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!