just one more thought: money in sports

    Subject: [acb-chat] money in sports

 

Rick wrote the following, and I answered...sort of. 

Curious Carl

 

I think there is a broader issue.  It is that money has taken over
everything in sports.  Here are some examples that disturb.

1.  The whole stadium thing bothers me.  Why can't teams build their own
stadiums?

2.  Coaches and players' salaries.  I think that players are vastly overpaid
in pro sports, making ticket prices unaffordable for many.  I think that
salaries should be lower, but good, possibly in the hundrreds of thousands
range.  However, since careers are so short, retirement and disability
benefits should be good.

I think that college coaches make way too much.  I think they should get
what department heads at universities get.

3.  TV determining game times.  This didn't used to be the case.  TV seemed
to abide by when colleges decided to have games.

4.  Exclusive broadcasts.  During the sixties, I remember being able to get
two or three different radio broadcasts of University of Illinois games.
The public, commercial, and student stations all had their own broadcasts.
If I didn't like a particular announcer, I could go elsewhere.

5.  Extremely long pre- and post-game shows.  I remember when pre-game
activities took about fifteen minutes.  Now, both the University of Kentucky
and University of Louisville come on about an hour and a half before the
games start.  This seems like overkill.

6.  Conference tournaments.  Do we really need these?  The regular season
determines a conference winner.  Why do we need an extra tournament to
decide this?

7.  The hypocrisy of the NCAA.  They are extremely strict about not letting
the players get even the appearance of getting money, even if it is only
giving tickets to family members.  Yet, everybody else makes money.  One
thing that always bothered me is that I have never heard that a school is
being investigated and never hearing that the school has been cleared of all
charges.

 

Damn straight Rick.  You got it right when you tapped out the letters, M O N E Y. 

 

Now just to set the record straight, the University of Washington and the University of Southern California have, in past years been investigated and heavily penalized for rule violations. 

 

But you got everything else nailed down. 

Back in the 60's and 70's I enjoyed listening to U. of W. Husky football on KUOW FM, the university channel, because they had former Husky players doing the bulk of the announcing. 

But the greed of commercial TV and Radio drove them onto the garbage pile. 

But we do love to pay for our distractions and our fantasies. 

We all can enjoy a good sports game because the rules are set up for idiots to understand.  And we can all pretend that maybe if we'd just tried a little harder, we could have been pulling down millions of dollars and getting all the "lookers". 

 

 

Curious Carl