The Year-Round Sports Cycle

Does anyone else think it's just a little strange to have hockey players reporting for camp on 16 September? The AP article points out just how short the off-season is for hockey players, and they are just one example of this trend all throughout the '90s and '00s towards longer seasons, more teams, more playoffs, and more games. Which, of course, means more ticket sales, more concession sales, more memorabilia sales, and more chances to win in the postseason.

We even have the current NFL Commish, Roger Goodell, pontificating on an expansion of the NFL schedule from the current 17 weeks (16 games plus a bye for every team) to something like 17 or 18 regular-season games for each team. Goodell, ostensibly, would shorten the pre-season games and replace those "meaningless" games with ones that count in the standings. The owners were already charging regular-season ticket prices for fans to watch backups and players with little hope of making the 54-man roster play their guts out, so I'm not entirely sure what the NFL would gain other than getting more TV revenues from the deal. Which is why the earliest they would make this change would be 2010, when they can renegotiate with the TV networks for the entire package of games.

On the one hand, I enjoy seeing the wildcard in both football and baseball, because more teams alive in pennant races in September means better quality of play on the field. In the NFL, having two teams per Conference able to win a wild card berth means that even week 17 games mean a lot to teams on the bubble. Just ask the Titans and Browns players last year. The Titans were fortunate to play against a Colts team that already locked up its best possible playoff situation, and so was resting key personnel like Peyton Manning, etc., but when the Titans won that game, it knocked Cleveland out of the wildcard.

However, more than just viewer fatigue (which is still pretty darn significant; how many people can say they are excited about watching NHL hockey right now?), there are real issues with how far the sports leagues are pushing their schedules. Players have higher likelihoods of getting hurt, the quality of talent has been diluted through expansion, and increased playoff eligibility makes regular-season games less meaningful. Let's be honest: after four weeks of pre-season NFL, the actual week 1 results were crazy for established players like Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, LaDainian Tomlinson, and a host of others.*

*Re-reading that line, it sounds like I would be in favor of Roger's plan to replace meaningless pre-season games with regular-season ones. I don't object to four pre-season games at all, although when they used to play five, that was too much. What I have a problem with is this current practice of not playing NFL stars in pre-season. Yes, the risk of injury is always out there. Yes, that risk actually tends to go up if guys aren't playing at full speed. There might not be a good solution to the problem of star players getting hurt, either in pre-season or regular-season games. It's a violent game, have you noticed?

Just the news cycle alone is almost too much to bear for an average fan. The NFL already operates pretty much around the calendar year, with the April draft, spring and summer minicamps, other training activities (the sometimes dreaded OTAs), and competition committee meetings all generating significant news in addition to the July-February training camp-Super Bowl schedule. Baseball has its Winter Meetings in addition to a spring training to World Series schedule that stretches from late February (pitchers and catchers report) to now potential game 7 finishes in November. I've always thought it was funny that winter sports like basketball and hockey were still having playoff games in June.

Enough is enough already!! Fatigue has set in. I already tune out most regular-season games, and especially in hockey and basketball. Even if you're a fan of a specific team, unless you have tickets to see that team in person, there's not much reason to watch baseball games in April-July. Many regular-season NFL games are snooze-fests, at least through the first half, until the defensive players get tired in the 3rd and 4th quarters. In golf, only the four majors are really all that interesting. I could care less about the FedEx Cup, but I will probably tune in to this weekend's Ryder Cup, if able.

I know we'll never go back to the old days where players couldn't afford to live for a year on what salary they made playing their games, and so they had off-season jobs selling insurance or real estate. There's too much money to be had by selling more tickets and putting more games on TV, even if dozens of new cable channels have to be created to display that content. I just exercise my right as an American to not watch regular-season games until the playoffs are looming and every game becomes more meaningful than the last.

I do worry about the dilution of records, however. More regular-season NFL games means more games that count in the record books, which means more chances to break the single season passing, rushing, receiving, etc. records. We all know what happened to Roger Maris when he passed Babe Ruth's seemingly unbreakable HR record on the last day of the season... after Maris was given 8 more games than it took Ruth to set the record. If the NFL extends the regular season, it will make it all that much more impossible for any future team to tie the 1972 Dolphins as the only team with a perfect record in the Super Bowl era. It sounds like Goodell is OK with that.