fantasy sports: things you will change about your favorite professional sports when you are made king

I spend too much time thinking about this

- how many cities can 'support teams' (in yr country)? how many leagues? how should revenues be allocated, both among teams and among players?
- what's the 'ideal' playoff / way of declaring winners at the end of the year? how long should the season be?
- rule changes? what's the 'best' form of over-time? how safe can you make american football before it becomes not-football? is it morally wrong to allow people to participate in hyper-violent sports?

MMA - ditch the 10-point must scoring system in favor of one where judges can more easily weight dominant rounds/overall performance
baseball - give Portland a MLB team, force the Angels to trade Albert Pujols to the Giants for Barry Zito
basketball - officiating reforms of some kind

cmon this at least deserves joke answers!

- promotion and relegation for all american sports
- college football/basketball teams turned into minor league teams w/ some sort of broken affiliation w/ the school. teams that can't break even go away.
- any city that spends taxpayer money a stadium is bombed

socialize the hell out of the MLB to promote competitive balance
was going to say the same about the NBA, but truth is small-market teams are hamstrung there by people not wanting to play in Milwaukee

The Wave abolished from baseball parks

oh, and all ball-strike, safe-out & fair-foul calls to be made by robot umpires

oh yeah that's a good one

Nobody wants to sit around and boo a robot.

UMPIRE SUCKS! REFORMAT HIS HARD DISK!

My change: Steroids required for all corner outfielders and designated hitters.

yeah, robot officiating as soon as inhumanly possible plz

make college sports illegal. more local & pro-am clubs, relegation, etc.

i was thinking of starting a thread sort of like this to talk about this article, heh

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7559458/cte-concussion-crisis-economic-look-end-football

i think american football should be played w/o pads

Losing thousands of college players and hundreds of pro players might produce a few more doctors or engineers. Plus, talented coaches and general managers would gravitate toward management positions in American industry.

lol

cowen mostly being trolly also he is a basketball fan so his prediction of basketball taking over the country is maybe not entirely unbiased. the super bowl is the biggest media event in the country. that is not something you can compare to 'people driving without seatbelts'.

also no Star-Spangled Banner or God Bless America

(going full fantasy here obv, that'd be like banning Air Force flyovers from football)

most valuable thing about the cowen/grier piece is how big the big sports of earlier eras were and how quickly they collapsed when... something changed.

I would make every team based in New York City

there are certain things that might have something to em

The Ivy League quits football, then California shuts down its participation, busting up the Pac-12. Then the Big Ten calls it quits, followed by the East Coast schools. Now it's mainly a regional sport in the southeast and Texas/Oklahoma. The socioeconomic picture of a football player becomes more homogeneous: poor, weak home life, poorly educated. Ford and Chevy pull their advertising, as does IBM and eventually the beer companies.

I can see the ivy league shutting down its football programs within the next 30 years. the process would be a war w/ alums, for sure, but after attending an ivy league football game this year I am p skeptical about how much the powerful alumni base 'really cares' about the football rivalries or whatever. after that could the process 'getting rid of football' turn into a symbol of 'focusing on academics'? I guess. but I don't see that convincing usc or notre dame alums.

you could definitely shut down ivy league football if you gave them a replacement event at which to get shitfaced blackout drunk

I am fairly sure that at least 50% of the columbia student body could not tell you where the football stadium is

it's in the meadowlands, right?

rename the ny jets and giants the nj jets and giants

force brett ratner into the half-done atlantic stadium wearing a vest rigged with C4 and pull the trigger on him on live tv

move the nets back to NJ

require etiquette lessons for fans in boston, philly and nyc

haha I am actually v much more 'require every sports team to be named after the shitty suburb they put the stadium in'

strict financial controls for all soccer clubs including meaningful board representation for supporters and local authorities

v much for*

Remove all human line judges and umpires from tennis.

Not sure the downfall of boxing and horse racing tells us anything about the future of American team sports. Horse racing is only interesting if you can see it live and can gamble - it's not a TV sport, there are no leagues or championships (aside from the three events that still get national TV coverage). Boxing didn't decline because of safety fears, but because of corruption and moving to a pay-per-view model for good fights.
If anything, I think they're representative of Americans turning from their local individual sports and nearby teams to following the major franchises, even when they're too far away to watch live. Don't see how that doesn't bode well for the NFL in particular. It's the only American sport that is inherently event viewing because of the way it's scheduled.

As far as barbarity and people turning away from the NFL, I don't see it happening. As above, we've known boxing can lead to dementia and Parkinson's for generations, but no one's talked about banning it. Instead we just embraced an even more viscerally brutal sport (but one that's probably safer for the athletes in the long term) (ie MMA).

Baseball is a much, much bigger deal today than it was in 1900 or even 1950, even though it's no longer the dominant pro sport.

allow one cyborg enhancement per player per team

caveat to boxing/NFL: yeah, boxers today are as often as not working-class first- or second-generation immigrants which may jibe with his idea that middle-class and up parents will discourage their sons from playing football, but boxers were never drawn from the middle class to start with.

also the death of the middle class makes the risk of middle class people not playing football less of a problem

- tax on all NFL/NBA/MLB tickets that goes directly to MLS teams (whch will have been locally nationalized along the lines of the Green Bay Packers) in order to let them buy first-rate players instead of washed-up dudes

i don't agree with that one at all!

i think the best long term hope for MLS is 'get more mexican americans'

tough, I'm the king

ha ok, have at it your highness

what if we turn nfl teams into 'clubs' so you have a soccer team you support along w/ the niners or whatever

that way you don't even get a choice, you sorta have to root for a soccer team

okay, instead of pimping the MLS, we use the ticket tax to build 5000-seat soccer stadiums in every town of 100k or more people and fund low-level pro leagues until soccer catches on and they can support themselves?
also okay with iatee's club idea

we could make soccer players wear helmets, also make the soccerball into an olive shape, also let soccer players pick up the ball and throw it

that marketing deal btw the yankees and manchester really lit americans aflame didn't it

added benefit, this is some WPA putting-America-to-work shit

well if manchester united renames themselves 'the yankees' I think that might still work out

Americans don't know where Manchester is.

you could do a special week during the nfl like the pink shoes or retro uniforms, but it's that they can't use their hands

surprise everyone turning in to the next Super Bowl by actually airing the MLS championship

tuning

please stop trying to force soccer on us king milo

it's either this or public executions of every member of the Walton family (retail empire, not TV), your call

we're talking about people being turned off by health risks, . somebody who can't stand watching mma for that reason also wouldn't be watching wrestling.

a hoy hoy was directly linking wrestling injuries and fatalities to MMA
It's only if MMA gains a track record of deaths, etc. - and there's no logical reason to connect pro wrestling and MMA on that. Boxing actually makes sense.

NBA: No team-specific contracts, pay is all incentive based, year to year. Every year, a draft is held at the beginning of the year to divvy up the entire league's players to specific teams. The order of the fantasy draft is determined by a poker tourney held the weekend before draft weekend, played by the GMs.

After the Finals ends each season, the players are thrown back in the hopper along with the new declares for the draft, and teams are reassembled.

well it's not out of the question that someone could die in a mma match

MLB: Regular season is 10 games long, playoffs last 8 months

well it's not out of the question that someone could die in a mma match

― iatee, Saturday, February 25, 2012 5:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I believe there has been one official death in a sanctioned mma fight.

There are about a dozen boxing deaths every year.

"official death" dunno what the hell I mean by that sry

big john mccarthy gets pissed sometimes

and re: fatalities, marathons kill a few people every year but no one really talks about it.

By and large I think people are more bothered by long-term health effects (dozens or hundreds of people with head trauma syndromes, etc.) than isolated fatalities.

if millions of people watched marathons and sorta got some pleasure from seeing people suffer along the way, then they might feel bad about being a part of the process when those peope died.

All sports:
officiating transparency

NHL:

Eliminate shootout; old timey OT rules.
Eliminate gay trapezoid
move to ITL-size rink <-- I was on the fence abt this for a while but really it's all safety. The players literally have nowhere to go on the rink w/o getting killed every second.
74 (ish) game season; All-star game eliminated outright, forever.
Eliminate 4 teams.
BONUS: NHL players still allowed in olympics but season will not stop for them.

MLB
Robot balls/strikes
Old timey pointless all-star game
Allow trading of draft picks

NFL:
College OT rules ffs.
No TV to's after kickoffs
Major and immediate equipment overhaul
Extended health care/pensions for players w/ "X" number of minutes played (vs. "games"), tiered if need be.

NCAA:
NCAA is eliminated outright
Players are paid a living wage, using time cards (lol) if need be.
I like everyone else's coach salary limits.

NCAAFootball:
True playoff

NBA:
4 team contraction

MLB trading draft picks is an A+ diea

RE: NFL equipment --- if you've ever picked up a regulation helmet that thing is fucking HEAVY. I feel like if you cut the weight/density by half you could improve the performance AND, since F=ma then...

There was someone floating the idea that modern helmets/facemasks have been a major cause of the head issues in the NFL. No headhunting if all you've got on your noggin is a bit of leather.

of course, the average player wasn't 245 pounds in 1950 either.

I think you can make steps in the right direction w/ helmets but at the end of the day concussions aren't really preventable without seriously adjusting the game itself

gentle hugs instead of tackles

they would find a way to fuck that up

ooh: if you make a tackle, you have to then tickle the player til he laughs.

Mark Cuban must be allowed to purchase a team in any league he wishes

There was someone floating the idea that modern helmets/facemasks have been a major cause of the head issues in the NFL. No headhunting if all you've got on your noggin is a bit of leather.

of course, the average player wasn't 245 pounds in 1950 either.

Also, the incidence of concussions in rugby is possibly higher than most people expect -- I've read that they've been seriously under-reported prior to widespread CTE knowledge.

not sure what pro wrestling's problems have to do with MMA

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Saturday, 25 February 2012 17:15 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Really? You don't see that they are essentially the same thing, that they have massive overlap in fighters, training styles, fighting styles and so on? And then that if MMA is the version where people legit TRY to hurt each other that it might have a similar knock on effect or have similar injuries (or worse) that has been seen in pro wrestling where they don't win by trying to beat the shit out of each other? Oh and then I just use one example of pro wrestling health shit from shoot fighting based on a dude (Goldberg) who styled himself on early UFC and encouraged MMA training early in his career. But I guess they have nothing to do with each other, despite having champions in both sports (Lesnar and Shamrock spring to mind).

a hoy hoy, I'm not seeing the connection between trying to pretend to kick someone in his head but accidentally actually kicking him in the head and genuinely trying to kick someone in the head.

and basically force every team to demonstrate its economic viability on an annual basis

Lemme interrogate this a bit. Gladwell (lol shuttup) sez that pro sports franchises aren't businesses so much as luxury items, like a yacht or some Damien Hirst artripoff, which aren't ontologically disposed towards profitability; further, the economic impact of a franchise on the surrounding city isn't so much stimulative as it is redistributive (I know not your point here but it's a related notion, I think?).

as soon as you shut off any and all support from taxpayers, teams don't need to demonstrate their economic viability, they'll either have it or they won't. part of the reason why franchises can operate as luxury items and not businesses is the fact that there's a limited supply of them - a more open model is less rewarding to the lazy rich dudes.

(but more rewarding to rich dudes who are willing to splurge on their team)

Really? You don't see that they are essentially the same thing, that they have massive overlap in fighters, training styles, fighting styles and so on?

A head kick landing flush in wrestling is one thing - because the event is designed to be entertainment, where those punches and kicks are pulled and the guy getting kicked isn't actually prepared to take one flush. And the fights are scripted to have huge, dangerous moves (lots of head-kicking, jumping off ropes, etc.) that cannot and do not happen in sanctioned MMA.

mma is not designed to be entertainment?

as soon as you shut off any and all support from taxpayers, teams don't need to demonstrate their economic viability, they'll either have it or they won't. part of the reason why franchises can operate as luxury items and not businesses is the fact that there's a limited supply of them - a more open model is less rewarding to the lazy rich dudes.

intersting! You would make an excellent Minister of Finance when I am king.

What I didn't get the first time I read the Gladwell and still don't get is why having a very finite number of teams leads to them being luxury items. Does the scarcity of resources (players, arenas/stadia, etc.) play into it?

Morbs-level pedantry. Yes, all pro sports are designed to be entertainment in addition to competition.

Pro wrestling isn't a sport and is designed to be entertainment - characters, scripts, etc..

well I wouldn't say the limited supply of teams necessary leads to them being luxury items - they can serve as luxury items in europe too. but anything that only exists in a limited quantity is gonna be a good trophy for someone with too much money.

milo I think you are taking offense at people comparing wrestling to mma as sports when really people are comparing them because they are monetized brutality.

Uh, no: "Really? You don't see that they are essentially the same thing, that they have massive overlap in fighters, training styles, fighting styles and so on?" A hoy hoy, who I keep responding to, has been drawing direct parallels between the two in terms of action and outcomes. You should read his posts.

Wrestling isn't really "monetized brutality" - it's an action movie. People don't actually think they're seeing people try to hurt each other, any more than they think Arnold is shooting people in Terminator.
MMA and boxing and football? Yeah, those are truly brutal, because they're real.

wrestling is monetized brutality because the process involves people destroying their bodies, that makes it 'real' in the same way that a stunt man who dies on a movie set 'actually dies'

a hoy hoy, I'm not seeing the connection between trying to pretend to kick someone in his head but accidentally actually kicking him in the head and genuinely trying to kick someone in the head.

― omar 13337713 (Leee), Sunday, 26 February 2012 21:44 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Both involve a dude getting smacked in the head. Also pro wrestling kicks are still kicks, it is just that usually dudes can know how to react 'and how to fall', which is an advantage you don't get in mma, with muay thai kicks and so on designed to fuck a dude up.

All of these are wrong, though, it's almost like you've never actually watched MMA. Lesnar is pretty much the only connection you've got - and he just retired, in large part because his wrestling career had nothing to do with modern MMA.

A head kick landing flush in wrestling is one thing - because the event is designed to be entertainment, where those punches and kicks are pulled and the guy getting kicked isn't actually prepared to take one flush. And the fights are scripted to have huge, dangerous moves (lots of head-kicking, jumping off ropes, etc.) that cannot and do not happen in sanctioned MMA.

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Sunday, 26 February 2012 22:31 (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've watched plenty of mma and shit that can cause concussions and other stuff (my og point) happens all the fucking time and my point was i know this because the same stuff happens in wrestling (and boxing). beating a dude till he cannot get up again is going to have long term effects on the body.

Also Lesnar is nowhere near the only connection I've got. He retired because of neither wrestling or MMA by the way, but because his intestines had to be ripped out because of a virus. MMA and UFC is about seeing whether a wrestler could fight a karate champ and so on. And then I don't see how you can think there isn't a massive overlap in training style, especially when it comes to brawling, submission specialists, amateur mat-style grappling, only a fucking lunatic would go in to the octogon without learning how to properly bump etc.

It seems crazy that anyone would think that the crazy health problems related to boxing or wrestling or other martial arts won't happen with MMA. People are a lot better conditioned today to boxers who got fucked up in the 70s, but both involve dudes today taking a fucking amount of punishment to the body and will have consequences.

People don't actually think they're seeing people try to hurt each other, any more than they think Arnold is shooting people in Terminator.
MMA and boxing and football? Yeah, those are truly brutal, because they're real.

What 'people' think they see and what happens when someone punches you in the face and breaks your nose, or wraps their arms around your face until you lose blood to the brain until you tap out are two different things, fyi.

Like I don't know how much more I can clearly say it but let me do it again: I'm not talking about Bruiser Brody getting stabbed to death or what happens to New Jacks body when he jumps 40 feet to the ground or whether it is real or not because they pre-determine finishes. I'm saying that there is a history of fighting giving anyone involved major health problems and MMA will be no different. I could have just as easily used boxing as a frame of reference but as people upthread dismissed that as potential for similar repercutions, I thought I'd throw in another similar sport. (And whether you believe it or not, when a punch is thrown in wrestling, dudes get hit hard in the face and the only 'fake' aspect is that dudes are trained how to react to that punch.)

I've watched plenty of mma and shit that can cause concussions and other stuff (my og point) happens all the fucking time and my point was i know this because the same stuff happens in wrestling (and boxing). beating a dude till he cannot get up again is going to have long term effects on the body.

Also Lesnar is nowhere near the only connection I've got. He retired because of neither wrestling or MMA by the way, but because his intestines had to be ripped out because of a virus.

MMA and UFC is about seeing whether a wrestler could fight a karate champ and so on. And then I don't see how you can think there isn't a massive overlap in training style, especially when it comes to brawling, submission specialists, amateur mat-style grappling, only a fucking lunatic would go in to the octogon without learning how to properly bump etc.

It seems crazy that anyone would think that the crazy health problems related to boxing or wrestling or other martial arts won't happen with MMA. People are a lot better conditioned today to boxers who got fucked up in the 70s, but both involve dudes today taking a fucking amount of punishment to the body and will have consequences.

Pro wrestling training is as much about bodybuilding as it is technique. Jiu-jitsu, boxing, Muay Thai - all equally important to wrestling in MMA and all things fighters train in - are non-existent, because they have nothing to do with pro wrestling.

Wrestling's health problems are far more about steroid use and the touring schedule as they are about the wrestling itself.
MMA undoubtedly has health consequences, the discussion was about severity - and wrestling is still not a relevant touchstone.

WRESTLING IS ABOUT MORE THAN WWE FYI. Watch Eddie Edwards (trained by Dan Severn btw) v. Davey Richards and then tell me it is all about steroids and have nothing similar going on to MMA, kick boxing, muay thai etc.

Seriously, get off your high fucking horse. I bring up legit issues and you start talking about how it is like an action movie. You dismiss Lesnar as doing nothing that matters between amateur mat wrestling and MMA which is so fucking condescending, as if the massive amounts of training and fighting experience were for nothing. And then oh look I bring up more legit connections and you start talking about steroids. Like gtfo. I said it isn't just about getting punched in the head but brutal submission techniques, which makes mma more like wrestling than boxing and just maybe you can understand how that might be a relevant touchstone? Maybe just read what I say once before acting like a dick because you don't like pro wrestling?

lol ok arguing on the internet is stupid and i need to stop. But lastly: didn't a dude die in ring in a high profile kick-boxing bout last year? It isn't a sport I follow as closely but surely the connections there could show the potential severity.

Wrestling's health problems are far more about steroid use and the touring schedule as they are about the wrestling itself.

Uhh, wrestling's health problems are far more about painkiller abuse (e.g. Eddie Guerrero) and repeated trauma to the head (Chris Benoit), hmmm that last one sounds familiar.

Pro Wrestling: replace body blows with food fights.

Guerrero's style more MMA like, Benoit was famous for, umm, using a diving headbutt and headbutts are illegal in most MMA.

Benoit was a shoot/submission specialist! The flying headbutt was just one of his finishers.

You know what I mean. It is the move most often connected to his mental instability and has since been banned as a move at many places. His body was already messed up but the head trauma was what made him be crazy and evil and he isn't exactly your stereotypical case study but the exception.

ncaa: conferences must be small enough that all schools play each other once in football and home-and-away in basketball

We're on the same side! I'm just correcting the idea that steroids are the main risk-factor in pro wrestling. xp

:D

MMA - 3 rounds, 15 minutes each round will be the standard fight format

MLS - No more expansion teams unless Arizona gets one.

EPL - Play late-afternoon and night games only so I don't have to get up early in the morning.

American College Football - FFS its time for a real Chamnpionship.

Also I really like Jimmy's ideas for the NHL...

they should move hockey to the summer olympics, so you don't have to interrupt the nhl season once every 4 years