Hank Steinbrenner and his wonderful buffoonery

[danzig6767]

Regardless, if your point is that baseball or other sports for that matter shouldn't try to emulate the NFL I have to disagree.

 

Each sport is unique, copying football would be a disaster for baseball. My point though was that the NFL is nowhere near as healthy as people seem to think it is, they have their fair share of big problems too.

Sure the NFL is extremely healthy when you look at it from the most important aspects, incoming revenues and popularity with the public. The NFL brings in incredible sums of money, especially when you consider they only play a 16 game schedule instead of 162/82 for MLB/NBA. Ratings are through the roof. We've seen more than once a Monday Night Football game, even involving two mediocre to bad teams draw in a higher rating number than a World Series game on the same night. Hell, even the NFL Draft draws in ridiculously high ratings.

 

As for team profits being down, it may be thew case, but call me skeptical. Even if they are, that eventually can be addressed in this CBA. Plus, look at the values of NFL franchises compared to what most owners paid for them. The Packers play in the smallest market in all of professional sports, yet are valued at around a whopping 750 million dollars. That's significantly more than the Boston Red Sox are valued at. Only the Yankees are valued higher than the lowest valued NFL team.

 

The public simply can't get enough of the NFL. How to split a goldmine between players/owner is a minor problem that eventually will get solved. Fan apathy, anger, and low revenues are what make a sports league unhealthy. Baseball is doing well also and the sports are different in multiple ways, so anyone making blanket statements like just put the NFL system in baseball are trying to simplify something much more complicated. That said, NFL fans like myself greatly appreciate that smarts of a GM are better rewarded than in baseball. The ultra small market Packer fans never had to worry about losing key cogs for financial reasons like Rodgers, Jennings, Collins, Tramon, or Woodson. I don't have to sit and stress when Clay Matthews or Finley get near the end of their contracts like Brewer fans and many other small market fan often have to start worrying about as a Fielder type of guy on their team gets say two years from free agency. Their are no Yankees or Red Sox type of teams that can't simply open their checkbooks each offseason and buy elite talents that the less fortunate teams can't afford. How much smarts did it take Theo to open his bank vault to sign Crawford and basically buy Gonzalez? They also bought Lackey, Beckett, Matsuzaka, and Drew.

 

Thankfully, that doesn't happen in the NFL, it takes much more than a checkbook to build an upper tier team and small market NFL teams can generally afford to keep their best players if the team is run well. It's a significant factor in why the NFL is so incredibly popular.