Now that the wonderful college football season has ended with my home state's flagship university atop the mountain, the sports world turns its full attention to the NFL.
Having narrowed down the field to the final two, woe is us.
We are now in the middle stages of the interminable Stupid Bowl run-up, during which analysts throw every possibility against the wall in their aggregate effort to demonstrate their collective ignorance about how the game will play out. Primarily, they will wax in a continuous loop for a fortnight about the contestants' past performances, which we already know will have little bearing on the contest.
Indeed, one of the two combatants is legendary for their weekly overhauls that render all that came before as credible as a presidential tweet.
The dreariness will not end there. Once Disneyland gets its annual plug and the postmortems are rung out a week later, we will be subjected to a sports universe whiling away the next several months obsessing about NBA regular season and early playoff irrelevancies, as if they will have any effect on the inevitable Cleveland-Golden State championship. You will hear more about who finishes seventh in the West -- some mediocre outfit of no consequence -- than about global poverty.
(During this time, the preliminary NHL season will conclude, and its months of playoffs will drag on, but you don't have to worry about sports media wasting any airtime on the sport. If you want to see the games, try the Elbonian Music channel, number 657 on your satellite package.)
Thankfully, the college hoops season will offer a consequential interregnum in February and March. Because it actually does matter to fans, alumni and locals who emerges victorious from some third rate conference and gets to go dancing against some big conference bully, the league playoffs will inspire huge interest around the nation. And unlike the early months of the NBA playoffs, round one and two (the real rounds one and two, not the Dayton-based play-in games euphemistically called Round 1) will actually matter, and provide noteworthy drama, as upsets provide some smaller conference teams and their school communities with their own Super Bowl moments.
The Final Four kicks off in Phoenix just as the Major League Baseball season -- thank God! -- finally resumes in April. It's always darkest before the dawn.
What do Gregg Popovich, Leonard Fournette and all of Major League Baseball have in common?
They're not buying the hype.
Popovich is the championship-winning San Antonio Spurs coach who regularly flouts NBA rules by resting his best players for whole games, despite outrage from league brass and ticket-buying fans. Recently, LeBron James absorbed blowback for similarly agreeing not to make a trip to Memphis for the second half of a home-and-home series between the Cavaliers and the Grizzlies.
Fournette is the star running back at LSU who has chosen to skip his team's bowl game -- an advertising platform for Hyundai -- in order to prepare for his Major League career in the NFL, which will actually pay him a salary. The sporting public lit up Twitter and the radio and TV commentary universe with brick-a-brats for Fournette, Christian McCaffrey and others making the same decision.
All of Major League Baseball regularly sits its star players from time to time in order to rest them for the grueling six-month, 162-game schedule. No one comments.
Their Own Best Interest
The common thread is this: the people involved recognize, even if their hypocritical overseers don't want to acknowledge it, that their best interests don't dovetail with those of the money counters in their sport. Contrary to the Association's best efforts to bamboozle fans about the abject irrelevance of its interminable regular season, Popovich understands that his team will cruise into the over-stuffed playoff field regardless of its lineup in any given game. He knows that seeding is, as Harry Truman famously quipped about the vice presidency, as relevant as the fifth teat on a cow. And he knows that championships are won on fresh legs, not on victories in Game 26 of an 82-game season against an out-of-conference opponent. And finally, he is well aware that he answers to the owner of the San Antonio Spurs, not the commissioner of the NBA.
Fournette, McCaffrey, et. al. are unmoved by the NCAA's best efforts to befuddle them about their "amateur" status. They are professional revenue generators for their schools, no more so than during bowl season, when a single game kicks back a multi-million dollar payout, even if it is the desultory Buffalo Wild Wings Sun Bowl to which McCaffrey's Stanford squad has been relegated. Each of them is acting in his own best interest. The swami of the NCAA, whatever irrelevant personage that is today, won't reimburse these NFL prospects if they get injured or fall in the draft because they offered their talents for free to the university's capital engine for one more game.
Some of the derision aimed at Fournette, McCaffrey and their ilk has centered around their "abandonment" of teammates. This is hysterical. Both are leaving school after their junior year, a well-worn tradition against which no one has ever railed for "abandoning" teammates. Coaches regularly "abandon" recruits for better-paying jobs at bigger football programs. That die was cast long ago.
A Base Hit for Baseball
Once again, baseball gets it right like no other sport. It's commonly understood that in a long season players need occasional rest in order to perform at their best for the most games. Fans purchase tickets aware that their favorite player might play spectator that day. Ironically, unlike the NBA, MLB's regular season actually does matter. One game can and often does cost teams an opportunity to earn a playoff spot that can lead to a championship. Yet everyone involved readily accepts the notion that resting players is a long-term investment.
What really separates baseball from college football and the NBA is that the latter two sports are built on foundations of hypocrisy, inevitably propping up a precarious structure prone to a collapse of logic. For all its warts, Major League Baseball at least is what it says it is, which is why no one complains when its athletes skip a meaningless game.
Thankfully, the college hoops season will offer a consequential interregnum in February and March. Because it actually does matter to fans, alumni and locals who emerges victorious from some third rate conference and gets to go dancing against some big conference bully, the league playoffs will inspire huge interest around the nation. And unlike the early months of the NBA playoffs, round one and two (the real rounds one and two, not the Dayton-based play-in games euphemistically called Round 1) will actually matter, and provide noteworthy drama, as upsets provide some smaller conference teams and their school communities with their own Super Bowl moments.
