Athletic Contests Debased by Scramble for Money and Electronic Gizmos

College sports programs and the NCAA have a number of problems that need to be sorted out one of which is the surrender of the contests to the quest for money. The debasing source of money comes from  advertising, radio and TV, and signs in stadiums.   College football and basketball games are both being infected by the same disease. How to maximize the amount of money to be made from each athletic contest. The quality of the game does not seem to matter anymore. In the sports of football and basketball they are constantly trying to find more ways to insert advertising into the games. For professional sports, the teams are private businesses and how they want to showcase their business is up to them.   However, colleges are supposed to be academic institutions and their athletic contests are supposed to be extracurricular activities for their students. In the sports which do not attract advertising revenues the games still seem to be conducted for the students. With football and basketball the academic institutions have surrendered to the drive for dollars.

The finance officers of the colleges have decided to turn these athletic contests into money fountains and they consistently spend exorbitant sums to stage and promote them further. They enter into contracts which have totally changed the nature of the game to allow more advertising to occur at the expense of the athletic contest.  The football games are now an hour longer than they used to be and that entire hour is the result of timeouts that mostly occur to allow commercial advertising while the players stand around waiting for the game to continue. This is even disconcerting if you're attending the game because all of a sudden there's the man standing out in the field in his red jacket, holding up the game until his little screen tells him that the advertisements are over. Then as suddenly as the game was stopped, the contest continues. Games used to have much more flow and excitement as the advertising, when it occurred, had to occur during a timeout that was called during the game or before or after the game or at halftime. In the quest for more money incongruent timeouts were created to allow more advertising.

The colleges have allowed the game to be reconstructed to this excessive extent seeking revenue, but the revenue is mostly canceled out by added expenditures.  The epitome of this is the fact that bowl games with a $1 million payout are now considered a consolation prize as the school will at best break even after expenses or lose money by playing in that game. This incongruency is incomprehensible.

Another embarrassing feature of trying to make money off of athletic contests is the gambling advertising that has appeared at some number of stadiums around the country. Some schools have entered into contracts with gambling companies where the company’s advertisements are splattered all over the stadium and you cannot watch the game without being bombarded by calls to bet and almost certainly lose more money. Of course that is the gambling company’s intention. What is mind boggling is that these academic institutions are so busy chasing revenue that they have entered into contracts promoting gambling.

An additional feature of athletic contests which has significantly delayed games and made them less exciting is the insertion of electronic controls into the refereeing of the game. Every time there is a close play we now have a timeout called so that the referee or umpire can go to a replay camera to see if the play was called correctly on the field. Games were played for many decades without this feature. The former momentum and excitement of the game was much better than the stand around time we now have for the referee to go watch his little screen. To understand the extent to which these timeouts in football change the flow of the game one has only to attend a soccer, lacrosse, or field hockey game, in which the clock keeps moving, and the play keeps progressing. Those games are much more entertaining  and the true momentum of the game can be readily felt by those watching or participating in the action. Since the vast majority of the referee calls, even in football, turn out to be correct it is not clear why we need this absolute precision that camera control is supposed to provide.  However, this feature does not always provide correct calls. It is just another batch of people making judgement calls from certain camera angles. There have been a number of occasions in which the review by the camera did not provide the correct call.  In other words the cameras have simply provided another means of dispute and aggravation over what is the right call while at the same time slowing down the flow and momentum of the game without necessarily giving precision.

With all the money and brainpower that now exists in professional sports and the NCAA it would seem that a little bit of effort could produce a situation where the advertisers can shorten their ads and run them during the time between plays while the offensive team is huddling in football or during the other timeouts that occur during a football or basketball game and halftime which is more attuned to what the media companies have to do in an ice hockey game. Apparently the people at the NCAA are so focused on getting more money they don't have any interest in trying to reverse this trend back to where college athletics like football or basketball are extracurricular activities for students and not a money source controlling the colleges.

Finally, please get rid of the replay cameras.  Otherwise the degradation of the game will continue.

Silence Dogood