The Small Market: Life and Death of the Sporting World (Part I)

*This was originally finished a month and a half ago (as people will notice with the mention of the Packers as Super Bowl champions), but never released. Sigh.
 

I’ve been trying to think of something to write. I’m about tired of talking about dating/relationship topics and I haven’t felt like delving back into the one big topic I was writing on at some point (perhaps this would be a good time to pass on what I’ve already written on that to my prospective collaborator, but I digress). So I racked my brain and thought - what better to write about than…

…sports.

I try to stay away from sports on here (especially football, since I do something on that every week), but I think there’s an interesting topic on which I can come up with a few words…and maybe it’ll have some non-sporting application.

(Ed. note: there are four parts due to the length of the piece.)

I used to think that fans of large-market or frontrunning teams - if you’re not a sports fan, think of the teams you know about: they likely qualify - were the ones that were so important to sports. I mean, they comprise mass followings. They move the ratings meter. They’re the reason that the frontrunners are…well, frontrunners. That’s all well and good, but there’s another aspect of sports - one that really keeps the sports world going: fans of small-market teams.

Without these fans, there would only be 6-8 teams per professional sports league. If you’re an NBA fan (my apologies if you are), you already understand this concept rather well. Much of the lockout - depending on who’s telling the story - was about the league not turning into “6-8 teams and everyone else”. Of course, people always want to bring up MLB at this point. You can talk about MLB all you want, but the MLB playoffs are such a crapshoot that random chance supersedes any supposed systematic advantage that large-market teams have. The NFL is, of course, everyone’s favorite baby since teams can always come from out of nowhere and post good seasons (this is also true in baseball, but no one wants to admit it).

Going back to the 6-8 thing, I think we would all agree that leagues need more teams than that to survive. The market demands that. You can’t have the Knicks play the Lakers 15 times, nor can you have 10-game seasons in the NBA. Same with MLB. Even with the NFL, what are you going to do: go with a HS/college-type schedule with 10-12 games and have everyone play each other twice?

Of course not…so you need teams for these frontrunners to play. And to now get to the really obvious part, geography plays a huge role in this. The frontrunner teams can be found in…shoot, we can name the cities: New York, Philly, Boston, Chicago, LA, and Miami. There’s a whole lot of nation being left out there. Other people want to watch and cheer for a hometown team too. A lot of those times, the team can be pretty good. Case in point, the current champions of the leagues reside in Dallas (NBA), St. Louis (MLB), and Green Bay (NFL). Mark Cuban and the Mavs are somewhat of a different story since the Mavs basically function as a large-market team, but the Cardinals are in one of the best baseball cities in America and the Packers are publicly owned.

It’s these fans - and fans like them in other cities - that keep the sports world going. Fans in places like Milwaukee, Orlando, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Kansas City have as much to do with the success of sports franchises as fans in the cities mentioned above. They go out and they support their teams…