Why Do Professional Sports Hate Indianapolis?

Indianapolis is a great Midwestern city.  It’s in the top 50 in the U.S. with a population of 829,718 people living in the city limits. 

My question is why do professional sports leagues, mainly the NFL and NBA, hate Indianapolis? 

The city isn’t so bad. Indianapolis is the home of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which hosts the two largest spectator events in the world: the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400, where crowds of over 350,000 people attend every year.

Indianapolis also is home to the NCAA headquarters and great venues like Lucas Oil Stadium and Conseco Fieldhouse, which allows the city to host the Men’s and Women’s Final Four every five years. No other city can say that. 

The men’s Final Four brings a crowd of over 70,000, and the women’s brings in over 18,000 fans.

The city also has Victory Field, the home for the minor-league Indianapolis Indians.  The “VIC” is voted every year the best minor league baseball venue.  It’s a state of the art baseball stadium.

My question once again is why do professional sports leagues hate Indy so bad?  You can say all you want about Indy finally getting a Super Bowl, but there’s a threat that the Super Bowl may not even be played this year. 

The NFL has come out and said if the Super Bowl is cancelled due to the lockout, then Indianapolis doesn’t just automatically get the next Super Bowl. 

The city will have to rebid and be reassigned a future date, and who knows if the committee will actually reward the city another bid. 

If the Super Bowl is not played this year, Indianapolis will be looking at debt of 222 billion, with a “B,” dollars. 

Why didn’t they just give us this past year’s Super Bowl when we bid the first time?  I think I actually have the answer to that. 

Dallas and the house that Jerry built were bidding too.  Jerry Jones built a multi-billion dollar stadium in Arlington, Texas, and the NFL knew there was a high threat for a lockout the following season. 

So they decided to give Dallas, who has all the money in the world, the Super Bowl. In return, they gave Indianapolis Super Bowl 2012, the lockout year.  They aren’t dumb; they knew there was going to be a lockout.

They weren’t going to give Super Bowl 2012 to a city like Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, or New York on a year the Super Bowl may not even be played.  What better place than the good old, country-town of Indianapolis to be rewarded that Super Bowl? 

Indianapolis will be so happy that they are even getting one, they won’t look ahead to notice the potential for a lockout year until it’s too late.  Guess what? That’s what happened.  There weren’t any lockout talks until last season. 

The NFL doesn’t care about Indianapolis.  If the Super Bowl is cancelled they will actually applaud they don’t have to come to cold, dark, dreary Indianapolis in February. 

The media already said they didn’t want to come here and would give up press passes because of the city and its weather conditions.  Isn’t that what the conditions were like in Dallas this year?

Let’s next take a look at the NBA, and how it hates the Pacers.  Take a look at the calls in the playoff games the last decade.  The Pacers got absolutely none of them in decisive moments. 

Calls can sway games one way or the other (e.g., New York Knicks or Chicago Bulls of the 90s).  No one wants to watch the Indiana Pacers vs. Utah Jazz in the NBA Finals.  God forbid that would ever happen. I mean, it just isn’t good for TV ratings. 

The NBA needs teams like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston and Detroit winning the Championships. 

The mid-market teams are just happy to get to the playoffs, mainly just to keep/receive a steady fan base and money flow, but when they are put up against big-market teams, they do not get a fair shot to move forward and win. 

They will toy with the mid-market teams like they’re stupid; the NBA gets the series to go to six or seven games in order to see more revenue, and then when you to think you have a shot, game over.

You lose because in the last five minutes the refs called 15 fouls against the mid-market team.

Look at this year for example.  The Pacers finally made it back to the playoffs, finally, and were matched up against the Bulls in the first round. 

The Pacers had the lowest attendance in the league this season, and no one in Indianapolis had any hope for them.  The Fieldhouse wasn’t even sold out for the playoff games in Indy. 

Game One the Pacers dominated the Bulls for 45½ minutes and had their offense and defense working in tune.  Ticket sales were sky rocketing in the first half here in Indy because people now thought they have a chance and wanted to hop on the bandwagon. 

How is it that all of a sudden with 2 minutes and 27 seconds left in the game, with the Pacers up by 11 points, the Bulls came back and won the game? I know the Bulls are good, but not that good.

There is no way Danny Granger and the rest of the Indiana Pacers forgot how to play good basketball in the last two minutes of the game.

So, how can a team playing high-level basketball just forget how to win a game? Well ladies and gentlemen, I have your answer.  The game is FIXED.  The NBA got what they wanted. 

The Pacer fans think they have a chance in the series now, and ticket sales skyrocketed.  By the Pacers losing with only minutes left, the NBA gets exactly what they want: money and a big market team with a win.

Well I’m not buying it, NBA.  I have watched this go on for 20 years now, and it has become a joke.  Look at Game 2 of the Pacers and Bulls series; it was the same exact game, with the same exact calls, as Game 1.

Why, you ask?  It is because the NBA is a business.  They can’t have the Bulls sweep the Pacers.  The more games and drama, the more tickets sold and money coming in.

If the Pacers win at least one of the two, then people will be happy and buy more tickets to next season.  Watch some of the games and tell me the calls and game play isn’t fishy.

I understand the NFL and NBA is a business and they need money too, but I will never understand why they hate Indianapolis so much. 

We’re not such a bad place, and with our venues and proven success on holding these huge events, why not give us a fair try?