Enjoy the NSFL Super Bowl, comrades!

Here's a two-fer about America's beloved National Socialist Football League.

Enjoy your socialist Super Bowl, comrades!


From a UK perspective, American football and the Super Bowl look downright socialist
By Joe Ware
February 1, 2014 | Guardian
URL: http://gu.com/p/3mcc9


Here's How The NFL Makes A Killing Off Of Taxpayers (INFOGRAPHIC)
November 27, 2013 | Huffington Post
URL: http://huff.to/1eAcXXU

CNN exposé: NCAA athletes read like children

This expose by CNN goes to show that sports socialism starts before the collegiate level. We subsidize, through our tax dollars, a sham system of "education" that promotes star athletes from elementary to high school to college who barely read at the level of children:

Based on data from those requests and dozens of interviews, a CNN investigation revealed that most schools have between 7% and 18% of revenue sport athletes who are reading at an elementary school level. Some had even higher percentages of below-threshold athletes.

According to those academic experts, the threshold for being college-literate is a score of 400 on the SAT critical reading or writing test. On the ACT, that threshold is 16.

Many student-athletes scored in the 200s and 300s on the SAT critical reading test -- a threshold that experts told us was an elementary reading level and too low for college classes. The lowest score possible on that part of the SAT is 200, and the national average is 500.

On the ACT, we found some students scoring in the single digits, when the highest possible score is 36 and the national average is 20. In most cases, the team average ACT reading score was in the high teens.

"It is in many ways immoral for the university to even admit that student," said Dr. Richard M. Southall, director of the College Sport Research Institute and a professor at the University of South Carolina.

Immoral, he says. Gee, ya think?

Yeah, but they get the best tutors to help them! said one of my sports-crazy friends. Even so:

Former and current academic advisers, tutors and professors say it's nearly impossible to jump from an elementary to a college reading level while juggling a hectic schedule as an NCAA athlete. They say the NCAA graduation rates are flawed because they don't reflect when a student is being helped too much by academic support.

"They're pushing them through," said Billy Hawkins, an associate professor and athlete mentor at the University of Georgia.

"They're graduating them. UGA is graduating No. 2 in the SEC, so they're able to graduate athletes, but have they learned anything? Are they productive citizens now? That's a thing I worry about. To get a degree is one thing, to be functional with that degree is totally different."

This immoral betrayal of student-athletes (most of whom won't play professional sports) and the ideals of higher education is all so that we have something to do on a Sunday, can enjoy the bowl games and hoopla, listen to the never-ending arguments on talk radio, and catch the highlights on ESPN before bedtime.

As I said before, the NCAA is a kabuki dance of amateur athletics. Everybody knows it's a lie, yet we still love it; we pretend it has something to do with the quality of a college or university, and by extension -- with the quality of the fans, I mean, us.  (Even queerer are the millions of college sports fans who never attended their favorite college, or any college at all for that matter.)

Even more galling, every halfway honest sports fan knows there is an inverse relationship at work here: the better the college's team, the dumber the student-athletes.  

It's so, so pathetic.  Sports socialism and sports craziness have spoiled America -- and sports. There is nothing else that unites us anymore.

Some college athletes play like adults, read like 5th-graders

By Sara Ganim

January 7, 2014 | CNN

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/07/us/ncaa-athletes-reading-scores/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Kuttner: It's not just Detroit

We bailed out the auto industry in 2008 and it was a roaring success, saving at least 1 million jobs.  We bailed out New York City in 1975 and it was well worth it. We shouldn't let Detroit go under either.

BTW, while Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is ready to let Detroit go down the tubes and cancel its pension commitments, he can somehow find at least $285 million to buy the Detroit Red Wings a new arena.  Snyder calls it a "catalyst project," and "something that is important to all of us."  As if paying city workers and rebuilding crumbling city infrastructure is not important to all Detroiters?  

This is the economic Bizarro world that conservative politicians live in, where sports socialism and bank payoffs are just dandy, yet they can't find the money to pay (already reduced) pensions as prescribed in the state's constitution.   

We Are All Detroit

By Robert Kuttner

August 11, 2013 | Huffington Post

Do you think the damage from the pending bankruptcy of the city of Detroit will be limited to Detroit? Think again.

Detroit is partly the victim of economic trends far beyond its control, the downsizing and outsourcing of the auto industry and the collapse of the sub-prime bubble, to name just two. And yes, the city has suffered from corrupt and inept local government. But leaving Detroit to a bankruptcy process that favors investment bankers over local pensioners will neither provide a fair outcome nor contain the damage.

In the past two weeks, other Michigan cities and counties, including Saginaw and Battle Creek, have had to postpone bond issues, as the damage from the Detroit bankruptcy spills over. Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, who hoped to whack both public employees and the heavily Democratic city of Detroit by promoting bankruptcy, could end up shooting himself and his state in the foot.

Those who hope to use the pain of cities to undermine public employee pensions are playing with fire. One of the striking government failures of the era since the collapse of 2008 is that the federal government has done so little to help municipalities whose revenues were doubly hit by the subprime collapse and the recession itself. In the absence of aid, we can expect a prolonged era of dwindling services and scapegoated public workers and retirees.

It is a travesty that the federal government and the Michigan state government are not sending Detroit a lifeline. Other cities and states stand to lose both public services and pension benefits as this trend spreads. Chicago, which just suffered three levels of bond-downgrading, looks to be next.

Some background: In 1975, New York City very nearly went bankrupt. It faced a financial crisis and was unable to roll over maturing bonds. When Mayor Abe Beame appealed to Washington for help, President Ford initially refused, prompting the famous headline in the New York Daily News, "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

But that was a different era and in the end, Ford did approve $2.3 billion in federal loans. The New York State government, through a hastily legislated Municipal Assistance Corporation, agreed to refinance the city's debt, subjecting it to a rigorous supervision process. The Big Apple avoided bankruptcy, its economy recovered -- and New York is now home to the wildly profitable financial industry that is destroying Detroit in order to protect bankers.

In contrast to President Ford and New York's then Democratic governor Hugh Carey, Michigan's Republican governor Rick Snyder was happy to collude with Wall Street by embracing a bankruptcy proceeding rigged in favor of investment banks. And President Obama, who successfully sponsored a recapitalizing of the auto industry, is staying far away from Detroit this time.

These policies are short-sighted as well as cruel. If you think about it, many of Detroit's citizens are getting screwed both as debtors and as creditors. With the city having lost tax revenues in the housing collapse and property values at rock bottom, most homeowners with mortgages -- debtors -- can't qualify for refinancing. But many of the same people are also creditors, the city owes them pensions.

In principle, a bankruptcy proceeding is a system for fairly allocating claims when a debtor can't service all of its debts. The Michigan state constitution guarantees that Detroit pensioners will be paid what they are owed. Even Michigan's Republican attorney general, Bill Schuette,agrees that the constitutional protection is binding.

But the most recent changes (2005) in the federal bankruptcy law, lobbied for by Wall Street, put bankers in line ahead of pensioners. As attorney, author and debt expert Ellen Brown explains, this special-interest provision gives credit default swaps held by banks priority over other forms of debt. So banks that speculated in Detroit's debt stand to get paid ahead of ordinary bondholders and pensioners.

As Brown writes:

Derivative claims are considered "secured" because the players must post collateral to play. They get not just priority but "super-priority" in bankruptcy, meaning they go first before all others, a deal pushed through by Wall Street in the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005. Meanwhile, the municipal workers, whose pensions are theoretically protected under the Michigan Constitution, are classified as "unsecured" claimants who will get the scraps after the secured creditors put in their claims. The banking casino, it seems, trumps even the state constitution. The banks win and the workers lose once again.

The average pension owed to Detroit municipal workers, incidentally, is just $1,900 a month, and only 4 percent of Detroit's general revenues go to pensions. According to AFSCME President Lee Saunders, Detroit's non-uniformed public workers have already had pensions cut by 40 percent.

As we saw in the Wisconsin assault on collective bargaining for public employees and most recently in the San Francisco area BART strike, all public workers are losing public sympathy because wages, pension and health benefits have declined even faster in the private sector, leaving regular people to conclude that government employees have it too good. In fact, a study by pension expert Alicia Munnell finds that average state and local employee pensions are well below level needed to maintain living standards in retirement. Wall Street must be chortling, as ordinary workers blame civil servants rather than bankers.

But the assault on public workers and pensioners will continue to spread until citizens generally start appreciating that the culprit is not "over paid" public employees but a banker-dominated system that undermines decent living standards for public and private workers alike.

Deford: Separate college from sports -- AMEN!

I'm glad that Grandpa Munster, er, I mean the great Frank Deford, who has spent a lifetime writinge about U.S. sports, agrees with me: NCAA sports are a money-losing scam.

It's always nice when the pros like Deford can take a cue from the amateurs like moi.

You know me, being so laissez-faire and all, I want to privatize everything and let the good ole' free market rule the world the way Jesus Christ and Adam Smith intended. That's why I want to privatize sports and take them out of U.S. public education altogether.  

Let's Separate The Schoolin' From The Sports

By Frank Deford

June 26, 2013 | NPR

We usually think of college sports in terms of classic big-time schools, polls and bowls.

But, in fact, our athletics are intertwined with — and complicate — all higher education.

The University of North Carolina, Wilmington provides a typical recent case. The Seahawks field teams in 19 Division One sports, but unfortunately, like many colleges, UNCW athletics are in the red, so the chancellor, Gary L. Miller, assembled a committee, which recommended the elimination of five sports: men's and women's swimming, men's cross country and indoor track and softball.

Well, that produced a firestorm, especially with swimming, which has won the conference 12 years in a row and, which, financially, is about on budget. Now, by contrast, the basketball team has a deficit of a million dollars; the coach himself earns almost a half million a season, notwithstanding that the team lost two-thirds of its games and is academically on probation. Hmmm.

So why not just get rid of big basketball? Well, fans don't show up to see cross country or swimming, do they? Isn't part of the power and charm of college sports that it brings town and gown together, cheering our school on? Isn't that the American way from high school right on up?

Like a lot of his colleagues, Chancellor Miller also has to factor in the reality that his school is tilting female. Sixty percent of UNCW students are women, and the majority grows. And Title IX requires athletic percentage to reflect gender proportion.

Chancellor Miller is also being whipsawed to upgrade facilities so the Seahawks can be competitive with their rivals. UNCW is in the Colonial Athletic Association. No, it's not the Big 10, but the CAA stretches about 1,100 miles. Every college is desperate to get into a better conference and maybe even get on ESPN.

So what did Chancellor Miller, a biologist by discipline, do? Well, obviously influenced by the thousands who signed petitions, he decreed that he was keeping all sports.

But, he offered a provocative afterthought. He suggested that those folks so blithe about signing sports petitions might "leverage their passion" –– which is apparently what a polite biologist says when he means "put your money where your mouth is."

We in the U.S. think, nostalgically, of athletics as integral to higher education, but perhaps they're so unusual that they should be entirely separated from the academic and simply turned into an honest commercial adjunct.

Leverage, indeed. Let alumni and local businesses pay for sports. It certainly would make a lot of college presidents happier. And passionate alumni could then sign petitions to keep courses, like medieval history and Western philosophy. Yeah, sure.

Socialismo esporte brasileiro chama de 1 milhão às ruas

(I love Google Translate).

A million protesters in the streets in more than 80 cites -- wow!  If only apathetic Americans could get off their asses like that!

It just goes to show that sports socialism and the corrupt cronyism that goes with it are not only American phenomena.  Just like in the U.S., the same governments that can't find money to fund public schools and infrastructure somehow manage to find all kinds of creative ways to build shining new stadiums that sit empty in prime urban real estate most of the year, whether it's through tax hikes, fee hikes, cuts to municipal services, municipal bonds, or public-private partnerships where businesses make off with public goods.  

UPDATE (06.26.2013):  Some guy named Marty Kaplan at HuffPo shares my envy of Brazil's protests: "Let's Be Brazil."  

Brazil's protests raise fears for World Cup as a million take to the streets

By Jonathan Watts

June 21, 2013  | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3gn7n

Report: NCAA sports socialism is a net financial LOSS

Read the scoreboard and weep, sports socialists:

“The belief that college sports are a financial boon to colleges and universities is generally misguided," the [Delta Cost Project] report states. "Although some big-time college sports athletic departments are self-supporting – and some sports may be profitable enough to help support other campus sports programs – more often than not, the colleges and universities are subsidizing athletics, not the other way around.”

Think about that. If you are an American man, quite likely your free-time enjoyment, pride in your home city, maybe even your own self-esteem, all come from government-subsidized sporting events featuring immature teens and young adults doing a kabuki dance of "amateur" athletics.

Dontcha think that's kinda weird?

Now, if only we could get the Tea Parties mobilized against all this waste and fraud in higher education, as the cost of college skyrockets and the quality of our higher education plummets, then maybe something would change!....

Playing Different Games

By Kevin Kiley

January 16, 2013 | Insider Higher Ed

URL: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/01/16/universities-spend-more-athletics-athlete-academics-student-report-finds

Bold black college drops NCAA athletics

Kudos to Spelman College in Atlanta for acknowledging the NCAA for the expensive, anti-educational scam its is, and instead investing its resources in health and fitness programs for all its students.

"We have to ask ourselves: What is the cost of the program and who is benefiting? How many people are benefiting? Is the benefit worth the cost?" asked the college's perspicacious President Beverly Tatum. Exactly. Schools have limited resources and have to make tough, cost-benefit-based decisions about how to use them.

It's no surprise, however, that the school's basketball coach isn't happy about the change:

"It teaches you a level of sacrifice that is so hard to explain," she said. "Unless you are an athlete or a former athlete, you don't understand what tools and gifts and things that you learn that carry you throughout your entire life."

But as I've argued before, all the lessons learned in sports -- like teamwork, commitment, determination, competitiveness, etc. -- can be learned in an academic or work-study setting, where they better conform to the mission and context of an educational institution.

Now, if we could only do the same at the high school level, and get rid of school-sponsored sports and get all our high schoolers moving, every day!....

To Trim Down, Spelman Trades Sports For Fitness

By Kathy Lohr

December 6, 2012 | NPR

URL: http://n.pr/THqEM7

'Business experience' loses on POTUS scoreboard

This post is for the reality-based community, for that sliver of the American electorate still concerned with facts, not gut feelings, blind ideology and personal anecdotes.  I.e, the smarts.  All you stupids, take a FoxNews break.  Go check SporstCenter.

Here are the real stats (oh, wait, all you mind-numbed sports fans are supposed to be obsessed with stats, but anyway...):

The startling bottom line is that the nation’s GDP has grown more than 45 times faster under presidents with little or no business experience than it has under presidents with successful business careers. And on average, when there has been a successful businessman in the Oval Office (so, Truman is excluded), GDP growth has been negligible.

On average, under presidents with successful business experience, GDP has increased 0.12 percent. And under presidents with little or no business experience, GDP has grown 5.46 percent.

That's right, sports fans, it gets even worse for the Red Team:

The most startling figures emerge when we combine party and business experience. Historically, a Democrat without business experience has been extraordinarily better for the economy and the stock market than a Republican who had a career in business. In the past 84 years, GDP has grown 7 percent per year under Democrats without business experience (FDR, JFK, LBJ, Clinton and Obama) and fallen by 0.2 percent per year under Republicans with business experience (Hoover and the two Bushes). The Dow has risen an average of 16.8 percent per year under Democrats without business experience and has fallen by 3.7 percent per year under Republicans with business experience.

I would yell "Scooorebooooard!" except Republicans don't care about the scoreboard unless it's a black or Hispanic athlete doing the scoring in a meaningless socialistic sporting event that is subsidized by taxpayers.  Go figure.

Can a businessman help the economy?

By Robert S. McElvaine

October 20, 2012 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/PH9cXU

GOP, IRS abet U.S. sports socialism

You know, I might not be against rampant U.S. sports socialism if all the rabid Red State Republican sports fans out there would just acknowledged how much of their personal self-esteem and enjoyment was tied up in government-funded schools, with teams filled with government-supported minority athletes -- minorities whom they fear or despise in most other contexts.

Take any Red State you want, and on any given Sunday you'll see bumpkins who barely graduated high school proudly wearing the local college sweatshirt, cursing at minority athletes and overpaid coaches on the TV in the local sports bar, all provided to them thanks to the local publicly-funded college team.  

Furthermore, it's a mockery of Republican-Christian notions of "charity" to say that mandatory, tax-deductible donations to a schools sports program in exchange for select seats is some kind of charitable "donation."  We've let Republicans pervert our tax code to this extent.  These so-called boosters of charity are neither charitable nor Christian.  

This is yet more evidence that our country has become dangerously obsessed with sports (and it wasn't always this way): watching a bunch of poor minority athletes competing for a one-in-a-thousand slot in the professional athletics lottery for our selfish enjoyment, subsidized by Joe Taxpayer.  Shame on us!

Read a damn book, take a walk, play a sport yourself, spend time with your family, get a hobby!  Sports socialism reveals the core of America's hollow, atomized, sedentary popular culture.  

College football gets tax breaks; fans ‘contribute’ millions for tickets

By Gilbert M. Gaul

October 18, 2012 | McClatchy Newspapers

URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/10/18/171894/college-football-gets-tax-breaks.html

Texas puts education first

Yep, America (especially Texas) certainly has its priorities in order.  ... Criminy!

Dallas-area high school unveils Texas-size $60 million football stadium that seats 18,000

By Brian Browdie

August 25, 2012 | New York Daily News

URL: http://m.nydailynews.com/1.1144442#bmb=1

To survive, NBA needs socialism like NFL, MLB

Basketball is the one professional sport I care to follow, so I'm pissed I won't get to see any NBA this year. But enough about my precious feelings.

This article illustrates how the NBA is in the same situation as the NFL and MLB: less competitive smaller-market teams cannot be profitable without a scheme of socialistic wealth distribution from the fewer more successful larger-market teams. In the short term, the smaller teams are demanding more money from the players, but we can imagine that even more of the players' share will not keep all small teams profitable indefinitely. Something's got to give.

Socialism -- Fantastic!

The Economic Battlefield of the NBA Lockout

By David Berri

November 21, 2011 | Freakonomics

With the NBA away, sports fans are looking for something to satisfy their need to watch teams strive for victory. Well, why not take a look at the teams competing in the lockout?

Okay, maybe this is a contest only a sports economist could love. But while it may not appeal to everyone, the labor dispute is still best thought of as a contest between two teams.

The first team is the NBA owners. The owners are the dominant buyer in the world market for elite basketball talent, so they have substantial monopsony power. In the other corner are the players, who are currently trying to disband their union. This union gave the players monopoly power in the sale of elite basketball talent (more specifically, in helping to determine the conditions under which individual players would sell their services). When a monopsony meets a monopoly on the economic battlefield, the outcome is determined by bargaining. And in that case, bargaining power – or what we call leverage – means everything.

At the onset of the lockout, the leverage was with the owners. This is primarily because the money made in basketball comes at different times for the owners and the players. The players are paid for the regular season, and receive regular paychecks throughout the season. So once regular season games are lost, the players start losing money.

What matters most for the owners is having enough of the season so that the playoffs can be played.

The owners also lose money when games are not played. But the owners also make a significant chunk of their money after the regular season ends. When the regular season paychecks stop, the owners start making money on the playoffs. And that means the owners are not quite as bothered by games being cancelled at the beginning of the season. What matters most for the owners is having enough of the season so that the playoffs can be played.

So this past summer, the owners were willing to hold out for a better deal. The players were much more anxious to reach a deal before paychecks were lost forever. This gave the owners an advantage over the summer.

Given the disparity in bargaining power, we should not be surprised that the owners have "won." The game's not over yet, but given the final offers we have seen from both the players and the owners, we know that even if the owners accepted the players' last offer, the owners would be doing better than they did after the last Collective Bargaining Agreement (an agreement the owners seemed quite happy to accept a few years ago).

Teams located in places like Charlotte, Memphis, and Indianapolis are not doing as well.

Although the outcome seems determined, there's still time on the clock. And the owners are looking to run up the score by increasing their margin of victory. To fully understand that move, we need to understand that the owners' team consists of two players: large market teams and small market teams. No one disputes the notion that the large market teams – in places like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago – are doing quite well. In contrast, teams located in places like Charlotte, Memphis, and Indianapolis are not doing as well. This had led the small market teams to ask for more money from somebody.

Such a move reminds one of a similar contest in baseball in 2002. About ten years ago, Major League Baseball claimed most teams were losing money and that the players needed to make concessions in the name of competitive balance. Does that sound familiar? Yes, it is the same argument we hear from NBA owners today.

Well, the owners in baseball didn't get everything they asked for in 2002. What they did get was about a billion dollars moving from high-revenue teams (i.e. the Yankees) to low revenue teams (like the Pirates). Theoretically, this money was supposed to allow the Pirates to purchase better talent. In practice, this money didn't seem to get spent on players, but it did allow the Pirates – one of the worst teams in professional sports in North America — to turn a profit. Regardless of how the Pirates spent the money, it is clear the 2002 labor dispute was not entirely a contest between the players and the owners. The most important combatants were the small market and large market teams.

Ten years later, the competitive balance in baseball hasn't really changed. And the players in baseball are still not subject to a salary cap or a luxury tax which would prevent the Yankees from dramatically outspending everyone else in baseball. But with money flowing from New York to places like Pittsburgh, baseball now has labor peace.

One suspects the story in the NBA will eventually play out in the same fashion. Here is how I see the play-by-play so far:

• The small market teams began by asking the big guys for more money
• The large market teams told the little guys to ask the players for some money
• The players – with limited bargaining power at the beginning of the season – have given up some money
• The owners – led by the small market teams – want even more

The players have now indicated – through the willingness to pursue legal action – that the offer the small market teams prefer is not going to work. In other words, the players have indicated that they are willing to sacrifice the season – and the money-making playoffs – rather than accept the last offer from the owners.

This last move by the players is designed to give them some leverage. And so that puts the ball back in the court of the large market teams. Will they step up and bail out the little guys, as the Yankees did back in 2002? Or will the big guys insist the players transfer even more money to the small market teams?

In sum, this is a contest with three players. If the small market teams are satisfied – either by the large market teams or the players – we will get an NBA season and an era of labor peace. If the small market teams are not satisfied however, then we may be without an NBA season for quite a long time to come.

Let me close by noting that just as we saw in baseball, none of this is about the fans. Yes the owners in the NBA claim – just as baseball claimed 10 years ago – that this is all about competitive balance. Unfortunately, there is simply no evidence that competitive balance is changed dramatically by luxury taxes and salary caps. In other words, this deal is not going to be something that will transform the Charlotte Bobcats into title contenders (especially with Michael Jordan calling the shots in Charlotte).

Furthermore, after the final agreement is in place and the players start collecting less money, do not expect your ticket prices to go down. Ticket prices in sports are driven by demand. Martin Schmidt and I have published research that indicates that demand will not be impacted by this labor dispute, and so ticket prices probably will not be changed much going forward. In other words, regardless of how this contest is eventually decided, fans are just going to have to be happy watching pro basketball again.

Surprise, surprise: Socialist NFL leans GOP

Is it any surprise that the owners of the socialist NFL give 2/3 of their campaign contributions to Republicans?

They know that Republicans love their redistribution of wealth from the few rich to many poor teams, and are ready to give lots of corporate welfare for unprofitable sports teams to survive.

NFL owners favor Republicans in campaign cash

By Eric Johnson

October 7, 2011 | Reuters

URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/08/us-usa-campaign-football-idUSTRE7966M520111008

Ticket bubble: More evidence pro sports is a scam

It looks like even more socialistic redistribution of wealth from rich upper-tier teams to the vast lower tier of pro sports teams is the only hope for saving America's ailing pro sports teams.

Meanwhile, attending a game has become a privilege of the rich and corporate staff.

I'm not a big sports fan, but if I were, I guess I'd be pissed off that my tax dollars went to pay for expensive local arenas that I couldn't afford to visit. But go figure: Americans hate socialism unless it benefits the employers of grown men dressed in costumes tossing their balls.

The two-tiered pro sports system is a mirror of the two-tiered NCAA Division I (men's) sports system, and, for that matter, a mirror of America's two-tiered economy of the super rich and everybody else. 

...Maybe that's why schizo, self-loathing Americans love their pro sports?

Plenty of Good Seats Still Available

By Neil deMause

August 4, 2011 | Slate

A few months ago, it seemed like Major League Baseball was in the throes of a ticket apocalypse. Through the first two weeks of the season, six teams had set all-time single-game lows at their current homes. The surprising Cleveland Indians led the American League Central in the standings, but remained in the cellar at the turnstiles. The New York Yankees, whose ultrapricey new stadium has been beset by empty seats since it opened in 2009, hosted record-low crowds for four games in a row. It was as if fans, having quietly absorbed more than a decade of price hikes and the advent of $9 beers, had spontaneously decided to go on strike.

Ticket sales have improved since—overall attendance is now roughly flat year over year. Even so, there's a good chance this will mark the fourth straight year that Major League Baseball has seen ticket sales slide after a record year in 2007. You can't blame it on steroids, either. NFL, NBA, and NHL attendance have likewise dipped over the last three years.

The obvious culprit is the sinking economy: Lose $4 trillion in spending power, and at least a few consumers are going to save by watching games at home in hi-def. Yet as the economy lurches back to its feet, there are signs that the sports ticket bubble will continue to deflate. That could have far-reaching effects on ticket prices, competitive balance, and the very existence of the major pro sports leagues that aren't the NFL.

Sports leagues' ticket woes aren't always visible to the naked eye. According to Team Marketing Report's Fan Cost Index, three of the four major leagues saw average ticket prices rise last year. (The NBA, which cut prices by 2.3 percent, was the exception.) These figures, though, only take into account the face value of tickets. Teams are understandably hesitant to cut prices outright, since it's a tough move to undo should the economy (or the team) suddenly rebound. Instead, we've seen a frenzy of discount offers, attempts to goose the turnstile count without tipping off season-ticket buyers that they're paying more per game than their seats are worth.

Perhaps the first sign of the ticket bubble came in September 2009, when the Baltimore Orioles offered an unprecedented deal: tickets for $1 (plus the ubiquitous "handling fees") for the entire month, except for games against the Yankees and Red Sox. Attendance barely budged. That fall, several NBA teams began quietly offering two-for-one deals to fill suddenly half-empty houses. The previous season the New Jersey Nets, lame ducks at their home arena after announcing a move to Brooklyn, actually gave away tickets to one game for nothing more than Ticketmaster fees.

At the same time, the high end of the ticket market showed signs of softening. Last fall, the New York Giants demanded that fans pony up as much as $20,000 for "personal seat licenses" before being allowed to buy season tickets at the New Meadowlands Stadium. That may have been a workable price point when ground was first broken for the stadium three years prior, but fans balked at the hefty fees in 2010. What was once a lengthy ticket wait list quickly evaporated, leaving the team with thousands of empty seats on its new building's opening day.

It's a remarkable turnabout for an industry that remade its business model over the past two decades around selling expensive tickets to corporations and rich people. It's no coincidence that the biggest surge in ticket prices came not during the 1970s and early 1980s, when free agency drove up player salaries, but during the 1990s, when the rich got dramatically richer thanks to the Reagan tax cuts and the Clinton economic boom. At the same time, a wave of new stadiums and arenas—mostly built with taxpayer dollars—flooded the market with pricey new luxury boxes and club seats to cater to fans' newly bulging wallets.

The result was a dramatic shift in the nature of sports business, and in the type of fans that clubs tried to attract. After an exhaustive search through consumer-price-index surveys, economists John Siegfried and Tim Peterson determined that the only demographic segment that attended more baseball games in the 1990s than the '80s was households earning more than $50,000 a year (which back then was still real money). As the rich poured into new stadiums and arenas, the less-wealthy folks who'd traditionally been the core of the sports market were largely priced out, or at least limited to splurging on tickets once or twice a year.

The rise of the online secondary ticket market could end up changing that dynamic. Ironically, resellers like StubHub initially looked like they would help drive prices still higher, as fans used them to unload sought-after tickets for more than face value. Teams also watched the sites to determine the market price for seats, and then raised their face values accordingly. MLB even anointed StubHub (now owned by eBay) as its official reseller in 2007, earning teams a cut of every ticket resold.

In recent years, though, StubHub et al. have been a boon for bargain hunters. A glance at FanSnap, which aggregates tickets posted on various resale sites, shows thousands of tickets available for virtually any game you'd care to see, often at well below face value. If you want to take in next week's Indians-Tigers AL Central showdown in Cleveland, for example, you can snag lower box seats in the infield—normally $44—for as low as $25. As a bonus, reseller fees are typically lower than teams' own ticket fees. Given those options, it would be stupid to pay full price at the ticket window.

There's a snowball effect here that can be dangerous for team finances. Just as rising prices on StubHub led teams to hike face values, so does a glut of online tickets lead to the deep, club-sanctioned discounts we've seen of late. (There are other signs of increasing desperation: No fewer than three New York sports teams have assigned "personal customer agents" to try to induce me to buy tickets from them directly; I'm sticking with StubHub, so long as it's cheaper.) There comes a point at which fans come to expect a deal on tickets, whether from the team or on the secondary market, and hold off on buying until they see a bargain. That pressures clubs to offer more discounts, leading to a downward spiral of ticket revenue.

We've seen this story before, incidentally. Last summer, the concert industry, which had been riding high after years of seemingly unstoppable price increases, completely tanked. Scads of tour dates and festivals were canceled after it became clear that no one was buying tickets. Humbled promoters promised lower ticket prices, while cutting way back on the number of shows offered.

The sports ticket bubble will ultimately stabilize, but as we've seen with the housing market, the landscape won't look quite the same afterward. For a handful of top teams, times are still flush. While 18 out of 30 MLB teams have seen attendance dip, the World Series champion San Francisco Giants are up nearly 5,000 fans per game, and their opponents in last year's Series, the Texas Rangers, have seen attendance jump by more than 8,000 per game. Likewise, premier events like the Super Bowl continue to set their own prices, as seen when the NFL managed to sell several thousand $200 tickets to watch the big game on video screens outside Cowboys Stadium—and after the "party plaza" sold out, tickets were scalped on StubHub for double face value.

Where we look to be headed, then, is a two-tiered system. A handful of top teams and events will be able to charge whatever they want, while most everyone else is forced to give away tickets. That's great if you're a budget-conscious fan of a cellar-dwelling team—or even a fan of the contending Indians, who remain 26^th in the league in attendance. (Thanks to the widely observed phenomenon that teams get their biggest bump in attendance the year after winning a pennant, fans generally end up paying the most to see teams that are just past their prime.) For leagues as a whole, however, it seems likely to exacerbate the spread between the haves and have-nots.

Unlike musicians, sports teams compete on the field for both wins and players. When the Eagles (not the Philadelphia ones) cancel tour dates, they don't have to worry about another band snapping up Joe Walsh as a free agent. In the sports realm—not counting the NFL, whose outrageously huge TV contracts, split evenly among its 32 teams, has effectively made it into a television show with a sideline in ticket sales—a more pronounced revenue split can be catastrophic for low-revenue teams, since somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 to 40 percent of revenue comes from ticket sales.

Unless team owners discover a new willingness to share, baseball in particular could be headed back into the small-market vs. big-market abyss. For the NBA and NHL, it could lead to more teams following the example of the Phoenix Coyotes and New Orleans Hornets and becoming wards of their leagues.

Declining ticket revenue could also be a major factor in the NBA losing some or all of its upcoming season to a lockout, as now appears likely—according to Forbes estimates, revenue from NBA ticket sales has dropped 6 percent over the last five years. For fans, that's the potential downside of the collapsing ticket bubble: Yes, it's a great time to find ticket bargains, but that only applies so long as the box office stays open.

The revenue scam that is NCAA Div. I sports

Some amazing takeaways from these two economic analyses, which I stumbled upon:

Texas which generates on average almost $50 million a year, has seen incredible sustained growth. In 2003, their profit margin was $34.6 million. In the year 2009? $68.8 million!

Amazingly the state of Alabama is at the top for college football revenue, though the state remains generally poor in GDP/GSP related measures.

Unfortunately, this is the sad truth:

In fact 40 teams averaged a loss in money through football over the 7-year period. It's no wonder that some schools are willing to travel into SEC country year in and year out for a hefty payday even though its [sic] another guaranteed loss. 

Women's sports lose money and only men's basketball/football are profitable.

So you could say that NCAA Division I sports are a microcosm of America: a lot of wealth distributed extremely inequitably, but nobody objects because they hope their winning lottery ticket is coming any day, too. Meanwhile, everybody is distracted by televised glam and spectacle and trying to rub elbows with the super rich.

NCAA Div I College Football Expenses and Revenue

By Vipul Lugade

March 24, 2011 | Matlab Geeks

NCAA expenses and revenue across gender and sport

By Vipul Lugade

March 30, 2011 | Matlab Geeks

Maher: NFL is a socialist success story

I've noted before how the NFL exists thanks to socialism: From each according to its ability to generate revenue, to each according to its need for revenue.


Enjoy your Socialist Super Bowl next Sunday, comrades!


New Rule: Americans Must Realize What Makes NFL Football So Great: Socialism
By Bill Maher
January 28, 2011 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-football-sociali_b_815673.html