Sports

Rethinking the rest of the Major League Baseball contract

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Suddenly ESPN’s agreement with Major League Baseball makes a lot more sense, because of an arrangement I knew about but hadn’t anticipated.

The New York Times is reporting that CBS and Turner, evoking their NCAA Tournament marriage, have formed an alliance to try to win the baseball rights. I had laid out a potential CBS/Turner marriage as a possible dark-horse option for the NASCAR contract, but I had figured that such an alliance was impractical and unnecessary in baseball, especially with CBS’ own existing commitments and successful primetime. This means that the scenario I had laid out as the favorite on Tuesday, essentially a maintenance of the status quo, may now be a nonstarter, as TBS neither needs nor probably wants Fox to be the broadcast partner. Under the circumstances, that makes such an alliance a very strong contender to kick Fox out of the sport, one that could box NBC out entirely.

Perhaps more interesting, though, CBS reportedly only wants the All-Star Game and World Series, which evokes shades of NBC’s post-Baseball Network contract in the mid-late 90s, an arrangement I hadn’t thought would be repeated. That tells me that TBS isn’t dumb enough to take the crappy Sunday afternoon package again, which means it might be moving to MLB Network after all. No, TBS has their sights set on a far bigger prize, the big enchilada, Fox’s current main Saturday contract. Even with one game each week compared to ESPN’s three, that, coupled with TBS’ considerable postseason coverage (though I still expect ESPN to get a piece of the Division Series and maybe even an LCS), would instantly cement TBS as the main baseball broadcaster, similar to TNT’s place in the NBA contract. I had described the “ESPN/TBS” scenario as the worst-case scenario for people wanting an ESPN competitor, but while it is bad for NBC and horrible for Fox, it may well be the best scenario for baseball fans, who lose Joe Buck, Tim McCarver, and the infamous blackouts of out-of-market Fox games – that last being something I couldn’t promise with NBC.

On the other hand, if MLB is seriously considering not putting a single regular season game on national broadcast television, they’re once again proving how out-of-touch they are. Leave it to MLB to find a way to be the first professional league to sign a contract as cable-reliant as the BCS and NCAA Tournament deals despite the anti-trust exemption hanging over their heads. Combine that with the monopoly many regional sports networks have over teams’ games, and many fans without cable might be utterly unable to see any baseball games other than the All-Star Game and World Series all year long. (Incidentally, the All-Star Game seems like it’d be an even weirder fit on CBS than it would Fox, since it’d be the only game on CBS for months. I don’t see any reason not to put it on TBS; is the ASG covered by the anti-trust exemption threat too?)

That leaves me hesitant to proclaim the CBS/Turner alliance the new favorite; after putting up Tuesday’s post, I realized it actually did make some sense to put the Sunday afternoon game on FX, though a Fox Sports network is still a non-starter (to the point that Fox retaining the baseball contract might now be a bad sign for its chances of launching a network). But despite the lack of broadcast presence, it is the scenario that makes the most sense to me. And it certainly makes enough sense that it probably murders what little chance NBC still had to win the baseball contract, which has to send NBC panicking; after all its commitment to sports, NBC may now find itself the only broadcast network without a presence in the three non-NFL modern major sports, potentially setting up some cruel NHL jokes at NBC’s expense (“it’s appropriate that the NHL is on NBC because…”) and placing a massive premium on winning a piece of the NASCAR contract.

As if I wasn’t having enough trouble getting anything done this summer…

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So, the frame of the screen of my laptop has become disconnected from the screen itself in one corner, AND one hinge has come loose, so I’m going to have to send it in to be repaired and that could take over a week.

The timing on this could not be worse as it jeopardizes the FF50 competition; I will probably have to do the drafts on my mom’s computer, if I do as many as I had planned at all, as Mom’s probably not going to be happy about me monopolizing the computer for large chunks of the day, especially when I could be doing more productive things.

Also, I’m going to be keeping my webcomics posts to a minimum over the course of the week. It’s unfortunate with the current events in Gunnerkrigg Court and Questionable Content that could become post-worthy soon, but it’s probably necessary.

ESPN extends its baseball contract eight years

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I never expected ESPN to not be part of the new baseball contract, but I have to admit I’m left utterly bewildered by the new contract that keeps all three primetime cable games on ESPN… but only gives them a single measly wild card game (and any tiebreakers).

First of all, I’m shocked that ESPN would pay so much (something like double the previous contract) for what basically amounts to the status quo, especially after their vocal commitment to get back into the postseason. I suspect that, even more than getting back into the postseason, ESPN’s real motivation was to blunt NBC and prevent NBC Sports Network from getting into baseball in any way. While TBS’ acquisition of one LCS was negotiated separately from their acquisition of the entire Division Series in the last contract, I don’t see how, if ESPN was going to acquire most of the rest of the postseason similarly, why they wouldn’t announce it now, yet I have a hard time seeing who else might get it. There’s no reason for Fox to suddenly do an about-face and go back to clearing out their October schedule for postseason games, there’s no point in NBC getting baseball without putting games on NBC Sports Network, and there’s no room for any other cable outlet to air regular season games, unless… sigh… the Sunday afternoon package is kept.

I now, sadly, think the most likely outcome is a maintenance of the status quo with the only real change being ESPN’s addition of holiday and tiebreaker/wild card games (and I do suspect ESPN will add some Division Series games later). NBC could take over the Fox package for the broadcast network and the Sunday afternoon package for NBC Sports Network, but considering how crappy the latter package has been, I think it’s more likely that NBC is already focusing on trying to get a piece of the NASCAR package. I also think any chance of Fox putting games on FX or certainly a Fox Sports Network is now out the window, reducing the chances of the latter coming to fruition.

By keeping all three primetime cable games, ESPN just severely crippled the chances of any entity seriously competing with them, and one has to wonder whether NBC will be stuck fighting for scraps forever.

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Starting Da Blog’s 2012 football season with a whimper

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It is with a heavy sigh that I have begun the process of preparing the site for the 2012 football season (last week’s fantasy draft didn’t count). I’ve been dreading this because of all the stuff I wanted to get done this summer that didn’t get done. Both lineal titles have their respective first games updated, and sometime before Thursday I’ll tweet out when you can expect the first rankings. Because of the Fantasy Football Fifty Challenge, those and the SNF Flex Schedule Watch may be the only things I do this year.

Shark League Draft Post-Mortem

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You may recall I was feeling pretty sure of myself after the first two rounds of my FantasySharks League draft, when I had Larry Fitzgerald and Maurice Jones-Drew in my possession.

That…feeling didn’t last. My next five picks ended up all being wide receivers, and I wound up drafting eight wideouts over the course of the entire draft. If Jones-Drew’s holdout doesn’t end and none of the injured running backs I picked are ready, I’ll only be able to play one running back Week 1. I have a hard time believing I’m going to have a worse draft when I fill out the other 49 teams over Labor Day Weekend.

It’s apparent that the lists I was relying on overemphasize wideouts so much compared to their Shark League value that it’s going to be difficult to correct for. Someone told me that the lack of trading in Shark Leagues has a bigger impact on the draft than I would have thought, effectively leading one to focus on drafting their starting lineup at the major positions in the first six picks, but I’m not fond of trading anyway, and it wouldn’t change the fact that I drafted a wideout in the first and third rounds and probably would have filled my entire bench with them thereafter. I’m now playing “Wide Receiver Survivor”, with my eight wideouts fighting not to be cut in the first few weeks in favor of free agents to shore up my situation at tight end, running back, and possibly quarterback, though it’s entirely possible Jay Cutler, who broke the run of wideouts in the eighth, could work out.

I joined the Shark Leagues to test how far my own “strategy”, to the extent it could be called such, could really take me. I now suspect that the rules of the leagues have been intentionally devised to attempt to weed out anyone remotely noobish, and undercut any crutches such as I might use. So I intend to stick with it another year, but I’m going to have to make some big changes to my strategy to allow it to hold up under the circumstances. Even then, I’m not sure it’s going to be enough.

The past and future of the Olympics

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Once, the Olympics were considered among the most pure of sports events, because of its tradition of amateurism. But today, years after it was abandoned, its past of amateurism is holding the Games back.

For the Olympics to be for amateurs only seemed natural in the early 20th century as the Games and the Olympic movement grew. But the prohibition on professionalism meant that FIFA had to create a separate World Cup if it wanted an international Olympic-type tournament. Today, the World Cup is arguably bigger than the Olympics and the Olympic football tournament is restricted to keep from competing with it.

The Olympic notion of amateurism was probably sustained well past its sell-by date by global geopolitics; the Cold War turned the Olympics into a point of intense patriotic pride regardless of who was competing. By the time the Cold War was over, the IOC had already dropped the professionalism requirement, setting up the 1992 Dream Team. Today, the Olympic basketball tournament is one of the biggest parts of the Olympics, indeed of the whole basketball calendar, and the hockey tournament positively dominates the Winter Games… yet David Stern wants to make the basketball tournament under-23 only and push FIBA’s Basketball World Cup as the new standard of international basketball competition, and NHL players might not participate in Sochi either.

Had the Olympics allowed professionals from the start, or at least in the 1920s, there would have been no need for a separate soccer tournament. The Olympic tournament could have filled the bill quite nicely. Without the World Cup? David Stern and the NHL wouldn’t even be thinking of dropping out of the Olympics. The Olympics would be the great nexus of international competition, which you don’t mess with unless you have a very good reason. I’m not even sure the Olympics would have dropped baseball; Bud Selig would have interrupted the season in a heartbeat to get major league players in the Games, because any sport would kill to have an Olympic tournament. With all these sports playing prominent roles, Americans might not even have to suffer through tape delays.

Instead? The Olympics could become the place for sports that aren’t popular enough outside it to have their own tournaments worth paying attention to. An Olympic soccer tournament with all the players participating might completely dominate the Games and push all other sports to the background, but those sports are more insidiously denigrated by the fact that soccer, and maybe basketball and hockey, are too cool for them.

At one point, I was thinking that if the Olympic basketball tournament became an under-23 affair, I would consider the Olympic Games mostly dead to me and push the notion of a “Pseudolympic Games”, consisting of all those tournaments in the off year between Olympic Games in Olympic-eligible sports that mostly exist because of the Olympic amateurism requirement or the popularity of the World Cup. But the Basketball World Cup might move a year later – funnily enough, to get away from the soccer World Cup – and to encompass the entire four-year Olympiad would result in complications, since the more traditionally-“Olympic” sports tend to have tournaments in every odd-numbered year. But every time a sport declares themselves too cool for the Olympics, I will sigh and observe that the ghosts of Pierre de Coubertin and 19th-century aristocratic notions of the gentleman still haunt the Olympic Movement.

Great, ANOTHER streak-filler post?

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I was planning on writing a post wrapping up the Olympics in more ways than one… but my day became completely occupied with my fascination watching the FantasySharks drafts over the course of the day. And my own league wasn’t even part of it, being stuck at for over nine hours. I may have to consider the first day of the FantasySharks drafts a personal day for me from now on.

For the record, I think I’ve done pretty decently drafting so far (I’m 11th, so I get two picks pretty much one after the other). I’ve picked up Larry Fitzgerald and Maurice Jones-Drew, and I feel like I’ve dodged a bullet because I came very close to spending my first two picks on wide receivers. (The Shark leagues are PPR leagues, but with two wideouts and no flex, so people are reticent to take wideouts too early. By the way, I feel like ESPN’s PPR rankings are the Matt Millen of PPR rankings; four wideouts in the first eight spots?) Regardless, despite the differences between fantasy and real football, anytime you pick up two players among the Top 50 resumes for the Hall of Fame, you must be doing something right. (If you want to follow the rest of my draft, I’m tweeting every pick and I might write a wrap-up when it’s done.)

That Olympics post may be up by the time you read this, or I may have scrapped the idea entirely because I wasn’t feeling it. Time will tell.

What Arab oil has to do with the Premier League – and the sports TV wars

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ESPN. Fox. NBC. Al Jazeera?

One thing that has become apparent to those following the world of international sports in recent years is that you don’t bleep with oil money. There’s no other way to explain why the United States lost the 2022 World Cup to Qatar of all places, in spite of all its problems. The richest horse race in the world is held in Dubai, as is the culminating event of the European Tour (last I checked Dubai is not in Europe, and I doubt it’s in a climate particularly conducive to golf courses). And American interest in soccer, at least European club soccer, could be shot down just as it’s getting off the ground by the whims of an Arab oil sheik.

Al Jazeera is best known to Americans as that group that aired Osama bin Laden’s tapes, and as such most Americans pretty much associate it with terrorists and thus its attempt to launch an English-language news network in the US has pretty much been a miserable failure. But over the past year it’s been on an astonishing run of acquiring US rights to international soccer leagues, winning rights to three of the five biggest leagues in Europe – Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, and France’s Ligue 1 – which it will use to launch two new channels on Wednesday called beIN Sport.

But of course, the big daddy of European soccer rights in the US by a long shot is the English Premier League, and that has to have people at Fox quaking in their boots. Fox has already lost the rights to MLS to NBC, and Serie A to the new beIN Sport operation. It still has rights to the UEFA Champions League and newly-acquired World Cup rights, but the English Premier League is the bread and butter of their Fox Soccer operation. Lose that, and you might as well move what’s left to a Fox Sports network and shutter Fox Soccer, convert it to Fox Sports 1 or 2, or sell it to the beIN Sport people. Already competitor GolTV has lost the rights to its own La Liga bread and butter, leaving it with not much more than the German Bundesliga, the Brazilian league, and some scattered international competition.

If Fox has to be worried about the prospect of these upstarts from Qatar stealing Premier League rights, American soccer fans have to be absolutely terrified. A lot of work has been done to get to the point where a substantial number of Americans are now interested in the Premier League and to a lesser extent European soccer in general, and beIN Sport could end up destroying all of it. Not even the NFL can launch a network from scratch in less than a year and get anything close to wide distribution, and even Fox Soccer doesn’t have as much distribution as you might think. How quickly can beIN Sport even get to Fox Soccer’s level? A year? Two years? Five years? (It doesn’t help that a lot that beIN Sport has done has been kept low-profile, almost secret, to the point that it’s not even clear what carriage agreements beIN Sport has signed, but the list of providers to call on their Web site indicates it includes none of the biggest ones.)

beIN Sport has already declared it has no plans to sublicence any games to anyone, meaning the sizable stateside fandom of Spanish clubs Barcelona and Real Madrid used to seeing games on GolTV and ESPN are already screwed. For the same to happen to the Premier League, so soon after Fox’s much-publicized experiment in airing every game of the Premier League’s final week, could be potentially catastrophic. And what of ESPN? They’ve gone on a full-court press promoting their embrace of soccer, even after losing the World Cup to Fox. But what if they can’t air Premier League or La Liga games anymore either? They’ll still have MLS, some National Team games, and the Euro tournament, but will that be worth it?

ESPN’s UK operation has already lost the rights to the Premier League, which could reduce ESPN’s motivation to keep airing it in the States. Fox will surely have motivation to keep the backbone of Fox Soccer, but will that be enough to counter seemingly bottomless piles of oil money? Soccer fans should enjoy the current relative glut of European soccer on television, especially the recent thrilling Premier League finish, while it lasts, because it might not for much longer. And they should root hard for Fox, as well as anyone else – ESPN, NBC, even CBS Sports Network or truTV, or a strange bedfellows alliance between two or more of them – in the sports TV wars interested in the Premier League rights, lest soccer in this country end up set back decades.

Then again, maybe beIN Sport can round up cable providers with no problems whatsoever… in which case the sports TV wars, and maybe the larger American media industry, might just have a new contender.

Introducing the Morgan Wick Fantasy Football Fifty Challenge!

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Last year, I decided to carry out a project called the Simulated Experts’ Fantasy League. I’d take the “big boards” of eight prominent fantasy sites and draft an eight-team league using each of them, then play out a season. It was an interesting experiment, but not one I’d like to try again with. I intended to run a second league, the Simulated Experts’ Auction Fantasy League. This league would attempt to hold an auction using several sites that listed recommended auction values for players.

After waiting for sites to have as up-to-date and relevant big boards as I could, possibly too long (Yahoo never did release a big board that reflected the end of the Chris Johnson holdout), I held the SEFL draft all day on Wednesday, the day before the start of the season. On Thursday, I woke up intending to hold the auction draft… and found that NFL.com had replaced its big board with Week 1 rankings. And there was no way to get the big board back, even though you could still draft a team right up to kickoff of the Kickoff Game.

I looked frantically for some way to get the big board back. NFL.com’s fantasy system has a feature where you can enter a draft – not a mock draft, a real live draft – just by clicking some buttons. As I would find, it’s a devious way for them to suck people into their fantasy football product. I entered a draft room to find that I could, in fact, get the big board back that way… but of course, it didn’t have what I actually needed, the auction values, and NFL.com is only supporting actual auction leagues starting this year. Nonetheless, over the course of the time I spent in there, I wound up drafting a team.

It was a strangely engrossing experience, and I decided to run a team in as many sites as I could, but I was only able to draft a team on ESPN before the Kickoff Game started. I’ve said before that I tend to go against the grain of what everyone else is doing, that I tend not to be caught up in whatever the current trend is, but in retrospect it’s kind of surprising that I hadn’t taken up fantasy football before; it involves just the sort of obsessive ordering, sorting, and categorization that’s right up my alley. For someone like me, who isn’t really a fan of any particular team, it’s really the perfect way to follow the NFL. For much of last season I was actually considering doing a live online radio show every Sunday of this year where I keep track of the developments in one specific fantasy league, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

(For the record, my impression was that the people on NFL.com were more prone to make boneheaded mistakes and massive reach picks than the more knowledgeable drafters on ESPN… so naturally my NFL.com team did horribly while my ESPN team dominated the league after Cam Newton basically fell into my lap and I turned out to have something like the two best running backs in the league, propelling me all the way to the championship game before getting crushed.)

Now that I know for a fact what my opinion of fantasy football is, I intend to take it to the next level, and finish what I briefly started last year, by running as many teams as I possibly can – a total of a whopping fifty at the same time. Why? Because I’m apparently insane and have decided that, after a summer I’d earmarked as a critical one with a number of projects I intended to get done that wound up progressing slower than I would have liked, and heading into a hardcore quarter at school where I’ll be taking a class that’s both critical and might end up demanding the most work of any I’ve taken, the best thing for me to do is to take one of the major saps on my time last fall and increase the work involved in it fivefold.

One of these leagues will be one of the MyFantasyLeague.com leagues from FantasySharks.com, despite my having no intention of using the actual advice on their site much – their ranking on FantasyPros.com, one of the sites in the SEFL, doesn’t lie, though their draft advice is of some use. So why am I doing it? Because FantasySharks.com has come up with a brilliant idea that I’m not entirely sure why no one has tried before: bringing promotion and relegation to fantasy football. At the top is the “Great White Shark League”, a 12-team league consisting of nine users of the site, two of the site’s top experts, and an automated team. The bottom four teams get relegated to one of two “Whale Shark Leagues”, which similarly each contain nine users, two experts, and an automated team, with the champion and the team with the most total points promoted to the Great White Shark. Below that are four “Hammerhead” leagues containing all users, then eight “Mako” leagues, then 16 “Blue” leagues, then the current lowest level, the 32 “Tiger” leagues (though there is a possibility that a new “Leopard” level could be added this year).

I love this concept in every way, from the way it raises the stakes on every level to the most important reason I’m actually participating in it, its usefulness as a yardstick of ability and success. I’ve actually expanded this idea out to one of a championship pyramid for all of fantasy football, a good 20 levels following the same power-of-2 structure, complete with a new-player-qualification scheme so new players don’t have to wait a lifetime to reach the top. For the limited competition that’s there now, I’ll be starting in Tiger League 3 with a team with the whimsically nerdy name of the “Green Lantern Corps“.

For the other 49 teams, I’ll be drafting as many teams as I can on every single free fantasy football website. NFL.com has a maximum of six, CBS three, ESPN and Fox ten each. Yahoo and Fleaflicker have no limit, so ten teams on each of those sites brings me to an even 50. All of these drafts, except the FantasySharks league whose draft will start this Monday and has a 12-hour timer so it could last upwards of a week, will be held over Labor Day Weekend and in the run-up to kickoff. To reduce the effect on my time during the school year, I will stop actively maintaining any team that starts 0-4 or 1-5, but I will maintain at least one team on every site and under no circumstances will I abandon the Shark team. I’ll track my progress over the course of the season and give my quick impressions of each site as I go along, on Twitter and on Da Blog.

Here are the times I intend to hold the draft for each league. All times Pacific.

August 13:
6 AM: MyFantasyLeague/FantasySharks.com

September 1:
9 AM: NFL
10 AM: ESPN
11 AM: Fox
Noon: Yahoo
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: CBS
3 PM: Yahoo
4 PM: ESPN
5 PM: Fox
6 PM: Fleaflicker
7 PM: ESPN
8 PM: Yahoo

September 2:
9 AM: Yahoo
10 AM: Fox
11 AM: ESPN
Noon: NFL
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: Fox
3 PM: CBS
4 PM: ESPN
5 PM: Fleaflicker
6 PM: Yahoo
7 PM: NFL
8 PM: Fox

September 3:
9 AM: Fox
10 AM: ESPN
11 AM: Yahoo
Noon: NFL
1 PM: Fleaflicker
2 PM: Yahoo
3 PM: Fox
4 PM: Fleaflicker
5 PM: ESPN
6 PM: NFL
7 PM: CBS
8 PM: Fleaflicker

September 4:
Noon: ESPN
1 PM: Fox
2 PM: Fleaflicker
3 PM: Yahoo
4 PM: Fox
5 PM: ESPN
6 PM: Yahoo
7 PM: Fleaflicker
8 PM: NFL

September 5:
Noon: Fleaflicker
1 PM:  Yahoo
2 PM:  Fox
3 PM:  ESPN

Sizing up NBC’s new French Open contract

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After NBC lost the Wimbledon contract, I expected it to be only a matter of time before it lost the contract to the French Open. If NBC didn’t decide it was time to get out of one of the lesser grand slams after losing the premier grand slam to cable, Roland-Garros surely would award it to ESPN rather than put everyone through excruciating tape delays. That’s why Sunday, NBC signed a deal to broadcast the French Open for another twelve years… wait, what?!?

Yep, and there are no signs that NBC is stopping with its tape delays either. Not only that, NBC is expanding its coverage to levels more akin to what it used to do for Wimbledon or what CBS does with the US Open.

I can’t help but wonder how much of this has to do with the Tennis Channel being the official cable partner, which might complicate ESPN’s ability to take NBC’s package. More broadly, the timing of the broadcast deal vis-a-vis the cable deal clearly is huge. NBC lost Wimbledon almost solely because it would have to wait for two more years to put games on the NBC Sports Network. With the French Open, the cable deal came first, meaning ESPN’s position was already locked in for the long haul. I have to imagine the confluence of these two items boxed ESPN out and gave NBC all the leverage (unless CBS was interested).

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