REGINA - Instead of wasting my time writing about something important, this week I want to rant about the NFL.
It is Super Bowl LVIII week with the big game happening between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers. You would think the football fans would be excited. Instead, I’m noting fans are ticked right off and complaining.
I am reading lots of stories about how this is the “Taylor Swift Super Bowl” and about how annoyed football fans by Swift’s romance with the Chiefs’ Travis Kelce.
Folks, these fans have really gone off the deep end: they think this is a big publicity stunt, that the romance between Kelce and Swift is staged, and that Swift is a big distraction.
You are seeing so much complaining from fans who are floating these conspiracy theories — totally unsubstantiated — that the NFL somehow rigged things so that they could get the Super Bowl matchup they wanted — one that Taylor Swift would be in, so they could capitalize on the marketing opportunities.
There are even fans — Trump supporters — who somehow think this is all an elaborate plot to re-elect Joe Biden (!).
This may sound like crazy talk, but if you really cut to the chase and dig deep there is this underpinning sense from fans that it’s all about money for this league. The sense is that the NFL is only interested in getting more viewers and selling more merchandising and extracting more money from people’s wallets.
There is this undercurrent this Super Bowl week that the NFL has gotten too big and too fat, and too rich. This league gives all indications of being too interested in taking advantage of the fans, and in being interested only about itself.
The ticket prices for ordinary games are getting to insane proportions. I read a USA Today article that stated that the average ticket prices for NFL games this year was $377. This is ridiculous, folks.
For the average cost of a game you are better off just buying a new TV and watching the game on that! Well, just wait, because the NFL has found a way to hose fans on that front as well.
This post-season, the NFL moved one of its wildcard games, the Chiefs versus the Dolphins, to a streaming service: Peacock. If you wanted to watch that game in the USA, you had to subscribe to Peacock. Fans down there were livid at having to shell out money to watch a game that normally used to be available for free on network TV.
And don’t get me started on the Super Bowl, which is priced out of most fans’ budgets to begin with. There are reports that tickets for the Super Bowl are going for as high as $10,000! Who can afford that? The elite people, perhaps?
This year, the Super Bowl is being held at the fancy new Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, home of the Raiders. That is my segueway to rant about something else that has really upset people — NFL franchises moving from one city to another. In recent years the Raiders moved from Oakland to Las Vegas, the Rams from St. Louis to Los Angeles, and the Chargers from San Diego also to Los Angeles. And this sort of thing has been going on for years.
Can you imagine how football fans in St. Louis, San Diego and Oakland feel today? Most of them have sworn off the NFL for good after getting shafted like that.
The two teams that moved to Los Angeles now play in SoFi Stadium in Inglewood: a big, expensive enclosed roof stadium that cost several billion dollars to build. It’s got this massive video scoreboard all across the top of the stadium. If you want proof that the NFL is all about largesse, just take one look at that place. And keep in mind — this is now considered a typical stadium in the league. Jerry Jones in Dallas actually ushered in this era with AT&T Stadium, and that place cost a billion dollars itself.
It’s a far cry from the 70s and 80s when NFL teams used to play in stadiums that were, at least, normal-looking. Just check out the old NFL games on YouTube sometime, the change has been night and day. This has simply added to the perception from fans that the NFL is all about greed.
In all fairness to the NFL, though, it’s not just them who are being greedy. You can point at countless other major league sports all over the world, such major European soccer leagues like the Barclays Premier League. In fact, the fans over there have gotten so mad that they have staged protests occasionally. Maybe we ought to do the same over here.
One of the things those European soccer owners tried to do a few years ago was a breakaway European Super League that would have essentially restricted the top-flight to the biggest, richest clubs and ended promotion and relegation hopes for everyone else. That plan got squashed in the end, but that’s gives you an idea of the greed on display.
Auto racing, and in particular Formula 1, is another sport consumed by greed. I still cannot get over the Las Vegas Grand Prix charging fans thousands of dollars for tickets to see Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton race. What ended up happening was a lot of fans balked at the price and the ticket prices dropped to the point where you could get into practice sessions for only a reasonably priced $200.
Two hundred bucks to watch a practice! You’re better off staying home and watching the traffic go by on your street!
As every baseball fan knows, Major League Baseball is carried away by greed, with the Los Angeles Dodgers spending to the hilt to lock up Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto! Ohtani is getting over $700 million over 10 years! It makes fans of all the other teams wonder why they should even bother following this coming baseball season since the Dodgers clearly have the title all wrapped up.
The rich teams keep on getting richer while the poor teams get poorer — and in the case of the Oakland Athletics, they are all set to move to Las Vegas, too, just like the Oakland Raiders did. Who else from Oakland is going to move to Vegas, now? All of its residents, perhaps? They might as well.
The NBA is consumed by greed, too — greed from players who call the shots, demand trades and take their talents elsewhere to whereever they want to go (South Beach?). As for the NHL, don’t get me started about their ticket prices being through the roof. And it turns out some of the players might not be such nice guys after all (such as five guys who played junior for Team Canada in 2018).
You can’t even escape it in college sports in the NCAA!
All the talk during this past college football season was about the major realignment happening, with teams quitting entire conferences to join other conferences and take advantage of rich TV deals. Yet the college football fans never asked for this, they were happy with the rivalries they already had going.
Most of the west coast-based PAC-12 has quit the conference this year to go cash in in the other eastern and Midwest-based conferences. So now you’ll have teams like USC, UCLA and Washington in the same conference as Michigan and Ohio State, thousands of miles away, all for a buck. Cal and Stanford plan to play in, get this, the Atlantic Coast Conference (!).
Seriously, if you are a sports fan in this current environment where you are getting hosed left and right by the sports industry (and its media and other partners, like sports betting), during a time of many other inflationary and cost of living pressures, you need to ask yourself some hard questions.
Why continue to support these sports? For the thrill of victory? For the love of the game? It's almost like that scene in Fever Pitch where the kid tells the Red Sox fan "you love the Red Sox, but do they love you back?"
I know that these sports have a business to run too, but the amounts we are spending on their product is paying for entire condo blocks for billionaires in sunny locales.
While they get richer, the bottomless pit of money that is "us", the fanbase, continues to get poorer and poorer. I’m personally better off just concentrating on being a movie fan, it’s way cheaper. Yet I’m too hooked on sports to be able to extract myself. What is worse is that the sports that are my most favorite -- like football, Formula 1, and the combat sports, among others -- are also the biggest wastes of money.
Nowadays, it seems like almost all sports are wastes of money. Keep in mind that at one point, sports like football and hockey were primarily for the blue-collar people. You could get in at a reasonable price. Now, the working class must take multiple jobs just to pay for tickets to these same leagues.
But you can bet the tickets are affordable for folks like Taylor Swift.
And that’s why the fans are ticked. Believe me, if the TV cameras cut to her enough times during the Super Bowl, football fans are going to want to shut the TV right off.
