May 29, 2020
The topic of professional and major college sports during the pandemic has been one that has been rattling around my head for the last few weeks, and since there seems to be some momentum in a few of the sports to return, this seemed like a good week to share my thoughts, which have been very conflicted.
In full disclosure of any inherent bias, I’ll start by saying that I would describe myself as a casual sports fan. I’m certainly not as interested in sports as I was in high school or college, but still follow them a little bit. My favorite sport is golf (which, if you don’t play, you may find boring to watch on TV) and my second favorite is probably professional football. The other major sports – baseball, basketball, hockey, college basketball and college football – usually only spark my interest during the postseason. With that interest level, I haven’t really missed having sports on TV the last few months, so I am probably biased in my thinking about this topic.
Since sports shutdown in mid-March in a stunning fashion over a few days, there has been the question of when sports might return, and what that might look like. Each of the major sports were in different stages of their normal schedule when the pandemic emerged. Football was in its offseason, hockey and basketball were at the tail end of their regular season and preparing for their postseasons, and baseball was a few weeks away from beginning its season. Golf is played virtually all year round, but the high point of its season is April – July, so it was heading into the peak portion of its calendar. When colleges sent students home to study online, the postseason tournaments for winter sports (famously college basketball’s March Madness tournament) were canceled, and spring sports seasons were canceled soon after the shutdown.
The professional and amateur aspects of sports have different considerations – notably, college students have limited eligibility and are compensated with scholarships, not salaries, as professional athletes are. But the one big commonality between professional and college sports is money, notably television contracts. The television contracts for the large college football and basketball conferences are enormous, rivaling professional deals with broadcast and cable networks. As I think about sports coming back and the considerations around safety for all those involved (not just the players), it keeps coming back to money.
The Next Twelve Months
It’s hard to predict what our world will look like in a year – if we have a vaccine, what its effectiveness will be, what its adoption rate will be, if it will be required for people to go to work, etc. Until we have a vaccine, we will be navigating our way through new practices in our everyday life. So, let’s talk about what is being considered for the major sports and what some of these considerations are. In everything I have been reading and listening to over the last few weeks, there is one topic that seems to be an afterthought that I can’t help but get stuck on. We’ll come back to that topic.
One of the first concepts that everyone agreed on from the beginning was that in the short term, sports would have to return without fans, or with a very small attendance. As new data emerges week to week, it appears that the biggest instances of the “super spreader” outbreaks have been where there are mass gatherings indoors – business conferences and churches, for example. So, having tens of thousands of fans at a sporting event is clearly a public health risk, so scratch that idea. If you own a sports franchise, now you are facing a season with limited (or no) revenue from ticket sales and concessions. Your revenue stream is now limited to the broadcast and cable television contracts. Make no mistake about it – this is a big deal to both sides. The networks have been DESPERATE for sports programming. Have you seen what is being run on TV lately? A lot of old games. While there is some nostalgic element to some of these games, I couldn’t see myself sitting down to watch an old baseball or hockey game from ten or twenty years ago. That being said, there have been some creative ideas the last few weeks.
During what would have been the Masters weekend, CBS ran the final round from Phil Mickelson’s first win at Augusta in 2004 and during the broadcast, they interviewed Mickelson about the final round. CBS did the same format the next day with Tiger Woods, recapping his 2019 Masters victory. Other than a few exceptions, sports on TV has been a huge hole in network programming since March. If that wasn’t already evident, there were two recent new sports programs that had monster television ratings. The first was The Last Dance, the ten part ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. While it featured new interviews with the major participants in the Bulls’ run of six titles in eight years, it didn’t feature a lot of “new” information, but it certainly scratched a sports itch for a lot of fans. The second event was last week’s charity golf match between Tiger Woods and Peyton Manning against Phil Mickelson and Tom Brady. I loved watching this (but I am an admitted golf nerd) and apparently so did another five million people – it was the highest rated golf telecast on cable ever.
With that in mind, clearly the television networks have motivation to get sports back on television. The owners have motivation to salvage some revenue and the players and staff of the teams have motivation to salvage some of their salaries. How is each sport going to pull this off? Let’s start with college basketball and football – these sports have a unique challenge in that the athletes are college students and the NCAA has made it clear that sports will not occur this fall if students are not back on campus. This may create the wrong incentive for colleges to get back to campus life for all students, but if they can establish a safe environment for all students (not just the athletes), faculty, and college employees, that’s a good thing. I am just hoping that there are no shortcuts made for the general student population to meet a requirement for athletes. That’s the first problem colleges have to solve.
Moving to the NFL, as the country’s most popular sport, they have the longest time to figure out how to return, since their training camps don’t start until August. They have maintained their offseason schedule, did a great job completing a virtual draft in April, and are still planning to play games this fall, even releasing the 2020 schedule a few weeks back. I have no idea how they are going to pull that off, but they have not shared many details of their plans yet. Moving next to Major League Baseball, this sport is probably in the toughest position, some of it is circumstance and some of it is their own fault. As the weeks tick off the calendar, the league is losing an enormous amount of money, and the current talk is a potential half season (beginning in July), with a unique realignment of divisions to accommodate a geographic bubble/campus environment. All of this is geared toward minimizing travel and exposure among teams given the contagiousness of the virus. Additionally, with states and regions across the country adopting different policies for what social gatherings are allowed, having all of the athletes in only a few geographic areas can help overcome that problem. But, the story this week is that the players union and the owners cannot come to an agreement on how much the players should be paid for the reduced schedule. As it has happened many times in the last fifty years, it seems that we have another ownership/union fight in baseball. I don’t have a lot of confidence baseball will be back anytime soon.
As I have been reading about the plans for hockey and basketball, the word “denial” keeps coming into my head. Both leagues are holding out hope of finishing their 2019 – 2020 seasons by having postseason tournaments. Both leagues typically finish in June and are now considering finishing up this summer, with the NBA thinking of permanently revamping their whole season schedule and delaying the start of the 2020 – 2021 season from October to December. The NBA is planning a postseason tournament in Walt Disney World, so all the teams are in one city, eliminating the need for travel. This arrangement will also include regular testing for all players and staff involved. I’ll finish with golf – I know it’s not a “major” sport, but it’s my favorite and it’s important to discuss for two reasons. First, golf is in the best position to compete in a socially distanced manner and second, the PGA Tour has already outlined a revamped schedule for the rest of the year, including beginning competition in two weeks in Texas, without fans. For those not familiar with how the PGA Tour works, they travel to different cities each week, so moving just one tournament had a domino effect on other tournament dates on the calendar. The PGA will also require testing for all people involved with the tournament each week. I’ll be interested to see how this works, and as I was writing this week’s post, I read that a scheduled event in July (the first one planned with fans in attendance) is being canceled due to a restriction on gatherings in Illinois, the tournament’s scheduled location. Running a major sports league has to be incredible challenging during a time like this, as it is with running any company.
Should Sports Return This Summer?
There has been a lot of discussion of when major sports could come back, but there hasn’t been a lot of discussion about when they should come back. I understand that sports are a nice distraction, and provide entertainment for people. I’m all for entertainment – heck, I write about movies each week. There are also conversations about sports providing a unifying moment for the country. I’m not a big believer in the “national unity” narrative. While the image of the President throwing out the first pitch at a World Series game in front of a raucous crowd at Yankee Stadium a few weeks after 9/11 can inspire the country, a baseball game in front of an empty stadium is not going to do anything for “national pride.” But that’s just my opinion.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have repeatedly mentioned the concept of jobs and incomes. If a business can be reopened safely and allow the employees to start earning income again, I’m all for it. Is that the case with sports? Who is really impacted when sports start again? Not the staff working the stadiums – with no fans, you will only need a skeleton crew of staff, not everyone on the payroll. Yes, the players have not been getting paid their salaries. But if we’re talking about the average salaries of these players being in the millions of dollars per year, you would think they should have enough financial security to wait until it is safer to return to play. The owners have had a large financial impact, but again, we are talking about people who own franchises worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. I was encouraged by Mark Cuban, the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, who committed to continue paying all employees of his franchise through the end of the league year. While he has strong opinions on a lot of topics, at least he puts his money where his mouth is. One unfortunate negative impact will be charitable foundations who receive donations from professional sports organizations. For instance, at each PGA Tour city, a large portion of the tournament proceeds benefit the local community charities. Any way that you look at it, there is clearly a lot of money at stake.
Despite the financial impacts, I keep coming back to the safety aspect. The concept that I keep hearing brought up, but as an afterthought, is testing. The conversation usually goes something like this: “If we can start the postseason on this date, figure out the travel logistics, get all the players, coaches and staff in one location (like a practice “bubble” in Walt Disney World), get the hotels squared away, schedule the television so it doesn’t conflict with the NFL, and figure the testing thing out, I think it will work.” That’s my problem with this – the phrase “figure the testing thing out”. Do we even have enough testing kits in this country now? Are we sure the people who need it the most – healthcare workers, first responders, essential workers – have access to regular testing? I have the same thoughts when I read about Hollywood trying to establish new protocols for film and television production.
It seems like we haven’t figured out what the “right” testing protocol should be and how it should vary by business and industry before people can comfortably go back to work. I think this will be the next big debate in this country. What will happen if people are told that they need to be tested before they can go to a certain job or participate in a certain activity? Will they view it as a violation of their “constitutional rights”? Or will they see it as a new way of how things need to be now? How many millions of people take a drug test before starting a new job? It was a different experience flying on an airplane after 9/11, but we got used to it – we accepted that it’s the way we do things now. What if the players are concerned about their safety and don’t want to resume playing? Shouldn’t we get this figured out before we start utilizing a large number (hundreds? thousands?) of test kits every day for professional athletes and all of the people that surround each of these events? Don’t get me wrong – it would be nice to have sports and movies back in our lives for a sense of normalcy, but it feels like there are still some big unanswered questions that need to be addressed.
This Week’s Moment of Happiness
Last week, as part of Connecticut’s measured easing of restrictions in the state, restaurants were allowed to open for outside dining, if they met a series of criteria established by the state health policies. A few days ago, after a nice round of golf with two of my good friends, we stopped by a favorite restaurant to have a few drinks and some wings on the patio. The restaurant did a nice job of setting up large tables, far apart from each other, so that you could visit with people from a safe distance. We shared some laughs, had a few drinks, kept our distance, didn’t share any food, and enjoyed some fresh air. We realized that it was the first time we were at this restaurant in about three months, and it was nice to feel a sense of normalcy, if only for a little while. I hope all of you are finding your moments of happiness and normalcy each week.
That’s all for this week. Thanks again for reading. I’ll be back next week another edition of my favorite comfort movies and some updates on news in the movie world. If you’d like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe here. Have a great weekend everyone!
Thanks Steve!