in the country by millions. A Monday Night Football game between two of the worst teams in the league barely lost the ratings battle to a World Series game. And the first blackout of the year didn’t take place until Week 13.

So we have to accept the premise that until someone dies on the field – and I’m not talking about Junior Seau killing himself because of repeated head trauma but rather something along the lines of Ray Chapman – the game isn’t going anywhere. With that in mind, here are my thoughts on how to make the game more enjoyable/less stupid.

The Kicking Game

Field goals are boring. Punts are boring. That said, to some extent they’re necessary at certain points. But we’re going to de-emphasize them.

–Field Goals: There’s nothing that drives me crazier than a team getting first and goal on the 5 only to see the drive stall and them taking the guaranteed 3 points. And they will take the points, because football coaches are pussies who won’t get fired because they kicked a field goal instead of going for it on fourth and 2. The problem is that field goal kickers (well, other than David Akers) have become ridiculously accurate with legs that can kick a ball 70 yards on the fly, so a field goal isn’t as much of a risk as it was in the ’70s and ’80s.

So we’re de-emphasizing the field goal at a certain point. Or rather changing their value. It doesn’t make sense that a field goal from 50 yards out is worth the same as a field goal from 20 yards out. Here’s how it works:

  • Any kick inside the 20 (basically, you’re giving up inside the 3-yard line): 1 point
  • Kicks between the 20-30: 2 points
  • Kicks from the 30-45: 3 points
  • Kicks from beyond the 45-yard-line: 4 points

Also, any missed field goals from beyond the 45-yard-line will see the ball spotted at the original line of scrimmage, not the spot of the missed kick.

Fun, huh?

–Extra Points: Since 2011, kickers have missed 18 extra points.  Out of 3,709.  That’s a 99.5% success rate.  That, my friends, is pointless to watch. So we’re getting rid of them. Touchdowns are worth 7 points. If you want to go for the 2-point conversion, you take the point off the board and you go for 2. It’s a little clumsy, but I’m tired of watching something so automatic. There’s no challenge in it.

(Note: I started writing this post over the Thanksgiving weekend in 2013.  In January 2014 Roger came out and suggested a plan practically identical to the one suggested above.  You’ll have to take my word for that one.  The lesson: if I wasn’t so damn lazy, I’d have grounds to sue the NFL.)

–Punting: No problems with punting, but it’s the easy play. Also, fans don’t pay to watch punters. One small alteration to be made: no punting if the offense has passed into the defense’s territory. If a coach wants to waste two downs to get behind the 50-yard-line so he can punt the ball away, that’s his right. But I’d rather see him try for one of those cool 4-point field goals.

–Goalposts: Raise them at least 10 feet. I’m tired of hearing Adam Carolla whine every time a kicker kicks the ball over the top of one of the goalposts. It happens several times a year.

By the way, it should come as no surprise that I hate defense.

Penalties

–Automatic First Down: Third down, 17 to go, cornerback holds the wide receiver 7 yards past the line of scrimmage, pass falls incomplete, ref calls the hold, 5 yard penalty, automatic first down. Stupid. Let the penalty yardage determine first down. The only exception is personal fouls, which are called because they could cause bodily harm, in which case you get the fifteen yards and the first down.

–Offsetting Penalties: Imagine a play where the defense gets called for a 5-yard defensive hold, but the left guard holds a guy 3 yards behind the line of scrimmage. By rule those are offsetting penalties and the down is replayed. This is asinine. Somehow the NFL has decided that a 5-yard penalty and a 10-yard penalty are worth the same if they happen on the same play. On the play in question, apply the 10-yard penalty (which is actually a 13-yard penalty because of where the hold took place) and then walk off the 5-yard defensive hold. One team doesn’t get bailed out because the other team committed a lesser penalty.

–Celebration/Taunting: I don’t watch football for sportsmanship, I watch it to watch outstanding physical specimens compete at the highest level.  I don’t give a damn if a guy gives a Riverdance performance after scoring a touchdown or gives a throat slash gesture after sealing the game winning interception.  It’s an amped up game played by physical monsters sweating adrenaline and testosterone.  Let them celebrate without repercussions.

Instant Replay

–Number of Challenges: Under current rules, every coach gets two challenges per game. If he gets them both right, he gets a third. If he gets only one of the two challenges correct, he loses his potential third challenge. This essentially penalizes the team for the referees’ mistake. Change the rules so that incorrect challenges are tied to timeouts. If you have 3 timeouts left, you get 3 incorrect challenges (since the penalty for an incorrect timeout is the team losing a timeout). If that means the officiating crew has 8 calls overturned during the game, so be it. I want the calls right, and I don’t care how long it takes. Challenges are not so time-consuming that they justify allowing the wrong call to stand. Plus we just shaved a bunch of time getting rid of extra points, so we’ve got time to make up.

–End Zone Challenges: All touchdown calls are automatically reviewed. You know what aren’t automatically reviewed? Questionable end zone calls that aren’t called touchdowns. This is not an insignificant distinction. A few years back, the Lions (after using their two challenges, one of which was a correct challenge, if my memory serves) had a touchdown ruled an incomplete pass. Had the call been ruled a touchdown, it would’ve been reviewed. It was ruled incomplete, the call was not reviewed, and since the Lions had no challenges remaining, the call stood. They settled for a field goal, lost by 4, and dropped from the 5th to the 6th seed in the playoffs.

(I’m not bitter.)

Anything questionable in the end zone should be automatically reviewed. Period. It should not matter if the play is called a touchdown or an incompletion.

–Plays Subject to Review: A pretty substantial amount of plays in the NFL are reviewable. That’s not enough. Everything should be subject to review. Penalties are relatively objective (although not always), and can turn the tide of a game. If a coach wants to spend a challenge because he thinks a pass interference call should be overturned, he should have that right.

Playoffs/Scheduling

–Divisions: This is perhaps my most controversial proposal.  We’re ditching conferences for reasons that will be explained shortly.  As such, we no longer need an AFC North and NFC North.  We’re renaming the divisions to celebrate the history of the NFL:

  • AFC East: Mara Division
  • AFC North: Halas Division
  • AFC South: Thorpe Division
  • AFC West: Rozelle Division
  • NFC East: Rooney Division
  • NFC North: Brown Division
  • NFC South: Davis Division
  • NFC West: Hunt Division

You’ll notice that these names have no correlation with any of the teams in that given division.  There’s a reason for that.  There are historical figures big enough to name a division after in every division except the NFC and AFC South.  As such, these 8 names were assigned to divisions they had no relationship with.  Owners of AFC teams were assigned to NFC divisions and vice versa, with as much effort being used to keep them in their geographical region as possible.

–Scheduling: Minimal and optional changes.  As it stands, teams play 2 games against their division rivals (6 games), a game against every team in another division in their conference (4) a game against every team in a division in the other conference (4) and 2 games against the teams in their conference that finished in the same position record-wise the previous year.  This can remain the same, either recalling the traditional conferences or with the other seven divisions rotating where applicable.

–Calendar: The final games of the regular season will always be played the last weekend of December, with the playoffs being played in January/February.  There will be no regular season games played in January.  This hasn’t been a major issue historically, but we’re putting it into the calendar permanently.

–Playoff Expansion: It’s already been suggested that the league expand the playoffs to 14 teams.  I’m adopting that, although for somewhat different reasons.  When the NFL restructured their  divisions to go from 6 5-team divisions to 8 4-team divisions, they eliminated 2 Wild Card teams.  Adding the seventh teams in each conference remedies that issue.

–Playoff Seeding: As I said earlier, we’re eliminating the Conferences and seeding the teams 1-14 based on record, and record alone.  Division winners get no preference because they played in a bad division.  If a the Packers win the Brown Division at 8-7-1 while the 49ers are a 12-4 Wild Card team, the 49ers get the higher seed and the potential home game.  The first tiebreaker will be head-to-head, the second tiebreaker will be division winners, and then the typical tiebreakers apply.  If 3 teams are 12-4, and 2 are division winners, the Wild Card gets the lowest seed.  Teams are reseeded after every round as they are now.  If this means we wind up with a Seahawks-49ers Super Bowl, so be it (and having seen their game last week, I think we’d all be better for it).

(Ideally here is the point where I’d list out the seedings as they would have been this season had these rules been in effect, but I’m too lazy to figure out the tiebreakers.)

There are other things in the NFL that can be fixed.  Their overtime rules are generally stupid.  There are ways to get the benefit of an 18-game season without actually going to an 18-game season (stretching it out to 19 weeks seems like the ideal fix, but I haven’t figured that out yet).  The players are screwed by not getting guaranteed money.  And the concussion situation needs to be fixed, but that’s beyond my comprehension.  But while some of my suggestions are ridiculous and will never be implemented, other things make a ton of sense and would make the game more fun.

My Confusion with the Steroid Era

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In 1998, after a game in which he hit one of his 70 home runs, a reporter noticed a bottle of androstenedione in Mark McGwire’s locker and naturally asked about it.  The reporter caught the 5th degree for asking about a substance that was banned by numerous sporting agencies, but not MLB.

Today, 12 players were suspended 50 games, and Alex Rodriguez for 211, for their links to the Biogenesis lab in Miami.

While it’s unlikely that there will ever be a beginning and end of the steroid era in baseball, to me there’s something about these two events that strike me as similar to the Nazis marching into Poland and the Battle of Berlin.

(I realize it’s a horrible analogy…work with me here.)

I’m torn on the PED issue in sports.  In the 1960’s, if you tore your ACL, your career was pretty much over.  Today it costs you a hear, but your career goes on.  When Tommy John blew out his elbow, his surgeon game him a 1 in 100 chance of pitching again.  Now the surgery’s named after John (I feel like Frank Jobe got gypped there and it’s forgotten that John won 288 games) and kids in high school and college have the surgery done as preventative measures.  Hell, you can get laser eye surgery and have 20/20 vision in a week now.

Can someone explain to me how these aren’t “performance enhancing”?

I get it…drugs are bad.  But are they?  What are the downsides to HGH?  Joint swelling…joint pain…carpal tunnel syndrome…an increased risk of diabetes.  It may also be a risk factor for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which sounds a little shitty, but your survival rate is over 80%.  My question is this: if those are your potential side effects, and using this drug is the difference between being a career minor leaguer and making the big leagues and pretty much set for life, wouldn’t you at least consider taking it?

I think if you say no you’re lying.

I get that steroids are the scourge of professional sports world, but I imagine that most people who get on their high horse about steroids would quickly take a drug that would put them into their next echelon of their given occupation.  If you wouldn’t, you’re a better man than me.

So maybe I’m not torn.

I have no morals when it comes to sports (well, aside from college sports, but that’s a whole other discussion).  I’ve long said that if it meant the Tigers would win the World Series I’d root for a team with Hitler as their ace and Stalin as their cleanup hitter.  So considering the fact that one of the players suspended today was Jhonny Peralta, the All-Star shortstop for my beloved Tigers, one might take this post as excusing Peralta’s behavior.  I’m not.  Whether testing has been in place or not, steroids have been illegal in baseball since at least 1991, and Peralta was selfish and unfair to his teammates and fans.

But I find myself thinking back to 1998.  Baseball was still recovering from a strike that had wiped out the World Series for the first time since 1903.  Cal Ripken chased down Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak in 1995, but it was the home run chase of 1998 that saw the country cheering for Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to break Roger Maris’s single season home run record.  When they both did so, and both soared past Maris’s 61 home runs (with 70 by McGwire and 66 by Sosa), it was chalked up to unqualified pitchers resulting from expansion (not unlike Maris’s own record chase in 1961).  McGwire hit 65 in 1999.  Sosa averaged 61 from 1998-2001.  Even after that breakout, after seeing McGwire’s physique explode and the banned substance in his locker, people were inclined to think the ball was juiced.  After all, home runs across the game were up.

It wasn’t until an angry, jealous black man broke McGwire’s record a scant 3 years later that the steroid talk really exploded.  Sure, McGwire looks like he’s twice the size of his rookie card, but look at the size of Barry Bonds’s head!  He must be juicing!  (He was, but so was pretty much everyone else.)  It brought us farcical Congressional hearings where Jose Canseco provided the most trustworthy testimony.  It brought us the Chicago White Sox (aka Frank Thomas) threatening to boycott investigative testing to trigger actual testing with (toothless) punishment.  It brought us the Mitchell Report, which found an employee of the Red Sox performing an investigation into steroids in baseball while – shockingly – going light on the Red Sox.  It brought us ridiculously expensive prosecutions of Barry Bonds and Rogers Clemens, neither of whom ever did a day in prison (nor should they have).  And it gave us the absurdity of the Yankees clearly orchestrating an extended suspension of Alex Rodriguez because they signed him  to an equally absurd contract.

It’s all been quite ridiculous.

Does that make it wrong?  Congress called for hearings under the guise of it being a public health crisis.  Apparently teens were watching their heroes take steroids, taking them themselves, and the side effects were causing suicides (never mind the fact that these kids were probably troubled in the first place.  Don’t get them help, blame the baseball players!).  Barry Bonds was convicted of perjury (you can debate the legitimacy of the prosecution all you want, but he was convicted).  There was a witch hunt against A-Rod because, well, A-Rod is a massive douchebag.  And let’s not kid ourselves.  Baseball is cleaner now than it’s ever been.

And to go further, it’s cleaner than every other sport?  The NFL voted in HGH testing during the last collective bargaining agreement in 2011.  The only problem is that they can’t agree on testing, which pretty much means that the entire league is on HGH.  And you’re not going to convince me that hockey and basketball, both significantly more physical games than baseball, have no issues with performance enhancing drugs.  Just because we haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean there’s not an issue.

The dirty little secret about performance enhancing drugs is that they work.  So does Tommy John surgery and knee reconstruction.  Only PED’s aren’t allowed.

And I find that very confusing.

Fixing Team Names

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The NBA regular season is over, and since I’m somewhat (completely) fair weathered when it comes to pro hoops and the Pistons don’t just suck but are a complete and total embarrassment to the city, there’s only one thing I care about…and it ain’t LeBron or the Lakers.

The New Orleans Hornets are no more!

It’s always bothered me when teams move to a new city – and have to rebrand anyway – and they don’t go through the trouble of changing the team name.  So we get ridiculous names like the Utah Jazz, Memphis Grizzlies and Oklahoma SuperSonics…oh, wait.  Theoretically team names are supposed to reflect the culture of the cities they play in, but the closest Grizzly Bear to Memphis is either in a zoo or 1300 miles away, and let’s not even talk about a style of music that is predominantly black providing the nickname for a team in the whitest state in the country.

So I’m fixing that.

Here’s the rules:

  • We’re only changing the nicknames of teams that have changed during the respective sport’s current “eras”.  For baseball, that’s the expansion era (1969-present).  For the NFL (1970), NBA (1976-77) and NHL (1979-80), this refers to the time since their mergers.  So teams like the Oakland A’s and Los Angeles Lakers lucked out, even if their names make no sense.
  • Team names stick with the city (a la Cleveland Browns, Seattle SuperSonics, etc.).  If a second team comes to that city, they are eligible to adopt that moniker.
  • They haven’t moved, but we’re going to address Native American names, which means that the Redskins will be getting dealt with.
  • I don’t have a problem using a nickname that is currently in use in another sport.

That’s it, it’s that simple.  It should be noted that while I tried to research some of the cities’ histories in their respective sports to come up with names, but in the end, I’m an accountant with no creativity, and my buddy Jeff came up with a bunch of these names.  I think you’ll like them.

MLB

There’s literally no corrections to be made.  Only three baseball teams have moved during the expansion era: the Seattle Pilots became the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970, the Washington Senators became the Texas Rangers in 1972, and the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals in 2005.

Good on you baseball!

NFL

Not a ton of movement, but enough that teams require some adjustment.  In fact, only one team that’s moved recently has done it right and rebranded themselves, and even that was after the Titans spent 2 years as the Tennessee Oilers (interesting fact: the Oilers nickname has since been retired by the NFL…I have no idea what that means, but I find it interesting).

Also, I’m not addressing the Raiders, since they were originally the Oakland Raiders.  And since the San Diego Chargers were originally the Los Angeles Chargers, they can keep their name when they move in 2 years.

  • Arizona: There are a lot of opportunities here.  Vipers, Cobras, Wolves, Rattlers and Pythons all work, but they’d seem to be redundant with the Coyotes and Diamondbacks.  The Roadrunners would be an utterly fantastic tie-in with the Coyotes, but I can’t imagine it would ever fly with the stodgy NFL.  To me, there are two options: Firebirds (it continues the bird theme from the Cardinals) and Apache/Apaches.  And since Arizona is the Apache State, we’re getting permission from the tribe and calling them the Arizona Apache.
  • Baltimore: Theoretically they’d get to revert back to the Baltimore Colts when they stole the Browns from Cleveland.  But in a way, that would be a reward for doing the exact same thing to Cleveland that they spent years bitching to Indianapolis about.  Plus, Ravens is a better name and tie in better with the city.  They’re staying the Baltimore Ravens and will be the only team in this exercise to keep their nickname.
  • Indianapolis: There are two options here.  One, stick with the horse theme (Mustangs, Stallions, Thoroughbreds, etc.).  Two, you go with the racing theme, which is really the only thing Indianapolis is known for (Racers, Fuel, Turbo, Wings, Spoilers, Aeros, etc.).  But again, the Pacers already cover that, and I don’t feel like those nicknames really fit with the boring standards of the NFL.  So we’re going with the Indianapolis Stallions.
  • St. Louis: this one’s simple.  The Los Angeles Rams are the second (third?) incarnation of the St. Louis Cardinals. ‘Nuff said.
  • Washington: They moved from Boston in 1936, but that’s not why we’re addressing the elephant in the room.  Let’s face it, you can’t do a post about changing sports team nicknames and leave the Redskins out.  If the Redskins’ history weren’t so sordid, maybe they’d get a pass on the most blatantly racist team name in sports.  But they had to be forced to integrate by the federal government, they proudly played as “the South’s team” for years (back when the South was opening fire hoses on blacks marching for civil rights), and they intentionally changed their team song to reference Dixie instead of D.C. (thank God that’s been changed back).  This team’s history sickens me.  Let’s just do this quick and easy, change the team name to the Washington Pigskins and be done with it.  Tradition is no excuse for bigotry.  I’m glad this team is run by an unlikeable prick like Dan Snyder.

NBA

The NBA is just a disaster.  The only reason Oklahoma City became the Thunder is because of the public relations disaster that happened in Seattle (again: Oklahoma City…Seattle…Sacramento…do unto others what has been done to you).  Let’s just start, because there, I think some pretty good ones.

  • Brooklyn: theoretically the Nets are just in keeping the nickname, because they were the New York Nets when they came over from the ABA.  But that’s no fun.  What sucks is that Brooklyn Kings would be a really cool nickname, especially because Brooklyn is in Kings County.  But the Kings nickname belongs to Kansas City where the current Kings played before they moved to Sacramento, and we’re not changing the rules.  Besides, with the “cool” factor that is Brooklyn and the fact that a rapper helped move them there from New Jersey, we’re calling them the Brooklyn Ballers.
  • Charlotte: Wait a second!  The Bobcats have broken none of the rules.  They entered the league as the Bobcats.  Why change the name?  First, because Bobcats is boring, and it’s rumored that the team was named after the original owner, Robert Johnson.  Plus, now that the Hornets nickname has been abandoned, and the Hornets name dates back to the Revolutionary War in Charlotte, we’re giving the name back.  We’ve got the second iteration of the Charlotte Hornets.
  • L.A. Clippers: There are tons of problems with the Clippers, starting with their racist owner who would never spend a penny to go through a massive rebranding effort.  But let’s ignore that for now.  The first problem with the Clippers nickname is that it’s a great nickname for when they were in San Diego, where there’s a massive sailing community.  In L.A. it makes no sense.  But the other problem is that by just changing the city name, they’re going up against the Lakers, and you’re never going to top the Lakers in L.A.  So we’re taking the Los Angeles out of the Clippers and coming up with a name so awesome that there’s no way I could’ve possibly come up with it myself (and I didn’t).  Can you imagine how many units a Blake Griffin Hollywood Stars jersey would move?
  • Memphis: Memphis Soul and Memphis Blues would be cool nicknames…way cooler than having a name that made more sense in Vancouver.  However, we’re sticking it to David Stern with this one.  Back when the Grizzlies were planning on moving, they explored the option of selling the naming rights to the team (not just the stadium, the entire team).  One of the options was for the team to move to Louisville and be called the Kentucky Colonels (sponsored by KFC).  The other would’ve had them moving to Memphis and being sponsored by FedEx.  Stern put the kibosh on that, to which I say fuck that.  The Memphis Express will be the first team to sell the naming rights to the team (most assuredly not the last).
  • Sacramento: Theoretically we should ignore the current Kings since they’re likely to move to Seattle next year and become the new Seattle SuperSonics.  But that’s no fun, is it?  Plus, I think Sacramento has one of the coolest names my buddy came up with.  Sacramento, much like San Francisco, was a boom town during the California Gold Rush, so we’re going to call them the Sacramento Prospectors.
  • Utah: Changing the team’s name is a no-brainer, because if you ask any sports fan in the country what team name needs to be changed the most, Utah Jazz is going to be second (see: Redskins).  The tricky part is figuring out what to go with.  Saints would be a good shout out to the importance of the Mormon faith in the state, while Miners would be a good marker of an important piece of the state’s economy.  I said we would use nicknames that were in use by other teams, but I didn’t say it was required.  And the fact that there’s already a Saints team out there means we’re calling them the Utah Miners.

NHL

The NHL generally does things right.  The Quebec Nordiques became the Colorado Avalanche, the Atlanta Thrashers became the Winnipeg Jets, etc.  There’s one small exception.

  • Calgary: The Calgary Flames started out as the Atlanta Flames and kept the nickname when they moved north.  I wonder why a team named after the city burning down didn’t work out in Atlanta. How well do you think a team named the Detroit Riots would do financially?  If Calgary hadn’t been relatively successful, I’d say the team name was cursed…then again, they did lose the Stanley Cup to the Tampa Bay Freaking Lightning and then the sport did shut down for a year.  So maybe.  Sorry…digression.  There’s only one thing of note in Calgary, and that’s the annual Stampede, which is one of the world’s biggest rodeos.  I know there’s already a CFL team named the Stampeders, but (a) that’s the CFL, and no one cares, and (b) the CFL once had teams named the Roughriders and the Rough Riders playing at the same time.  They can deal with having a hockey team called the Calgary Stampede.

Wasn’t that fun?  Tell me you wouldn’t prefer those names over at least some of the ones we’ve got now.