Cutback?

- J. Andrew Lockwood -
Senior Editor of The Bear Zone/ Sports Columnist
james.andrew.lockwood@student.mercer.edu

           While the American economy struggles to regain ground in 2009, one sports team brings in the new year by spending outrageous amounts of money.  It’s nothing new for the New York Yankees to spend money, but to pay $424 million for three players when the unemployment rate continues to rise is a little ostentatious.  The plush deals for 1B Mark Teixeira and pitchers A.J. Burnett and CC Sabathia should keep them quite content for the next few years, even if the Yankees fail to win a title, but one has to wonder when enough is enough.  The $46 million those three players are earning annually is greater than the payrolls for three TEAMS from last season.

            Everyone is feeling the pinch of the slumping economy, from the Arena Football League to Major League Baseball to the National Football League.  On December 15^th, the twenty-two year old Arena Football League decided to ‘suspend’ the 2009 season to redevelop their economic model.  Colorado Crush co-owner and former NFL quarterback John Elway said, “Although it is disappointing to suspend the 2009 season, the Arena Football League and its owners feel it is essential to reevaluate the current business model to ensure the livelihood of the AFL in the future.” 

Come on.  We can read between the lines.  The AFL, which acted as a sort of minor league for the NFL isn’t coming back anytime soon.  The same may be true for small market teams in other major sports as well.  Led by the San Francisco Giants, sixteen of the MLB’s thirty teams will ‘freeze’ season ticket prices for the upcoming season as well as bolster promotions at home games.  Only during these times will you see promotions pop up like the NHL’s St. Louis Blues’ promotion last month to help one lucky fan pay three months of his or her mortgage.  Mortgages?  What happened to umbrella giveaway night?

It’s not the fact that the Yankees are spending money that I see wrong.  In fact, to restart the economy Americans must spend money instead of wavering in their consumer confidence.  Until this current period ends though, you’ll start to see the teams with money only grow exponentially bigger while smaller market teams will scrape by and attempt to make ends meet.

A salary cap would be a good idea.  Maybe the idea would catch on when the Yankees spend 10 times the amount of any other team to win the World Series.  What about the players and stadiums and owners though?  Shouldn’t they cut back?  Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones surely isn’t will his $1 Billion dollar Texas Stadium almost complete.

Corporate sponsorships however are starting to slow down though, reflecting the downturn on Wall Street.  Domino’s Pizza and Home Depot are two major NASCAR sponsors that are pulling out their support next year for financial reasons.  Many other companies are thinking twice before shelling out money just to put their name on a stadium wall.

I find the Yankees’ strategy especially intriguing considering the circumstances.  There’s nothing illegal about what they’re doing, but by outbidding every other team to assemble a team of all-stars they will only hurt the game of baseball in the long run.  While I like seeing advancements in sports, from the huge jumbo-tron scoreboards to a worthy player cashing in from a new contract, sometimes cutting back can be a good thing.   

            

J. Andrew Lockwood is a free lance sports reporter for The Bear Zone, Mercer's Cluster Newspaper, and a broadcaster for ASun.TV

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Selflessness in an Age of Individualism

- J. Andrew Lockwood -

james.andrew.lockwood@student.mercer.edu

Something about this NFL season is different.  Maybe it’s the absence of injured quarterback Tom Brady from the New England Patriots or maybe it’s seeing Brett Favre in a New York Jets uniform.  Or it could be the fact that Kurt Warner, the Arizona Cardinal’s 37 year-old quarterback is on his way to another NFL’s MVP award.  Kurt Warner…really?  Nobody’s really heard of him this season.  He’s not flashy and he doesn’t pound his chest after every touchdown.  He doesn’t bite off reporter’s heads either.  He’s…well, a nice guy that believes he’s just a part of the team.

            That’s the difference I’ve pinpointed in this season.  Not just the reemergence of Warner, but several other personnel moves throughout the NFL that signal a new age of the ‘team concept.’  Take for instance the new hire the San Francisco 49ers made at the head coach position.  Mike Singletary, a Hall of Fame inductee that played linebacker for the Chicago Bears in the 1980’s, brought about sweeping changes in the 49ers locker room during his first week on the job.  Most notable was his run-in with the 49ers star tight end Vernon Davis during a October 26^th game versus Seattle.  With just a few minutes to go in the blowout loss to the Seahawks, Davis caught a meaningless pass and then did the usual pound-the-chest-look-at-me move, sending Singletary into a rage.  Minutes later, Singletary sent Davis to the locker room early before the game ended, saying after the game, “I will not tolerate players that think it’s about them when it’s about the team.  We cannot make decisions that cost the team, and then come off the sideline and it’s nonchalant.  No…I’d rather play with 10 people and just get penalized all the way until we have to do something else rather than play with 11.” 

            Is this the NFL?  The same league that seems to tolerate and reinstate criminals and felons alike seems to be taking a turn for the good.  Even one of the league’s worst franchises, the Cincinnati Bengals, aren’t tolerating individuals anymore that take away from the team concept.  Chad “Ocho Cinco” Johnson was suspended just a week ago for questioning a coach in a meeting and was promptly sent home despite being one of Cincinnati’s more productive players.  An interesting move, but one that will likely benefit the Bengals in the long run.

            Finally it seems the professional athletes are learning that the game isn’t all about them.  Sure, they can make a ton of money if they perform well, but if their attitude doesn’t coincide with the team concept, there are always other capable players out there to replace them.  That’s why Kurt Warner, the unheralded hero for the Cardinals is helping bring back an age of selflessness to an NFL that was full of individualism.  He credits everyone but himself.  First and foremost, he always credits God for his abilities, but is also quick to give credit to his teammates and coaches.  Week in and week out, he’s putting up video game like stats, passing for nearly 300 yards and a few touchdowns per week, but does it in a quiet, professional way.

           No, you won’t see this story in the USA Today or on CNN or ESPN for that matter.  It’s not ‘newsworthy’ enough and doesn’t exactly sell newspapers, but it’s a story worth telling.  The Warners of the world aren’t flashy and aren’t going to be the center of each and every newscast you see, but they’re the kind of people worth getting to know and the ones you wish you could hang out with.  And for this reason, I could care less what happens to the flashier players that spike the ball after every touchdown.  I’ll root for Kurt Warner, Mike Singletary, and those play for a purpose greater than that of individualism.

                       

 

J. Andrew Lockwood is a free lance sports writer for The Bear Zone, Mercer University's Cluster, and a broadcaster for ASun.TV

Season Tickets Make Sense

- J. Andrew Lockwood - 

james.andrew.lockwood@student.mercer.edu

I thought the purpose of running a sports organization was to make money.  I’m not really sure now after watching the model that is Mercer University.  Maybe it’s more about just having the sports themselves or maybe it’s just the fact that we can say we have Division I athletics at Mercer, but the cold hard fact is that someone has to support it.  In saying this, I think our university and those in charge of marketing, promoting, and kicking up the dust about athletics have lost their direction.

 If you’ve been a student here for several years, you can probably agree with me on two generalizations about the student body: (1) if you want students to show up at an event, you have to advertise and promote the event like crazy and (2) the student body is relatively small in comparison to our other in-state universities.  For these two reasons, I really believe those in charge of promoting the homecoming game versus Tech (Campus Life and Mercer’s administration) and Mercer Athletics as a whole have really missed the mark, not to mention the un-capitalized opportunities they have with the rest of the basketball season.

            On the first day of almost any business class, you’ll learn that when you put a maximum capacity on supply below its’ normal state, you’re going to have more demand than supply available.  With this fundamental assumption in mind, I propose the idea of ‘Season Tickets’ for men’s basketball.  Yes, it seems at first to be an outlandish and crazy idea to sell Season Tickets for a sport that has played in front of half-capacity crowds in the University Center for the past four years, but allow me to continue.

            When you pay for something, you agree that it’s worth is at least the amount you exchanged for the good.  With basketball being Mercer’s premiere sport on campus (and a very marketable one at that), it seems that its worth to students has plummeted in recent years.  Last semester, I wrote about how our university wasn’t ready to support a football program yet, financially, in terms of support, and in large part due to the attendance for all major sports on campus declining for the second year in a row.  

            Sure, the publicity of releasing 1000 ‘free’ student tickets and the emails nudging us to support our university are great, but it seems that in the process, the university and those organizing the homecoming event are forgetting about the loyal Mercer fans and the fact that the basketball season is five months long .  Where was all of this hoopla last year (excluding the Alabama game)?  Where was the sell-out crowd for the important conference home games?  More importantly, where was the advertising?

There’s a reason professional sports teams have season ticket holders.  The fans that value their product the most are rewarded with seats to all of the game for a fee higher than the individual game ticket price.  Mercer is a relatively small school, but there were fans that attended most (if not all) games last year.  They were the fans that decided to stay on campus, rather than go home every weekend, to enjoy the game and the events offered on campus.  Let’s be honest, we’re not Duke University.  Or the University of Georgia for that matter.  For that reason alone, we should throw away all expectations that we’re going to have 1000 people camping out all night long for ‘free’ homecoming tickets.  Tickets are free to every other athletic event on campus, but now the cost is in hours spent in a line, rather than in money.  And time is money.    

A sentiment widely reflected by many of my fellow Mercer die-hards, it seems silly to stand in line for ‘free’ tickets when we’ve been in attendance all along the way.  When you look around at those in attendance, you’ll find that many are athletes in other sports or part of other organizations on campus.  Even if I had wanted to stand in line, I couldn’t have because I had to work that morning.  I’m sure that there are others on campus that couldn’t have sacrificed several hours waiting in line…not when tickets to every other game are free.  So again I say, the cost in time for attending the homecoming game seems to be to high for the loyal fans.

            That’s why I propose the idea of season tickets.  Reward your most loyal fans (customers) by allowing them to buy a ticket package to all home games, including the homecoming game, for a really low price (for students $5-$10).  In turn, sell individual game tickets $1 or $2 to students who don’t want season tickets and then charge more for the homecoming game seats that are in higher demand.  It makes sense and cents.  It gets rid of the disconnect between students not knowing when the games are and Mercer’s administration wondering why events aren’t more populated.  It’s a win-win situation for Mercer Athletics.  They’ll see an increase in revenue and a small increase in attendance in a short time while building their fan base in the long run. 

But until our university decides that we actually want to make money and to put fans in seats at athletic contests, we’ll continue to see the status-quo and worse.  In the meantime, if anyone wants to scalp their ‘free’ ticket, I need two for the homecoming game.

            

J. Andrew Lockwood is a free lance writer and contributer for The Bear Zone, Mercer University's Cluster, and a broadcaster for ASun.TV