American Sports are for Losers

American Sports are for Losers

           

You read the title. I mean what I wrote, and I’ll say it again, “American sports are for losers.” It has nothing to do with the sports, and everything to do with the leagues. For as much as fans, the media, and players talk about winning, championships, and competitive fire major American sports leagues continue to hand out participation trophies and give the message that winning is optional.

           

            I love hearing, “failure is not an option,” because, while completely untrue, it creates serious stakes that I can get invested in. If failure is not an option for the Marines, because it means a lot of people will die, then losing should not be an option for any team, because, let’s face it, death is not really on the line. Herein lies the problem with American sports; winning is optional because losing has little to no consequences. If you have played or have watched sports at some point your ears were blessed with the hilariously bitter and almost sociopathic sounding parcel of wisdom that, “these guys hate to lose more than they love to win.” The idea that losing is such a painful experience that winning is not the ultimate goal, but the absence of losing is, is such a retrograde fear based motivational tactic that I’m sure it is still widely used in youth sports today. For the participants losing carries significant meaning and an emotional toll, but what does it actually mean for the team? Losing, in the major American leagues, only costs you a better draft pick. Think about that. Losing ultimately gets you something more valuable than the team that beats you. To the victor goes the spoiled leftovers of amateur talent!

            Fans love the draft. I think the draft is idiotic, and I still devourer content about it. The draft is dramatic! The draft is where teams gain hope! The draft is where dreams are made! The draft is where we assign numerical values to young men based upon their physical performance, mental attributes, and overall character! Wait? The draft is basically the Miss American pageant? The draft is where the worst teams get the richest reward, and the young players beginning their professional careers get screwed. I know a lot of these guys become millionaires, but they also have basically no agency in where they play, outside of picking the league they want to play in. Imagine, fresh out of college and the only way you aren’t forced to work in Buffalo is to be unemployed. Players get a raw deal, and so do we. The draft gives bad teams a reward, and the worse you are the better the reward. That’s like buying a kid an entire cake because they ate none of their vegetables. I know it is supposed to help the bad teams, but is it really worth it for fans to be rooting for their team to be as terrible as possible? It just does not make sense that competitive balance is the goal for the draft when teams use it to justify being terrible on purpose, and thus there is less competitive balance because teams are being uncompetitive on purpose.   

            American sports leagues rewarding losers through the draft may seem like a small carrot, but think about what a freshly drafted player means to a team. Rookie players are, by design, under-compensated. The amount they would receive as free agents is far larger than the amount they are paid through the draft. By giving teams that lose the most games access to the elite young talent you are rewarding losing with the most coveted asset in all of sports; cheap, talented, and hungry players. This is a primary reason tanking is prevalent in major American sports. The best way to get elite talent for a fraction of the cost is by being miserably bad for a while. If this strategy fails, guess what teams do? They do it again, and again, and again until it turns out right. The carrot at the end of the stick shouldn’t get bigger the more you lose, I’d argue a better system would be that the paddle at the end of your ass gets bigger and bigger the more you lose.

            Now is the part where I bring up European soccer, and all you do mentally is complain about something you don’t truly understand because your feelings about soccer are derived from some weird interaction with you uncle where he made emasculation and soccer synonyms. In European soccer leagues, there is promotion and relegation. A relegated team stops playing in a better league and plays in a worse league where the talent level is closer to theirs. If we had this system in football the 2018 Cleveland Browns would have been playing in the Sun Belt. Promotion, on the other hand, is where a team wins so much that they get to compete against better teams in a better league. In this system losing is not an option. Teams have legitimately gone bankrupt after getting relegated. It is brutal and beautiful. It rewards success with massive amounts of cash, trophies, and additional games while bludgeoning failures with a loss of cash, no trophies, and fewer premium games. As a fan, this is the stuff of dreams. No matter how bad or how good each and every game has meaningful consequences. As an American sports fan, your team falls out of the playoff race and you can just pack it in and wait until next year for the season to be over by Christmas again (I love WWI references). If your team is fighting the relegation battle. Every game, to the very end, has significant meaning. Not too long ago Wolverhampton Wanders, at the time in Premier League (they went down and are now back up again), were playing match-day 38, the final game of the season. They were on the edge of relegation and the events of that day would determine their fate. They lost that day. But guess what? So did the team that was right there with them in the standings. They remained in the premier league, and the fans stormed the field and celebrated with the team. After a loss. AFTER A FUCKING LOSS. The emotion of the fans and players were immense, and it was all because they had something to play for as players, and cheer for as fans.

            Tanking is bullshit. Unfortunately, that bullshit makes sense. There is nothing at stake for being really bad and a lot to be gained from it. I get why teams do it because the system makes it work. The people that lose the most from this system are the fans. The concept of Championship or bust is prevalent in American sports. Teams can either win it all or they are playing for nothing. It’s common for pundits to make fun of teams that have no chance to win a championship but still push in assets to get better in the short-term. This is awful. We have become conditioned to laugh and mock teams for trying to get better if getting better does not mean best. Imagine telling a child that? (If you do you are a grade-A jerk, by the way) Sure teams push to get into the playoffs, but that still leaves at least half the league spending half of the season playing for nothing. As fans, we deserve better. Don’t tell me it’s okay for you not to try and put the best team forward this year so you can win the championship in three. Win as much as you can now. Then do that for perpetuity because I don’t take seasons off from being a fan.

(Here is a rudimentary drawing showing the forces that push teams to be the most competitive or to be as uncompetitive as possible. It also shows the promotion and relegation system)

What matters the most for fans? Is it winning? Is it aesthetic beauty? Is it entertainment and escapism? Is it tradition? Is it family? For any fan, it is probably a combination of all of these factors. For the teams we root for, what matters most, is money. American sports leagues are monopolies, and as such, they create systems that benefit their wallets with little regard for the fan. Each owner is a business partner with the other owners in a league, and they protect each other’s investment by any tactic necessary. The salary-cap only exists in sports. It also only exists in American leagues, which happen to be monopolistic. The draft can only exist because there are no other leagues even close to matching the pay of the major American sports leagues. So many systems are in place to enrich the owners, and the worst of all is that a team’s valuation is as Teflon as they come. By not having relegation a team cannot suddenly lose a revenue stream, but it also means that a mismanaged team can remain financially healthy without operating as a successful business within their own industry. The monopoly that American sports teams operate in mean innovation and competition amongst their “competitors” is relatively small because the league’s health is more important to any individual team’s bottom line than their own success.

            American sports are for losers. The teams do not compete with each other, they collude with each other. Yeah, games are played, one team wins the other loses, but those are just proxies to keep us interested. There is no real competition between the Lakers and Celtics because they’re business partners. I want the teams to compete as much as the players do. I want the teams to care as much about winning as the fans do. I want poorly run business to fail, and the innovators to rise up. I want American sports to be for winners. 

QB: Questionable Business

QB’s: Questionable Business

Or

OBs: Quit Being Stupid

            The NFL dominates the American sports landscape. People bemoan its demise, but in reality, the league is so omnipresent that every scandal feels massive simply because it has to do with football. We cannot quit it, and as a result, the NFL draft feels bigger than the actual sports that are being played in-between football seasons. Prior to the draft, no player is dissected more than the incoming crop of quarterbacks, and for good reason, a good QB means victories…. right?

            Quarterbacks are obsessed over, glorified, blamed, vilified, protected, and grossly overpaid. There, I said it. It needs to be said. The amount of attention they receive is understandable because it is the most difficult position to play and the most important. Simply put, passing the ball is the most effective way to score, and scoring is the most effective way to win. Year to year, a team’s offensive output is much more stable than its defensive performance. Essentially, if you have the best defense in the league one year the chances your team will be in the top five the next year is lower than the top-ranked offense remaining elite. So far, the logic of valuing quarterbacks highly makes sense, but a deeper look exposes a massive flaw in concept.

            Supply and demand is a basic economic concept. If the supply does not meet the demand the product becomes more valuable, and as a result more expensive. For NFL franchises, quarterbacks are like NFL franchises for billionaires; there are simply not enough to go around. In sports there are tiers to players, the elite (5%), the very good (10%), the good (15%), the average (20%), the we’re kidding ourselves (15%), the hand on face emoji (20%), and the we are so fucked (15%, this includes the remaining 99.9% of the human population as well). What happens is that teams convince themselves that these percentages can change. They can’t. That’s the point. It’s the Fortune 500, not the Fortune 500 plus 200 other companies that are doing just as well! In competition it does not matter how good you are; it only matters how good you are compared to your competition. Babe Ruth is the greatest baseball player ever compared to his peers, but if he was transported to today he’d be a DH only for a JUCO before flaming out in Independent ball after ballooning up to 300 pounds. The point is that there can only be so many elite players because once there are more some stop being elite and are merely very good.

           

I don’t know if you just did the math, but 5% of 32 is 1.6. The .6 is because Drew Brees is so short that he doesn’t count as a full quarterback (I kid Saints fans). Really we should think of it as follows: there are 60-90 quarterbacks that can be reasonably expected to play in the league at any given time, which means there are 3 to 4.5 elite quarterbacks in the NFL in any given season. With a breakdown like this we should see a sliding scale of quarterback salaries based upon what tier they fit into. The problem is….we don’t. What we see is absolute insanity or idiocy or incompetence or cowardice.

            As it stands right now, the 9 largest NFL contracts, by annual average salary, and 19 of the top 23 in all of the NFL go to quarterbacks. The four non-quarterbacks are Khalil Mack, Aaron Donald, Odell Beckham, Jr., and Von Miller; you may have heard of these guys. Lists are easy. So I’m going to list the top nine and their per-year average salary, and follow it with my reaction.

1.     Aaron Rodgers ($33.5 Mil): Sounds about right

2.     Matt Ryan ($30 Mil): It’s a stretch, but he’s good, and his agent is better.

3.     Kirk Cousins ($28 Mil): LOL….. wait, it’s all guaranteed! His agent is the GOAT!

4.      Jimmy Garoppolo ($27.5 Mil): He is handsome, but has he even played 16 games yet?

5.     Matt Stafford ($27 Mil): That’s a lot of money to basically never make the postseason.

6.     Derek Carr ($25 Mil): I remember that one good year he had. I wonder if he does?

7.     Drew Brees ($25 Mil): Wow! The first bargain! No wonder the Saints should have made the Super Bowl.

8.     Andrew Luck ($24.594 Mil): He’s back baby! Let’s hope his shoulder stays healthy.

9.     Alex Smith ($23.5 Mil): Even before his leg snapped in half, it’s like paying extra for flood insurance when you live in a Yurt on the edge of the Gobi desert.

What an inspiring bunch of passers. If someone in an NFL front office ever tells you that you could not do his job, please show him this list and inform him that you could probably do it better than seven of the guys who gave these contracts. The real question is how did we get here in a salary-cap sport where so many teams have so much money tied up in not very good players at the very most important position? I think the answer is fear. Teams are so scared not to have a quarterback they will literally do whatever it takes to keep them. Even if it means making their team dramatically worse in the process. Yet, the idiocy doesn’t stop there.

            Teams will overpay quarterbacks in free agency, but they will also over draft quarterbacks until they have a guy they are willing to overpay in free agency. It’s funny, but the hot team building strategy is to have a quarterback on a rookie contract so you can build a strong roster around that quarterback. If teams struggle to hand out good contracts to NFL quarterbacks, you can imagine they have an even harder time determining which college quarterbacks will be good. Excluding the 2018 draft (it’s honestly too early to tell) let’s see how teams did when drafting quarterbacks.

·      In 2017, three quarterbacks were drafted in the first round. Mitchell Trubisky went first, followed by Patrick Mahomes, and Deshaun Watson. Good work; that’s 2 for 3 because Mitchell Trubisky has basically shown no indication of being good.

·      2016 also saw three quarterbacks go in the first round with Jared Goff, Carson Wentz, and Paxton Lynch, with Dak Prescott going in the fourth round as well. Paxton Lynch is basically out of the league, and Jared Goff and Carson Wentz have shown flashes, but there are still some concerns about them going forward.

·      2015 had a celebrated first round with Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota, and we still somehow have no idea if they’re good (here’s an idea; if you don’t know if they’re good, then they are not good).

·      2014 was an all-time first-round stink-athon with Blake Bortles, Johnny Manziel, and Teddy Bridgewater. The next two QB’s taken were Derek Carr and Jimmy Garoppolo.

·      I’m going to call it quits with 2013 because the only first-round quarterback was EJ Manuel.

This list doesn’t even show all the trades teams made to move up and get some of these guys.  While some have worked out, many have completely failed, and as a note, none of the quarterbacks taken first in these drafts has ended up being the best quarterback from that draft.

I know drafting quarterbacks is hard, but here is a novel strategy. Stop caring so much about your quarterback. Landing an elite quarterback is luck. Getting saddled with an average quarterback on a gargantuan contract is foolishness. Build the rest of the roster, and get lucky at quarterback. The Patriots did and they’ve built the greatest dynasty in the history of the sport.