I Kid You Not: Football, Soccer & Teams With Disasters For Names

If I were 12 years old, I would be pretty upset with the Target Corporation.
To be fair, I’d probably be less than happy with almost all the retailers out there this time of year, because it seems like it gets earlier and earlier every summer that they insist on reminding us that summer is winding down, thanks to a slew of “Back To School!” banners, commercials and ads in the newspaper.
But for as much fun as summer is when you’re a kid, there’s really not much in it if you’re a sports fan. Sure, there’s baseball, but who wants to watch two guys play catch for three hours (unless it’s a Red Sox-Yankees game, in which case it’s more like four)? NASCAR is going strong, but the summer months feature some of the most boring races (Pocono, Indianapolis, Chicago, Michigan twice... yawn) and The Chase is still more than a month away. Things have gotten so bad that I actually watched a Major League Soccer (MLS) game last week. Let’s just say that MLS is not so exciting after you’ve gotten used to World Cup soccer.
But even in a summer when the weather can’t seem to make up its mind (we just went through San Diego’s coldest July in nearly 100 years), I still had a few random thoughts about sports this week that I would like to share with you.
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts about these, or any, sports-related topic. Send me an e-mail at sports@valleycenter.com anytime and we’ll get a good discussion going.

I’m Sure The Browns Would Still Be Terrible
Watching the World Cup this year was a really fun experience, and I feel like I learned a lot about soccer. If I lived in Europe—or if it didn’t cost an arm and a leg to watch English Premier League (EPL) soccer here in America—then I would probably watch more of the world’s elite soccer players battle it out on the pitch.
One little detail about the EPL that I find fascinating is the idea of relegation.
Basically, the Premier League consists of the top 20 soccer teams in England and is affiliated with The Football League, which consists of 72 clubs split evenly between three divisions, The Championship League, League One and League Two.
I suppose the simplest way of putting it is to say that, at the end of each season, each of these four divisions changes teams. The top three teams in the three lower divisions get to move up to the next division, while the bottom three teams from the top three divisions move down. It sounds complicated, but it makes sense.
The idea is that the Premier League is reserved for the teams that are the best of the best, but each team’s spot in this league is not a guarantee. You have to earn your chance to play in the EPL every season.
I absolutely love this idea for other sports. For one thing, you’re not watering down the competition between the good teams by making them have to play pushovers. For another thing, you’re giving teams in rebuilding years a chance to play meaningful games against opponents who are more closely matched in talent, making for more exciting games. It’s the best of both worlds.
Imagine if this concept were to be applied to the NFL. Right now, there are 32 teams in the league, and honestly, it’s not hard to say that 16 of those teams are legitimate, while the other 16 are middle-of-the-road, at best. Take the top 16 teams (according to last year’s standings, the top 16 teams in the league were Indianapolis, New Orleans, San Diego, Minnesota, Green Bay, Dallas, Philadelphia, New England, Cincinnati, Arizona, New York Jets, Baltimore, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Houston and one of the teams that finished 8-8, which were Carolina, San Francisco, Denver, New York Giants and Tennessee) and separate them into the NFL Division I or something like that. Then put the other 16 teams in Division II and have them play against each other all season. At the end of the year, the bottom three from Division I get sent down, while the top three from Division II move up. It adds more drama to those games at the end of the year, especially for those teams who aren’t going to make the playoffs. More meaningful games are good for all of us.
Of course, the teams that stink wouldn’t be happy about it… at first. But I have a feeling they’d all get used to it, because they’d still be officially in the NFL, they wouldn’t be getting blown out, and they’d have a chance to play for the Division II championship (which could be held the week before the Super Bowl to save us all from the disappointment that is the Pro Bowl) at the end of the season. It’s hard to get excited about a game between the Browns and the Panthers, but if a win meant that one of them got a shot at moving up to Division I, then the intensity gets ratcheted up a notch. Again, how could anyone turn down a chance to see more games that mean something?
The only potential downside I can see is that it’s hard to get better if you’re not playing against better players. But I think the competition level in the NFL, across the board, is such that even the worst teams in the league still have players who are playing at an elite level. Just because the Rams only won one game last year doesn’t mean that Steven Jackson isn’t a talented running back.
And with the way that the NFL goes through cycles (remember when the Colts and Patriots were terrible?), I think we would still see those cycles play out like they have in the past. The NFL would have to tweak the draft rules just a bit—perhaps they would have Division II draft first, going in the inverse order of the standings, then have the Division I teams follow after—but I think things wouldn’t change much. A few good players can turn a franchise around, and it can happen at just about any time.

On The Plus Side, We’d Get To See More Of Brooks Bollinger
Another NFL idea I’d like to see put into action is the concept of a minor league farm system, similar to what we have in baseball and hockey.
Each Major League Baseball (MLB) team has a series of minor league teams in the farm system—meaning that if a player on the MLB team gets hurt or traded, the club can “call up” a player from the top minor league team to replace him. Each minor league team is affiliated with an MLB team so the pro team can develop the talent of young players before bringing them up to the big leagues.
It’s the same in the National Hockey League (NHL), only each NHL team only has one minor league team instead of a whole farm system.
Why hasn’t anyone tried this in the NFL? I guess the popularity of football is still relatively new, and it would be a pretty serious undertaking to get the logistics worked out for the creation of 32 minor league football teams. But I have a feeling that the investment would more than pay off, and I don’t think it takes a genius to get the ball rolling.
Let’s say that we could convince 32 multi-millionaires that it would be totally cool to own your own sports franchise. A stretch, I know, but… we’ll just call it a hypothetical. Anyway, we get 32 rich guys (or gals, there’s nothing wrong with that. Other than still using the term “gals” I mean. I digress.) to pony up enough to pay for players, coaches, uniforms, staff, stadium use and team travel expenses. The league would have to set some kind of a salary cap to keep things reasonable (ideally, you’d want some kind of system that only allows you to pay a certain maximum based on a player’s experience and position on the field), but we’ll skip that for now.
What would be great about the DFL (Developmental Football League)—or whatever it would be called—is that you wouldn’t really have to change much about the structure of the current NFL squad. Each team is allowed to have 80 players on the roster during training camp. Throughout the summer, a series of cuts is made, brining the roster down to the regular season size of 53. Of course, during the season, each team can only have 45 active players dressed for each game. Those eight who are not dressed are the members of the practice squad, or scout team.
If each NFL team had a minor league affiliate, they wouldn’t need to make all those cuts, just a decision about who plays in the big leagues and who gets sent down. Keep those 45 players for the NFL team and you still have 35 left over from the 80 you brought to training camp. And there are always plenty of unsigned free agents out there after the draft, so I don’t think teams would have trouble finding another ten guys who want a shot at playing pro football.
Here’s the genius of the plan, though—because of the popularity of college football, the NFL draft has become a big-time event in and of itself. We want to see where Tim Tebow is going to play his pro ball. We want to know what will happen to Jimmy Clausen, Jahvid Best, C.J. Spiller and Ndomukong Suh.
With a developmental league, these players would all get to play every week, and we’d get to watch their development. Watch Tim Tebow learn to read the cover-two defense. Watch Jahvid Best learn to pick up a pro blitz. It’s riveting.
Plus, if an organization were to be particularly on the ball, you could have a similar system in place for both levels (for example, if the Philadelphia Eagles run a West Coast offense, then their minor league team should also follow suit). It would be a lot like the high school system of varsity and JV, with different coaches following the same system. And something tells me there would be no shortage of coaches who would be more than happy to sign up for this kind of a chance.
Really, the only detail that’s left is to start picking out the names of the minor league teams. I still can’t decide if it would be easier for the teams to play in the same stadium as their NFL counterparts or if they should have their own (nearby) cities. If they used the same stadium, they could just follow the NFL team’s schedule, but reversed (for example, if the Chargers are hosting the Chiefs, then the San Diego Lightning would play at the Kansas City Braves in the minor league matchup).
But, if each team had its own city, we could revitalize some smaller cities and give minor league football its own culture, just like minor league baseball. Each team could come up with something a little wacky (like the Lansing Lugnuts or the Tacoma Rainiers) that’s also specific to that geographic location. Add some crazy logos and you’ve got some fan-friendly football fun ready to take the field.
The other question would be when the minor league teams would play. I say they should play on Friday night so they wouldn’t interfere with college football. You could also make arguments for Wednesday night (a cure for the mid-week, no-football blues) or for Sunday afternoon. I’d be ok with any of these, just as long as we got to see more football.
Of course, the downside is that we’d be over-saturating the talent pool a bit—look at the rosters in the United Football League (UFL) and it wouldn’t be surprising to wonder, “Quinn Gray? Isn’t he dead? I thought he died in 2002. Weird.” And the UFL kind of already has a leg up as far as goofy names and logos (although I’m sure you get lots of street cred for wearing a light blue Florida Tuskers cap in downtown Tallahassee these days).
But I still think that more football can’t help but be fun to watch, especially if we know that it means something (with apologies to the UFL’s championship game, the aptly-named UFL Championship Game…that took some marketing genius). We’d get to see some college stars sharpen their skills before getting tossed into the fires of the NFL. We’d get to see more of the 2009 UFL MVP, Brooks Bollinger, and who wouldn’t want that?
Seriously though, minor league football is an idea waiting to be realized. I just hope I’m given the proper credit when the time comes.

What, Too Soon For A Team To Be Called The New Orleans Hurricanes?
Speaking of team names, and speaking of MLS, I realized something while watching the MLS All-Star Game this week. And no, my realization was not overwhelming shame brought on by watching the MLS All-Star Game.
As the announcers desperately tried to sell the viewers on the merits of MLS, they would talk about the various teams in the league. At some point, I realized that two of the teams are named after natural disasters that happened in that city. The first one I noticed was the Chicago Fire, which I’ll grant is a cool name, and since the Great Chicago Fire happened nearly 140 years ago, I think it’s a safe enough reference to make.
But I couldn’t help but Tweet my reaction, and the follow up thoughts about teams and names that reference disasters. Ever full of sarcasm and wit, I wondered if we would see the San Francisco Earthquakes, or the Seattle Volcanoes, or the Louisiana Flood.
Turns out, as I watched more of the telecast, there actually is a team in MLS called the San Jose Earthquakes.

For one thing, I think a single earthquake is scary enough, but to have to face a team full of earthquakes…that is a contest I’m not prepared to undertake.
Is it just me, or is it a little odd that a team can be named after a disaster that happened just 21 years ago? I remember the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, mostly because it interrupted the World Series, but I still have clear mental pictures of collapsed bridges, chunks of highway uprooted and buildings falling over. This wasn’t that long ago, but it’s open for a team to be named after it?
My Tweets carry over to Facebook, so I ended up in a bit of a discussion about this phenomenon that circled back to listing a whole lot of borderline-inappropriate team names that MLS should consider. Some of the gems include the Oklahoma Cyclones, the Buffalo Blizzard (an actual team in the now-defunct National Professional Soccer League),
the Kansas Dustbowls, the South Carolina Confederates, the Dallas Grassy Knolls, and my personal favorite (courtesy of my friend Rick), the Pearl Harbor Attack.
Just to be clear, none of this is meant in a mean spirit or anything—the point is that if it’s OK to have a team named the San Jose Earthquakes just 21 years after the actual earthquake, where do we draw the line?
I’d like to further explain myself by saying that I honestly have no opinion on the matter, I just happened to find it interesting that a team/league would step out and make a decision like this. I don’t have a problem with it—to me, it’s just a team name, and should therefore be taken as such. I could write a whole lot of pages about my thoughts on people who take themselves and everything else too seriously, but I’ll save that for another time.
I guess my curiosity is such that I wonder why a team would even bother to tempt it by using a name that could have any potential negative connotation? On the other hand, part of me wants to congratulate them for taking that kind of a stand, because, as I said, it’s just a team name, and honestly, why should it be taken as anything more? It’s an interesting situation, that’s for sure.
And as I said before, if you have any thoughts on the subject, please e-mail me at sports@valleycenter.com and I’ll be sure to share what you have to say with our readers.
Just be sure to send it in right away, because (as Target keeps reminding me) summer is almost over, and the sports pages will soon be filled with all the football that’s fit to print once again!