I do hope we’re not going to start referring to the Foxboro Patriots, Orchard Park Bills, East Rutherford Giants, and so forth. To say nothing of the pending “Oakland Athletics of Fremont”.
Look, to the world at large, anywhere between San Diego and Santa Barbara (and sometimes even those) is “LA”.
Yep, agreed on all counts, but I’m intrigued by this:
If we completely ignore rivalries and ratings, what would be the ideal divisional split geographicly? The only requirement I will impose is that two teams in the same market should be in different conferences, preferably with the same geographical descriptor.
AFC East NFC East
Patriots Eagles
Jets **<->** Giants
Bills **Panthers**
**Ravens** **<->** Redskins
AFC North NFC North
Steelers Packers
**Colts** <-> Bears
Browns Vikings
Bengals Lions
AFC South NFC South
Jaguars Falcons
Titans Saints
Texans <-> **Cowboys**
**Dolphins** <-> Buccaneers
AFC West NFC West
Chargers Seahawks
Raiders **<->** 49ers
Broncos Cardinals
Chiefs <-> Rams
I would dig these divisions.
ETA: Here’s a decent enough map (expand to actual size) if anyone wants to try to come up with a better plan. For example, there’s a huge distance between Daalas and Tampa…
Unfortunately so. I’ve even known some people in NorCal who refer to everything south of the Tehachapi Mountains as LA.
Also, relating back to some other comments, teams like Dallas, Kansas City, St. Louis, etc. could fit fairly nicely in multiple divisions, geographically speaking. I have no problem with Dallas in the NFC East. However, an LA team in an Eastern or Southern division is stretching too far, IMO.
NFC West: SF, Sea, ARZ, STL
NFC South: TB, NO, ATL, CAR
NFC East: DAL, NYG, WAS, PHI
The only possible alignment issue here is where to put DAL and STL. DAL is west of STL, but not by much. You’d rather the Rams played in the east? That would suck a lot of fun out of the NFL.
Granted, Miami, Indy, and Baltimore are geographic oddballs in terms of realignment, but not outrageously so. If I lived east of the Mississippi, I might think differently. That’s why I said the alignment was “fairly” nice, not perfect.
AFC East: BUF, MIA, NE, NYJ
AFC South: JAX, HOU, IND, TEN
Swap out LA for BUF and you have utter craziness, taking us back to the old NFL (ATL in the West, TB in the North, ARZ in the East). Swapping LA for JAX is less offensive because LA is at least in the southern half of the nation, although LA is not considered part of “The South” (i.e., Dixie).
In a perfect world, BUF or JAX to LA would result in KC getting bumped out of the West, but breaking up the OAK-KC division rivalry for the sake of perfect alignment ain’t gonna happen.
Hey, I’ve heard of people in Redding (during that secession movement a few years back) calling San Francisco “Southern California”.
I’ve been trying to come up with a scenario that might help explain the situation.
Imagine a Europe, from Rejkavik to Moscow, in which there are only 30 football clubs. Thirty, period. No Second Division, no national leagues, no local leagues, no national teams, no World Cup, nothing. If you want to watch a football match anywhere in Europe, you must watch one of the 15 matches being played by those 30 clubs. If you want to choose to follow a club, you must choose one of those 30 clubs. There is simply no other option. And imagine that soccer’s popularity is exactly the same as it is now, with (tens of) millions of followers in every European country.
Now imagine that only one of those 30 clubs has its home field within the area covering Iceland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, and that’s the “London” club. For years and years, for any Icelander, Irishman, Scot, or Welshman who is a football fan, he or she has no choice but to choose London, as the nearest club, as the object of fan attention, or randomly choose one of the other 29 clubs, say Paris or Rome or Berlin or Moscow.
Don’t you think that if one of the other 29 other clubs decided to relocate to Glasgow or Dublin, that there would be a built-in fan base ready to accept the relocated club as its own local club?
That’s the situation in the United States. It’s a country of tens of millions of (baseball/football/basketball) fans and 4 million square miles in which there are only about 30 (baseball/football/basketball) clubs to choose from.
Furthermore, until the 1960s, most of the clubs were in the northeast quadrant of the country, no further west than Saint Louis and no further south than Washington, D.C. So when the New York and Brooklyn baseball clubs moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1957, why wouldn’t the baseball fans of San Francisco and Los Angeles accept the relocated teams as their own?
Imagine a Premier League in which all the clubs are in the Home Counties, and there are simply no other clubs. Wouldn’t Manchester or Glasgow fans like to steal one of those clubs away?
Does this make it any more understandable?
I thought of another thing that might shed light on the matter for you. In American sports, there is no promotion/relegation. “Big league” status is one that is granted upon creation of a club and can never be taken away. Similarly, “minor league” status is also granted upon creation and can never be changed. That’s why nobody cares about lower level clubs: they’re never going to be in the majors. So, most people don’t pay attention to them. Even in local papers, news about them is treated as secondary (like high school sports) to news about the nearest major league club, even if it is less “local” than the local minor league club.
So think about non-major league clubs as like your school team. Yes, you’ll always have some degree of loyalty to your school, but are you really going to follow them the way you follow a professional team?
I mildly disagree with that. I think in the case of minor league baseball and hockey, the people who live in the smaller cities where the teams are located do follow and care about their clubs. One fact that UK and European sports fans should know about is that in baseball and hockey, it’s individual players rather than teams that are promoted to a higher level. Players are signed out of high school and college by the major league teams and then assigned to a minor league team they’re affiliated with. From there, there’s a sorting out process where, in the course of a few years, the best players ostensibly rise to the top (i.e., the major leagues) and the also-rans drop out.
It’s harder to support a minor league team because it’s impossible to get too attached to any of the players. The good ones get called up to the next level before you get a chance to know them, and you barely have a chance to appreciate their development. The enjoyment factor has to come more from the ballpark experience than the team itself, at least to a far greater degree than at the uppermost (stable) levels.
I think that just the fact that minor league teams mostly aren’t independent hurts fan loyalty.
Ha! Tell that to any Charger fan who’s lived in San Diego for most of this decade. Oh, sure, they’ll all tell you that they were there back in the dark days, but almost nobody actually was, so odds are good that anyone who currently claims to have been a Chargers fan for life probably rooted for the Broncos from the mid-1990s to about 2004.
The problem is that the vast majority of football fans are Bandwagon Jumpers. If sports were a prison and sports fans made up all the prisoners, the Bandwagon Jumpers would be like the pot dealers – they would have the run of the prisoner culture, by and large.
You have never lived in Dallas or Washington, have you?
That’s just blatantly wrong in baseball and hockey. Where do you think expansion teams in baseball come from? The difference is not that minor-league status is permanent–it just plain isn’t–but that “promotion”, if you would call it that (listen up Europeans):
There’s definitely some hatred from the Cleveland fan base towards Baltimore. You can call that a rivalry if you’d like. It’s definitely stronger feelings than Cleveland generally has towards Cincinatti who are too cute in a retarded puppy sort of way to hate too much.
Although I guess it depends on how you define a rivalry. I want to beat Baltimore, beat the living crap out of them, and root for their failure. Same with Pittsburgh. But I half-respect Pittsburgh… absolutely zero respect for Baltimore. There’s a sizable minority at least that feels the same way.
They don’t follow and care about their clubs in the same way that they care about the major league team that they’ve chosen to follow. Every serious sports fan is a fan of major league sports and it is rare for someone to call himself a baseball/football/basketball fan and have as his principal interest a minor league fan. I’m not saying such eccentrics don’t exist, but they are economically irrelevant.
An expansion team is the creation of an entirely new club. The one thing it is absolutely not like is promotion of a club. When a league wants to expand, it does not look at existing minor league teams. It looks at offers from investment groups to create an entirely new team.
As in never.
The minor league team is not promoted. In fact, in most cases, if there was a minor league team in a place that is awarded an expansion franchise, the minor league team continues to exist … it is merely moved to another city.
I have to come back to this because there’s no way someone could make this statement while having the most basic knowledge about expansion in American sports and promotion in European sports.
An expansion team:
It is treated in every way like an entirely new entity. Its records and statistics start anew.
One of the basic differences here is that in the United States, the basic operating entity is the league. The league creates (and sometimes uncreates) clubs and its decision on how many clubs there will be is entirely up to it. The owners of the individual clubs are actually really partners in the ownership of the league. It’s like a co-op building. You have a share in the building (league) that gives you the right to control one unit (club). You can sell that club but only with the permission of your partners.
In England, for example, someone with enough money can create a club, enter it into the the lowest levels of competition and can qualify, through objective measures, to move up into higher leagues. It’s completely different from what happens in the United States.
Okay, the Brewers, Padres, and Orioles also took names of previously existing minor league clubs, but I think the point still stands.
Plus, an expansion team is charged a fee of hundreds of millions of dollars in order to be admitted to the league.
And existing club owners are given veto power over placing an expansion team within their geographical markets.
I certainly do, and I’m glad to hear it, too. Ain’t nothing like a good recreational hatred, and the mroe, the merrier too - that’s a huge part of what fanship is all about.
The Padres, off the top of my head; I know there are more, but I’m not going to dig through the MLB history books to find more. That said, it looks like I misrepresented the expansion process; not all expansion teams are in places where minor league teams have been relatively successful and act basically as major-league continuations of that city’s professional history, but it happens often enough (see the Padres, again).
I already said that.
Ahem! You are completely ignoring college sports, you know. There is no group that puts the fanatic back in fan like college sports fans.
Horned Frogs rule!
In the U.S., minor league teams or other major league teams joining a league happened pretty regularly in the past, but doesn’t really happen anymore. If I remember correctly, a lot of the newer NHL teams from the 60’s-70’s came from a minor league. Also, the NBA cannibalized the ABA in the 70’s. More historically, the NL and the NFL joined with rival leagues. Today, however, its like others have said. Any expansion teams buy into the league. Even in the case of the expansion Seattle franchise in MLS, they may co opt some of the Sounder’s players, and maybe even use the name, but they will be a different ownership group than the current USL team.
Probably the WHA, mostly.
That sound about right. I don’t follow hockey that much, so I didn’t want to blindly speculate.
