Poll: What is wrong with professional sports today?

[Déjà Bru]

Choose as many as you want.

EDIT: Bah. "You can only add a poll to a thread within 5 minutes of posting the thread."

If a moderator would wish to insert the poll, the choices were as following and respondents would be allowed to choose more than one:

• "Win a championship — anything else is failure"
  
• Head coach / manager carousel
  
• Obscenely large salaries and profits
  
• Rising costs of attending and viewing games
  
• "Balkanization" of sports viewing opportunities
  
• Lack of player loyalty to team / school / city
  
• Sports gambling possibly tainting results
  
• Ubiquitous, relentless, juvenile commercials
  
• Cheating / performance enhancement drugs
  
• Too much analysis and statistics
  
• Obnoxious, vulgar fans
  
• Frequent player injuries
  
• There is something else bothering me (specify in a post)
  
• Nothing! Professional sports is just fine as it is.

I thought a poll would be interesting but it really was not my purpose. I was planning to vote for the first 12 items, all of which bother me about professional sports today.

For, I have realized in the past several days that my ideal of "Pan-Sportsism" is a chimera. What I thought would be an elevation from parochial sports rooting, toward an interest in other teams and sports, is in fact a growing disillusionment with following professional sports at all.

[CONN CHRIS]

Just copy the verbiage you want before starting the thread. Start a new thread, set up a poll, then paste your verbiage.

We can delete this thread once you have it up.

[Cobra Mgr]

I don't see a poll. But it is simple for me..........The decision makers in any sport we have going right now aren't in love with the game, but in love with the profit from the game.

Why are school jumping from conference to conference?
Why are gambling sites now plastered all over stadiums, sports networks, radio & game commercials?
Why are NFL & NBA refs not trained by the leagues?
Why are NFL playoff games on pay networks?
Why was the Russian Sports Federation banned from the Olympics but not their athletes?
Why does Oakland, CA no longer have a baseball team? A football team? A basketball team?
Why did the NCAA defend in the Supreme Court the practice of restricting players from being compensated by pointing out the Constitution allowed prisoners & indentured servants to be treated in the same manner?
Why did the baseball media allow the whole PED situation to exist right under their noses w/o reporting on it?
Why do WNBA players have to play in Europe & largely get compensated more than they do here?
Why are Jerry Richardson & Dan Snyder no longer owners, but Jerry Jones & Robert Kraft still are?
Why have the Giants/Jets not replaced their turf?
Why can't I see every Tar Heels' TV games?
Why are the Carolina Hurricanes game blacked out on my ESPN App?
Why do multiple championship games or series have some half time entertainer?

[Amazin69]

• Grinding out the average fan to reach greater profits via sale of "luxury boxes" and suites to the ultra-rich and to corporations (in the latter case, at public expense, since the cost can be written off as a tax deduction).

Associated with this is the general reduction in stadium size to create artificial scarcity and justify raising all tickets by several orders of magnitude, as well as the refusal to take action against the inflationary impact of the "secondary market" (corporate scalping).

• Insertion of commercials into the game itself, from all the signage on the field/court/rink, as well as the sale of "naming rights" to destroy the local significance of stadium/arena names and "sponsoring" parts of game itself by corporations ("and here's the Allstate kickoff", etc). I don't much care about what's on between innings…that's what the "Commercial skip" button is for.

The NUMBER and LENGTH of ad-breaks is a different issue, but I don't much care whether the ads are for Pepsi or Coke.

• Mangling the established rules of the game to cater to perceived "cool", from sticking the ****ing DH in the NL to pseudo-science twisting kickoff returns, and (sorry, Cobra) silly robo-umps.

(If the umpires aren't doing their job, train them better or get new umpires. Burying the game in even more "after further review", on every single pitch is a needless punt. Yes, Angel Hernandez sucked. That's a reason to fire Angel Hernandez, nothing more.)

As for those items already listed, obviously broadcast balkanization is one of the worst. If you can't view all sports through the same provider (cable or satellite), that's a tax on the viewer. I wouldn't pay for ONE "streaming" service (this issue aside, the format has intrinsic problems), much less the THREE that WWE is currently demanding fans use and that's just one "sport". It is stupid af that I need to give money to Amazon (a deeply evil company, btw) to watch the NFL and ESPn- to see my local hockey team and Pisscock to see the key soccerball games and AppleTV and Roku for MLB and so on.

Gambling is a total disaster, and if we can come up with a better structure for amateur athletics than constantly morphing Mega-Conferences, that would be good, too.

[swany13]

THE GHOST RUNNER IN MLB AND MINOR LEAGUES
The dumb shootout and 3 on 3 in overtime in Hockey

[Cap]

In response to the query "What's wrong with professional sports?" I would have to say darn near everything, and it's only going to get worse. I don't go to games any more and only watch baseball on TV. When they make it too much trouble to watch that any more I'll just switch off. Might as well confine yourself to watching little league play.

I gave up watching hockey a long time ago when I realized the NHL was based in New York and the fix was in. If you're a Canadian fan you probably suspect the same thing.

I used to go to the fights too, but those are few and far between these days. The less said about MMA/UFC the better. Pahtoooee!

The good old days of pro sports are long gone and they won't be coming back. Corporate media controls everything now and they're sucking the joy out of everything in pursuit of every last dollar.

Cap

[low]

I'll pick 3:

- Capitalism
- Gambling
- Analytics

[letsgobuccos]

salaries are not high enough, and there isn't enough (accessible) analytics

most other things I agree with

also reporters that are more like PR agents and the soapification of sports (documercials and all)

[lightgrenade07]

Owners who feel entitled to suck money out of their franchise without putting anything into it.

League management that enables owners.

[Hrycaj]

Here is my wonder. While I agree with most everyone's comments that have already been shared, my wonder is if this is a case of "ignorance is bliss"? I'm assuming that most people around here commenting have been watching sports for a LONG time and have become completely jaded because they have learned the truth some time ago and that truth ruined the romanticism they/we held for sports as kids growing up when players were our false idols and the sports were all that mattered. So while I believe all of the reasons listed are valid and justified many have been around for a really long time as well. Here are just a few examples off the top of my head.

Gambling on sports especially baseball has been around since the 1850's. Some baseball authors have even gone as far as making cases that it was gambling more than anything that led to the rise in popularity of baseball in the 1850's.

PED's you say? That also goes back to at least 1889 when Pud Galvin decided to inject what was known as the "elixir of life" back then. (It was testicular fluid from a number of animals) Tom House was drafted in 1967 and admitted to taking steroids that you "wouldn't give a horse."

Damn I hate the cheating f***ing Astros: Do you feel the same about Tony LaRussa and the White Sox of the early 80's when he had a camera on the scoreboard zoomed in on the catcher to see the signs and then installing a semi-sophisticated system of relaying the signs to him on the bench. Or how about the 1976 World series between the Reds and Yankees where in Game One the Yankees were caught with staff in the pressbox on binoculars relaying signs to Billy Martin in the dugout all on live TV. (That game is a great watch and can be found on youtube) I could go on with all the cheating scandals but you hopefully get the point.

Hate teams that aren't trying to win?? How about the Kansas City Athletics acting as the Yankees AAA team in plain sight back in the 60's?

I hate having to have multiple subscriptions to watch my team: I don't know about you guys but the all the Detroit sports teams aside from the Lions were on PASS sports in the 80's. You needed a special subscription outside of what regular cable costed to view them. Consequently, I watched more Atlanta Braves games on WTBS (as it was called at the time) Chicago Cubs games on WGN and there was a station I cannot remember that would play Mets games, than I ever saw of the Tigers who would be played sporadically on local TV.

These are just a very limited amount of things for one sport that could be used as examples. Thing is though, when I grew up I wasn't aware of any of these things and I just saw the sports as pure enjoyment. It wasn't till I was older that I became more aware and jaded. Now arguments can possibly be made that things are worse now but maybe that is expected as we live in an era of the 24 hour clickbait news cycle and the over saturation of all sports on TV. However my wonder still stands, is this really at the heart of things a situation where ignorance WAS bliss.