Pro Sports- Bang for the Buck

In My Humble Opinion
1

IMHO pro sports and why I like or dislike them:

Basketball- Never watch any regular season games. They play too many in a season. I do enjoy the playoffs however do I really need to watch anything more than the fourth quarter? Would I be missing anything? I know they play 4 quarters for the endurance factor but I don’t really need to watch them wear eachother down for 2.5 hours before the fun begins.

Baseball- Watched a lot as a kid since I played and knew all the rules. But I grew sour on the sport since I was a Brewer fan and slowly came to the realization that if they ever got a decent player they’d loss him to a high paying team. The no salary cap thing just bugs me to know end. And especially since Selig owns the Brewers but feels people should turn out to watch the team because they like baseball, not because they hope their team can someday win a championship. And I’m also soured on players strikes. Especially when I watch basketball, football, hockey, soccer players hussle their ass off for an entire game while Baseball players spend most of the time in the dugout or standing in the field.

Football(american)- Best bang for the buck as far as i’m concerned. The play is so varied from passing games, to running games, to defense. And the short 16 week schedule makes every game count. I’ve only been bored a few times on low scoring games during defensive battles. Salary cap is a huge plus. No team hogging the talent.

Hockey- Again, too many games in a season to matter. Hard to observe any strategy going on. Too much drive! drive! drive! (turnover) defense! defense! defense! (turnover). Power plays keep it interesting but the low scoring is a little slow.

Soccer(world football)- A lot like hockey being played on a huge field. Less action than hockey. Turnover! Turnover! Turnover! Like hockey, the only highlights you can show from the game are the goals.

Just my .02 cents. Can’t wait till football season starts!

2

Woah. I’d like to disagree somewhere but instead all I can accurately muster is a peevish “Ditto.”

3

Discounting playoffs, what pro basketball games have you been to where you have exhibited “hussle”?

As for me, I embrace any sport where people like John Kruk and Cecil Fielder can excel.

4

While american football is by far my favorite sport, if we are trying to determine which sport gives you the most bang for the buck, I’d have to go with soccer.

Though I love football, the action/non-action ratio is nowhere as good a soccer. The average football game last a little over 3 hours (we’ll call it 3 just for the sake of argument). A football game is 60 minutes, so right away we have 2 hours of non-action. Now, of that 60 minutes, maybe 15-20 minutes is actual game play. The rest is spent in the huddle, running out the clock, and other various times between the plays. Hell, even if a a game contains 25 minutes of action, that’s still less than 15% of the telecast.

In soccer, the teams play anywhere between 90-95 minutes of non-stop action [insert smarmy comment about what qualifies as “action.”] with a 15 minute intermission. That’s means 85% of the time is watching people play.

Basketball and Hockey will have closer ratios to soccer, but won’t be above it - and baseball will be closer to football.

(P.S. I’m not arguing that any sport is better than another, nor that one is more interesting. Rather, when looking at it from a pure action/non-action ratio, soccer, imho, is the clear winner.)

5

I gotta disagree with the OP’s opinion. Pro football has about 15 minutes of action in a 3 hour game, not including the numerous fist fights in the grandstands between drunken Steelers’ and Browns’ fans. The only thing less compelling is the NFL draft. You can have it. Give me baseball, with all its faults, any day.

Basketball hasn’t been interesting to me since Bird and Magic Johnson left the scene. At the NBA level too many games are semi-fixed, in that the refs give huge inherent advantages to superstars. At least when it was Bird’s Celtics vs. Johnson’s Lakers, the refs had to call the game squarely since the two stars were of equal magnitude.

Hockey isn’t big with me as I’m not Canadian.

6

Formula One, friends!

Best damn “bang for the buck” if you ask me. Last year, at Indy, I paid $50 for a ticket that got me into the track 4 days! Thursday Pit walk, Friday qualifying, Saturday qualifying and the race itself on Sunday. When the big boys werent on the track, there was other stuff goin’ on and things to see. Good value if you ask me! The absolute pinacle of world-wide motorsports.

Not going this year. They changed the date and I don’t want to go to Indy in June. I predict heat, humidity and possibly rain as the third jewel in the “Shitty Weather” triple crown. :rolleyes:

But I got Speed Channel!

7

I think baseball would have less action than football. Since there is no clock in baseball I think a fair assessment of when the action happens is whenever the ball is in motion. If you took a cumulative stopwatch to a game there’s probably not a whole lot of action in that 3 hours.

8

Even that might be too generous; to a lot of people, a called strike isn’t “action.”

9

So far, only one person has actually mentioned bucks…($50 for 4 days is a great price)

For my local teams - I know I can get a reasonably good seat at an MLB game for $17. (Not a great seat, but it’s ok) and a mediocre one for $13 (Remember the days when you could go to a game for $5? I do. And I’m not that old)
Checking, it seems that at the local NFL game, I can’t get in the door for under $30, and from the seating chart, that doesn’t look like I’ll actually be able to see anything (but I could be wrong). At the NBA, I’m getting in (and sitting all the way up and behind the hoop) for a mere $11.

So for the NFL to provide “more bang for my buck,” it needs to consist of at least twice as much action as basketball or baseball… (and I agree with the earlier posters that pointed out that there’s only about 15 minutes of action stretched over a 3 hour period.) In basketball, at least, people seem to be moving a lot.

10

Minor league baseball, amarinth. $4 for a front row seat and the beer costs a buck. Trust me. It’s the best thing in town.

Why is EVERYONE’s approach to player salaries a salary cap? It’s not like the owners would say, “Hey! We can’t spend more for the players! Let’s lower prices!” What you would hear is evil chuckling as they headed for the bank. Revenue sharing is a much more sensible course (and a major advantage for football). If the choice is to make players or owners rich I know I vote for the guys on the field.

11

Seriously. Has a salary cap made the NBA more competitive? Of course not. It just made the owners that much richer.

The NFL? It’s easy to have “parity” in a single elimination playoff with 12 teams.

Revenue sharing is a good idea, but not in its current MLB form. That has been an unmitigated disaster and the single biggest contributing factor to the futility of certain franchises. There needs true revenue sharing formula - none of this cutting checks to reward teams that keep their payrolls low.

That means 60-40 gate splits, upping local broadcast deals to 50% sharing, killing the Cubs’ legal scalping operation, etc.

Then, to make sure jerks like Pohlad, put a real salary floor down of $60 million. Or make it a percentage of total team revenues. Whatever. But it needs to be meaningful, none of this $45 million cap floor that Bud Lite wants.

12

Actually, it’s about the same as a football game - nine to twelve minutes. The great majority of an NFL game’s “60 minute clock” is spent with the players standing around between plays. Since the average NFL game also takes longer to play, baseball does have a better action-to-standing around ratio than NFL football does.

Of the four big North American sports leagues the NHL delivers the most actual play per game - sixty minutes. The NBA is at 49-50 minutes (48 minutes of regulation plus foul shots.) Of course, if you like soccer, that’s 90 minutes of actual play.

Automobile racing gives you even more action time - from two to four hours depending on the level of racing. The major leagues of auto racing, Formula 1, can give you five hours plus if you count qualifying.

However, for bang for your BUCK, it depends on the ticket prices for your local team and how much expense you need to go to to get to the stadium. Formula 1 may have cheap tickets but the closest race is a six hour drive from me and most of the races are on other continents. On the other hand I have two hockey teams I could see nearby, but NHL tix cost a lot.

13

He said sports.

Although in soccer, the clock keeps running when the ball is out of bounds or various other times when nothing is really happening. Hockey has a lot more action in the way of scoring opportunities because of the difference in field/rink size. The thing I’ve come to like about hockey is that the game is less broken up than the other sports, although I think basketball is the sport I watch the most.

14

I question how useful an action/non-action ratio is. I certainly wouldn’t rank a sport No. 1 simply because it was non-stop action; in fact, I’d be begging for a breather. It’s important to consider whether or not the non-action can be interesting, too. There’s a lot of non-action in the NFL, certainly, but if it’s third-and-5 on the opponent’s 35-yard line, the fact that the players are standing around doesn’t bother me because I’m quite caught up in considering the wide variety of plays that might be run – it’s not an obvious passing down or running down – and what will happen on the next play. If the non-action can provide good dramatic build-up, then it’s good non-action.

15

Unless the race consists of two to four hours of crashes, I’ll have to respectfully disagree. “Drive fast in circles” will never count as “action” in my book (unless, of course, I’m the one doing the driving :)).

16

I’ve never beaten up (or been beaten up by) a Browns fan, although I have shot a Cowboys fan with several paintballs…

I think football gives more “bang for the buck” than other sports by virtue of its structure. Since each play has a definite start, fans have an easier time following the game over sports like hockey and soccer, where long periods of passing action are broken by explosions of scoring. In baseball all the players except the three in the battery are waiting for action; in football all players are supposed to be in motion at the start of the play (although Randy Moss and others take time off when the ball isn’t coming their way.)

Auto racing in all forms is a matter of mastery over machines, I don’t consider it in the same category as the other sports- but that’s my personal preference.

Y’all can decide if I’m drunk or not.

:smiley:

17

When it comes to watching sports, hockey’s the only game in which I can enjoy an entire game. (If the teams playing don’t suck, of course; but the parity in the league has been pretty good for a while now.) When you factor in the speed of the players, the puck, and the potential for long periods of non-stop action, ice hockey is the fastest game around.

While I don’t really follow any other sports, the only other major one in which I could stand sitting through an entire game is football - American or Canadian. And a big plus for American football is that it’s an affordable game to actually go see in person. The short season is also nice, but if I actually got into following the game, I might prefer a few more games. (Hockey, however, could use quite a few less games. The fewer the games, the more meaningful the rest are, and the more likely people will actually go to the games.)

Baseball is just too dang slow and boring, although I’m sure it can be nice to just sit back and relax on a summer day at the park. But I can do that for free on my back porch, and the beer’s a lot cheaper. Or watch a game of golf. :slight_smile: About the only time I can stand watching a game of baseball is during extra innings - the only time there’s really any sense of tension and excitement.

Basketball is similar to baseball in that I only enjoy overtime. However, the rest of a game, despite being much more fast-paced than baseball. (On the non-stop list, it places behind hockey, but ahead of football and baseball.) The big problem with basketball, though, despite the back-and-forth action, is the back-and-forth action. It’s just too monotonous. (I must admit though, it’s a great game to play when you only have a few guys, or you’re all alone.)

Soccer bores me to death. The field in so big the players can’t really play with any sort of consistently fast speed - only quick breaks every now and then, which usually just lead to one team regaining control of the ball from the other. The players rarely score, much less get chances to score. The Simpsons’ parody of a game of soccer wasn’t that far off, IMO. :wink:

Some people complain that the scores in hockey are too low, but I’ve seen 1-0 games than have been extremely exciting. It’s not how many goals you score, but how many chances both teams get that matters. A 7-1 game may be exciting to see if a certain player gets a hat-trick (three goals), but if the losing team had no chance at all, then the game was likely not very enjoyable. While I have my favorite teams and players, I prefer a close, competitive game.

I must point out though. While hockey may be “Canada’s Game”, our official sport is actually lacrosse. While I’ve never watched more than a few minutes of a game of lacrosse, it does look more exciting than baseball, basketball and soccer. And, like hockey and football, can be pretty darn rough.

Also, while hockey may dominate television up here for most of the year, curling - yes, curling - tends to get the greatest ratings whenever it’s on. While it looks like a fun game to play, I don’t understand my fellow Canadians’ love of just watching it. It’s like bowling in the States (“the true game of the common working man”), except I don’t know how well bowling does in the ratings.

Anyhoo…

18

I’d be willing to bet that the ball isn’t out of bounds more than a minute, on average, per game. And the game is usually restarted within a minute after a goal has been scored. I don’t know what you speak of when you mention “other times when nothing is really happening.”

19

Just when the ball is out, setting up for free or penalty kicks, the goalie holding it waiting for people to go downfield, that sort of thing.

I’ve said it before, but late-game playoff hockey (especially overtime) is my favorite thing in sports. Trips down the ice can alternate in quick succession, and every one could end the game. Overtime is particularly great because there are no commercial breaks.

20

I never understood the “hockey is low scoring” argument. Granted, it isn’t basketball (generally speaking and the Pacers-Pistons series not withstanding) but it isn’t as low scoring as soccer (again generally). Why would a football game that is 21-14 be considered higher scoring than a 3-2 hockey game?