Rambling with Alex

If there has ever been a difficult year to enjoy sports, 2011 takes the cake.

While there have been plenty of great games, our favorite leagues have had more issues than a marriage
involving Charlie Sheen.

For nearly five months we listened to NFL owners and players bicker at each other throughout the lockout.

Billionaire owners complained they weren’t getting a fair share of the leagues’ revenue as they lobbied for rookie wage scales and a longer season among other things. Player’s such as Minnesota Vikings running-back Adrian Peterson compared the NFL to modern-day slavery.

Retired NFL players filed an antitrust lawsuit against the owners, while U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson ruled the lockout should be lifted to save players irreversible damage. Her ruling was then appealed and overturned.

When the lockout finally ended on July 25, teams rushed to sign free agents before the start of preseason, since they couldn’t during the lockout, making Adam Schefter the busiest man in the world for a few days.

Of course it’s not just pro-football that’s been messier than a frat house this year. While
we knew there would be a season in 2011, college football has had more issues than the cast of Celebrity Rehab.

Miamigot in trouble for dozens of past and former players receiving illegal gifts from Nevin Shapiro, a convicted Ponzi schemer and Miami booster from 2002-2010. Shapiro told Yahoo Sports, who broke the story that he spent “millions” on Miami players, ranging from sex parties on his yacht, to expensive jewelry to an abortion for a woman impregnated by a Hurricane player.

Some of the other big-time college football programs that committed violations were Ohio State, Southern Cal, Auburn,North Carolina, Oregon,Tennessee and LSU.

Kirk Herbstreit, the award-winning college football analyst for ESPN, told CNN.com, “I honestly don’t think the sport has ever had as tumultuous of an off-season as we had during this year. I do mean, ever, and I’m referring to the entire history of the sport.”

And we haven’t even begun to talk about conference realignment, which has me more confused than I ever was in calculus. The Pac-10 is now the Pac-12. The Big Ten has twelve teams with newcomer Nebraska. The Big 12 is soon to be the Big 8 and Pittsburgh and Syracuse are the newest members of the ACC. Texas A&M is bound for the SEC.

As if football problems weren’t enough for a sports fan to deal with, the possibility of there being no NBA season in 2011 becomes more of a reality with each passing day. The NBA erased part of its season Friday, announcing it was postponing the start of training camps indefinitely and scrapping 43 preseason games because of ownership’s lockout of players.

The lockout is occurring because NBA owners claim they lost $300 million last season andthat 23 of 30 teams are losing money. They want players, who collected 57% of basketball-related income in 2010-11 — or $2.15 billion — to take a substantial cut in salary and promise to keep the total salary figure rolled back at a fixed $2 billion for at least five years.

The chances of at least a portion of the season being cancelled are high.  In 1998, the last time the NBA had a labor dispute, they cancelled the entire preseason on Oct. 6. On Oct. 14 the first two weeks of the regular-season were canceled and on Oct. 29 the first month of games were dropped. On Nov. 25, Christmas games were cancelled. Those dates are a good blueprint for what might happen this year, with many experts predicting the season won’t start until January.

This is unfortunate given how exciting the NBA was last year, and how many young stars the league has.

For any major league, the cancellation of a season deforms history, changing things such as a player’s ability to climb the ranks in career statistics like points scored or games played. Subsequent drops in TV ratings and ticket sales are likely.

It also hits the industry that is built around the training camps, preseason games and memorabilia. It cuts into the bottom
line of restaurants, bars and businesses near arenas.  Not having a season takes a lot of joy away from the fans.

What it can’t do, is take the love for the game away from fans.

Whether there’s an NBA season or not, there will still be kids in the city shoveling snow off a court in January so they can get a game or two in. Intramurals in college will live on, and fans will pack high school gyms. Men in their 40s and 50s will play after work at their local health club.

Professional and major college sports have been hard to put up with in 2011. Some fans may have been turned off from the professional leagues for good. That doesn’t matter, however, because true fans don’t need to watch a pro team to enjoy the sports they love. True fans will love sports no matter what.