I Kid You Not: forget resolutions, what can sports do for us this year?

The beginning of a new year can serve as a reminder of the ever-changing nature of our world. The old is gone, the new has come.
And so many of us take this opportunity to take stock in our lives; to re-evaluate what’s important, to learn from the experiences of the past year, and, if possible, to make plans for improvement in the year to come.
This is not what I will be doing this year.
Operating under the assumption that I’m pretty great already, I’ve decided that the world should be making resolutions to make my life better.
Specifically, I’ve decided that the sports world should make a few changes.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a list of sports-related resolutions that I wanted to implement. I wanted to watch more games (which I’ve done), go to more games in person (also done),
...root for a team over an individual (sorry, Miami Dolphins players, but my fantasy football team did much better without any of you in my starting lineup), wear real eye black (which was confused for mascara by a scorekeeper in my coed softball league last year)
...and in general, have more fun with sports.
After months of introspection (or five minutes watching Sportscenter), it became clear that A) I’m pulling my weight around here, and B) the sports world is not.
So what should the world of sports do to better appease me?
I’m glad you asked.

1. Quality Over Quantity

512. 4,860. 2,460. Another 2,460. 36. Add those all together and you get 10,328.
That’s how many major sports competitions are held every year, just in the regular season. 512 NFL games, 4,860 MLB games, 2,460 games in both the NBA and NHL, and 36 NASCAR races. If we say that the average length of each of these contests is around three hours, that’s 30,984 hours of major sports action every single year.
There are only 8,766 hours in a year, so since many of these games are going on simultaneously, the number will be higher.
But my goodness, 30,984 hours of sports? I’m a big sports fan, but even that seems like a little bit too much time. Some games are fantastic, and more than worth the three-ish hours we put in. Others involve the Milwaukee Brewers, and shouldn’t be shown to small children.
I’ve written before about how the NFL has it right—one game per team per week, 16 games in the regular season, three weeks of playoffs, then the Super Bowl. Just enough to keep us interested, but not too much that we get bored. Because let’s face it, Americans get bored really easily. What used to be called multitasking a few years ago is now just called “tasking.” We watch TV while we eat. We talk on the phone while we drive (um… with a hands-free device, of course). We watch more TV while we… um… sleep.
I’m just as guilty as the next person. In our home, my wife and I have three TVs (one of which looks like this),
...four video game systems, two computers and three cell phones, two of which are “smart” phones. Not counting my collection of old Hardy Boys books (I’m a sucker for kitsch), our DVD collection outnumbers our book collection (not as much as it used to before I got married, at least). I recently chuckled to myself as I noticed another person watching TV, listening to an MP3 player and playing Mario Kart on the computer, all at the same time. Needless to say, we live in a country that takes sensory input to levels never before imagined.
But as we discussed in the NFL-has-it-right column, more is definitely not always better. Baseball is fun to watch, but it’s easy to lose interest in a team when you can’t watch 162 games. Same with the NBA, NHL and NASCAR (as much as I love NASCAR, it’s just too long of a season). And now the NFL is talking about an 18-game schedule for next year. Really? I mean, I know football is America’s current pastime, but as ESPN.com writer Gregg Easterbrook consistently reminds us, there is no law that says football has to remain popular.
I know it’s a lot to ask, but I think the sports world owes us less quantity and more quality. If it means contracting a few teams in the NBA and NHL and scaling back to 40 games or so (from December through March or something like that), then let’s do it. If it means only playing baseball in the summer (the horror!) instead of spring-to-winter, then let’s whittle the schedule down to June, July and August, with the playoffs in September. If it means only running NASCAR races from February through August, so as not to overlap the NFL, I’m all for it.
Basically, I want to be able to enjoy the sports I get to watch. I want games to mean something. I want each sport to have its own season of the year, with the exception of basketball, which is boring and should be ignored while we watch hockey.
I want sports to be worth watching in the 8,766 hours I have this year.

2. More Football!

I know, this one seems to contradict the last one, but really, when you think about it… OK so it contradicts the last one. This is my wish list so I can contradict whatever I want.
I know it’s a long shot, but I’d really like to see steps toward the implementation of a Minor League Football system.
I outlined this idea in depth back in August—basically, you take the 32 NFL teams, give each of them a minor league affiliate in a nearby city, and have the minor league team supplement the NFL team’s roster when necessary. Wow, that was much easier to explain this time around. Makes me wonder why I needed 1,100 words to discuss it last time around.
I guess it was to talk about the details of how it would work, not to mention to suggest some fun names for the minor league affiliates (admit it, you’d go see a team called the Escondido Spark Plugs or the Fort Lauderdale Manatees).
This time, I’d like to focus on how it would make being a sports fan better. We all like football, because this is America, and if you don’t, well… you might be a communist. Just saying.
So how could more football not be a good idea?
The risk, as we touched on in the last section, is over-saturation. Too much football could make it seem ho-hum and watered-down.
But the potential reward is intriguing. If each NFL team had a farm team it could use to groom young players, the quality of play in the NFL would go up because young players would get more game experience in the minor league before getting shoved into NFL action. Players who were stars in college would get to quickly show whether or not they belong in the big leagues, while scrappy players who weren’t highly drafted would have more shots to show how their hard work has paid off. And it would even give players returning from injury a chance to play a real game as a bit of a warm-up to coming back to the NFL.
From a fan’s perspective, Minor League Football would give us more opportunities to watch professional-caliber football, play more (or different types of) fantasy football, buy more gear, attend more games (hopefully with the fun-first atmosphere of Minor League Baseball) and see more young players play in real games.

3. Cleaning House

If the world of sports really wants to appease the fans, the key is quality. And the best way to ensure that a quality product hits the field, court, rink or track is by increasing the level of competition while limiting the number of spots available to elite athletes.
In the case of professional sports, I really like the format of the English Premiere League, in which soccer teams are relegated to a lower league if they finish in the bottom four spots in the standings at the end of the season.
For the four major American sports, this would mean splitting the leagues into two levels and allowing only the teams in the top level to compete for the major league championship. In the case of the NFL, if we were to take the top 16 teams in the league (by record) and split them in half, we could separate the teams who are good from the teams who are not. We would have good teams facing good teams on a regular basis, and we wouldn’t have to sit through blowouts like we saw between the Steelers and the Browns on Sunday. Seriously, Cleveland? 41–9? Is that whole LeBron thing still getting to you?
Some might argue that this idea is flawed because we would still have to watch games like the Cardinals against the 49ers. That is true; terrible teams would still be terrible. We can’t get around that. But at least the terrible teams would only be playing other terrible teams, and they would be playing for some sort of second-rate championship, not to mention the chance to move up to the big leagues and play for the real title.
If we don’t get relegation, I’d at least like to see some form of contraction, especially in the NHL. I really like hockey, but there are 30 teams in the NHL, and I don’t think I can name more than one or two players on most of them anymore. And that’s kind of a shame since hockey names are pretty much the best. Where else can you find a guy named Guillaume Latendresse or Georges Laraque or Radek Bonk? Probably not even in the NHL anymore since it’s pretty well impossible to find a hockey game on TV these days.
But if the league went back to 15 teams (half of its current number)—preferably in the colder regions of North America— to consolidate talent, then slashed the schedule down to one or two games per team per week, it would make each game more important and full of better talent. And that’s the goal of this whole thing—more important games with more talent.

4. More Gus Johnson

Pro sports commentators are a dying breed.
Well, we’re losing most of the good ones, anyway. Pat Summerall was an icon. Keith Jackson made a highlight out of introducing the starting lineups. Dick Enberg and his trademark “Oh my!” provided so many great moments.
Bob Papa and Matt Millen, however, do not fall into this category. The NFL Network commentators are just two of the host of insufferable game callers who are increasingly harder to stomach. They all use too many clichéd catchphrases (“When you talk about the Chargers, you talk about a team that really plays well in December.”), too many incorrect words (it’s not, “They’re having a tough time figuring out how to defense the pass,” the correct phrase is, “They’re having a tough time figuring out how to defend the pass.” Don’t try to get all fancy on us.), and too many weird versions of common phrases that nobody else seems to be using (as in, when did “hand-eye coordination” become “eye-hand coordination?”).
At least we have Gus Johnson.

The CBS play-by-play guy has developed a reputation this season for calling the NFL games with the most thrilling finishes. He called the Jaguars/Texans game that ended with a Hail Mary touchdown on the final play and inspired ESPN.com writer Bill Simmons to incorporate Johnson into his many theories about how to predict the winner in NFL games. He’s even the commentator on Madden 11, which is a huge upgrade from Tom Hammond in the 2010 version of the game.
If we cut back on the length of the various sports’ seasons, then we can get Johnson calling games year round. And if that doesn’t make sports more enjoyable, then I don’t know what will.
But maybe you do.
If you have any ideas about what the sports world can do to make 2011 better for us, the fans, send them to me at sports@valleycenter.com and I’ll share them with our readers. You can send an itemized list, a couple of ideas, or just random scribblings on a napkin. Whatever you’ve got, send it in and we’ll do our best to make 2011 a great year for sports.