Blog Education

A very well thought-out and interesting blog that I have been reading recently is Sportsbiz – The Business of Sports Illuminated. Sportsbiz discusses many of the financial implications of everyday sports news. As described by the blogger himself, the intention of the site is:

To bring a bit of a practical angle to some of the questions we see on the sports pages and Sportscenter everyday that take away from our enjoyment of the games.

The blogger, whose name is posted simply as “Mark”, is an attorney working in private practice. He spends most of his time dealing with sports related matters. Mark began work on this blog on January 11th 2005 and has posted about 3-4 times per week since then. His style involves using mostly short, but very information-heavy posts. Some of his posts are simply links to articles related to sports business that he found interesting, but didn’t have time to discuss. The assumption seems to be that if you’re reading this blog, then you must have some idea about the topics that he presents. Although Mark notes that his expertise is in collegiate athletics (due to the nature of his work), he presents topics from both the collegiate and professional level. Technorati.com lists his blog as 13,422 out of 1,179,313 total blogs. I do not know if Technorati has filtered out inactive blogs, but I do know that Mark doesn’t get as many comments as he deserves. He averages about 2-3 comments per week…more people NEED to read this blog.

Often times, Mark will talk about sports business topics that are more fun than analytical. In a recent post titled “Texas Stadium Goes Better with Macaroni and Cheese”, Mark discusses the recent agreement that the city of Irving, Texas made with Kraft Foods. Texas Stadium, the former home of the Dallas Cowboys, is now useless to the city of Irving. The team has moved to the new (and very expensive) Cowboys Stadium, located in Arlington. The city is going to demolish this building, and because the Cowboys are the most profitable team in the NFL, Kraft Foods decided that there would be a good amount of media attention to this event. This made for a good time to plug their brand. Kraft agreed to pay $75,000 to the city of Irving, and they will make a donation of $75,000 worth of Kraft products to a charity of the city’s choosing in exchange for naming the demolition of Texas Stadium a “Cheddar Explosion.” This agreement will likely pay off for Kraft Foods after the media coverage when Texas Stadium is demolished. The city also gets paid for something they were going to do anyway. Seems like a win-win situation to me.

One thing I really appreciate about this blog is that it does not try to be anything other than what it is. Mark knows that there probably isn’t an overwhelming population that is interested in sports business, but he sticks to his content. He doesn’t always write about only popular, media-friendly sports. He even gets down to the high school level. In his post titled “Profiting From the Army All-American Game”, Mark explains the financial aspects of this high school football “all-star” game. As many of us know, the NCAA, among its other regulations, does not allow collegiate athletes to get paid for their play. There are less standard rules regarding high school athletes. While high school athletes are still protected from exploitation an extent, a couple of former New Jersey politicians devised a moneymaking machine that is now known as the U.S. Army All-American Bowl. The producers of this event began holding very expensive camps several weekends a year for kids aged twelve and older. The idea is that exposure at these camps will give the kids a better chance for a college scholarship. They then choose from these camps two teams to compete in a game that draws over thirty thousand fans annually and is televised by NBC. However this is all icing on the cake that is the sponsorships. The U.S. Army pays over two million dollars annually to the event, and that is just one of over a dozen sponsors. Technically the two ex-politicians are not making money directly off the players, so can you really blame them for taking advantage of a profitable situation?

Sportsbiz provides an intellectual forum for the discussion of interesting and often ignored sports business issues. Despite the specificity of this topic, it still enjoys a decent following, and does not try to change itself to appeal to a wider audience. The world of sports business is intriguing because the finances of not only each organization or league are affected by business decisions, but the finances of even a whole state can be influenced by the popularity of sports. I am hopeful that I can emulate Mark’s professionalism!

Winning Isn't Everything

Hello, world!

This being my first entry on this blog, I suppose I should explain what I intend to blog about, and a bit about who I am. In the next several months, I intend to write about the business, ethical, and sociocultural issues surrounding the world of sports.
To me, describing sports as a “world” of it’s own is very meaningful. Athletes are revered cross-culturally, and they seem to be held to different standards than the rest of us – though not always in their best interest. In many cases, we see these athletes only in their respective domains, and forget that they are not immune to the stress and hassles that affect everyone. Similarly, we too often overlook the fact that professional sports leagues are businesses run by human beings, and are therefore subject to any corruption that plagues other large corporations. While I hope that this blog will not simply digress into my own personal rants about possible conspiracy theories, I do hope to address some controversial issues that are reported but not well known.

The world of sports business has fascinated me my whole life. It began when I was a kid, asking myself questions like “Why can’t this player be traded to that team?” or “How did this owner just sign this coach and those players?” I researched the intricacies of the Collective Bargaining Agreements, and I was hooked. After college I want to do something related to sports business and I hope that this blog will help me keep up with the side of sports that is not typically discussed on Sportscenter.

I feel that ethics in sports is a very intriguing topic because they are constantly being challenged and violated, often times without much media attention. These issues could not be more topical than they are now. It seems like every major sports league is experiencing some sort of controversy surrounding the integrity of their respective games. In Major League Baseball, Mark McGwire’s return to the game has been overshadowed by his admittance of the use of performance-enhancing drugs. MLB Commissioner Bud Selig has used this event in support of his claims that the steroid age is over in professional baseball. Skeptics, however, have been calling for Selig's resignation for the performance-enhancing era to officially be over.

In the National Basketball Association, recent scandals involving referees gambling on games have been among the biggest topics surrounding the league, despite Commissioner David Stern’s attempts to sweep those issues under the rug. Almost a year ago, the FBI launched an investigation on NBA referee Tim Donaghy, who was found to be providing gambling tips to people with mob ties, and gambling on games himself. Donaghy then went on to expose a supposedly intricate scheme created by the NBA to control the outcomes of certain games. For anyone that watches the NBA, it has, by quite a large margin, the most influence from referees than any other professional sport. It is hard to hear about something that could potentially bring down the entire corporation, and yet the media, as well as the league under fire, almost completely ignores it. David Stern continues to claim that Donaghy was a “disgraced ref” and was trying to burn the league down on his way out. However, just because most of the smoke is coming from this “disgraced ref” doesn’t mean that the league hasn’t started the fire.

Once again, I do not wish for this blog to digress into a conspiracy theorist's sounding board, but I do wish to discuss topics that I feel do not get enough attention. Why does the media seem to avoid certain issues? Can we blame them? ESPN and Fox Sports base their entire business plan on the success and popularity of the major sports leagues. You can’t bite the hand that feeds you.