I’ve been reading about the NBA wanting to add a midseason tournament and expand the playoffs. The NFL wants to add another game and expand their playoffs as well. Now I see this story about MLB and some goofy (to me) ideas about expanding their playoffs and adding an element of the top seeds selecting which opponent they play.
What’s going on with these three leagues wanting to make major changes? Sure, every so often teams are added, and MLB added the wild card a while back. However, I don’t recall ever seeing a trend for changes this major in all three leagues all at the same time, and I’ve been following them since I was a kid in the 80s. Is this due to falling TV ratings? The owners of major sports teams all simultaneously becoming more greedy? What’s going on here?
I believe the deal with the NBA is they are trying to find a way to boost TV ratings and to raise the profile of the lesser teams. The NBA is, and always has been, a top-heavy league; any given season there are really only a handful of teams that have a legitimate shot at a championship, and everyone else is just fodder, and everyone knows it before the season even begins. This means the majority of the league is basically shit.
It’s just going to be a secondary playoffs where the same shit teams are eliminated immediately, and the same 6 good teams will be playing in the end.
The NFL was looking at declining ratings for several years, but I believe that their ratings rebounded in both 2018 and 2019.
In that league’s case, it’s a matter of:
Another game (or two; they’ve proposed going to 18 over the past few years, as well) means more money for the league – mostly, additional TV revenue.
Preseason games don’t make as much money as regular season games (since most of them aren’t carried by the national TV networks), so part of the proposals have included considering preseason games to regular season games.
The players’ union has, up until now, been strongly opposed to expanding the schedule, mostly due to injury concerns.
Live sports is about the only thing keeping live cable going and if these leagues can bring more revenue generation to the table, they can probably keep a big chunk of that additional revenue.
It’s easy to see why the NBA is considering the mid-season tournament idea - there is little interest in the league until the playoffs start. As pointed out above, there a few consistently good teams, who are more or less guaranteed to make the playoffs and advance through the first rounds. There isn’t a lot of drama until the Conference finals.
NFL ratings are good but the main thing is that ads targeted to men work well on NFL games. You don’t see viagra, truck, beer,etc ads on Lifetime network.
In the case of MLB, I think (in addition to money, which drives everything) it’s driven by Rob Manfred’s desperate need to define himself as a commissioner that did things. Bud Selig made significant changes to MLB and left it in good condition, Manfred probably doesn’t want to go down in history as a guy who did nothing but maintain the status quo.
There are some clear things that MLB can do to make their game better, particularly speed up the damned game. But, the players’ union has consistently rejected any moves to do this, and Manfred either feels that he really can’t do anything about it, or he doesn’t see it as a real issue.
I suspect that’s because with roughly 150 NBA starters, and the sort of one-on-one nature of basketball play, you have a situation where the relative impact of a standout player is huge. A team who gets a LeBron/Kobe/MJ/Yao/etc… has a HUGE advantage.
Contrast that with baseball, where you have about 270 starters and their relative performance is best determined statistically, or football, where you have 704 starters, and each one has a very defined role to play and consequent limited impact.
That said, I suspect that the NBA suffers from the same problem that baseball does- the season’s too long, and nobody really cares until fairly late in the season. 82 games may be appropriate to let the teams shake out in terms of who is and isn’t good, but if you’re not a hardcore fan, you may as well wait until the playoffs and start watching then, as watching a game in early December is going to be for the sheer love of watching people play basketball, not because the game itself has any real import.
The NFL is just straight up greedy, if you ask me. They have fine ratings, and a polished product. Anything about more games is just trying to squeeze the fans a little bit more.
Cutting down on the commercials would help. Cutting down on batters stepping out of the box after every pitch, and pitchers constantly stepping off the rubber, would make an even bigger difference.
I get that they’re doing it for money. The question is are the leagues doing worse than in the past and trying to right a sinking ship, or did the owners just wake up one day even more greedy than usual? I think a lot of people who do watch do so because of the traditions of the respective leagues. Major changes seem to run the risk of alienating hardcore fans while doing little to attract new fans or increasing the interest of casual fans. If the leagues are really in good shape, why run this risk?
None of this is “new” – all of the North American leagues have been regularly tinkering with things (expanding playoff fields, adding “alternate” uniforms, different overtime formats, etc.) for decades, all in the name of driving fan interest, but really in the name of getting more money. They didn’t suddenly and recently get more greedy; they’ve been increasingly greedy for a long time.
It’s not like MLB or the NFL have been doing things exactly the same way for decades, and the “traditionalist” fans in all of the sports are a dying breed.
It should be hard to make the playoffs in MLB. I personally think enough teams qualify as it is. When you have 162 games to prove yourself a top team and fail to do so, your season should end.
They’ve made two asinine rules- the instant intentional walk, which saves a negligible amount of time, and the three batter minimum, which ruins some of the strategy. I do approve of the new roster limits, teams are carrying too many pitchers and not enough position players.
Part of it is the dinosaur-nature of management. Entertainment markets have fragmented and evolved, and they don’t know how to recapture the market. So they go back to what they believe worked in the past (and it may have)…more playoffs. IMHO, if they want to revive interest, how about making attending the games live affordable? Maybe it’s just me, but being in the stadium is much more conducive to building strong fanship. Instead, most tickets are stupid expensive, food and drink are stupid expensive, and licensed souvenirs and apparel are beyond stupid expensive. Wage growth has been fairly flat vis-a-vis inflation. The leagues are losing their base.
The NFL in particular seemed like it was dipping in popularity and revenue before it ticked back up again. (I say “may” because I’m not sure that declining TV viewership wasn’t due to people watching through webcasts instead.) That may have spurred some urgency to innovate. Now that there is less of a need to make changes that might increase revenue and interest, would you stop the initiatives that you already started? If I’m the NFL I wouldn’t; it doesn’t matter if the urgency is gone, more money is more money.
To recap; I think the reason they are changing is because they want more money (and as a business, making money is their primary job). The reason why it’s happening now is because of the recent slip in ratings that spurred the changes.
Regarding the NFL, another aspect is that they’re about to do a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, which is really the only time they could make a big change like adding more games. The “Let’s do a 17/18 week season” topic comes up every time there’s a new CBA. It’s a bargaining chip.
Maybe more importantly, there are so many more scoring chances in basketball, luck matters less. In a seven-game NBA playoff series, each team would have about 700 possessions; in a NFL playoff each team would probably have less than ten. One bad bounce is much more likely to change the outcome of an NFL game than an NBA playoff series. So upsets are a lot more likely in the NFL playoffs.
