More Is Not Always Better

An article by WhoDey    2 Comments

More is not always better.  Repeat that with me.  More is Not Always Better.  There, I capitalized the words to make it easier for you.

Sometimes, we forget this in sports.  Or, more appropriately, the folks that run our favorite sports leagues forget this.  Where should I start?  How about college football bowls.  How many bowl games are there now?  Do we really need all of these?  Sure, we sometimes end up with interesting games that might not have ever happened otherwise.  But those types of games are few and far between in the PapaJohns.com bowl, or the Mobile, AL bowl.  What’s the point of those?

The NBA changed 1st-round playoff series from 5 games to 7 games several years ago.  More games.  Why?  Now the NBA playoffs stretch almost as long as the Stanley Cup playoffs.

A lot of the offseason talk in baseball is on adding a second wild card in each league.  Let me get this straight – Selig wants to take the pro league with the best playoff system and change it?  Where do you stop?  Do you end up like the NBA, where literally half the league makes the playoffs and you see some sub-.500 teams in?

And, of course, the big story is the NFL wanting to move to an 18 game schedule.  I’ve got enough (negative) opinions of Roger Goodell to fill another whole post.  Sticking with the length of season, I just have to say, why?  The NFL’s king right now – why mess with it?  Its TV ratings are tops among all sports, its attendance is tops, and fan interest is through the roof.  So, naturally, you’re going to stretch it out and possibly begin to cause viewer interest to wane in the later weeks.  You’re going to push the Super Bowl well into February.  And, of course, you’re going to possibly cause all sorts of injury problems amongst teams.

In the end, it all comes down to greed.  There are only really two things I’d like my sports leagues to care about – the fans number one, and the players number two.  In the case of college sports, the players (“student-athletes”) become even more important.  These expansions, however, are all about the money, which is really all about the owners and the front office.  College bowl games?  The schools love them because of the money they bring in.  An 18 game NFL schedule?  It’s all about increasing the value of the TV contract and putting more money in the owners’ pockets.

As a fan, the less these leagues care about my enjoyment of the sport, the less I begin to care about their sports.