Mark Cuban Thinks the 'greedy' NFL is 10 Years Away from Implosion | Hacker News Reader

Mark Cuban Thinks the 'greedy' NFL is 10 Years Away from Implosion

ftw.usatoday.com

40 pointsytNumbers53 comments

Baseball seems to have a lot more games than football, and it manages to stay in business.

Seems to me the head injury problem might taken a more prominent role in the future of football. If football becomes more commonly viewed as a gladiator battle that liquifies the participants brains, it might become less popular. Then again, boxing doesn't seem to going broke, either.

>it might become less popular

Nope. You think the average NFL player, who knows by around middle school if they're going to get on the track to go pro or not, cares about or is actively thinking about their physical condition in ~40 years in addition with the potential millions they'll be making in ~10? Not in the least. A lot more banging of pots and pans needs to occur before the general public gets it in their heads that the sport is incredibly dangerous and will be ruinous for one's physical health down the line. It's bad enough that the NFL and ESPN all but swept the concussions ordeal/settlement under the rug...and why wouldn't they when there are insane profits to be had?

It's not the child players you need to convince, it's the parents. I was on the middle school football team, and my parents pulled me off the team in high school because of the chance of severe and permanent injury. If parents say no, the sport dies.

There are enough parents out there who are either just don't care or who buy fully enough into football culture that there will still be enough football players.

Right, which is why I said it's going to be a while before the general public wakes up to realize how destructive the sport they all love and support is. People don't want to acknowledge that one of their greatest escapisms is crippling its main participants and thereby disrupting their own status quo; it's easier.

The general public might become more aware if lawsuits start happening in numbers. Another possibility is that colleges and high schools pull football if they think they might be sued and can't afford it.

>If parents say no, the sport dies.

The context for (what I'm assuming) a middle class kid who is playing for fun vs an underprivileged kid or a kid with clear potential is vastly different. It's easy to pull your kid from middle school football when its just a hobby for them.

Boxing has fallen way off from what it was in the middle of the 20th Century. The big paydays at the top are much greater than they once were (so big, somebody said, that the fighters are even getting some). But it seems to me that it has fallen off in its share of the attention that goes to sports.

In the US it seem like MMA (UFC) is at the right place at the right time to take over. It seems much more violent but I don't know that it is. But seeing some of those hits I can't help but wonder what the long term effects are of being in even just a handful of professional fights.

Mainly because MMA UFC has taken a big chunk of that attention

The problems started well before UFC. The problem was the exact same issues that Cuban is pointing out: the sport started to believe in its own hype that nothing was which caused an implosion of greed and corruption. Mike Tyson and Sugar Ray Leonard are the reasons why boxing didn't go extinct in the 80s.

I would argue that baseball is popular in spite of them playing 900 games (I'm exaggerating) every season (not counting spring training).

The NFL has tried to put player safety at the forefront of it's PR with all this concussion prevention talk; otherwise the talent pipeline would eventually start drying up as more and more parents would stop letting their kids play football. But I can assure you, alongside the head injury issues, Thursday games are only going to increase injury in the long term as they stand now.

The right move is to push for an 18 week/16 game season, each team gets two bye weeks and only plays on a Thursday game when coordinated with one of their byes to allow maximum recovery. The NFL can then sound the trumpets of encouraging player safety as well as broadcast more games.

For fun - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78qF72JwJwA

#GoHawks

The talent pipeline for professional football is going to dry up no matter what. As more scientific evidence mounts of what we already know anecdotally lawsuits will increase along with the insurance costs for youth football. There is no stopping that.

My dad played football, and so did I. My child will not, because his brain is more important than football. That's anecdotal, but there are plenty more like us.

Isn't their this kind of risk in lots of sports? They haven't seen talent dry up

e.g. Motorsport

In the 70's Formula 1 there were 9 deaths and many more serious injuries. Safety has improved significantly in the last 15 years but there was never a lack of talent in the most dangerous years.

e.g. Boxing

I don't have specific evidence here but in a sport where people punch each other there has to be long term risk and it continues to prove extremely popular.

e.g. Rugby

Again little specific evidence but it's at least as brutal as the NFL and lacks the protection for the players. I know several kids in my local area who have suffered broken necks, paralysis, and I've heard of one death. And these were kids playing for their high school team. Yet it continues to grow in popularity and talent.

There is a huge difference between those sports and football. Youth football is sponsored and run by public schools whose residents will not want to cover the financial fallout from a lawsuit. Private schools have been ending football programs for awhile now because they have even less ability to pay for a lawsuit, it's only a matter of time before public schools go the same route.

I completely disagree. There is a huge difference between professional and amateur level football in terms of intensity and potential damage, so the inherent danger is orders of magnitude lower at the high school and most of the college level. At elite college levels, the potential for money from a future NFL career will trump any concern about personal safety. Furthermore, parents are going to have a hard time preventing a kid with clear potential from playing high school football.

I don't know why more people don't recommend 18 weeks/ 16 games. Every time I mentioned it it got dismissed apparently because the NFL tries two bye weeks years back and it went over poorly. But it seems like a great way to increase player safety, protect viewer scarcity/appetite, and increase tv revenue.

#GoHawks

#GoHawks!

As others are saying, I'm more amazed at how quickly society has recognized the health problems.

Pee-wee football saw a 9.5% participation drop from 2010 to 2012: http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/page/popwarner/pop-warne...

I know personally I've been suffering Football fatigue these last few years. Frankly the only reason I watched much football at all last year is because my team was doing well (Broncos). Once Manning retires I wouldn't be surprised if I end up taking an NFL hiatus because it has gotten so ridiculous.

Throw in the fact most of the Thursday Night games ended up with at least one team playing horribly likely in part due to the short recovery period from previous games...

And that doesn't even get into the whole "expanding to London" thing which is such a cash grab that is in no other way good for the League...

One of the best things about sports is that they are seasonal. If they weren't, people would grow tired of them and they wouldn't be that interesting.

For example, professional wrestling is a year round "sports" TV show. Without big events like special pay per view shows and such, it would have completely died. As it is, without "Wrestlemania Season" once a year, it would lose a lot of its audience over time because it would have trouble building to anything interesting. Professional wrestling has a resurgence once a decade or so because like many fads, there is a hook that gets people in, but since it never ends, people grow tired and move on to other things. The biggest performers - Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Shawn Michaels, Brett Heart, Steve Austin, Dwayne Johnson, and John Cena. Each one's careers coincided with a short "peak" in the business that eventually trailed off as another couple guys had their own peak 5-10 years later.

If NFL or any other sport moves towards more games, more tv, more exposure, it is going to risk being overexposed in a huge way.

Case in point - curling. One of the huge draws of curling is that for most Americans it is only on tv once every 4 years for the Olympics. That has added a mystique and an interest that makes it fascinating to watch. If curling was on every Saturday afternoon all year long, its ratings during the Olympics would drop.

It's not just the audience that grow tired, also the players. If you have an all year around sport then there will be no match that is the most important. All matches are equally important(unimportant) and the players become numb. Compare watching the early rounds of NHL each season with the Stanley Cup semi finals, winning the former doesn't mean shit but winning the later means everything, when do you think the players will give their max, which one will be more interesting to watch?

As a Canadian this strikes me as incredibly true. I'm at the point where I really don't watch that much regular season hockey anymore. The NHL keeps extending the season and trying to add more teams and it is just becoming tiresome. But once the playoffs are on I would pit hockey against any other sport on the planet for entertainment. The olympics were another example of this. The hockey played was at such an incredible level that I watched every game I could. I couldn't get over how intense and entertaining the games were, and if more people saw that style of hockey it would be much bigger than it is now with over 80 games, 60% of which will be absolute snoozers.

Football has an incredible advantage in that its players get ~1 week to rest up in between games and with only 16 games, they are all pretty important. This means that most games are played at a high level of intensity and skill and are thus more entertaining. Moving to dilute this quality in pursuit of more revenue is a path I've watched the NHL walk down, and hopefully the NFL can learn from their mistakes.

Is this solely an American phenomenon? Soccer runs from August to May with a major international tournament (either the Copa America, European Championship, or the World Cup) most summers and it's the most popular spectator sport in the world.

I don't see anything wrong with putting more games on Thursday. As long as teams still play 16 games a season, it won't make any difference to fans. The league is great because every game is important, not because every game is played on sunday.

It's also worth noting that there's already a Thursday game broadcasted on the NFL network.

The issue with spreading games out comes down to people's ability to schedule and set aside time to watch. Currently if you're a fan of one team you need to figure out if your team plays on Thur, Sun or Monday. If it's Sunday you then need to figure out if it's at 1:00, 4:30 or 8:00.

For those who don't want or intend to pay for the NFL Network, the options are only Sun/Monday.

I would argue that this "simple" schedule makes it easier for fans to tune in, and block off time to enjoy their team play.

Thursday games are broadcast on local networks in the cities where the teams playing are from, so you don't have to have NFL network to watch your local team.

He has a point. One of the big values of the NFL is i) A limited number of games and ii) All played closely together (timewise) So every weekend is important because a team's fortunes can really change from week to week. Baseball and Basketball teams can go on multi game losing streaks and it's just a bump. In the NFL it's almost certain death to playoff aspirations.

That makes for better analysis Monday through Friday. Because all of these events have been compressed and the future can be mapped out. Now you're spreading events over 4 days of the week you lose that "Completeness"

Having said all that violence and injury will be what kills the NFL before saturation. Negotiating the move to a more athletic spectacle vs warrior battle without losing the base of fans is key to continuing to have the best athletes chose football over other sports early on.

Your first point isn't an issue as they're not proposing extending the ovral # of games.

Your second point is valid, and I would add that the rhythm, and amount of preparation needed to play American football at the highest level is seriously compromised when you play on Thursday. If the NFL only has teams who have a "buy" week on Thur than the problem is mitigated (can anyone confirm this?), but it takes serious effort to prepare (and heal) for an NFL game and the players/coaches surely won't enjoy the abbreviated prep time caused by the new time slot.

Agree on the rest and preparation time. Also note the article mentioned the debate around playing less pre season games and adding 2 regular season games (which would start to dilute the importance of any one game)

> Football is the most popular thing in America because it’s the greatest spectator sport...

Pretty controversial!

Yeah. NASCAR commonly claims that they are the largest spectator sport, and for certain definitions they are probably right. If you define spectator sport as a sport with very low active participation compared to the viewing figures, it's probably NASCAR. Not a lot of weekend racers or race car drivers out on the playgrounds of schools.

Wikipedia says MLB is the largest spectator sport [1]. NASCAR doesn't make the list (NASCAR estimates between 3-5 million per year).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sports_attendance_figur...

NASCAR fan here.

I think when NASCAR says they are the biggest "spectator" sport they mean that their individual events attract more spectators to one spot than other sports, which for many tracks is absolutely true but misleading. Capacity at Daytona for example is around 150,000 seats which is far more than the highest capacity NFL stadium (Redskins at 82000). With that said, Indianapolis motor speedway has attracted almost 250,000 race fans for the Indy 500, but unfortunately not in recent years.

Anyway, what NASCAR doesn't talk about is that there is only one race going on at one track on any given sunday, and with a few exceptions the sport only comes around once a year. Compare that to the 14+ NFL games that take place in any given week during the regular season and there's really not much of a comparison. The NFL blows them out of the water.

Total attendance is a poor metric for judging popularity between such different sports, such as MLB (162 games a season for each team) and NFL (16? 18?). But equally average attendance doesn't work for the same reason.

If this is interesting to you, you might enjoy this long form book excerpt from a former NFL player:

http://deadspin.com/my-injury-file-how-i-shot-smoked-and-scr...

This reminded me of the dangerous, unhealthy culture I knew well as a high school player but had forgotten as the NFL's marketing efforts replaced that perspective with their own narrative over the years.

It's worth noting that the commissioner of the NBA (the league in which Cuban is an owner) recently announced that they'll likely be putting sponsors' logos on NBA jerseys within five years:

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/10637752/commissioner-adam...

It's also worth noting that Mr. Cuban is not allowed to criticize NBA policies.

I don't believe that's correct -- though he certainly receives more attention and scrutiny when he does so. Recently, he (along with pretty much everyone else) criticized the new sleeved jerseys:

http://espn.go.com/dallas/nba/story/_/id/10198314/mark-cuban...

He's not allowed to criticize officials, big difference.

To be fair, Cuban's already complained about the stupid short sleeve jerseys, I would guess he'll complain about this too. He's often in hot water for not toeing the party line about various stupidities in the NBA (which IMO is only not the worst run league in the US because Hockey in NA is so poorly run).

The NBA is not run well, but they have grown a lot under the last commissioner while things like baseball and hockey have shrunk in popularity. The NBAs biggest problem is lack of talent and the long, meaningless regular season.

The best regular season in recent memory was the strike shortened season where they played maybe 50 games. The talent issue is harder to solve because in a 5 person game you need a least 1 super star per team to really matter. The be a super start in the NBA you need so many skills that it is similar in rarity to being a top QB in the NFL. There just are not many athletes at that level.

"The NBA is not run well"

There are certain things they could do better (the cap, age requirement, too many teams) but I think this is a stretch. The Association does the best job of any American sports league with globalization, no one else markets its stars better, and no one else has done as good a job leveraging technology as delivery medium.

I think those two issues are somewhat related: the 'lack' of talent (I'd more call it an uneven distribution of talent) leads to a lack of parity amongst teams, and a lack of parity amongst teams leads to a pointless regular season where you have a pretty accurate idea of the playoffs before even the All-Star break.

I think they should add a mid-season or pre-season tournament and shorten the regular season. Play some of the tournament games overseas.

I've been playing fantasy football for 17 years and the past 2 have been the worst w/r/t the schedule. We now have 2 days to "manage" our teams: Tuesday and Wednesday. Instead of the occasional Thurs game, it's now nearly every week with multiple teams, etc. God forbid you get busy and miss Tues and Wed. It's definitely a fatigue. And forgetaboutit if you have small children. You almost need a personal assistant to help with the scheduling.

Edit: I think the player safety issue is completely separate. I would still get football fatigue even if we completely solved the head injury issue.

>> "There’s a certain richness to Cuban complaining about the NFL trying to take over every night of television. His team plays in the league that runs from October through June and has a playoffs that lasts slightly longer than the gestation period of small mammals."

>> "Still, Cuban’s completely right."

Emm, how? People will get sick of too much or a sport and start turning off. Ok. Yet the sport he is part of proves his own point wrong. And the author still thinks he's right?

I can't find a more recent graph, but perhaps Mr Cuban means this gigantic gap in leadership is what will implode: http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/...

"Greedy" is such a meaningless criticism in the modern economy. He means short term greed that compromises long term greed.

Aww you wait til that nice Mr Murdoch buys up all the rights and you can only get NFL on sky just like football in the UK.

Oh and Bar owners get ready to pay a lot more to show NFL in your bar.

Part of me thinks that its contract negotiation time with the players union.

The NFL ought to have relegation/promotion last team in each conference gets drooped and replaced each year.

He is mistaken. Soccer is a 24/7/365 thing in South America and Europe and people don't seem to be getting tired of it. The sport itself is not what matters, what people care about is the competition.

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