Top Seven Worst Sports Ideas of the Decade

It doesn’t matter that sports franchises and media outlets are million- and billion-dollar enterprises.  They can make some really atrocious decisions.  It is up for grabs as to which particular league makes them the most frequently (NHL?) or the biggest-impacted bad ideas (MLB?), but everyone has a few that were candidates on the list. 

This week’s Top Seven takes into account bad ideas in sports from the last 10 years, so “not allowing an entire race of people to play your sport” can’t make the cut.

Some things had to be cut because there were a lot to choose from, so they get an honorable mention: the NBA moving from Vancouver to Memphis; the WWF/E changing titles every week in the early 2000s; the NCAA having selective nickname outrage—the Illinois Fighting Illini must go, but the Florida State Seminoles are fine.

Makes sense.  Onto the big list.

7. College Football

The whole BCS thing is beaten completely into the ground every year, and now even freaking Congress is involved. 

It’s not worth going over everything again, except to say that there is no excuse for ever having the possibility that there is not a clear champion in any sport. No one ever argues that the NIT winner may be the best basketball team in the country.

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6. NFL Network

Blackout rules in general are past their day and absurd, but the NFL takes it to another level with their own channel, offered to cable subscribers, where they black out their own games.  Most Comcast customers can’t get the games that they show on Thursday or Saturday nights. 

They will run some other random crap instead. Much like steroids, the NFL doesn’t get nearly as scrutinized for this as baseball does. 

When MLB Extra Innings was about to go exclusively on DirecTV, fan outrage was as high as it’s been for anything, and John Kerry even reported for duty and got involved. No one says a word about Sunday Ticket being only on Direct and costing $300.

5. NHL Expansion

There have definitely been more successful movements than the NHL taking its act to Dallas, Nashville, Tampa, and Phoenix. Phoenix. Their NHL team just filed for bankruptcy. 

Who could have predicted that a hockey team in the middle of the desert wouldn’t make it?  If you have a professional sports team and they file for bankruptcy, you have yourself a bad idea.

4. Home Field All-Star Game

There are better ways to try to drum up interest in a mid-season exhibition game than allowing it to determine which city hosts one extra World Series game in three months.  How about throwing plastic pigs on the field like Rock n’ Jock softball? 

Just as many fans would have tuned in for that as tuned in just because of the home-field—zero. The worst part was that we were subjected to months of throat-cramming “This time it counts” crap. 

The silver lining thankfully was granted to us the very first World Series when the rule kicked in, when Josh Beckett threw a masterpiece to win Game 6 and the Series for the Marlins at Yankee Stadium. 

In fact, it hasn’t made a “difference” yet: the Red Sox won at St. Louis, the White Sox won at Houston, the Cards won at home in Game five, the Red Sox won again at Colorado, and the Phillies also won at home in Game five. 

If there ever was a Game seven, expect MLB and Fox to remind you of why that particular game is played there at least four trillion times.  While on the MLB and Fox kick...

3. Fox Saturday Baseball

The “game of the week” stuff has got to go.  In your local market, you can only get your local “game of the week.”  EVERYTHING else on Fox channels is blacked out until night games.  It doesn’t matter if you have the package, or MLB-TV, or you go to a bar with thousands of channels available. 

You literally can’t watch the game that you want.  This absolutely defies logic.  If the goal is to get more people to watch the “game of the week,” it doesn’t work. As a Cards fan, I’m going to watch nothing rather than the local Sox/Orioles game if I am in Chicago.  The craziest part is that start times don’t even matter. 

In Vegas two summers ago, the Cards were playing the Cubs and several of us were betting on the game. Since it was a Fox Saturday, the Cards/Cubs game was blacked out in every single freaking Vegas casino, while the local A’s/Angels game of the week didn’t start for another three hours. Of all of the stupid ideas on the list, this one makes me the angriest.

2. ESPN Mobile

Remember this one?  ESPN was trying to create the iPhone before the iPhone, but made it simply about sports and nothing else, never minding that most people could already get sports scores on their phone without having to buy one that was specifically for sports. 

It actually says something good about society that people weren’t willing to have their phones be for sports and nothing else, although there are still air conditioners with team logos on them. 

Their projections were to have 240,000 subscribers, and despite a massive media whoring, including a Superbowl ad, they had fewer than 10,000.  That’s “Martha Burk getting a year’s worth of free pub for her Masters protest and it drawing 50 people”-level bad.

1. The XFL

“This…is…the…X…F…L!”  In an alternate universe, those words by Vince McMahon spawned a new football league that ended up challenging the NFL for players and superiority.  In reality, Stone Cold Steve Austin called out the NFL’s commissioner in a wrestling promo during the first-ever game, which took right around five hours. 

By the end, it was doing ratings barely above what The Magic Hour would have drawn in prime time, or barely above the number of people whose ratings register because they forgot to turn their TVs off.

When there are more choices than ever and ratings are inevitably down for most everything because of this, the XFL still has some of the lowest ratings ever on NBC’s primetime.